Monday, March 31, 2008

March 30 - Blur

Blur is right. I'm reaching the point where I remember a large chunk of dreams each night, but not really the larger context. If you follow along, you'll probably notice me talking about a dream but never really describing how it began, because beginnings are the worst for recall right now. The big problem I'm facing is remembering the context and timeframe. I'm not sure how linear time is in dreams anyway, but it was pretty hard for me to really remember how things fit together last night. I may end up having to swap out the idea of listing "dreams" and just start listing dream concepts some of the time.

Anyway.


Part 1: Flight

Don't remember a lot here. Good old "me flying". I was pretty high in the air. I was apparently flying instead of using these floating funny-shaped stepping stones (they look like your stereotypical ancient ruin). The flight mechanism this time was more of a passive floating type deal (almost like I'm in orbit) rather than the other mechanism I sometimes have where I rotate my arms in funny patterns. That kind is more controlled, whereas this is more like a bird: swooping and stuff.


Part 2: RPG

Remember those films and movies about wilderness survival? Where the protagonist is trapped without contact with anyone and has to live on their own wits in the wild?

Well imagine that. As a computer game (an RPG). Starring Indiana Jones.

Well, I say "Indiana Jones" in a rather loose sense. It was associated with him because the weapons in the game are a gun and a whip. Well, actually there's also a flaming club, not sure what that's about.

I seem to recall it being almost TBS-like. It's an RPG in the sense that you control one character and you make choices and stuff, but it's turn-based. There's resources like wood and food. I kindof think you start out with just your weapons, clothes and a cotton sheet. Trapped under a log that fell on your leg. But then you improve your clothes and sleeping gear and stuff, it's like an RPG in that sense. I kindof think that this wilderness survival thing is sortof the tack-on ending to a larger dream about a platforming game or something. More on that later. But in any case, you get to make a choice early on about whether or not you're going to last the full two weeks before getting rescued or if there's a random chance every day of people finding you.

I kindof think there's some other party members, trading and stuff because I remember this scene where apparently one of your (the protagonist's) friends is dying. This was toward the end. They're dying, and we perform some sort of black arts ritual that turns the protagonist into a mummy while saving the friend. Well, I say mummy becauses that's what it was in the dream. What it looked like was more like the Egyptian god Anubis wearing a really badass black cloak. Apparently the ritual involved a pillar of rock, a coffin, and some weird stuff. Anyway. Shortly afterwards, we get rescued (early). There's this reporter asking us if I'm aware that I'm a mummy (that's why I said mummy earlier).

More about the framing context: I kindof think this was a video game that was being played in a class in college. There was this class I had last semester that was really pathetic in the "why the heck are we doing this in a COLLEGE class? This is the sort of thing you do in middle school" sort of way. Apparently that class was a prerequisite for the Indiana Jones TBS/RPG wilderness survival video game class.

I should point out, of course, that while I'm supposedly playing a video game, there's no computers. Sometimes I'm the protagonist, sometimes I'm watching the protagonist. But I'm always doing it from inside the game world.

Also there's this whole spiel I had about repetitive gameplay, and a scene where we're apparently rafting down a river that's not supposed to exist while being chased by guys with guns. While on this raft we exhibit the old classic, complete lack of traction.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

March 28 - Rail Shooter / Pacific / Scientology

Well, got three here. At least, three distinct contexts of dreams that I don't remember how they connect. They might connect, they might not. It's hard for me to say with my waking mind.


Dream #1: Rail Shooter

Well, this one starts off apparently as Professor Layton. Well, that'd be great, except I've never seen anything from the game other than promotional graphics. Apparently, though, I'm supposed to travel from various nodes to various other nodes, and find secret passages and solve puzzles. There's various islands and stuff, and I'm solving these puzzles (well, most of them). They're more like classic adventure puzzles than the puzzles I understand are in Professor Layton, but that's OK. So then I think I come to this one puzzle that I don't remember the details of except that there's these rotating blocks and I'm supposed to use them to create some kind of border when I'm told to. Apparently sometime around here it is revealed that the plot of Professor Layton consists entirely of the Professor and his sidekick solving puzzles and defeating evil villians off-camera. Well, this'd all be great, except that the Professor Layton in my dreams actually looks like the protagonist from Zach and Wiki. Oh well. But sometime around here we make a full-fledged switch and we end up with a Zach and Wiki rail shooter. Zach is zipping around on some power lines shooting various that's dangling from the sky. And that's the end of that dream.


