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Counting Lambs

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Around August of 2020, my dreams became very small.

Maybe it’s the quarantine. The world has become very small. Can a brain run out of things to process?

It could be my stress levels.

For whatever reason, my dreams have become very small.

And I have become very aware.

There are places I can go to in my dreams. The same ones, over and over, cobbled together in a city that is at once Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, the French Quarter, downtown Las Vegas, and New York City all at once. There’s a lake. There’s a place that’s a cross between Disney World and various video games; last night, I spent quite a bit of time in a farming simulation that was also my high school and a community theater performance. Along with the familiar locations of my high school (often mixed with my middle school) and the community theater that is a jumble of both theaters I volunteer at, I can attend a nightmare mashup of the churches I attended as a child. There’s always a funeral going on! I can also go on vacation with my friends, ride jet skis, visit my grandparents’ lake house, or simply stroll the streets of my own village, which isn’t an exact replica but does contain the most anxiety-inducing grocery store ever designed.

Or the shopping mall.

It is every shopping mall and none. It is a closed-down mall, a 1980s throwback mall, a glitzy Detroit suburb mall, all in the same enormous building (one side of which is a second-run discount movie theater, another, a seedy strip mall).

Because I am lucid in these dreams, but still obviously dreaming, I occasionally treat myself.

But because I am lucid in these dreams, but somehow still awake, I occasionally treat myself. I wake up the next morning, confused as to why there are notifications that Wish has received my payment.

The first time this happened, I panicked, until I saw that I’d only spent three dollars on a charming little ring instead of eleven dollars for a set of ten crack pipes.

I don’t know why those always pop up in my recommendations.

The second time it happened, I’d spent twelve dollars, total. Nothing alarming. I’ve done this five times since August and as it turns out, I’m just as cheap in my dreams as I am in real life. Otherwise, I would have to seek some kind of treatment.

Most of the time, what I buy in my dream is nothing like what shows up in my mailbox. One night, I bought a huge potted plant and tickets to a Billy Joel concert. Waking in a panic, I found that all I’d ordered was a correction tape that prints little owls over your mistakes. Total cost: $3.87 after shipping.

Other times, I’ll dream of buying something adjacent to the product I’m actually sleep-buying. Nail polish in the night becomes an eyeliner/eyeshadow combo in the morn. Brass knuckles become a silicone mold for casting self-defense keychains from resin. They make sense. But none of them have been literal.

Until now.

We’ve come through a lot of words here to get to my point: I have literally had a dream come true.

It is a hoodie. And it is beautiful.

A hoodie draped over the back of my computer chair. It is printed with a huge image of Mariah Carey. As in, like a photo of Mariah Carey is the print of the entire fabric.

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7 Comments

  1. JennyTrout
    JennyTrout

    I would like to add that this was not all that I ordered that night; it shipped to me with a long black funerary veil.

    January 25, 2021
    |Reply
    • Dove
      Dove

      Oh! Well, clearly, you needed the perfect dream outfit combo for all of those funerals you’ve been going to in your dreams.

      January 25, 2021
      |Reply
  2. Tez Miller
    Tez Miller

    Good thing you live with other people – just in case they’re needed to confiscate your electronics so you can’t sleep-shop 😉

    January 26, 2021
    |Reply
  3. Crystal
    Crystal

    I follow a chick on Tik Tok that has been posting videos of her sleeping walking inside her house. I think you and her may have the same issue with stress. LOL. At least you aren’t going outside and having to have your husband chase you back into the house.

    January 27, 2021
    |Reply
  4. Christine Mah
    Christine Mah

    It’s glorious!

    January 31, 2021
    |Reply
  5. Julia M.
    Julia M.

    My dreams are always nightmarish. They take place in a dark, cavernous, or light, suffocating atmosphere. I’m almost always in danger in some way. In one dream, I found a dead body in a concrete hotel room. (It was a huge room with wooden scaffolding, and a concrete platform in the middle. Around the edges, except the walkway to the door, there was a 20 foot drop. I looked over, and found a decomposing body. Apparently, the last guy who stayed in that room, or the owner, disappeared. They weren’t even sure it was him, though. At that point, I decided that a hotel with possible 2 missing people associated with it wasn’t someplace I wanted to be. And then I woke up. One of the biggest things I remember was that the room was very very cold.)

    I dream stuff like this because I have a big, warped imagination. And sometimes it comes back to bite me.

    I’m happy for you, though. You might want to put your electronic devices under the bed, or somewhere unusual. That way, you don’t go through your routine. Or change your password every night, then switch it back when you wake up.

    March 19, 2021
    |Reply
  6. Kim
    Kim

    “Maybe I’ll set up an OnlyFans account and it will just be me staring vacantly into the camera while I eat eggs” Someone’s probably super into that…rule 34, right?

    April 9, 2021
    |Reply

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