Dream Log: August 15, 2001

Whilst working in the local fish and chip shop, where I had been left to do the night shift, The boss told me to go and get something from down the road. Although I was wondering who would look after the shop, especially since there was a sudden boom going on (I like to think it was my wonderful chip frying technique that was drawing the crowd) I took off in my car - a Datsun 120Y an anomaly as I own a Holden 4x4.

With my friends in the seats around me, and it being dark I pulled up into an unbuilt-up shopspace, in the dirt, sliding to a stop, leaving great furrows, then slamming the thing in reverse, and spinning the wheel to 'slide' back again.

About this stage I realised that there was an abundance of muscle cars dragging around the streets and that also there was suddenly undercover police everywhere. The sting went down and I happened to have pulled my own little stunt right in front of the main cop, who was now laughing his head off, at me, saying that I was going to jail forever.,

I know I had lots of charges laid against me, and that I was facing a fair amount of prison time. everything else is hazy here...

I woke up fairly distressed

This dream is pretty strange in the sence that it absolutely, positively could be happening in my real life too. I'm working for the department at university and there's not too much to do right now so I've adopted the role of 'department's little helper', programming-wise. Also the bits about Mark corresponds the reality, apart from the goal of work.
And now the dream:

Mark, who's an international trainee from Switzerland, is supposed to be doing a system for a toilet that indicates if it's reserved or not. He has plenty of code finished already but my help is needed because Mark is going back home very soon. He don't know how to get the information if someone is in a toilet or not. Nor he doesn't know yet how to demonstrate that for the people.

So, I figured out that we could install electrical contactors into a lock so that once a lock is locked it will give a signal. You see, that's the way how locks work i.e. a metal clapper protrudes out of the door when you turn the lock. Otherwise the current cannot flow, so..

Then I thought it might be a bit funnier to get traffic lights as indicators of toilet's state. Of course we could simply set up small ordinary lights to indicate the state but a traffic light would be cool.

Having said that I started to mind my own business and Mark started to work hard with this. Again, I didn't have anything real work to do but since I've been working reluctantly the whole summer this -- my new role as an innovative force -- suited me fine.

Ever since beginning to take zoloft, I find myself remembering my dreams :)
Glass, my dreams are filled with glass. All throughout my life I have dreamt of glass: a glass palace, my bedroom ceiling a glass dome looking out to the stars, a dodecahedron fishbowl.. last night I dreamt of glass again. And a mansion, I always dream of mansions. It is a major theme of dustfromamoth’s dreams.

I dreamt that my uncle asked me to carry a pony inside. The pony was so tiny and brown like a puppy!!!!!!! I was so excited that I saw exclamation marks in my dream! I woke up and buzzed into Micky’s room and told him all about my dream pony breathlessly, and he looked at me and blinked, and said, “..yeah.. but if it’s so tiny you can’t ride it”. Sigh. I bet inside he was thinking how cool my dream pony was.

I also dreamed that Margaret wanted to surprise her boyfriend with a birthday message written up in lights on the side of a skyscraper. Apparently this was some type of extraordinary advertising business, where people would pay mass amounts of cash to say something in city lights on the side of skyscrapers. Her message simply said “MM”, and underneath that, “M”. I do not know what this means. Apparently it was really expensive because it didn’t stay up there long enough for her boyfriend to see. And my dad also bought one of these messages and was very disappointed that his didn’t stay up there for very long at all either. Stupid skyscraper advertising. I had a dream once that the sky became a place where people advertised. I’ll kill myself if the sky ever becomes cluttered up with fucking sprite logos and such.

My family and I were also evidently at a carnival last night and my grandmother offered to buy clothes for me. I apparently decided upon some lustrously fuzzy black cardigan (as well as two singlets*) but it ended up being very very overpriced and so my grandmother got mad at me and I didn’t buy it. I didn’t particularly want the thing anyway.
*She ended up buying me the two singlets which sort of had glitter thread through them, and one of them had this kitschy picture of a whoreish alice in wonderland. They were eight dollars each, and I was satisfied that my grandmother didn’t have to spend very much at all on me. Everything I bought was $8 actually. There were two shaggyish cushions in cappuccinos and dull greens and pale pinks, they were $8, and two tiny CD-like objects, I forget their purpose but one was a goat CD and one was a horse CD. I was unsatisfied with the horse one. The discs were slightly bigger than a coin, and covered in plastic like MiniDiscs are. They were goldish orange. I would like to have a shop where everything cost $8.

I dreamed I was part of what turned out to be a radical, Black Bloc-esque troop of Girl Scouts. We were all on a bus (a nice tour bus, not a school bus, which was weird because Girl Scouting as I know it is a low-budget operation, as is getting into black garb to go make ruckus, which is what we did as the bus rumbled on to wherever we were going). I had just made up my mind not to wear a mask when the bus stopped.

I was the last to get off the bus, and the group was already out of sight when I emerged, but some friendly construction workers on top of a nearby building pointed me which way they'd gone. It was then that I realized we were Girl Scouts, protesting the fact that the uniforms on sale at this location were a) made with sweatshop labor, and b) too darn expensive (hence our black army-surplus gear? I dunno).

