Music and Veganism

*Warning: this is slightly whiny, and really pretty gross.  Read at your own risk.  I’m nauseous after writing it.*

There a lot of things I hate about the state my mouth is in right now, but the taste that accompanies the pain is the icing on the cake.  My. mouth. tastes. disgusting.

I had a dream that I parked my car in a parking lot, only to find out, when returning to it, that the lot was now fenced in and locked.  Luckily, there was a tour group passing through it.  So I tagged along with the tour, intending on hopping in my car and leaving once we entered the lot.  Through a series of weird, dreamlike events that make no sense at all, I suddenly found myself hopping into a lake of the most foul, disgusting water I had ever encountered.  I tried to stand up, but there was no bottom, only rotting trash and food.  The water was white, and thick, and kept getting in my mouth.  I thought I was going to throw up, and then I thought it didn’t matter, because that was basically what I was swimming in.  The tour guide (everyone in the tour was flailing in the water, too) explained to us that we were swimming through a lake in West Africa that was so polluted it was essentially sewage, implying there was human waste in it as well.  I thought I was going to die.  We looked around desperately for a way out of the water– and where was my car?!

And then I was waking up, and oddly enough, this simple dream was such a terrible nightmare (I think because the feeling of disgust was so real) that I was literally breathless in bed, and it took me a few moments to fully come out of it.  Then I opened and shut my mouth, and swallowed.  Wait– did I actually have a nightmare about how terrible my mouth tasted?

Yes.  Yes, I did.

Today, when I told Phil how much the taste upset me, he said he knew exactly what I meant and he explained to me that it was the taste of “coagulated blood”.  Basically, I am licking a scab all day long.  He experienced the same taste when he had mono as a teenager, because his mouth bled all night when he was asleep once.  It sounds crazy, but knowing that he understood and could relate made me feel so relieved I almost started crying (I was in a lot of pain at the time, though).  I don’t know why the taste has upset me so much.  The only thing I can think of is that because I haven’t eaten meat in so long, I’m not used to the taste of blood?  I’m not sure if that really make sense, because it doesn’t taste like blood, it tastes like rotting-horror-cesspool-sewage-lake in West Africa filled with buckets of KFC chicken and other rotten food trash (did I mention that part of the dream?).  Whatever.  It will go away soon– until then I just have to keep rinsing with salt-water and continue to not get food in the holes.

So, the disgusting aspect of the dream aside, I find it really odd that I related my mouth to pollution in West Africa.  I have no idea if any lakes are particularly polluted over there.  I wonder why my subconcious dropped that one in there?

The above picture is what I wish my dream had been like.  It’s labeled Start of the Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race, 1971 and was discovered, as usual, in the Commons on Flickr.  It belongs to the State Library of New South Wales. The note reads:

The Amphicar was a German vehicle manufactured 1960-1968. It was the first commercially produced amphibious car and used a Triumph Herald engine over the rear axle to power the wheels and twin propellors. In the water, the front wheels acted as rudders. The body was steel.

Awesome.