PILLOW TALK: Deborah Goes Shopping (Part 2) | Deborah Goodwin

Mar. 23, 2012 (ShapeShiftas) -- Last night I was shopping in my dream.

I'm not certain where I was shopping or what I was shopping for, it was more a feeling of being in a store and looking for something that I couldn't find. I imagine that this is a pretty common dream in one form or another, the Lost Item(s) dream, different from the Lost dream but no less distressing. Whatever you are looking for, it must be important, but you can rarely remember what or where it is when you wake up, unless you can lucid dream. (Now that would be a great pillow, the Lucid Dreamer...)

The Snoozer nap pillows tuck perfectly under your cheek when you want to grab a quick nap

Lucid dreams more often occur during naps

I am frequently shopping, or at least in some amorphous Mall, in my dreams. I guess in my Professional Shopper days this was understandable, but it has continued to be a recurring locale for some dreams.

It's fueled by the many, many malls that I have Shopped, and still have the floor plan filed in my brain. It's not exactly a fun dream, it usually features a fruitless search or a declined credit card, and there have been times when the clothes become animated suddenly and chase me around. (That one took place once in the Leni-Leni* warehouse, which truly became a nightmare when the dresses turned into rats, not an uncommon sight in the Leni-Leni warehouse, but still scary.)

U2, the soundtrack for today's Pillow Talk

Back in New York, there was a commercial for Burlington Coat Factory, where the wife is smiling and laughing in her sleep, and the husband says, "I can always tell when she's shopping." (Sorry, couldn't find it on You Tube, it's several years old by now.) My shopping dreams are more likely to see me bolting awake and shouting, "I'm begging you, give me an extension on the order! I can ship them next week!!"

I was having the Lost Item dream because my daughter lost her cell phone, I was giving her a hard time about it, and then I felt guilty for getting mad at her. Those things are easy to lose, she has lost only one more than I have, and we got the insurance on it this time.

I really shouldn't have gotten so mad -- it's just stuff -- I didn't mean to stress her out, I swear! I was having a hard time falling asleep because I was thinking about l'affaire iPhone. I thought, "Perhaps the Universe will help me find the phone if I apologize for my behavior, and then I can have a lucid dream about its whereabouts!" So I asked the Universe to show me where the phone is hiding as I fell asleep.

The Universe didn't cough up the phone's location, at least that I am able to figure out. But I did have a dream about looking for it. In my dream, I'm walking through a weird Tralfamadoran Mall looking through racks of clothes and boxes of shoes for that -- something -- I was sure I was about to find. (hmmm...)

I'm not sure what the dream had exactly to do with her missing phone, even though she is reading Vonnegut. I seem to remember ending up in front of a huge store in the mall, sort of a Best Buy-ish place with interior design from Blade Runner, but I didn't go in. I'm taking that to mean that we shouldn't buy the replacement phone just yet. Maybe it will turn up in one of her snowboarding boots.*

The mall in my dream looked like Billy Pilgrim's cage on Tralfamadore -- (from the (terrible) movie of the (great) Vonnegut book, Slaughterhouse Five)

peace, Deborah

*Leni-Leni, manufacturer of budget dresses, where I worked in the 90's, had a whole floor of a building in the Garment Center where we shipped from. I think there could be condos there now, although it was within the designated Garment Center area that some are trying to protect from redevelopment.

*Update: Jane's sister, Robin, found the phone a few days after I posted this, tucked in "a weird place" in the couch where the girls watch TV.

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