Dreams/Nightmares

I woke up this morning in the middle of a really weird dream. We were at my friend Jamie's wedding, but instead of the fancy, black-tie-requested affair that it was, in my dream it was a little more informal -- like most other weddings I've been to, not that it wasn't formal at all. I wasn't a bridesmaid, and for some reason I didn't think that was weird, especially given that in real life I was a bridesmaid, and Eric and I got seated at a table with all of Jamie's friends from when she lived in Ohio -- which has never happened in real life.

Then the DJ started doing his thing, and his thing turned out to be this weird dinner theater stuff, where the whole bridal party was enacting a murder scene or something. I think the premise was that one of the bridesmaids had shot Jamie, and now the place was on fire and a real fire engine even showed up. Except throughout these events, my attitude was, "Oh my god, this DJ is so cheesy and lame. I guess I give him props for actually getting a real fire engine to show up, but this is so obviously all faked."

I don't know what happened next, because I woke up. Definitely a weird dream, and one of those dreams where in the dream, you know it's weird.

The one interesting thing about the dream was the food. The dinner was a buffet, and Eric and I were among the first to get our food. The buffet was a whole series of dishes that had nothing to do with each other but that I knew were Jamie's favorite things (they were dream-Jamie's favorites, anyway). Lots of Indian food (served on too-small platters with too-large serving utensils), and then a huge plate of barbecue ribs, and a bunch of stuff on a ghetto candy buffet
(like, it looked like a kid dumped out his Halloween bag on the table, not one of those nice buffets everyone's doing now). My reaction was positive -- "Oh look, these are all of Jamie's favorite foods! How nice!" even though the food was all pretty unconnected to each other and would have made for a weird dinner.

Maybe it's a sign? We're in the middle stages of picking a caterer and finalizing our wedding menu, so maybe my subconscious wants me to stop figuring out which vegetables go with seared tuna and just serve naan and ribs with dim sum and snow crab legs with drawn butter. Now that's an idea.
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I don't think I ever shared my first wedding nightmare with you. It happened about a month ago, and it was one of those totally vivid dreams where everything is REAL (and usually going badly) and there is nothing you can do about it. In the dream, it was my wedding day, only it was actually that same day in July that I was having the dream -- in other words, I had to go ahead with the wedding with only whatever planning had gotten done up to that point. So we had a place and a photographer, and that was about it. For some reason, I wasn't freaking out about the fact that we had no caterer and I can't remember what the wedding dress situation was, but my #1 concern was that my hair was all messed up. [I often sleep with my hair in a loose pony tail to keep it out of my face at night] and I apparently had to get married with my hair looking the way it did at that very moment, because there were no bobby pins or curling irons or anything to be found. So it was going to be messy, half-pony tail half-pull-through-bun, with pieces sticking out everywhere. It was quite frustrating.

So I guess I've passed a milestone of some sort, where the wedding planning anxiety, though still very mild, is important enough to invade my subconscious while I sleep. These are the only two wedding dreams I've had so far, and as long as they keep occurring no more than once a month, I can handle it. Maybe I should pay attention to my subconscious, though, and finish with the catering plans and figure out what I'm going to do with my hair.