Very weird dreams, and Art Space

I'm not going to go into too much detail with last night's dreams. They were just too weird.

In the first one I remember, William Atherton was cast as the Antichrist. He was dying, and had caustic blood. This dream took place in my old High School. The role of my old High School was played by the rehabilitation center in Wilkes-Barre Township where my grandmother recovered from her stroke. I woke up from all this at 2:00 in the morning, completely freaked out. I had been asleep for less than two hours.

Another one involved stone fly larvae, or some other big insect juvenile stage that is used for fishing. Maybe hellegrammites. I don't know, I've never been fishing and I've never seen them in person. In my dream they looked like five-inch long turds with scorpion pincers. Yayy for nightmare imagery. (If you're at all squeamish, I hope you didn't click on either of those links.)

Next up was one that involved either Gil Gerard or Robert Pine, who played the Captain on CHiPs, getting hit by a car.

This may have happened on the street in front of the setting for my last dream, which took place at my new house. The role of my new house was played by my Grade School, which is in reality only two blocks away. This dream was much less coherent than the others, and involved someone trying to steal a car. I don't think the car was mine, and it already seemed to be mostly stripped down of everything, including its windows and metal skin. The robber "hotwired" the car by reaching through the missing passenger's-side window and doing something inside the car while at the same time fiddling with an ignition-like thing mounted in the exposed passenger's door. When I accosted the robber he was a short, thin, late-middle-aged man with very dark skin and a salt-and-pepper beard; after I tossed him onto the sidewalk with his head propped up on the school foundation and interrogated him, he became a feisty late-teenage girl with a much lighter complexion. I never got to see where this dream was going.

So. I think that cast of characters beats the hell out of Abraham Lincoln, a deep-sea diver, and a groundhog.

* * * * *

A lot of people wonder what I'm planning to do with the half of my house I'm not planning on living in. Storage, I tell them, and maybe an art studio.

I'm running into a lot of people who want to express themselves creatively but can't find an appropriate place to do it. Art can be messy, and it can require isolation from everyday distraction.

I have half a house that will be mostly empty, has a Southern exposure partially shaded by the neighbors' house (except for the front rooms, which have an Eastern exposure), and is currently in a semi-wrecked state. (Tenants? You think I should get tenants? Hah!) I also have several tarps and dropcloths that will see duty for my indoor and outdoor house painting projects, but will otherwise go unused.

So I can see myself creating a sort of artists' colony in miniature, each of the rooms its own little studio. An acrylic artist here, a sketch artist there, a nude model in the living room - not that we're painting her, we're all doing landscapes, but it's nice to have nude models around - a sculptor in the basement, maybe even a deranged poet in the attic. No oil paints, though - I don't need the house burning down from turpentine-soaked rags.

Just a thought. I should finish fixing up the other side first, and maybe move in there, too, before I start making plans for an artists' colony.