Dream: Butterflies and Owl Man

I was walking by the Delphi plant (now Nexteer)--actually, on the other side of the street of it, down Holland Rd in Saginaw. I think it was night, but sometimes there seemed to be a little more light. A butterfly landed on my face, either my eye or mouth, and I tried to remove it. It was hanging on rather strongly, affixed similarly to the way a caterpillar might. It felt like a velcro-y microscopically shallow barbed line along its body. I didn't want to hurt it, but I wanted it off me. I found that grasping it by the wings and gently pulling it back at a particular angle removed it neatly, but it seemed damaged. I set it by the curb in the grass. It was a deep pink color but there was a another one nearby and it was blue, turning pink like a fallen leaf. They were like monarchs but smaller and obviously differently colored.

As I walked I noticed trees, maybe poplars? That were tall but very leafy throughout, leaves all over the trunk or on short stems tucked close to the trunks. I thought that they were trees Gleachel (catalyst character from my story) would leap out of, so I kept an eye out for him.

Another butterfly landed on my lip, and as I went to remove it, but I first felt my nail scrape its body, and thought that it was too bad, but I also didn't feel that bad about it, and finally figured out how to catch its wings and pull it off my lip. The feeling of it was exactly as it had been before. I set it on the ground, and its wings spread and it withered and curled up like a drying leaf. There were other butterflies on the ground, and I thought that they were dying anyway, maybe talking myself out of feeling bad. This one seemed quite damaged, so I thought to put it out of its misery, thinking about if it was its karma to end its life in this way, and that I couldn't do anything without the permission of its soul. What is the least painful way to kill an insect, I wonder...? Somehow there was now a rock atop it, and I pressed it down. A strangely colored cloudy liquid pooled around it, blue-pink without becoming lavender. As I straightened, I thought of my mother coming along and finding me killing butterflies like some sadistic child.

When I started walking again, there was what looked like the silhouette of a giant matryoshka doll, but when I was in front of it, I saw it was a huge owl with closed eyes. “Whooooo” I said to it, and its eyes opened. I had anticipation that it would be like huge glowing plates, like the one I remembered seeing when I was little, but it changed entirely somehow, like I lost attention on what was in front of me long enough for it to become what looked like a person in a giant owl suit—more like a puppet, large and ornate, but of a sort of almost felt fabric. We kept saying whooooo to eat other, and I see now that I was treating it as a sort of sacred being, even as it waddled over to a tree and climbed up into it. I knew it was using arms and legs to climb, but I can't, now, with my logical mind turned on, determine how it would climb the tree. I kept walking, not wishing to disturb it.

Dream: Buck-Tick and a Bus

Anyway, the nearly epic band and bus dream.

I was in a small town that seemed to be in the area of my old church, but the church wasn't there. Sometimes I was watching as if a movie and sometimes I think I was riding around in the mind of an adolescent girl who looked similarly to the girl in The Lovely Bones. I saw a familiar man who had just gotten out of a black car, and recognized that he was Hide from Buck-Tick, though I said he was the bassist (he's the second guitarist). He was also about fifteen-twenty years younger. There was a sort of record store set up under a tent, and they had a few Buck-Tick albums, more in the shape of DVD cases, in plastic keeper cases. I grabbed one that was a vinyl album and another that had Sakurai from the PV Dress off of it to show my mom that it really was Buck-Tick. When Sakurai got out of the vehicle, I dropped the items and stepped away from them. And hid.

Imai, the guitarist, got out with his guitar, and he handed it to a kid to play. I laughed out loud, explaining to my mom, who was now watching this on video with me, that Imai plays lefty even though he's right handed, so the kid was really confused by the guitar. It has a sort of flat handle that connects the body to the neck in a long arc.

Then it seemed that it was a movie, and Sakurai seduced the girl, but it was more like a her nodding her affirmation since he didn't speak. I was like what the hell, why would he do such a thing. Parts of the video showed him nude from the side and I thought, “What? Sakurai took off his clothes for this role? Wait, that can't be Sakurai's body.” When I tried to figure out what was off, the video switched to a perspective where it was easier to see, like the scene switched. it looked like a weightlifter body with Sakurai's little head pasted on, looking as though he was trying to keep himself from bursting out laughing. I laughed out loud at the ridiculousness, and sometimes the face didn't look anything like Sakurai either. It seemed to skip where they were sleeping in the basement room of the house that was located where my old church would be in real life, to where I thought it was safe to walk around town again (back out of the video?). His name was also different, but I couldn't tell you what it was. Atsugi Ma....? something.

There was a teenage boy, slightly older than the girl, either her brother or someone with a crush on her. He was so angry about what had happened that he started the house on fire. Belatedly he realized she might still be inside, and he checked the basement window. It looked like the back of someone's head in the top bunk of a bunk bed. He got inside and the room was still the way in the video, a larger bed on the floor (no bunks) and the shape of a person was wrapped up in black sheets. He tugged them away, pulling back blankets, but there was nothing there. I imagined the scene if he had found her, cradling her, probably dead for some reason.

I was talking to someone about... something... when I saw that there had been an accident on a bus. The bus driver put a little girl and a puppy into an empty suitcase and closed it, going to stow it underneath. I tried to keep the attention of the person I was talking to so they wouldn't be alarmed, but when the driver closed the suitcase, I made motions toward it with my head so the person I was speaking to would see. I got on the bus carrying a fold down caution cone, but this one was big enough to be a cat carrier. I accidentally dropped it when I was getting on and a lady in a powered wheelchair tipped over on it. I rolled my eyes because I knew she was trying to remember the serial number of the cone so she could find out who owned it and sue me. The driver righted her and she rode off with a satisfied look on her face. I might have gotten off the bus too? I'm not sure.

Dream: Smoker on the bus

I was getting on a bus and this lady started lighting up. She was older with long white-blonde hair, and I said, kind of angrily, “ma'am, there is no smoking on the bus.” She seemed rather stunned that she couldn't smoke, and she asked the driver too before returning to me. “Don't I have the right to smoke?” she demanded. “You do NOT have the right to pollute the air that I am taking into my body, into my lungs!” I poked her in the chest a couple times as we argued, but I jabbed at myself just as hard, which wasn't, really. She got it then. (Thinking about it after waking up, I thought a more elegant explanation was, “you have the choice to breathe air or smoke—but if you smoke, the rest of us lose that choice.”)

She was still bothered, but a woman sitting a few seats back, also older and blonde suddenly said, “Don't you want to stop wasting every moment of your life?” The smoker was again taken aback, and the other woman continued. “You are the most beautiful woman I've ever had the privilege to sit behind, and I have a question for you. How would you like to get away from here, free and clear?”

I think there was also food and tickets involved, and the non-smoker told a waitress to use the blank check (I understood it was given earlier). And in the dream, at first I thought she said black check, but then realized it was blank a moment or so later. [Great, I can't even process language properly in a dream state?] The two women departed, and either I dreamed what they did or just imagined in the dream. Lots of travel to beautiful places, anyway.