Another dream in which I just want to take a shower.

I was at a summer camp-like place and was trying desperately to sneak out of an event of some sort that the entire camp was being forced to attend. I really wanted to get across the camp to be able to shower in the good showers. I was running stealthily through a wooded place, avoiding guards and ducking behind buildings at unnecessary times. It was AWESOME. I finally made it to the building with all the showers, and after ducking one last guard, I ran inside. The floor was full of holes. Imagine a drop ceiling, except on the floor and three out of five of the tiles are missing and below is just an endless pit. I can see the fantastic showers on the other side of the room and begin inching my way, Indiana-Jones style, across the broken, disjointed floor. I make it to the showers but a guard comes in the building (though I'm not sure if he heard me or if it was just part of his rounds). He sees me and starts yelling and making his way across the room (much slower than I had been earlier). I wait until he is no longer in the doorway and dash across another part of the room so I can get behind him/out of the building before he has the ability to make it back to the door. I make it, just barely.

I run for the exit of the camp and just outside come across an old acquaintance. She is standing on the side of the road, sobbing. She tells me that everyone thinks she is too fat (she is a hefty girl, but I'm certainly not going to make this worse). I talk her down and tell her that everything is going to be okay, but I really have to leave because I'm being chased by the camp guards. She tells me to go into her friends apartment, just down the street, and that she will tell the guards that I went another way.

I make it into the apartment and it is a mess. There are pipes leaking from the ceiling, all the furniture is hidden beneath never-unpacked boxes. They seem to have expected me, because there is a note on the breakfast bar saying they'd cleaned the bathroom for me. I was fairly terrified with how the bathroom would look when the entryway and living room looked completely awful, but it turned out to be absolutely pristine. I got the shower I'd been trying to get earlier and fell asleep on a bed that wasn't mine.

Belt-powered shower systems

I'd lost a grandmother that used to raise lots of orphans (like Granny Wendy from Hook) and my mother was trying to find someone to help her take care of everyone, and to help clean and everything. We had interview after interview but nobody actually seemed interested/qualified.

I knew that if we didn't find the perfect person soon, I wasn't going to be able to help my mom anymore because I was getting ready to go to summer-camp for two weeks.

A woman let herself into the house and was doing all sorts of things you don't do in a stranger's house... like cleaning, and wandering around without even saying hello to us. Turns out she was one of the orphans that my grandmother had raised and she had already arranged with my father to take the job. It took forever to find her in the house... and now that I think about it, it was actually my cousin's house in real life mixed with the house I always dream about (which I'm sure will be another post someday).

When I finally found her, she was dictating the rules to everyone. Very strict rules about when you can do things around the house. It seemed like every time you did something even remotely fun, you had a chore to accompany it. I did something (I cannot remember what) and she told me that I could have 4 grams of fiber. Also that I needed to take a shower before I went to camp.

To take a shower, I knew that I needed to cut a piece of the Christmas wrapping paper. I have no idea why. So, i cut the paper into a strip about two feed wide. I walk over to where the showers are now (she moved them to under the porch and I was very concerned about spiders) and see that they are all rigged to be manually powered using wooden gears: you attached your belt around two pegs and had to pull the tail of it to get the showers to work.

That was the final straw. I had been okay with all of them changes until she took my showers from me. I started yelling about her and all the awful things she'd done, waving the wrapping paper around in the air. I remember yelling "and I don't even know how to GET 4 grams of fiber!". My mom ran over and helped me to cut down my wrapping paper into the appropriate shape/size (which was like 3 inches wide with a little triangle flag on the top), trying to talk me down, tell me she knew what she was doing, and that everything would be okay.

I was so mad at her for ruining my ability to stand in a hot shower without having to do anything. I was so upset at this woman for disrupting a our perfectly functional systems of cleaning and having fun.

I literally woke up crying and had to sort out dream from reality.