Dream Log: November 8, 2000

In last night's dream, I was biting my fingernails (as I often do when awake) and noticed a very itchy feeling under and around my fingernails. I poked around (using a cotton bud or q-tip) and revealed a cavernous hollow filled with writing white-yellow worms.

I have had dreams before involving pulling large, earthworm-sized (again, white) worms from the sides of my fingernails, leaving being fat cylindrical holes of the same diameter as the invasive beasts. This is - it seems - as popular as dreams where your teeth fall out, or dreams where you can't move. In last nights dream though, the worms were smaller - like thin maggots.

Having been pulled from my fingers these worms made straight for my eyes. I didn't realise this until I'd seen something wiggling in my wife's eye.

Next, I peeled back my the skin above my ears, revealing weird shallow hollows in the structure of my skull. Again, using a cotton bud I set about cleaning away a thin layer of stinking black filth that had somehow accumulated there.

I woke up feeling quite nauseous. A feeling that returns now as I recall the dream.

Concrete corridors intermittently lit, travelling swiftly, we pass locked doors with glass windows. There are people I know in there but she will not let me stop and we push on. She is in a silver ski suit, and she moves fluidly, as if she were skiing. Down in a lift in silence, out again into another set of corridors and we're speeding past bright, familiar tags on the walls - FUME KNOWN INSA TEACH -: they have made a huge piece of intricate graffiti but I can't read it at this speed, we're gliding as if we were on roller skates. We pass some strange little creatures travelling in the opposite direction: they're blue and look like smurfs and they're all talking frantically at once. I smile and point them out, but she doesn't hear me through the silver helmet and we keep going at the same breakneck speed. Down a slight incline, round a corner, and here there are more doors. Magically we glide to a halt in front of one and she opens it.

"Here we are," she says, "this is yours."
And she leaves me. I look round the room. It's small and white, with a blue carpet. One wall is desk, purple sgi machines, monitors, racks of black oblongs with knobs and lights, mixers. Record boxes make patterns on the floor. It looks like my friend's old room, without the dust and gack. There's a comic lying open on the floor. I bend to look, and the pictures start to move, animated manga stylee. It's the girl in silver, she's the comic's heroine. The tale seems to go on and on: she's in a war with some of the little blue smurflike creatures i saw earlier. The drawings and animation are amazing, but the story is dull. I get bored and look away, and there's my friend F with two cups of tea.

"You like it?" he says, nodding at the comic. "I did it all in this," and points to the screen on his desk. I take the tea and look at the software: it looks like the old Alias Power Animator, but with 100 extra amazing menus I long to get at. In a motion capture window there's an image of the corridor as seen from the silvergirl's helmet, and the drawn line images of the comic are appearing at real-time speed, perfectly rendered in another window. I see the graffiti flash past, perfectly drawn. I say wow a lot. I want. He grins.
"Suppose you wanna copy, then?" he says with twinkling eyes, dangling a freshly burnt cd in front of me. I snatch, clutching it gleefully....

I wake up. Arse.

This is fucked up, but, what do you want when you watch election coverage for four hours before falling asleep (once again, just you keep you updated, Gore has carried Massachusetts and its 11 electoral votes...)

I'm helping these inner city kids, in what capacity I'm not sure. It's weird because they live right on this busy intersection. Anyway, there's this girl who helps out, too, and I can't stand her. She's always bossing the kids around. So the mother tells us to go water the lawn, so the girl, the kids, and I go out to the back. It's a pretty big field, actually, rather than a lawn, and you have to water it by jamming a rubber hose onto this rusty pipe, and then putting your finger over the end to increase the pressure to send the water further than just a trickle. As we're doing this, Spike Lee is standing in the street preaching.

He's preaching about inequities of race in our country, and my friend Will is lying down on the sidewalk with his hands behind his head, debating the famous film producer. Normally, Will's not a debator, and I doubt if he would have issues with Spike Lee's particular points of the day, but eventually Spike Lee announces that he's cancelling the film he was going to make. Will goes ballistic, telling him that it's a meaningless gesture that's only going to piss off the high-ups in Hollywood. Spike says he doesn't care.

Meanwhile, the girl that helps out is having a conversation with another random girl. I find out that she wanted to go to college to become a scientist, but gave it up because the kids needed help. I tell her not to worry, that she'll still be a scientist some day.

Later on (jumping ahead a bit, as my memory isn't too clear), I'm playing softball. I think it's my company team, because there are a couple people from work on the dream team, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm pitching, and everyone in the field keeps making errors, and it's pissing me off. After a close play at home plate, I argue with the umpire, and I get thrown out.