Dream #2: Pacific

This one's a little odd. I don't remember quite how it starts except that I end up in this church-like setting (complete with pews) and apparently I'm a female slave. So there's this auction or something and then the dude next to me pulls a sweater over my head and convinces everyone I'm some saint named Mary. They all start worshipping me and apparently this whole thing was a plot of me and my buddies because then these dudes convince me to lead the entire pack of them to a certain place and then lose them. So I go around through this sort of mall-like setting and they follow me, with me following a guy I hate from college a little ahead. We come to this elevator and apparently only holy people are allowed down it. Or something. So we take the stairs and I'm talking to the dude next to me and apparently this is on some pacific island where the High Priest or the Mayor (sometimes it switches between the two) mysteriously vanished (incidentally, apparently the Mayor is Bosquinha from Lusitania from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card), creating a power vacuum and upsetting the social sytem of who's allowed where. So anyway, we walk around and I manage to lose everyone in some sort of really lush verdent residential district. I end up finding them again only to discover that me revealing myself to them at that point was a bad idea, because then they realize that the person they've been following for a while wasn't me. So I capitalize on this and there's some stuff that happens and then someone angers the volcano god and it starts pouring rain. Then we manage to convince the volcano god to make it HOT, only that just turns it into hot rain, which is apparently a perfect recipe for malaria. So we run around, and I think there's this flashback and a dude from my church back home, and then I find myself outside of this house that I seem to recall having similar design to some dude I had in a dream a couple years ago that I don't remember anything else about (and indeed, only just remembered that part when the dream felt familiar). There's this huge table in there and some people singing, and at some point there's me talking to some people about finding a different island to be on. And that's all I remember.


Dream #3: Scientology

This doesn't start out being about Scientology. It starts out being about me talking to some old friend back in Goshen. They've apparently found a new house and I'm talking to them about their internet service, which is apparently being run by my servers which are subletting from Verizon. I talk to them about college, and then apparently I start talking about Scientology. They have a watertubing slide like thing from Scientology apparently, and then that gets emptied of sand, and then a whole bunch of other friends show up, and I make some mean jokes, and they all turn into Scientologists and chase us off the property. But we go just past the edge of the property (apparently there were these goggles and some surveying done earlier so we ended up seeing the edge of the property exactly in some sort of glowing purple), and they pump us full of bullets (which apparently don't hurt, even though they've got, like, AK 47s), and we laugh in their face and tell them that we just videotaped them trying to kill us while we weren't on their property, and then I wake up.


Fragment: Newspaper

Don't remember where this fits in, but apparently there's this thing with a newspaper and I'm treating the newspaper like a website, and the newspaper has hyperlinks that lead to this columnist's blog, and there's this police officer talking to this woman and apprently he has to get out an AR-15 because she has one and it's police policy here to have at least as good a gun out as anyone you're talking to.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

March 19 - Moon

Quite the dream last night. Another one of those long dreams with the shifting contexts and bizarre twists.

Starts out with some stuff that I don't remember. But then I'm driving in this bus and I start getting this extreme lurching sort of paralysis where unless my joints are all bent at approximately half their capacity TO bend, they lock up and give me extreme pain. So there's this funky scene where a bunch of ambulences show up and do SOMETHING or other with colored hoops, and then the dream takes an abrupt turn for the supernatural.

Turns out there's some force out there giving me this joint problem. There's this cool prophecy that I remember was cool but don't actually remember (it's disappointing how often that happens), and then I get in a fight for this file folder where it's stored. I get it and it turns out that this prophecy comes with pages and pages of rules for some weird game. If I can solve some sort of logical conundrum, I can play the game against someone. If I win, I'm cured, if I lose, I die. It's sort of like a grid-like game with some glyphs and stuff. Apparently I have to jump from square to square in a certain fashion. If I land on certain squares, I gain a certain number of lives. If I land on others, I lose them. I win if I get 7 lives, and lose if I run out. I remember that there was a second player to the game, and yet the rules as I remember it and just told you, you'll notice, have nothing to do with more than one player. Maybe the second player messes around with my movements or something.

Anyway, suddenly this woman shows up. Apparently I'm a woman in this dream, because I have a boyfriend who suddenly starts getting hypnotized into a gullible moron who believes anything this woman says even if it's a blatant lie. So there's this whole scene where me and my boyfriend start not getting along very well. Then, all of a sudden, in a bizarre twist befitting my long line of bizarre dream twists, it turns out this is a role-playing game of some kind, because I suddenly say to my boyfriend something like "Man, this gameplay style is kindof annoying. It mixes IC [in character] with OOC [out of character] and it's hard to tell our real feelings." Something weird like that that made no sense in the previous context of the dream (actually, it doesn't really make sense in the rest of the context of the dream either, come to think of it). Anyway, suddenly my boyfriend starts kissing my arm. It's really bizarre. Anway, I kindof recall getting married at this point and then we take our honeymoon on the moon.

