Two dreams last night.

1) I needed to cater a party for my company, and I had to do it with my own money. So I went to Costco. I remember I was going to marinate diced chicken in Indian spices and then roll it up in tortillas (apparently to be eaten raw, because I don't remember where the cooking would have come in), and also serve strawberry shortcake.

In the frozen aisle I found a massive package of 48 frozen shortcakes with the littlekuriboh  brand name on them. Although they were more expensive than the other brands by $1 or so, I was so happy to be supporting my favorite funny video web-based artist that I had no problem subsidizing his on-the-side shortcake business.

2) Just as I was waking up, I thought of a product we could develop and sell: A big, hollow ceramic bird house in the shape of the Cross, with holes along the arms for the birds to fly in and out.

I'm kind of surprised no one has already made one of these, considering Matthew 8:20: "Jesus replied, 'Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.'"

Then again, having the symbol of one's faith fill up with nasty feathers, parasites, and bird poop might not be the best thing ever for the religiously-minded. ;-)

When he woke up this morning, Andrew said "Apparently we have a Norwegian research library in our attic."

He knew because in his dream, his old youth pastor had come to consult it.

Oh, and he also said that we had a church in our basement.

The youth pastor had brought along not only his two adult daughters, but a teenage boy he'd adopted from Korea. Jokingly, I said "Maybe we could open a kimchee stand on our front porch!" Andrew said "That would be silly."

I had a strange dream just as I was about to wake up this morning.

My friends Jen, Nikki and I were sneaking around a giant, soaring, steel-beam-and-glass skyscraper. One of those skyscrapers that's impossibly high, with huge airy stairwells and carefully chosen modern art placed seemingly at random. It was deserted, and we weren't supposed to be there. It was probably owned by a vast, shadowy business consortium. You know, one of those buildings.

We got in the elevator and noticed that the buttons formed the shape of a cross. We were on a lower floor, and we pushed a button to take us up. As the elevator started moving up, several buttons on the arms of the cross lit up -- those buttons were all prefixed with the letter "N."

Instead of continuing up to the floor whose button we had pressed, the elevator headed up, then started going sideways, along the arm of the cross. We realized that the elevator didn't merely go up -- it also looped the building at one specific level, and those stops were represented by the "N" buttons.

As the elevator went faster and faster, and we kept pressing the "stop" button with no effect, we got very apprehensive about where we were, and what, precisely, went on in the "N" rooms...

Finally the elevator stopped and let us off. We proceeded carefully up a stairwell, flooded with sunlight. We were probably on the 50th or 60th floor, totally cut off from the rest of the world.

Then, above us there was a movement. I looked up and saw a caveman, with the jutting brow, scraggly matted dirty hair, and stereotypical loincloth, crouching on the next floor up and peering down at us.

The caveman started throwing rocks at us, which we dodged. Just as I was waking up, I realized what was going on here --

-- You see, the vast shadowy consortium had a tribe of cavemen living at the top of this office building. They were using them for experiments, mostly anthropological in nature, to see how a tribe of cavemen would react to living at the top of an office building.

-- And the next phase of the experiment was to capture some civilized modern humans -- Jen, Nikki, and me -- and take away all our trappings of civililzation, and see how long it would take us to snap mentally and revert to savagery.

It all made perfect sense.

So now I can gasp "I was a caveman's bride!!!" in the manner of the old horror film titles, and swoon in a pulp fiction / Roy Lichtenstein-esque attitude.

I had the weirdest dream just as I was about to wake up this morning.

I was walking through my neighborhood when I met a policewoman. She fell into step beside me and asked me where I lived, and I told her. Then she asked if she could search the house.

Well, I thought, we have nothing to hide, so why not?

Then she was asking more about our house, and I told her it was three stories, almost 3,000 ft2, with a separate mother-in-law apartment in the basement we rented out, and I should really get clearance from the resident before we let random policewomen search that part. But she was welcome to search the rest of it.

When she heard how big our house was and how much there would be to search, she got a disconsolate look on her face and proposed that instead, I attend a short informational meeting. I said sure, why not.

The policewoman ushered me into a classroom and left. There were 10 - 12 people there, 40-something professional-looking people. NPR listeners (and hey, I'm one myself, so I should know). But instead of 10 - 12 students and one teacher, they were the teachers and I was the one student. They had me take a seat in the middle, and they sat in a semicircle around me. We were all sitting in those useless, uncomfortable little chair-and-table-combo student desks.

I asked what the meeting was about, and they told me that I would be part of a program to help Americans save more money, since everyone knows that Americans now have a negative savings rate, and it was going to be a big problem. They told me they were going to help me save for retirement and house expenses and other things that might come up.

This sounded harmless enough, but as I was looking around at all these 10 or 12 people sitting there looking at me earnestly, it seemed ridiculous that so much staff time was being spent on this one meeting with -- me. I said, "Wow, you must really want people to save." They all nodded.

They handed me a little brochure explaining that saving money was good and not having any money was bad. They said that Andrew and I would be saving money on a monthly basis for our future, and the money would go into a fund.

