Dream Log: October 19, 2000

Party Foul

• My mother decides to put on a huge party for my friends and I but the word leaks around town like it's sometimes apt to do and hundreds of people show up. Luckily, there are a few kegs, but I struggle all night trying to get the stereo to work, with no success. Sooner than later, everyone takes off from the decidely downbeat party. I also noticed a lot of homosexual activity in the front yard. One of my hetero friends even remarks to me that he made out with three girls and two guys. "Congratulations, Bill."

I hope I don't have anything for the dream log in the morning. I've been having some odd dreams lately, and when I have odd dreams, I generally wake and don't feel very rested. I've a midterm today, and not feeling rested on Hell Day is a bad thing.

I've been playing with my Vitamin Z levels a bit lately; that probably has something to do with the odd dreams. SSRIs are notorious for inducing intense dreams.

Eventually I know I'm going to start dreaming about Everything. It's just a matter of time. kanon42 has already, I presume, given that she talks in her sleep about it -- see thefez haunts the node mountain.

Trippy

The dream I just experienced kept wavering between lucid and...whatever the opposite of lucid is. I was taking a test in class, but couldn't concentrate due to several distractions. I don't actually remember ever looking down at the test...there were simply too many other things to see. Nothing looked quite right...faces were vague, everyone was moving strangely. Like stop-motion, or people moving jerkily in a strobe light.

My professor, an immaculate dresser, was wearing blood-soaked rags and kept asking female students if they had any Kleenexes in their purses. I just knew she had killed anyone from the previous class who failed the exam. The windows were open, and a dense fog kept drifting into the room even though we were on the second floor and the sun was shining directly on my desk. The professor warned us that we had only a few minutes remaining, and I became very frightened since I hadn't even started. I tried looking over the shoulder of the girl in front of me, but she wasn't writing anything either. She kept staring at a photo album, as though the test meant nothing to her. I realized at that point that it wasn't really happening, but the awareness must have been incidental or fleeting, because I couldn't get up from my seat to leave.

My director entered through the window, which must have reminded me of Salem's Lot because her eyes were dead when she leaned in to say "You're going to be too late."

Something in the way she said that hit home hard enough to wake me up. I frantically checked the clock...

I've got all the time in the world.

I actually fell asleep for a couple of hours and had one of the best and most impressive (in the special effects department) in something like five years. It was nice because it was a welcome respite from the horrible nightmares that I've been having about an old girlfriend of my father's who molested me when I was six. I finally got him (my dad) to admit that it happened about a year ago (which coincidentally is the last time we spoke.) What really sucks about it is that I'm 28 now and I've been plagued by bad dreams about it ever since it happened although I don't really have a conscious memory of what happened. It was kind of a typical scenario - sadistic psycho beats kid until he pees his pants, does a few things that I don't really wanna talk about, and then locks him in the closet for like ten hours. I'm not surprised that I don't remember much of it actively.

Anyhow, now that I've spilled my guts and probably told you more than you really want to know...the point to all of that gruesome detail (which I've considered deleting like ten times while I typed it) is that a sweet dream is a rare thing for me.

In this dream I was with my girlfriend at Montauk Point in New York. That particular place is like the furthest point out that you can get on land. We were sitting there watching the ocean when it just stopped. It froze with no motion and no sound. It was unbelievably beautiful and vivid. It just made us laugh for some reason and it was the kind of really long laugh that doesn't send you into spasms or make your stomach ache. It was just a laugh of astonishment.

When I woke up it felt like I'd had a full eight hours of sleep. It's weird because several hours later I'm still trying to shake off the haze of it - expecting that something utterly surreal yet incredibly beautiful is going to pop out at me. Sigh.

The first bit I remember is sneaking into the concentration camp.

I was trying to catch up with some of my friends and maybe rescue them. I found the room they were staying in and tried to find a place to hide from the Nazis, but this girl from a couple of my classes had claimed like half the places in the room, which she could hardly have planned to use. Feh.

---

I managed to end up with the gargoyles at this fortress. It turned videogamey here. In the upper-right corner of my vision was an indicator in Roman numerals. There were 5 of us total, and the indicator predicted how many of us would make it out alive.