Standing on the sidelines, a cute blonde girl suddenly appears. She's carrying a bunch of yellow pom-poms, and she's very angry. It also appears that there's a convenience store here now, as there are several low shelves behind her with items on them. Keep in mind that we're still outside on a softball field... there's just some extra shelving.

She's really pissed. Apparently, (this is going to sound REALLY stupid) she thinks that I am the one who has nearly destroyed her planet. With pom-poms. Yes, she's from another planet, one where pom-poms are some kind of deadly weapon. Whatever. She starts throwing them at me, and I'm just catching them and throwing them back over the first shelf. She picks up this really big pom-pom, and gets ready to throw it, but before she can I walk up and kiss her (good for me!), like that World War II photo with the soldier and the nurse. She's very stunned... not like 'why is kissing me', but more like she doesn't even know what a kiss is. Strange. I tell her, "I'll fix this," then I turn around and enter then house behind me.

Boom. Wake up time. What the fuck?

I agree to go eat lunch with Zarah at The Budapest, a local Hungarian restaurant.
Once we get there, the typical menu has completely changed, as has my dining partner, to Joanna, an early childhood friend! I have a rambunctious Maxwell in each hand, but fortunately there happens to be a birdcage nearby our table. I am distressed that the Maxwells are able to phase through the bars and enter the cage without my opening the doors, but apparently the ability only extends one-way.

The side they passed through looks like a child's crude scribbling.

The food arrives and is all-meat in arrangements hitherto unobserved outside Bernard Kliban's fictional "foods of the world" comic strip.

in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...

i'm standing in someone's backyard on a cellphone, trying to inform someone of importance what i am witnessing, which is the launch of two nuclear weapons. they appear over the tree line just behind my house and are flying very low to the ground. also, they're gigantic (think Independence Day).

. . .

i'm at some abandoned factory when some country strikes back against our nuclear attack. i hear an explosion and it begins raining. hard. hard enough to rip through the roof and any place you may try to find shelter from it. everyone and everything is drenched and people are wailing from the sting of the rain. somehow, i end up back at my house watching my neighbor pump out his backyard, shooting mud everywhere.

back / forw

• My baby's first word was "danger," but I forgot, and thought it had been "rescue." It was anticlimactic - Noah asked him to say "danger," and he did, clearly, enunciating.
• I do not eat suchlike vittles
• At the Muppet party they dumped blue paint over us and we ran around hugging everyone to get them painty too. Pete was dwarfed beside the hairy monster. Vern took off his disguise.
• we had to paint her ears with quinine
• edebroux and I ate at one restaurant and washed dishes at another. I swung the car around in the street to give her a ride.
• I was Robin and the woman was yelling about the bus was going to leave me there on the hill. But I knew it wouldn't, because I was the only one on this field trip and she needed my help to get the silver cart down the steps. I took my time. There were chasms in the ground bridged by clipboards, sometimes 6 feet long. I jumped over, afraid it wouldn't hold my weight on the other side, even though it could hold trees. I found a sheet of paper I'd covered with words and forgotten. I found shed bird feathers and shed cat tails, which were fine, but the squirrels' tails made me nauseous.
• two deer unafraid of me in the driveway, because I held very still. One white rabbit coming up through the pasture. My brother was unsuprised.
• Heather thinks you don't like her. I tried to convince her otherwise, but I knew it was a trick.
• The boy baby was terrified of being eaten by a vagina. The girl baby was busy dreaming of jewelry.
• Lex Luthor fucking hates me.

Everything was comprised of smooth thick macromedia type lines. I was using a nice far gradient fill to flesh of the shapes. I walked around peacefully. This guy i barely know whom I hate shot an arrow in my gut. I found it annoying but didn’t bother to remove it. I covered it with my shirt creating a cotton temple. I only looked at peoples midsections when I met them. Nobody spoke but everybody’s midsection paused when confronted. I woke up very dehydrated and collapsed on the way to the bathroom.

So, I'm sitting in History class, and my pager starts vibrating. I slickly reveal it, hiding it from my teacher, and say "Mr. *, I'll be right back". The pager screen reads "yo someone talking shit*d wing*pete".

I cut through people in the crowded halls and reach the D-wing. I see Pete there telling off this kid, and they push each other back and forth. The kid sees me, and says, "There you are, you fucking bitch." He approaches me and tries to hit me, but before he connects I push him back and start kicking the shit out of him. Pete starts cracking up laughing while I haul ass back to class after sufficiently beating the little bitch. Looking back I see three of our security guards running over. I get back to class and say, "Sorry, Mr. *" and go on with my work.

Interesting dream. Probably just another sign of my recent, stress-induced violence. Imagine that.