Performance anxiety?

[beetiger]

A nice home kitchen, but not one I recognize. My sister and I, and a bunch of other casual friends were there. I had to cook this strange sort of elongated rat, something about a foot and a half long with a little roundish flat at the end of the tail, kind of like a beaver. Actually, it was my sister's job to cook it, but she wanted me to help, since she didn't know what to do. I got distracted because I needed to go into the other room and help decorate a cake for a show. The women who were doing it were making a decoration of a girl with a skirt, but they'd done it off center and not left space for her legs at the bottom although it was a really short skirt. I wanted to try to fix it, but they didn't seem to want to listen so I gave up. They put on a bunch of white sparkly stuff in the halo on the top half, but then some of it came out blue and they thought it was moldy and spoiled and screamed and wanted me to help take off the blue parts. I vaguely helped, but it was obvious by looking at the container that someone had just put the white stuff on top of a container of blue stuff that was fine and I actually thought the cake looked terrible either way so I wandered back to the kitchen.

I realized we were running late with cooking the rat, and then I looked and someone had taken the rat and curled it up in the bottom of the fishtank. I was annoyed at first, but then I saw that there weren't actually any fish in the tank, just clear water. Someone must have been trying to plump up the rat, which was a kind of dumb way to do it, but okay. I remembered that I'd prepared the previous one with a sour cherry sauce and it had come out better than I thought it would, considering it was a whole rat and all. I looked in the cabinet and there wasn't enough cherry sauce left, but there was a big container of some sort of orange marmalade sauce, so I thought I'd use that, mixing it with a little sugar and a whole lot of melted butter to make the sauce. Someone had opened up all of these jars of random things near the stove though, and I grabbed several of them by mistake. I poured a bit of tamari into the orange sauce, which I thought I could get away with despite the discoloration. Then I added all of the butter I had, but I had to go do my part of the show.

It was a cool multimedia show, we were just in the back doing the voices, chanting text that changed in front of complex images on screen which changed very fast by half of a compound word at a time, like maidenhead transforming to headstrong transforming to strongman transforming to manhole, etc. When that ended, I went back to the kitchen where my sauce had almost started to burn but not quite. I was able to salvage it, but then I poured in the liquid from a jar of capers that someone had left open by mistake. I didn't have enough ingredients to redo the sauce with anything else.

Then I woke up.
I just noticed that there were no men in this dream. That's a bit unusual for me.

******************************************
Driving in to work today, I heard a radio ad for "Queen of the Damned" which had "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana playing in the background. Why is that piece constantly used for demonic background music?

Comments

Obligatory Dream Interpretation

[awolf.livejournal.com]

This is a rather disturbing dream, and it speaks of potential hidden stresses. Clearly you enjoy cooking, but the dream isn't about cooking, it's about identity.

It feels to me as though you're wrestling with your view of yourself--as represented by the cake--and various parts of your mind are all taking a stab at trying to "complete" and "fix" this self-perception. You're allowing this to happen subconsciously rather than taking direct control over it, because it's an annoying process and you're distracted by other things currently going on in your life. The fact that so many things you cook in the dream turn out unsalvagable despite your best efforts suggests that you may be facing some issues of esteem or efficacy in addition to the identity crisis.

Overall, I'm puzzled, because my interp of this dream doesn't match my general impression of you.

Trickster

Re: Obligatory Dream Interpretation

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

Actually, there's a huge amount of accuracy there, Trickster. Many potential identity-related life changes are going on for me right now, ones about which I'm rather confused in a lot of ways. I hadn't parsed the dream that way at all, and having your interpretation is helpful. If only the dreams would offer the answers and not just the questions! :)

I'm curious as to how you got your training in dream interpretation, as you do a better job of it than anyone else I've ever had do it for me. Or is it just intuition?

Re: Obligatory Dream Interpretation

[awolf.livejournal.com]

It's from an understanding of some very basic Jungian principles, combined with intuition. I also have a lot of experience in dreaming and studying my own dreams, from many years ago when I was an avid lucid dreamer.

Trickster