So we end up on the moon, right? So there's these little green bugs or something fleeing in droves from this forest. We ask the bugs where we should be going, and then the bugs tell us to follow the RED bug who's walking backwards. Anyway, we do that and we reach the forest. Apparently the forest is the power source for this bad guy that was giving me this lurching paralysis that mysteriously got cured despite me actually not having gone through the supposedly required hoops.

Anyway, there's this really awesome music playing in the background (yup, my dreams have a soundtrack). I don't remember much of it, but it kindof reminds me of the musical style of the Rohan theme from the Lord of the Rings movie, or else the musical style of the dude who composed for Firefly. Anyway, I throw this match at the forest, it lights on fire, and I wake up.




Freud would have fun with this one. I mean, I'm a girl in it. With a boyfriend. But Freud is a pathetic nutjob.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Dream Signs - Family

Well, it's taken me this long to recognize it, but me seeing my mom or dad (or especially my brother) is generally gonna be a dream sign because I'm living at college miles away from any of them.

Of course, some of the dreams about family took place when I was at home for spring break or whatever, but I fully expect that dreams with my family in them will continue.

March 18 - Chess

And in a burst of luck, I was wrong. I remember at least part of my dream now.

This is from toward the end of the dream, but still. Apparently I'm involved in this whole big underground blackmarket type service for playing some funny game against other people. It was apparently taboo because of its associations with cannibalism or something, very strange. Anyway, this hub for the game trade is this jeweler shop. You go to the jeweler sometime after 3 PM, and look at his display of gems very carefully. They contain a hidden code in them, and when you deduce the code, you know the current combination to this lock. You use the lock with some color-coded keys, and if you use the right two keys in the right order, it opens the door. Then the jeweler knows you're part of the trade and can pull out his game card that lists various different types of games that you play.

...But that's just how the dream ended. Here's how it begins.

I'm in this sort of real-life version of Wired.com. There's news stories floating around or something, and my brother shows up at one point and there's some clowning around and stuff.
Various hijinx insue that I don't remember the details of. Anyway, the dream proper begins when I apparently start learning more about Scientology. The wired.com-like place starts focusing on Scientology and I start wrapping myself into the group. Apparently this is all for the purposes of infiltration, but just when I'm almost in the group, I have this nervous breakdown. I come crying to my parents, say I can't do it, it's too hard, blah blah blah. So I run up this gigantic hill. I keep going and I reach the top and apparently it's turned into some sort of freaky weird quest, because I'm passing these increasingly weird sets of objects. I don't remember all of them, but one of them was a bomb, an apple, and... something. I collapse HUGGING the bomb. I look up and see some sort of reward, again for the quest that I'm suddenly on. Apparently there's a squirrel on my team because one part of the reward is this giant acorn. I actually don't remember the other parts, but at this time I'm high on the hill and am eating this apple. My parents are down below and are talking about how I'm refusing to do this Scientology thing (yeah, I know, perspective and context are about as slippery as an eel taking a bath in vegetable oil). So they start walking down the hill. I start eating one of three Granny Smith apples. Another of the three gets dislodged from the hillside and starts rolling down the hill. The hillside starts getting increasingly steep and I start slipping. By the time the apple rolls down and is in front of my mom, I'm clinging on a cliff for dear life. My mom gets my dad and they apparently think the apple is some sort of omen for some sort of supernatural monster that had introduced itself to them before via apples, but then they get close enough to the tree that I'm now clinging to, and I tell them, nope, it's just an apple. But could they get me down from the tree?

Well, I'm clinging on to the top of the tree, and they're at the bottom. So my dad whips out his magic powers, which apparently are totally freakin' sweet. He uses this sort of mathematical translation or something: two steps up, one to the side, and you form this L shape.

Then you TWIST in the air ninety degrees and the L-shape twists with it and this portal opens. You step next to the portal and rotate it again the right direction ninety degrees and it opens on the other side in another portal location.

I stepped through the portal he opened at the top of the tree and appeared in the jeweler shop.

Sadly, this is where I start forgetting the order in which things happened. I kindof think after the incident in the jeweler shop I got locked in a bathroom by some political fanatics and harassed by Ronald Reagan who threatens to casts some votes, which is apparently incredibly bad for the cause I'm fighting for. He starts doing that and then I wake up.

