I had a couple of interesting dreams last night. In the first I was hanging out with my brother and some of his friends. We were going to some costume party and I had on this 70’s-ish one piece jumper that had frilly bellbottoms and sleeve cuffs with a kind of hotel-carpet print that was loud and flowery. It also had a matching hat that was almost like a pointy-wizards hat, but truncated at the top with a little rim. The hat’s brim matched my frilly cuffs. Everyone thought my costume was pretty crazy. Jordy, my brothers friend, had a batman costume, but it didn’t look like Batman, you had to think about it, and when you did you thought it was pretty clever. My jumpsuit had a lot of pockets with zippers and I kept finding new pockets full of stuff. My left breast pocket had a handful of quarters and nickels. I was glad to find that the costume had a zipper fly as I was searching, because I was wondering how I was going to go to the bathroom without skinning out of the whole mess.

I got up to the counter to buy my ticket to get in and said, “One, please,” fishing for a handfull of quarters in my change pocket.

The ticket lady said, “What?”

One. Please.”

She said that the tickets only came in pairs, and cost $10 because it was a date thing. I said, “Oh, my wife doesn’t allow that, I’ll just pay full price and go in alone.” They thought that was crazy and were putting up a fuss when I woke up. In the bleary waking-up I was disappointed that nobody would get to see my wacky oufit.

In the second, I was back in the pottery studio just before it was closing. Everyone was working furiously trying to finish the work for the semester as people were taking down the stuido equipment. I couldn’t find my locker to get my stuff, and I kept going up and down different stairs looking for where my locker should be. I came down a set of stairs into the glaze area and saw my apron with my name on a piece of masking tape on it and started to put it on. It turned into a pair of overalls that had a tag that read Erin, not Erik and Erin took it away from me because it was hers.

I turned and saw a overly-large teapot of mine on a shelf that would have held maybe a gallon-and-a-half of tea. It was a very tall teapot and had a big dome lid. The lid was glazed on and I knew it wouldn’t come off. I took ahold of the lid with the palm of my hand wrapped around it and twisted really hard and I heard a glassy snap! and it came free in my hand, but it had broken away a chunk of the top. I didn’t really like the piece, anyway. Just then John Shaw, the instructor and a good friend of mine came over to see how things were going. I was so happy to see him. He looked at the teapot and asked, “What have you got there?” I handed it to him and he said, “Well, this is interesting.” and we stepped inside the broken edge of the pot. We walked down and around the side of it, or maybe a kind of spiral ramp inside the wall. John was pointing out the stoneware representations of draped curtains and textured carvings. He was saying, “Oh, that’s really nice! Why did you put it inside the pot?” I didn’t know, but I remembered being kind of proud how the textures had turned out. He told me I should save them for another piece. I picked up some stone draperies bigger than me and walked on. We got a little farther and saw many tiger and lion sculptures on textured stones that were life sized. I told him I hadn’t carved those, but had hired it out to a friend because I didn’t know how to make animals. John said it was a good idea.

We were just exiting the teapot when I woke up just 3 minutes before my alarm was supposed to have gone off, but I could feel the dream still right there and thought I could have just gone back to it for a couple minutes. I really miss my time with John and Diane and how they always had time to critique work, or just shoot the breeze.

It’s been a fairly melancholy day and I can’t really stop thinking about those dreams. You can tell because I’m actually writing something, which I’ve been pretty hard pressed to do, lately.