An Evening With Kate

MORNING OF DECEMBER 18, 2008

In real life a couple of nights ago, I happened in passing to catch an interview on TV with Kate Winslet concerning her upcoming movie, Revolutionary Road. While I'm currently completely neutral on seeing that movie, this interview apparently worked its way into my dreams tonight.

I was at the theater watching the movie with none other than Kate Winslet and one other person (I can't remember who, but it was a guy). Somehow I "remembered" that I'd already tried to watch this movie once and had been interrupted. This was my second attempt. At one point during the movie, Kate yawned and then rested her head on my shoulder.

The simple head-resting became progressively more of a full-fledged snuggle-up. Would you believe I didn't protest? Things were quite nice, but eventually the scene changed so that we were no longer in the theater, but were sitting in some kind of old wooden shed out in the middle of the woods at night. We were in the same snuggled-up position, only the location had changed (the change was not jarring to me in the dream).

We continued to snuggle alone in this old shed. And I'm not just toning things down for the blog when I say that snuggling is all we were doing, and there was something so pleasant about it.

We'd left the door of the shed cracked open just a bit to allow in a little moonlight (the only light we had). Suddenly I noticed the door was crawling with bugs that looked like a cross between roaches and regular beetles, but I just identified them as roaches in the dream. There were also a lot of ants visible nearby. I told Kate I'd better spray, even though "someone was supposed to be keeping this place sprayed already."

Kate stepped outside, wrapped in a large blanket for warmth (I'm not sure what, if anything, was under it). I found a can of bug spray that was kept in the shed and began spraying the door and all the corners, etc. I was just so frustrated that this had interrupted such a nice time. I feared that I wouldn't be able to recapture the moment. I worried that we wouldn't be able to go back into the shed because of the poison. The bug spray ran out very quickly, adding to my frustrations.

Suddenly, a middle-aged man approached me. He was of slender build, had a thick mustache and wore a baseball cap almost as dirty as he was. He cautiously asked in his southern drawl if I could help him. He wondered if I kept a shovel in this shed, because he and his young son were trying to bury their dead pet parakeet. I told him I thought there was indeed a shovel in there, and he went on to ask if I could actually dig the hole for him. Apparently he had some sort of injury that kept him from being able, and his son was too little to dig efficiently.

Since it need only be a parakeet-sized hole, I agreed to do this for them. I looked over at Kate, still waiting nearby in her blanket. She gave me a "do what you have to do, it's okay" shrug, so I followed the man, just hoping the snuggling could resume when I returned!

The man showed me a nearby location where they wanted me to dig. His small boy was waiting there with the dead bird. It was in front of a conveniently placed, human-sized tombstone. I began digging, and only a short time later found my shovel striking something hard. Then, all at once, as only dream logic could provide, I unearthed an entire coffin. The man's son freaked out a little, and the man just said something like, "Oh crap, we dug too close to Uncle 's grave!"

Then the man began awkwardly trying to push the casket back into the ground, and somehow Uncle Whoever partially fell out. It was a very disturbing scene, so I just left as quickly as I could.

Making my way back through the woods to hopefully find Kate still waiting is the last thing I can remember (because, you know, naturally that would still be a concern immediately after accidentally unearthing a corpse).