Tuesday 31 July 2001

Pic of the day: Not exactly the stuff of dreams, you would think.

A somewhat queer dream

It was another of those dreams in which I know all the places and people, and yet none of them are like the places and people I know in real life. As if I was some entirely different person. As if I was dreaming someone else's dream. Which I guess is just as well ...

A friend and I were hurrying home. I did not reflect on my own age, but I must have been fairly young, perhaps in my late teens since my friend looked that age. Something really exciting and a bit scary was going on: The first tsunami to hit Norway in any time we knew. Well, I was excited and a bit worried. I knew what a tsunami was ... a wave caused by earthquakes, almost invisible at sea but rising to a wall of water when it hits the coast. This was not a tsunami to end the world as we know it, but it would definitely cause some destruction. And it was coming this way!

We lived in the countryside. The landscape was broadly similar to where I grew up (and not too different from where I live now either, but slightly more like my childhood farm). My friend also lived somewhere nearby. The tsunami would not reach this far, not up to where our homes stood in the hillside, but it would almost certainly come up the valley a ways, perhaps all the way to the foot of the hill. Or perhaps not. No one knew exactly how big it would be, only the approximate limit of it. We were safe in my home (my mother's home, actually. Evidently I still lived at home with her. There were no other family members in sight).

There was one window in the house from where I would get the best view. In the attic or loft, there was a fairly small rectangular window. It was really low on the wall, indeed the wall wasn't very high up there. A narrow winding staircase went up there, and there was little more than a ledge between it and the window. Here I knelt down to look toward the sea: The valley met the sea to the south-east, and I could just glimpse a little piece of the sea from there, and nowhere else in or near the house. I made myself as comfortable as I could, resting my arms on the window sill (such as it was) and looking intently for the great wave.

My friend was still downstairs, talking with my mother. But after a while I heard him coming up the stairs. He did not join me at the window, though, but stopped near the top of the stairs. I'd known for quite a while that he was mostly queer[1], though it had never come between us in any way, and I realized that he had stopped to look at my butt. As well he might, I guess, because it was currently at its roundest and pointing in his general direction. I found his distraction more amusing than anything else. He was my friend and if he preferred my backside over the wave of the century, that was his choice. I continued to lazily watch the faraway seaside.

Then it got even funnier. Rather than moving on, my friend started to touch my behind. Tentatively exploring the curvature of my buttocks, he was very lightly stroking the surface of my trousers, just barely firmly enough to not outright tickle. It was rather comical but also slightly exciting in a vicarious way, because I knew that as a "queer" he probably had a rather erotic experience fooling around with his friend's butt. (As I would have with a female friend.) I did not move or make any comments, my attention divided between the seashore in the distance and the weird feeling of being my friend's pet right there in the room. And then I woke up, still kind of excited and ticklish all over, feeling the touch of my bedclothes against my body.

***

The tsunami is a no-brainer: It came from a picture in the magazine Illustrert Vitenskap which I read yesterday. The picture was of a small tsunami, only 6 meters high. Evidently I took the concept of small tsunamis with me to bed. My gay friend probably comes from my recent comment that for some reason I get acquainted with a lot of gays and lesbians online, whereas I never meet any offline. My dream corrected this situation. Similarly, in the dream only my mother is at home, whereas in real life my mother is dead while the rest of the family lives on. Another re-balancing, though the mother in the dream was the mother of the dream-I, not the original.

And yeah, I know gays too prefer chests. But let's face it, not even my best friend would get to fondle my chest - that would mean instant fight. OK, perhaps my best friend. No, I don't think so. Eeep. That's just too touchy.

You know, perhaps this is a SIGN. Perhaps it means I'm going to turn gay eventually. Or that my best friend will become gay. (Except that my best friend is already a girl.) Or that a tsunami will strike Norway soon. Hmm. If one of these happens, I'll be sure to worry about the rest. :)

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[1]: I understand that the current politically correct name for a male homosexual is "gay". But the way I thought about it in the dream translates better into the older expression "queer", which also means strange, unusual, not quite normal. I kind of considered it a bit funny, sort of like when someone claims to have met aliens.