In any case, we set about filing into a corporate boardroom in the lobby of the store where the unacceptable uniforms were being sold, so the Girl Scout Council types couldn't have their meeting (they promptly set up shop at another table near ours). Our troop leader looked disappointed that we weren't causing more disruption of the corporate types' activities, and we were embarrassed to be disappointing her, so we set about blocking access to the store. Mostly our presence there was enough to intimidate the mothers seeking to buy uniforms for their daughters, and we made posters and pressed pamphlets about the evils of sweatshops, child labor and exploitation on the ones brave enough to approach the store. But mostly we had a lot of free time, so we sat around reading.

I was rereading The Chronicles of Narnia but one was missing: one in the middle, about a green witch (somehow, even in the dream, I was sure no such book even existed). The boxed set available to me didn't have it, and for some reason contained a few R. L. Stine-type cheap, trashy horror books of the type that can give me the willies right before bedtime instead. I rejected these and went back to my reading.

I found myself engrossed in a story about a man who had made himself a woman, and would torment her by doing things like cutting off her nose and sewing it back on. He was quite paranoid that her agonized screams and complaints would draw someone's attention, and justifiably so: the story was being told from the point of view of a small creature, a pixie or maybe a magical talking mouse who had invented a hot air balloon to travel in and had seen their interaction. Nonetheless, he continued to abuse her and to tell her to keep quiet, because he felt like someone was watching him. It was weird, but there's a story in it, one I might have to write if it hasn't been done already.

I woke up not sure if I had really dreamed up that story, and thinking about letting it evaporate like dreams do. But it stuck with me, and now I've written it down here for future reference, and we'll see if anything comes of it.

Body Switching Jam Session

• I arrive with my friends Thomas, Allen, Mario and Dave at the house of our friend Luke. It's actually his father's old house, built right on the edge of a salt-water bay. Luke lives here with a housemate and his father comes every so often to work on the house. The marina is right next door and the masts of many sailboats poke up into the dusk sky. In the side-yard of the small two story house, there's a tiny man-made inlet from the seawater that has some unknown function; it's rectangular with concrete edges like a 3 x 3 meter pool and looks about that deep. We are welcomed by Luke and enter his house. We've never been here before so he gives us a little tour. The living room and kitchen are downstairs and the two bedrooms are upstairs. Luke's dad is adding a small balcony to the side of the house that would extend off the bedroom and overhand the front door. It looks about halfway done, a framework of raw pine. Dave starts messing around, fake-wrestling with me and rolls me out onto the balcony. I try to fight him off as the delicate structure sways and begins to crumble beneath our weight. Dave pulls back into the bedroom as the balcony collapses into the pool with me. I'm not angry as I get out and re-enter the house. Our plan is to have a little musical jam session--after some of our group pick up some alcohol and the rest smoke pot upstairs. Thomas, Mario and Dave leave while Allen and Luke join me for a smoke. It is at this point that I realize I am not in my own body. Somehow I know that it is in fact Luke's housemate's body. In the mirror I see a pudgy-faced, freckled 20 year-old with longish straight black hair. We're upstairs and Luke tells us some girls are coming over to listen to us play so I decide to have fun by styling this guy's (my) hair. I can tell how he usually wears it, hanging down long, but I try slicking it back into a pony tail. I used to have long hair so it was a strangely familiar sensation to feel all that hair pulling on my scalp as I tied it back. The metaphysical/lucid dream thoughts have now occured to me and I make comments about this body-switching to the other guys, and even wonder aloud what the housemate's actual physical body is doing in the waking world while I'm borrowing it in the astral world. It occurs to me that I might have a different guitar-style in someone else's body so I pick up a guitar and reflexively play an improvised blues lick. It sounds pretty good and isn't something I would normally play. We hear the people arrive downstairs and decide that we're finished getting primped up. As I descend the stairs I hear the voices of my girlfriend and another friend, Meghann. The last thing I hear before I awaken to the alarm is the voice of my ex-girlfriend, Radha, who is also there (and who I am meeting for lunch today).

The dream began with an odd kind of sensation, like it was raining outside, or that something had happened. It must have been of at least some interest to me, because it was very bothering that I couldn't remember what it was.

Next I'm water skiing. Or maybe not so much water skiing as being towed by a boat without touching the water (despite the fact that my feet were clearly immersed in the stuff). It all has an edge of unreality about it, like it's almost happening but not quite.

Now the speedboat (which I never actually saw, only its wake was visible) takes a sudden turn towards a rocky shore to the left. The rocks are jagged yet flat and smooth.

As I near the rocks I "let go" of whatever I was holding onto, and careen towards the shore (a cartwheeling motion, only horizontal. Like a car caught in a spin). I try to stop myself (how I'm not sure), but nothing can be done. Still skimming the water, I collide with a rock only to be repelled into the sky.

Then I'm above my bed, and I'm looking down on myself. As I watch, I roll and fall out of bed. This has the result of forcing me to abruptly awaken, clutching both sides of the bed (convinced I had in fact fallen).

I should also mention that upon waking, I noticed a scrap of paper next to my bed, upon which I had written:
"Thing ot

it____________has that_______________the
and fear about talk to want"

It was quite legible so there is little doubt that this is what I was actually trying to write.