March 17 - Strong Bad

Well, this is late and I only remember the one dream now. It's nice and weird though. Sadly, this replaces today's dream that I unfortunately just forgot.


Dream #!: Strong Bad

This dream is loosely affiliated with Homestar Runner. Anyway, it starts out with Strong Bad going to an alternate universe or something where there's this giant car or something and he's driving over a bunch of people. There's some sort of resistence group that's against him driving over people, and then he drives up a ramp and does that move where you fly through the air in slow motion and then jump out at the apex of your arc. He whips out a hammer and does this whole slow-motion fight scene with everyone. At this point perspective shifts and I get a body. I fly up in the air and watch as lots of people show up and he starts being ridiculously outnumbered. At this point I'm like "holy cow, I'm flying, I must be dreaming." The dream turns lucid and I start commenting to myself about how this is a lucid dream. I say to myself that I should be able to control the dream. Then I wake up.

Monday, March 17, 2008

March 16 - Teeth / Apocalypse / Eyes

Dream #1: Teeth

Well, there's a couple details here, but the gist is that I dreamt I was REALLY obscenely tired (like, opening my eyes was hard work and it was highly bleary), and that my teeth were dangerously loose. Then I dreamt that I woke up and was lying in bed and my teeth were loose and some had come out and were floating around in the mess that was my mouth in early morning. Then I realize that there's a bunch of teeth in my mouth, reach up, but the movement parallels in real life and it wakes me up and I realize that I was dreaming the whole thing.


Dream #2: Apocalypse

So. Kind of a long-ish dream here. Let's see if I remember it all.

Starts out at some point with this scene in a courtyard kind of deal. There's the base of an elevator shaft for some reason and various emergency exits and stuff. Don't remember all the details and don't care to: this only sets up the rest of the dream.

So I go inside the building and apparently it's kindof a cross between a dorm and a summer-camp type of weirdness. It's time to go to sleep and there's this large array of bunks surrounding a central shaft, sortof like a hotel atrium. So I'm going up to my bunk and apparently people make fun of me because my bunk is dirty, but I get in, and for some reason am rolling around in it, and there's this girl who shoves me and I go flying off and into the space over the shaft, I fall and scream something like "HELP ME!" and then I hit the ground. I kindof think this is when this mysterious woman who apparently was SUPPOSED to be in my bunk instead of me says something like "the time stream has been altered. Now I am done for." and I'm lying on the ground with broken bones and for some reason I don't understand everyone is running around as if it was some huge deal. I see a friend from high school who comes over and I raise my arm or something to tell them that I'm alive. There's some sort of funny stuff happening and there's more friends from high school, and then I go unconscious.

When I wake up Mr. Exposition kicks in and I'm told that as a result of my falling, some missiles got launched at this thing in the middle of the ceiling (there's this whole little backstory about how someone was trying to help me out and launched the emergency stash of missiles instead) and it turns out that the launch automatically triggered more launch of missiles, which went to various places in Europe I think that caused casualties, except the missiles owned by Israel, which got launched toward some country in South Asia. So apparently there's millions of casualties and I feel like it's all my fault but then I remmeber this woman and it turns out that actually no, it's HER fault. There's this whole scene where I try various strategies to get everyone out of the dorm, because apparently there's high levels of radiation or something. Various stuff happens and I end up getting out, following one of my friends from high school around. We end up in some new location but then there's this backtrack thing and my friend ends up apparently back where we started inside the exclusion zone, but this time it's a pair of houses in each other's back yard, and I go inside after the girl and we pick up these huge stashes of candy bars, because apparently they were left behind and they'll improve morale, and then just about everyone else (at this point, pretty much all people I knew from high school) shows up to start collecting stuff and they remark about how altruistic the two of us are, gathering candy bars for them.

There's kindof a time skip here and other than some sort of tour of some sort of facility where there's these four dudes whose police badges are only visible when they glow in the dark, except that that's actually only true of one of them and we don't know which one, and some really hard-core post-apocalyptic accomodations, we end up traveling back in time to fix this whole thing.

We end up back in the original zone of the disaster, only now apparently the whole thing was instigated by a pair of characters from Angel (sometimes it's Angel and Cordelia, sometimes it's Wesley and Fred) kissing. We manage to prevent this from happening, and there's this whole thing about a hugely bright light, and then it's fixed and everyone starts clapping. Since nobody is supposed to know that we just kindof saved the world, this is a bit of a plot hole. And then the entire gang of us points out that this is a plot hole in one of the stranger moments of this whole situation.

