Babyfinder and Owl Dreams

I usually find there are easily a dozen or or so bloggable moments in a day, things worth recording and expanding on. Many of them may be reactions to news that could just as easily be written by someone else. Others are more unique. I haven't been able to write at a fraction of the rate I would like to. My blogging tapered off in July as I got busier at work. Then, in the summer holiday, I attacked my to-do list, which didn't really include blogging. When I went back to work, I was too busy for blogging again. That's why I never have got around to writing about this dream. It is probably the most memorable dream of the year; actually I can't remember many others right now. It either woke me up or just stayed with me when I woke up. It was unusually vivid. About a week later I read a news story about US soldiers in Iraq finding a baby, but the circumstances were very different: under a piece of sheet metal on some rocks after the parents were killed by ethnic conflict. Still later I saw a television documentary abut progeria. Then, in the fall, a student asked me to help her with a speech about a girl with progeria. Memory of the future? At the very least, these things made the dream more memorable.

In the dream, I was walking up to a convenience store across a row of parking spaces. The place resembled West LA near the 405 where the Persian neighborhood around Westwood meets the Japanese on Sawtelle with the Mexican and American background, but with a bit of a Detroitized abandoned feel. As I got closer, I saw something crawling toward the store's glass about two spaces from the door. At first I thought it was an animal, but as I got closer, I saw it was like a human baby. Strangely, it had the body proportions of an older child, but about the size and mass of a small baby maybe six months old, or of a large cat. The heel of its foot had gotten stuck in some tarry asphalt that had been used to patch some small hole in front of the store. It was pulling its foot and fussing with it as it tried to get the tar off. I picked it up as I walked up, and turned it over so I could see its face. The body seemed emaciated, which was the first shock, but the face was another shock. The tiny face was almost alien, but was recognizable as a middle-aged Asian woman. The hair was black and a little on the big side (Kim Jong Il?) and there was a streak of white coming back off the forehead locks. The eyes were mean, squinting, ornery, and distrustful-looking. You could almost understand why the parents might have dropped it out of their car. And if the girl had been abandoned then it was natural that she would be distrustful. I tried to make sense of what I was looking at and decided it was some kind of freak of nature, probably a baby girl suffering from progeria, accelerated aging. I carried her in to the convenience store and found they had running water in a sink and cottony paper towels right around the corner to the right inside the door. I used the towels to try to clean most of the tarry stuff off of the girl's heel. The cashier guy seemed Iranian and was trying to be cool but watching me fairly closely; he would be able to file a police report. I was thinking about it because I had this idea about finders-keepers and was thinking that I would have to bring the police into this but also thinking that nobody would ever love this little girl who probably would not even live long, so that I should be the one to care for her. I was thinking that I might be able to persuade the police to let me keep her, but I knew that wasn't likely and she would be in a hospital or institution of some sort. In this timeline the convenience stores also served as restaurants. People would buy food and then go to sit down and eat it in an adjoining indoor area that was a little like a food court or a garage but really a floor of a seemingly abandoned building. There wasn't any electricity, heating, cooling, lighting or sanitation in there but it was just there for you to use if you wanted to get out of the sun or rain. I was thinking about whether to go in there to wait for the cops but it seemed like the cashier wasn't really going to call the cops but would be the type to answer questions if the cops came around asking them so I might as well call them myself. It seems I woke up before anything else happened. Possible dream interpretations: The baby was actually an alien making me think it was a baby and want to take care of it -OR- as one dream interpretation site said, the baby represents the self. (Doesn't everything in a dream represent your self?) The tar-heel thing represents either North Carolina or any experience that leaves an indelible imprint. Scene from a future war where genetic weapons induce accelerated aging?

Second memorable dream of 2007: I was flying or maneuvering through some kind of cubistic grid or matrix, perhaps tree branches, minding my own business, when I was suddenly attacked from the left by a large gray owl, about 3 feet or nearly a meter tall. I'm not sure if it killed or ate me. (Am I a bird?) This woke me up. My interpretation: avoid libraries. A deranged senior may attack me from out of the shelves.