Death and Puppets

MORNING OF JANUARY 8, 2009

First I remember being with a friend and she told me that someone she vaguely knew from her past had died (not a person from real life). I can't remember all the details around the conversation. Eventually we departed, and I was walking alone down the street to go back to my car.

I passed an old theater--not a movie theater but a small performance theater. It was obviously closed down, but one of the front doors was open so I stepped inside. On the stage there were a few men doing construction, as if maybe the place was being renovated. None of them ever noticed that I had stepped in.

On one side of the room there was a small staircase leading up to a door that presumably led backstage. At the top of these stairs, in front of the door, there was a life-size cardboard cut-out of the person I'd learned earlier had died. Only now I could see it was someone I went to high school with, not a vague acquaintance of the friend from earlier in the dream (but still, this was a person I only knew of in high school--I never knew him personally and haven't seen or thought of him in the years since--so it's amazing to me that he showed up in this dream).

There were notes pinned to the cut-out, presumably messages left by mourners. I began to ascend the stairs so that I could read them, but about halfway up I began to feel really weird about it and turned around and left. (I don't know if I felt weird because of the death matter or because I was snooping around in this theater where I probably really wasn't supposed to be).

Then I remember being at someone's house with a large group of people (all fictional, as far as I can recall). At one point the host wanted to put on a puppet show to entertain us, and she began picking guests at random to man the puppets. She picked me to be the puppeteer for Kermit the Frog, and I was elated.

I can actually do a decent Kermit voice, so I was having a lot of fun operating the puppet, which was very much like the real thing. I was trying very hard to give him authentic personality and mannerisms. There were a couple of other puppets next to my Kermit, and we puppeteers were all ducked behind some furniture. The entire thing was ad-libbed.

In the center of the room, a man stood speaking to the three puppets. He was a very scholarly figure, middle-aged with a beard and glasses, and acted very serious.

The scholarly man gave some kind of self-important monologue about his accomplishments. When he finished, everyone in the room gave polite applause. But I suddenly decided to make the Kermit puppet go, "Yyyyaaaaaaayyyyy!!!!!", characteristically waving his arms about.

Everyone cracked up to the point that I woke up.

Later on there was something about going to a grocery store late at night. It didn't feel safe there, but I can't remember why. I can remember seeing a few floating helium balloons here and there, as one will sometimes see for sale in a grocery store.

I took the few groceries I bought to my parents house for some reason. In real life the evening prior to these dreams I had eaten some ham sandwiches made with leftover ham frozen from the holidays, and they were delicious. In the dream I asked my mom if she had kept any more of the ham at her house.