And then we all live happily ever after and the dream ends.


Dream #3: Eyes

Various details escape my recall here, but one scene is towards the end of the dream and is burned in my memory. Something about a mom named Joyce. This part of the dream is being narrated by her daughter's diary and I kind of think this is supposed to be related to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Anyway, the daughter is talking about her mom, using some strange language like "arkbuilder" and "tanner". Apparently she has some mixed feelings, somewhere between "well, she's a nice, strong woman" and "she's really annoying." In any case, the daughter ends up describing her eyes, which look really creepy. Here's my memory of the image.

Obviously that's not exactly what it looked like, but the central part is pretty accurate and I do remember that there was this sort of web of white strands surrounding it.

That is not a normal-looking eye. At all.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Dream Signs - Pain / School

Well, it's kindof early to say on some of these things, but I think I can conclude on a couple new dreams signs.

  1. Pain. It shows up when I die, and it's shown up a couple times since then. I can conclude at this point, I believe, that if I experience a great amount of pain and don't particularly care, I'm probably dreaming.
  2. School. I'm not in high school anymore. And yet I find dreams about it. Dreams about a gymnasium, me going to high school, a high school classroom. If I'm back in high school, I'm probably dreaming.

March 14 - TV / Delusions

Been having trouble remembering my dreams recently. Today's dreams are more like fragments than anything else.


Dream #1: Barack Obama and Television in the classroom

Something about Barack Obama comparing moderation in politics with getting up to get a glass of water in the middle of the night. You get a sip of cold water and a sip of hot water. He liked the cold water so he filled his glass with it, but as he reached the bottom of the glass it got TOO cold and he had to stop.

A classroom talking about TV networks. Somebody talks about some weird names of broadcasting where there's a big network of various products started by a person that falls apart. I think the name "Amputatable productions" showed up at one point. I also kindof think we had the standard hoopla about me at a desk figeting with stuff.


Dream #2: Delusions IF game

Something that's pretty similar to the IF game "Delusions" in terms of the opening sections of the plot and the setting. The only thing is that the goal of the project is to create decent spices, apparently, while the only thing they have successfully created is some aphrodesiacs.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

March 10 - Islam / Hospital

Dream #1: Islam and Politics

Sort of a religious dream, which is weird for me. It begins with me at home in the dark, in a sort of nod to the meta. I wake up, and apparently it’s time to go to school in the morning. I’m following my brother to school, only in my dream my brother isn’t my actual brother, it’s one of my friends from school. They’re running on ahead and I’m desperately trying to keep up. There’s this little interlude where I ask them about their dream, and we talk about how our dreams were about Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton holding an election at a street intersection. Apparently Barack Obama had the vote stolen from under him or something. Anyway, I’m following my brother/friend to school and he’s running on ahead, I yell that he knows I’m not an endurance runner like him, when suddenly he veers off to the side, and then I am suddenly running past my house again, and I go inside, and my parents are there and my brother is playing the piano. I go in and am eating breakfast, and I talk to my parents about church. Apparently it has since become Sunday. I’m apparently raised Muslim in the dream, and I ask whether or not it is typical to ask for forgiveness of transgressions on the “day of divinity”. Apparently it is, and it feels slightly weird to me because of my aforementioned Muslim upbringing. I start to wonder why the heck I dreamt about this practice in my dream, and then I wake up.


Dream #2: Paralysis and Hospital

Don’t remember how this dream started. At some point I find myself on a bus, and apparently I’m like a fugitive or something, because I end up having to use this paralytic on someone and take them onto the bus, but it backfires on me because the paralytic causes them to bleed whenever their muscles shift position and it gets gruesome pretty fast. So I have to take them to the hospital. We drive the bus to the hospital, but it’s not a normal hospital. We enter via the ER entrance and are told that they’ll be people to help carry the person in, but we find ourselves in one of those discount grocery stores with the concrete floor and stuff. We pass through that area and find ourselves in a high school gymnasium. We wander around for a while and get lost looking for the actual hospital area. We find ourselves in this really ruined tumble-down brick place, with pennies taped to the wall for some reason and floors that look like they might collapse at any moment. There’s some holes in the wall that look out onto some very foggy ruins, and I can fly. I fly around for a while and find out that the fog is caused essentially by hot water pipes leaking hot water into the cold winter air, and I kindof scald myself at one point, but that’s about as much of the dream as I remember.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

March 8 - Puppet Masters / Party

So, another day, another pair of dreams.


