Postpartum Birthday Dreaming

I turned thirty years old this year. Yay! No, really, yay. I'll blog about it sometime. But that's not what this post is about.

I turned thirty eight days after Gracie was born. (Several days after that, Robin McKinley turned sixty. Coincidence? Um, yes.) I got some sleep for my birthday. It was delightful.

I had two noteworthy dreams that day.

In the first, someone gave me some sort of explosive for some reason, I think. I had to walk very slowly and smoothly with it, and other people were constantly walking too fast for me, leaving me behind.

Kind of like the slow careful hobbling around one does after giving birth... Possibly while holding a baby, even.

In the second... oh, the second. Oh my. Let's see. Well, I had to go to the police department and talk to a clerk to make sure they weren't going to arrest me. I'd been given a ticket, and John and I had mailed it in, but it might have been too late, I wasn't sure. So I had to go talk to someone and see.

The first clerk I talked to was quite mean. I told him I'd just had a baby on Tuesday. (Later I remembered that it was Sunday, and I'd gotten out of the hospital on Tuesday.) I told him I didn't remember the exact date of the "speeding incident." He said, "So you're admitting you speed all the time?" Don't ask me. I argued with him about it, but I remember that my argument was rather different from the one I came up with when I woke up. More along the lines of not admitting that I was speeding even on the day I received a ticket, I think?... but never mind.

The first clerk went away. I expected him to come back, but he didn't, so I left as well, or tried to. I think I got lost in the building, and they were closing... someone found me, I went back to the spot with the clerks... I think someone else was in line, but that guy was there all the time, so they cut him off and let me go.

This second clerk was better. This time I explained that I had a baby on Sunday and got out of the hospital on Tuesday, with trepidation that I'd get in trouble for changing my story, but it was fine.

And then... somewhere in there I think the clerk changed again, because I think at first he was a man, but later definitely a woman, but I don't remember any actual change. The infraction changed, too, something about knocking a road sign over, a Very Serious Offense. Because somehow in the next part of the dream I remember, she was proving that it couldn't have been me, based on the positioning of the sign, because I'm not lefthanded!!!

Yes, this clerk was much nicer.

We went out to the scene of the crime, and we figured out that actually a righthanded person could have done it -- a righthanded person could have thrown a snowball at it. A motion that crosses the body.

But it still wasn't me. Some suspicious person who carted snow out here...

Or wait! Maybe it's artificial snow, produced chemically! Further investigation showed that the ground under our feet had a suspiciously snow-like texture! And if you dug down a little, yes, it was cold underneath.

But then, once the snow was produced, I think we decided that the wind could have swirled it around to knock down the sign? It wasn't very clear. But somewhere around there we decided the area was kind of freaky, and that we wanted to leave.

So we did.

The End.