I was at my parents' house, and we were about to go on vacation. Before we left, though, we decided to take in a very large Mexican family. They were going to live in our house while we were away, but we had to spend a few days with them in the house together first.
Our house is small: only three bedrooms. The first night that the new family was staying with us, they all crammed into my parents' bedroom. I got up in the middle of the night and peeked into their room: my parents were sleeping in their bed, but so were two of the other family's children. The parents were sleeping under blankets on the floor. And my sister was sleeping on the floor beside my dad's side of the bed. My mom had put feng shui fountains everywhere to drown out the noise of people snoring.
My sister woke up. I asked her why she had decided to sleep in my parents' rather cramped bedroom instead of her own bedroom.
She said, "It's too hot in there."
My mom suddenly woke up and said, "Well, if you're not going to use your bedroom, then I am." And she grabbed a blanket and stormed down the hall to my sister's room. I went back to my room, thinking how lucky I was that I didn't have to share my room with anyone else.
In the morning, things were crazy. The other family didn't speak much English, so they were trying to communicate with us and we were trying to communicate with them, all of this producing almost no concrete results. I decided to conceal the fact that I knew Spanish. For most of the dream, I found myself doing little more than standing around. At one point, I was standing next to my dad in the kitchen as he went through the day's mail. None of it was for us: the other family had begun to claim our home as their own, and all the mail had our address on it but their names on it. There was a big package sent Priority Mail, and for some reason I expected it to be mine. No such luck, though. It was for Jose Luis, the father of the other family. Someone had sent him a dress shirt.
I was getting very claustrophobic in our house. I couldn't wait for us to leave for our vacation. During the course of the dream, though, we never left.
