Dream 1: I was working as a grief counselor, but like a talk show style one that doesn’t let people whine for more than a few seconds. My main technique for getting people past their grief is something I called “bottling.” With bottling, you take a day off and lock yourself in a bedroom or study/den for five or six hours with nothing to distract you except your thoughts. Whenever you think of something that saddens you, you write it down on a piece of 4x6 paper. When you have a half hour to go, you stop thinking and roll up everything you’ve written into a thin paper tube. Take the paper and place it in an emptied out wine bottle (or any other bottle that has a cork.) Plug the bottle with the cork and seal it with wax. Then you place the bottle in a place of prominence in your home. Feel free to decorate it with ribbons or other crafts if you want it to look nice on a mantle or end table. Any time you start to feel sad again, remind yourself that all of your troubles are safely bottled over there on the table and can’t hurt you any more.
Dream 2: Can’t remember it now. Shoot.
Dream 3: My girlfriend and I were invited to an extremely fancy restaurant for its grand opening. It’s a really large open air Asian fusion restaurant that is on the crest of a small hill surrounded by giant mountain tops. We were invited because my GF designed and built the website for them. It is a black-tie affair, but I don’t have black tie so I look extremely out of place. We’re sitting at a table on the outside of the row of tables. A guy in a wheelchair, a famous food critic, and his family arrive a few minutes late and it’s clear that getting to his table is going to be a problem because everyone is already seated and there’s no room to get the chair down the row. I offer him my seat to make it easier, satisfied to move to the other table, but he is too proud to accept. He kind of looked like Max Von Sydow. There’s a huge commotion as he gets to his table, and I’m embarrassed to even be near that situation so I go to the restroom. When I come back, there’s a new commotion because some of the workers-who were also invited because they helped build the place-were called out as being illegal immigrants. There’s no evidence of this, but for some reason they are made to leave anyhow. I woke up as the hostess and owner, who looks like an Asian version of Hillary Clinton, was introducing all of the people who helped make her restaurant possible.
