Subconscious Overload (dream post)

It all started in the grocery store.  Being my dream grocery store, the first thing I did was go talk to my friend, the bear.  He was going through a rough divorce and had to move out.  After wandering around the store together, I helped him find a little hillside just outside the store that he could burrow into to hibernate for the winter.  After that, I went into the grocery store, where I went up to the deli counter, and ordered a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  The man behind the counter was one of the professors here that I'm not particularly fond of, but thankfully he talked like Lunch Lady Doris, so he was a little bit better than usual.

While my sandwich was being prepared, I walked around the store.  One man insisted on getting me to try his special type of "gazpacho" made out of grapes instead of tomatoes.  And he didn't take them off the stem.  He just put a bunch of grapes into a glass, told me Lance Armstrong loved it, and insisted I start drinking.  I tried to drink, but  drinking a bunch of grapes from a glass is hard.  Before I had even gotten a single grape into my mouth, he snatched the glass away from me and told me I had to pay up if I wanted the real thing.  I had enough of his bizarre shell game, and went to get my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which should have been finished by now.

When I arrived back at the deli counter, my brownie was ready, but my pb&j was not.  After waiting around for an indeterminate amount of time, my order was ready.  I was served four half-sandwiches on a plate that was slightly too small for them, and surprisingly slick.  One of the half-sandwiches fell off the plate and onto the floor, when I bent over to pick it up, the rest of them fell.  This process continued for far too long, until eventually all the pieces were back on my plate.

At this point my mother and sister joined me, because I was about to get braces.  Thankfully they could do that at the grocery store two.  I was only going to need braces for two months, so it wasn't all bad, but I they were kind of uncomfortable, even in my dream world.

Once my braces were installed, it was time to go play a semi-pro baseball game.  I'm not sure why baseball, or why semi-pro, but before the game started, I was pretty confident my team was going to win.  We had a few ringers--one of my friends (not an actual friend, or even an actual person) was a Major League ballplayer, who was rehabbing an injury, and he brought along one of his friends (also not an actual person) who was going to be a Major League ballplayer in a few years, so he was really good as well.  I started out pitching, which I hadn't done since Little League, but thankfully my brain skipped over the details of how I got out of the inning.

Then, for some reason, when my team came up to bat, instead of batting, I switched over to playing catcher... catcher and umpire.  I've never played catcher before in my life, so this scared me, and I was a little self-conscious about umpiring because I was wearing the wrong shoes.  To make things worse, home plate was in a ditch, and there were a few trees between me and the pitcher mound.  I caught the first pitch, miraculously, but when I tried to throw it back, my throw didn't make it out of the ditch.  This was when the other team started yelling at me--because if I were a better catcher/umpire, I would have successfully thrown the ball back to the pitcher.  After all, this was semi-pro baseball, and I was undermining the integrity of the game with my poor performance.

So, the other team (which was originally my team, but I had just switched teams, despite being umpire) got runners on first and third.  The batter popped up to the pitcher, who was covering home plate, because I was stuck in a ditch too far away to get to it.  He caught the ball and the runner from third tagged up and scored.  Then the runner from first tagged up and scored.  Then the runner from first tagged up and scored, but he did so by running straight from first home, without touching second or third.  Being the competent umpire that I was, I called him out when the other team tagged him, because you can't do that (run from first to home).  Then the other team appealed to one of my fellow umpires (not how appeals work), and he overruled me, and said that running from first base directly home was okay, and that the runner was safe, and the run scored (not how baseball works).  This was particularly awkward, because I had called it the third out of the inning, and now we had to bring the team back onto the field.

At this point in the dream, both teams were yelling at me, because this was semi-pro baseball, and I wasn't up to the imaginary standards that existed in the dream.  Thankfully, then I woke up.  I looked at my clock to see that it was 4PM (I lost power some time yesterday evening, and never bothered resetting my clock), then got up to go to the bathroom.  I wanted to go back to bed, but I didn't want to forget this dream... so I stumbled into my kitchen and began taking notes on everything that I remembered.

Then I peed, stumbled back into bed, fell asleep, woke up, stumbled over to the refrigerator to get my notes, and started writing this blog post.  That dream was a real shotgun blast from my subconscious.  I'm not sure what it was trying to tell me, other than the fact that my teeth aren't straight enough, and I should play more baseball.