Dreams are just weird.

And since there’s not much worth blogging about going on in my waking life, let me share the bizarro little mind-movie my subconscious concocted last night:

I was at a party in some big house out in the boondocks. I didn’t really care for most of the people who were there; they were all snotty and mean-spirited and spent most of the time bad-mouthing people who weren’t present. I had only come because I had thought a friend was going to be there, but she hadn’t shown.

There was one girl I knew in passing and sort of liked, but she spent the entire party in the kitchen. Eventually she decided it was time for her to leave, so I went to talk to her a minute and say goodbye. I mentioned that I’d be going soon as well.

Then I went back to where everyone else was. For some reason I and several other people were topless, which up until this point in the dream hadn’t seemed strange or noteworthy. Now the guy whose birthday we were celebrating came up to me, grinning in a way I didn’t care for, and offered me an armful of notebook-sized objects. The other partygoers were amused at the suspicious way I took them, and made several snide and condescending remarks, but by then I was getting a majorly creepy vibe. The things he’d given me were a stack of “adult” board games, the message being that I was now to be the focus of the “adult” entertainment of the party. Clearly everyone at the party had known about this plan except the girl in the kitchen, and they’d just been waiting for her to leave.

I moved around the guy to retrieve my bra, and asked them what they had done with my shirt. He moved in to intimidation distance and said something like, “Come on, if you’ll just go down on us all and let us use you like we want, we can all have a good time.” I snapped that he should go have sex with his wife if that’s what he wanted.

The phone rang and he picked it up, and moved away a few steps to talk. Now there was only one person between me and the exit. I threw the board games at him and bolted out the door. They had assumed I wouldn’t leave the house while topless and it was several seconds before they thought to give chase. My van was parked on the street, not blocked in like most of their cars; I unlocked it with the remote as I ran. My bra (which I was still carrying) got hung on something, but I yanked it free, jumped in the van, and locked the doors. As I peeled away from the curb I could see them in my mirrors milling around their cars, trying to get one free of the cluster.

At that point I woke up. It was definitely one of the stranger dreams I’ve had. Most of it seemed to revolve around the feeling of dislike and distrust I had for the people at the party, the later evidence that those feelings were well-founded, and their assumption that I would subvert my own well-being to accepted social mores (i.e. stay in the house rather than run outside without my hidden shirt).

Generally speaking, I don’t think dreams mean anything. I think the subconscious is like a cleaning service that comes in at night to tidy up the office of the absent consciousness. Most of the time it sifts through the loose papers and objects and puts them away without incident; sometimes it comes across a thought or feeling that was unusually intense or interesting, and then it has to turn it over and try to figure out where it belongs. Maybe it will gather a few of these thoughts and feelings together to compare them and see if they belong together somehow, or maybe it will put them down and come back to them another night until it can sort them out. I think dreams are just a by-product of this process.

But they’re still damn odd.