Dreams of False-Waking and Soccer-Mom Artists

This moring I had about three false-waking dreams.  The most confusing was the dream that the automatic LED candles in our room switched on and I woke up... and then I woke up for real and saw that it was something like 3:30.  

In other dreams... as I was looking at a pitcher on our deck fill with rain water, I remembered that I dreamed we had a small fishtank in our house.  It kept losing water and I kept filling up one of our tall glasses with filtered tap water to refill the tank.  The water was being siphoned out by the tank's water filter; someone kept bumping or moving it and I'd fixed it at least twice.  The strongest image from the dream was the seven or so fish swimming sideways in about a half-inch of water at the bottom of the tank.  Adding more water revived them.

Another dream was set in a dream almalgam of our old rental.  I had ridden my bike there to go shopping -- somehow the old house had become the vestibule for cyclists.  I was pulling my bike around, looking for a place to lock it, and every time I came up to a wooden bench or a table or other blocky wooden furniture which was what we used as bike-racks, someone would sneak in ahead of me and lock her bike up.  There may have been some twenty-something college guys there, but the place was filled with typical Eugene moms (nobody I know in real life, but a dream-crowd of late-thirties women in Birkenstocks, corduroy and faded cotton with a soccer-mom-club air of "everyone is equal but my special child IS going to be first in line.").   

There was something about my realizing that I'd walked there in my bare feet, and that my muddy feet wouldn't go over well in the grocery store.

The house turned into an art studio -- I want to say wood-working and print-making.  A group of about four of us went into a college office that was under construction and the woman artist stood in a closet or small room that was only partially completed to have her picture taken in front of a large hole in the wall.  In waking life, I'm reminded of the paintings of Remedios Varo, except in the dream the office space was much lighter and more beige than her paintings (and there were no cats or star people).   I and the other artists were dressed in Eugene casual.  A female office worker (like a secretary to a dean) in dark, formal office attire and her hair in a bun, stuck her head into the room as she was passing by and expressed skeptical amazement that we'd want to take a picture of a hole.