Dream #1: Puppet Masters

This dream is about a world in which I am apparently alone among a great army of monsters that look like my family and friends. Some stuff happened at the beginning I don’t remember too well, but I do believe that at one point we were at this festival and me and one of my friends were having pretzels. The main “plot” began with me being fed up with one of the people I know in real life when they stole my food and did some other mean stuff. I get home and I want to call the police. However, I discover that my dad is in cahoots with him. When I call the police, though, suddenly a booming voice says something like “You can’t get help in this universe” and my dad comes down the stairs and is talking on the phone about doing something to me. Seems like just about everyone is in on it but me. At this point I think I get taken to this room where I’m supposed to be turned into one of them via some sort of mechanism. I’m told that I failed to be successfully turned in the past apparently because I wasn’t evil enough, and that this transformation is necessary for the smooth running of society. They’re going to try again, though, because apparently I’ve done some evil things recently. So they hand me these tin cans that look like they’re gonna contain some food, but when the label peels off suddenly contact between them and my skin is intensely painful. Apparently the transformation begins when I attempt to stop the pain, but in my dream I’m some sort of weird person who apparently can withstand obscene amounts of pain. So I just hang around holding these tin cans that are giving me an obscene amount of pain. There’s some talking, I don’t remember the details, and then some people come in and talk about how apparently I won a cat in a raffle (a raffle I signed up for in the festival at the beginning of the dream). I’m supposed to go downstairs and get it. I go there, still holding my cans as weapons, and it turns out it’s mostly just a ploy to send an army at me to kill me. I figure this out, and when the army shows up I apply my cans to them but apparently they’re immune to the pain, and indeed, can cause it. This sort of queen woman shows up and I don’t remember the rest of the dream.


Dream #2: Parties

Don’t remember the whole dream. I kindof remember me going through this sort of Zelda-like dungeon crawl to find this white lacy cape that makes you invisible. Unfortunately, it gets stolen by the big bad (who I remember nothing about), and apparently there’s this green cape that can do a lot of freaky stuff like turn you invisible. Then it turns out that the entire white cape thing is a scam, and it’s JUST the green cape that turns you invisible. Apparently we’ve developed this spell that’ll swap the magic cape with a completely identical one with no powers. The bad guys get ahold of the cape and somehow I’m watching them at this party where everyone’s dressed up like stereotypically evil animals and then they start engaging in risqué activities that I really shouldn’t detail. Later there’s this second party with stereotypically good animals, but I end up NOT going to that one because apparently there’s an entry fee. At some point in this whole affair the white cape gets shredded and there’s this test for people, one of whom has some sort of disability that makes them involuntarily kick the desk they’re sitting at. There are these buses and a driver who has this weird name and is your stereotyped big muscled car aficionado.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Somniloquy

Sometimes I talk in my sleep. Mostly I don't notice, because, you know, I'm asleep, but people who are around when I sleep tell me about it.

Sometimes I do remember, though, because I end up shouting in my sleep and waking myself up. It's interesting because I hear myself saying it, and I know that if only I could remember this, it would provide key insight into my dream. But inevitably, the instant I'm done speaking I forget. Instantly, completely.

Recollections - Never / Slave Pen / Natives

Well, I already find myself posting more than I thought I would going into this.

It's possible this series will continue if I manage to dredge up more dreams from my past that I remember. In the mean time, I have four that I recall. The first two are from long ago, while the third is quite recent. The fourth is going to be copied from something I wrote a while ago, because I don't actually remember the details anymore.


Dream #1: Never

This dream is likely to be ensconced in my hall of fame as just about the only dream I'll still remember years from now. It begins with me finding myself in a graveyard late at night. There's a bunch of people there, and apparently someone is telling me that it is absolutely crucial that I never touch the tombstones. Sure, easy enough, except there is this tendency for extremely strong winds to blow me right toward them. I'm clinging on to this tree, and at some point in the dream I end up touching the tombstone.

Wham. Suddenly, here I am, with a couple other people, in a different location. It's strange, but the best way to describe it is that I'm floating, essentially, high and off the edge of the map, in a sort of RTS game analogy, looking down at this place I'm told is called Never. I'm told that I'm stuck here for 60 years. Well, needless to say time skipped a bit, but I still vividly recall this scene where I'm climbing a mountain, it's above the tree line, in the snow, and there's this vivid image imprinted in my mind that is highly reminiscent of the Caradhras scene from the Lord of the Rings movie. That's actually about all I still remember, except that the dream pulled a Narnia at the end and I found myself back in the graveyard as if no time had passed.