"How much money are we talking about?" I asked.

"$200 a week," they said.

This is a lot of money to Andrew and me, although as I thought about it in the dream, it's the same as what the Ameriprise financial advisors had told us -- we'd have to save $800 a month, starting now, to fund our retirements. So I was heartened that at least the numbers matched, although I had to scoff at the idea of saving $200 a week.

"Where will this money be invested? Stocks, mutual funds?" I asked.

"Oh, it'll be going into a safe government-run entity," they told me.

"Yes, but what will that be invested in? Stocks? Mutual funds? What?" I asked.

"It's a safe, government-run entity," they told me again.

At this point in the dream I decided I'd had it, and I started in on them. "Look, you all seem like intelligent, well-intentioned people," I said. (Really, I do remember using those precise words in the dream, but the rest of this rant is a reconstruction.) "But it's ridiculous for us to save $200 a week right now, and even if we could, we'd want to have control over where the money was invested, rather than just subsidizing the government's general operations." I got really heated in the dream, and it felt great to just rant at people, since I never do that in real life.

"Oh, it wouldn't be used to subsidize the government," they assured me. "It would be in a safe, government-run entity."

"And just so I'm clear, is it a requirement from the federal government that we have to participate?"

"Yes," they told me.

"Americans should do lots of things, such as eat less, exercise more, not cheat on their spouses, and step up to take responsibility for things in their lives. But the government isn't coming around to our houses monitoring what we eat or checking our levels of sexual excitement!" I yelled. (Really, I do remember yelling that!)

"Well then, maybe we should!" they replied.

"Where do I go to appeal this?"

They sounded pretty smug as they told me that I'd have to go to the Solid Waste Disposal Center south of the where the Kingdome used to be in order to appeal it, "and the smell is so overwhelming, you'd be better off not going."

"I'm from Minnesota," I told them haughtily, "and I used to go to the Minnesota State Fair and go to the Swine Barn and eat a hot dog, just because I could. So I don't think a little bit of odor is going to deter me."

But by that time they had all lost interest in me, I guess deciding that I was too much trouble to try to help anymore. The side of the classroom had turned into a giant pane of glass, through which we could see the inside of the Minnesota Swine Barn, with farmers and country kids parading their pigs and piglets around in various contests, and they were all a lot more interested in that, so I was able to slip out.

When I finally got home, Andrew had been driven to distraction by baby #2 (who had already arrived in the dream, but whom we still hadn't named), and Vivian was taking a nap. In the dream we decided to name the second baby "Califf," which is a terrible name, and I felt misgivings about it, so I asked him to let me have some more time to research old Marvik family names and come up with something better.

I woke up almost right away, and I lay there cementing the details of the dream into my head so I wouldn't forget them.

So, here they are for you, my discriminating LiveJournal audience. :-)

I'm so worried about Vivian's ultrasound procedure on Wednesday. I don't know whether they'll need to knock her out for it. I don't know whether we'll get to stay in the room while they do it. I don't know whether they'll need her blood type, which we don't know. I don't know whether having Andrew's parents here during the entire week will serve as a support, or an additional stress.

Andrew's off at work, so I had to sleep alone. I hate that. I had anxious dreams all night. Holding Vivian and trying not to fall through the metal staircase. (WHY do they make stairs you can see the ground through? I don't like that!) Oh, and we were thousands of feet high in the air... Holding Vivian and watching her shrink down practically to nothing. I was left holding a tiny grub-like thing. Falling, loss, death. Fun dreams.

So this morning I have a stress tummyache. I almost curled back up in bed and had a pity party for poor, poor me, but I can't afford to do that anymore... when I do, everything is undone and I get even more stressed out later.

So I got up, showered, put a load of dishes in the dishwasher, made coffee, had some nourishing granola, and am logged in to start working from home. When Vivian wakes up I'll get her ready and go to the neighborhood playground from 10 to noon or so. Andrew should be home by then (he's working midnight to 10 AM today), and talking with him is sure to make me feel better.

I love to cook and love to eat... so I guess it's not surprising that I often dream about food.

This morning as I was surfacing from my dreams, I dreamed about an old friend, Cameron. Haven't heard from her in a good long time; my last e-mail wasn't answered. I think they're just busy adjusting to parenthood -- they were expecting a little girl, due date January 5.

Anyway, Cameron can't eat meat, and I've recently been avoiding meat (not for moral reasons -- although I have to admit that my mommy hormones are making me ridiculously sentimental about all sorts of things, including how the cows' mothers must be suffering to have their babies taken away and eaten!!). Actually we've been avoiding meat for health reasons. Andrew needs to lower his cholesterol.

So last night Cameron was in my dream, and we were making a big batch of breakfast potatoes -- you know, those diced potatoes that you saute with onions, and maybe a hot dried red chile pepper, and it gets all brown and caramelized and crusty on the bottom, and then you eat them with eggs?

We were making this big, fragrant batch of breakfast potatoes, and we were scrambling some tofu on the side. (Apparently in my dream mind, eggs = meat.) And we were going to have it with coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

Mmmmmm. Good dream.