Dream #2: Slave Pen

Again, there's not a very high detail level. I basically still remember three things. The premise of the dream is that I was captured and put in a slave pen that's actually more like a play pen for babies, and this is all happening during a hymn sing my mom went to. The dream ends when I find this girl who I apparently know very well (despite thinking in my dream that this is my dream and I don't actually know her) taking a shower in a bathroom that's actually more reminiscent of a swimming pool / hot tub.


Dream #3: Natives

There's a little bit more detail on this one, because it was so recent. It began with me being on a bus. I kindof don't remember much of this part, except we're driving down this road (I think we're supposed to be in Florida) and there's this one scene where someone's distracted the driver and it takes me like five seconds to get the driver to notice that he's about to go careening off the road. We end up doing so, but it doesn't matter because apparently we end up on a contingency rail road explicitly for this purpose. You see, apparently this bus is a hitherto unknown bus / train hybrid. We ride this sort of weird switchbacking machine that's supposed to get us back on the road, but eventually we end up just taking the railroad to where we're going. I remember thinking that we were going at 500 miles per hour, despite the fact that trains do not actually go at this speed and that relatively speaking, we weren't going that much faster than the cars on the nearby road. Anyway, at some point this whole thing kindof morphs and I find myself alone on something (not sure if it's still the bus at this point) but the rails have begun sporting a complicated rotating system of wooden gears, and the rails are also wooden and are frequently branching and merging. At some point this morphs again, and now I'm riding more in a ski-lift fashion a cable up in the air. I'm in the woods, and I look over and see a boat full of Native Americans. Suddenly Native Americans burst out of the woods all around me, about to attack. However, suddenly there's this burst of birds everywhere, some of them landing on me, and apparently it's some kind of omen that I'm blessed by the Native American gods and I don't get skewered. I get off this cable thingy and suddenly I'm inside a convention center and everyone is shocked at what just happened a moment ago when I was still in the woods. Various things happen at this point, including a meeting with someone supposedly called "Rand" but looking more like my old boss from my programming internship, and something about my socks and my keychain. The dream kindof dissolves at this point and I don't remember much more.


Dream #4: Time Travel

"It started out innocently enough. Well, sortof. It started out with some people making some weird doohicky, and it turned out to be a shrunken version of a time machine. Someone popped up in it, and they complained quite thoroughly about it being way too small.

But other than the theme of time machines, the rest of the dream was quite different. It was basically about some people trying to create a time machine.


These people find a sort of strange light. Don't ask me how they find this light, since it is abundently clear from the dream that the light is very deep underground. Frankly, it probably was a light in name only. Anyway, they find a light and some globes. They try putting the globes in the light, but things go psycho. They find a couple more lights, still no luck. The lights aren't the RIGHT lights for the globe they have.


And then a weird alien comes down from space. It gets all annoyed at us because we've got an unnaceptably strange galaxy, with (gasp!) a black hole in the middle that's researching the flora and fauna of an obscure planet far from the action of this dream.


Anyway, it gives us a "seed". Apparently we have to use the seed on a NEW light in the far east on a continent we've never heard of. So we go there, and apparently it turns into a Nevada desert with a giant waste dump-like thing. Someone makes a comment about how Nevada deserts seem to always have something to do with major technological breakthroughs. Another person says "duh, look at these robotic probes lying here next to the dump".

Anyway, we put the seed in the dump and a fountain shows up. Then we put the globes in the fountain, and it turns into a time machine.

Unfortunately, the time machine is oriented to face the planet's surface, so we can't use it to travel into outer space. Fortunately, the aliens show back up and help us out.


That's where my absurdly surrealist dream ends."

Fragments - CDs / flying / teeth / friction / death

So this is sortof a dual-purpose feature. I'm gonna talk about minor elements in dreams that I don't remember the context of, and I'm gonna talk about (at least this once) various dreams signs I've got.

First off, the fragment. Don't really remember where this fits in, but I had this snippet of dream I just remembered from last night where there was this whole bunch of CDs and they kindof accidentally spilled off the back of my desk or something and they got all dirty and gunky and generally unusable. I kept finding them later in like the radiator and stuff, it was weird.

Now for some dream signs. People tell me certain ones are common, and I've got a few of those. Don't really remember enough dreams yet to start looking for more, but I do remember these.

  1. Flying. It's weird. I've had tons of dreams where I can fly. It's always this sort of weird motion I make with my hands that allows me to essentially float everywhere I go without touching the ground. It's gotten so pervasive that sometimes when I wake up I have to go "oh, right, I can't actually fly in real life." So there's this sort of floaty thing, and also I can sot of gyrate my hands in a circle and adjust my height.
  2. Teeth. This one's old, and I haven't gotten it in a while. But every now and then there'll be these dreams where by the end I have like a pocketful of bloody teeth that have come out. Gruesome.
  3. And our good old friend, friction. I don't think that many people get dreams like this, but boy I have them all the time. I'm in some sort of ordinary environment, but I can't stop moving. I push off at one point and go flying crashing into the far wall. It's like I'm in null gravity in terms of motion only without the ability to go up or down.
  4. Death. Sometimes I die in my dreams. No idea if it's actually what dying actually feels like, but it's this sort of concentrated intensity that serves as dream-pain, followed by blackness, so you really kindof tend to draw the conclusion. There was this one time where I died and then the dream kept on going with me as a ghost.

More on these types of dreams as they happen. Maybe.

March 7 - Lost Valley / Tower of Babel

The night of March 7th. The night I got into this biz. I might post some retrospectives later, talking about the dreams of my past, but for right now, we're just gonna jump right into the dreams of the night. I've got two this time.


Dream #1: Lost Valley, Spiritus day

Something about my dad getting sick and I need this antidote from this park system, and I need it now, and it’s after dark and the park closed and so on. So I go to the park. I wander through my neighborhood until I get there. I follow the road up toward the woods, where I cut through and there’s this news program about how researchers get screwed over by people walking through the woods, distracting the predators from the prey that get trapped there by strip mining. I end up in this park and someone’s following me, which I discover when they’ve been attacked by a bear. I wander around for a while until suddenly I find myself at the precipice of this sort of hidden valley thing with some animals. There’s this rhinoceros nearby, and I’m kindof scared. I go to sleep when this dude shows up and it turns out he’s been following me and he’s taking me to jail for being alone in this park after hours. I talk to him and he proposes the defense that I was given permission by my mom and that I didn’t know the park was supposed to be closed and anyway, the timing was urgent or my dad would die. I show up at this convention where its “Save the Spiritus day” and dad’s there and he’s fine and the dream ends.


Dream #2: Tower of Babel Musical

Some sort of cross between tower of Babel, Legend of Zelda, and a very complicated adventure game/musical/movie. We begin in a postapocalyptic universe. There’s this giant destroyed spire thing. Slowly we unravel the story of what happened here. Some stuff happens that I don’t quite remember, the gist of which being that we kind of replicate certain events that allow us to partially restore the spire. I kindof got stuck on what to do next (remember, this started off as a sort of game like thing), and there was this whole musical about something like “come, let us come, to our home”. I don't remember the verses, and I really can't recall the name of the tune, but the chorus is a standard "come let us walk. come let us walk. come, let us come, to our homes." I reach this one point where suddenly something I do restores the spire by a certain degree and I’m afforded a look into the past. At the height of the civilization, there was a giant futuristic civilization. Instead of this really primitive society (I think earlier parts of the dream had some interaction with the culture, it was almost cave-man-like), there’s a whole big thing with a telecast and everything. Martha Stewart is apparently the news anchor and she’s talking about something or other, when suddenly the entire top levels of the spire sort of dissolve in a burst of blue energy and everyone starts plummeting. I remember her suddenly saying “wait, that’s Link’s house” and going silent. Apparently Link, Zelda, and a couple other people survive by sprouting wings. They complain about how they caused this destruction on tons of people (someone was out to get them and these people got caught in the crossfire), but their friends (apparently named Marrim and Genor) point out that just about everyone took part in what was essentially a tower of Babel. They fly down and talk about some stuff. At this point it sortof morphs, and Zelda takes on some properties of Alyson Hannigan. Genor is a blond boy, and Marrim is a slightly red-headed/blond girl. At this point I remember thinking how obviously everyone had gotten different actors because apparently by this point the dream had morphed into some sort of sequel movie. Suddenly the past is back and we’re singing this song. Still don’t remember the words, but “come, let us walk” also comes in, and there’s this whole motif about me being determined and focused, and something about being to mature or SOMETHING. Possibly a schtick about lost youth. Obvioiusly dream recall isn’t perfect yet.

Genesis - General Introduction

Well, here we begin. I finally get a blog, and it's not really a normal one. Most people create blogs to talk about their waking life. I'm gonna talk about my dreams.

This is sortof doubling as a dream journal, but also they'll probably be some commentary and stuff.
I have college and stuff, though, so I really don't know how often I'll be able to take the time to write down the dreams and how often I will just have to wake up in the morning and go to class.

Hopefully I'll be able to catch the weekends at the very least.