So we were trapped in this place trying to find a way out. It was like a pyramid at first, ancient and forgotten. We were running about at random, opening doors and running into guards and things. One of us opened a west door, and the number went all the way down--I had an idea that he had released a virus trap.

We started over. I went directly to the door that had the most promising aspect behind it. There was a schoolteacher inside who seemed not a bit alarmed at our presence. The number stayed V. All right. From here on, the place began to look less like a forgotten tomb and more like an office building.

There were different rooms, and we were doing all right, until we came to the computer lab. They were bringing in people from the concentration camp to use the computers for a while. I made my first big mistake... I noticed my university president was not a prisoner, but was up front with one of the guys in charge. When that guy took all the prisoners out to bring in the next round, I caught the prez's attention, identified myself and started trying to plead with him to help us out. It was working okay at first, but it was taking too long to say and I suddenly noticed the number going down. I started over again. I ran right up to him and asked for help directly. The number went down right away. Arrgh!

---

I ran away. I managed to get through the exit. The evil leader guy gave me a white rock, but I'm no fool--I hid it somewhere, in case he were able to track me with it. I managed to make it back to the school, but there was no help there. I ran back to the pyramiddy fortress and tried to save the gargoyles myself. I went to the computer lab, asked the prez, and he took us all up to the roof. There were these biplanes waiting for us. We all got in and flew off.

---

The dream didn't end there, but that's all I remember..

The Funeral

Walking along the eastern bank of the Missouri River, heading north... the river appears to be drying up. I am on my way to attend the funeral of a distant relative I'd never met in life. We find our way to the funeral, which is being held outdoors along the banks.

Apparently my relatives (most of whom I've never met, and they remain indistinct in this sequence) feel that the person officiating is terribly hilarious. There seem to be thousands of people attending this funeral, so the laughter is impressive.

Hexed Space

Another sequence. I am with people who are showing me around an enchanted space of some kind. There is a post which is part of a framework that is somewhere between a garden enclosure and the frame of a house. If you place a quarter on this post, it will almost instantly "zing" off and land somewhere around the borders of the space, which resembles a Monopoly-like gameboard.

Attacks and Questions

Isolated in a house somewhere, possibly near the hexed and enchanted spaces. People are shooting at us through the window frames of this house. My youngest daughter asks me why I don't seem to own a tiara... She seems puzzled that I have all these nice dresses, but not enough hair ornaments for her taste???

• Party at my grandma's house. I was nervous, didn't know anyone very well, didn't feel like being there. Only thing left was to get drunk so I did. Mikey was very kind to me, sat with me on the couch. I knew I was dreaming but I was drunk too so it didn't matter, I could detach and enjoy it. Beth called the pizza place, which was closed, so she yanked the popcorn machine through the phone line and ate the cake out of it. We were appalled and knew the cops would be showing up soon. We all left her in the kitchen and went to the back yard for more sex.


• Man and a woman going up the stairs ahead of me. As they passed the bulletin board she straightened a photo and he barked at her not to touch it, he had taken those photos for her and he would not have her messing them up. She jumped and knocked it more crooked than before. When I went past, I fixed it and tried to read the writing on the back, but it was upside down. We all kept going up the stairs forever. I could see right up their skirts.


• Wandering through New York we found Madonna in a princess dress, with pink hair and eyeshadow, standing on a frozen lake, cooing at the camera. Someone threw a golden ball and she giggled and ran to catch it. The photo showed her with hands cupped to catch a plummeting star.
  I talked to the photographer, who turned out to be the one who'd built the stage and the false lake and arranged for silver snow to fall constantly over the woman on the stage. Everyone wanted to be the princess and have her picture taken. I asked him if he knew how many women he was making happy, and he said yes, he had counted. He made me get on stage. "What princess are you?" I was thinking. I walked around the chairs on the stage and kicked up silver snow. I had my hands deep in my coat pockets and head down thinking hard. He took my picture. "You are the Pacing Princess." he said.

I was in a different part of the world. It was hotter there. Some friends and I were in a toy store. I remember seeing the stupid giraffe the Toys 'R' Us uses as their mascot, but I don't think it could have been a Toys 'R' Us, because we definitely weren't in Canada or the States - it was too hot.

Anyways, there were all these big scorpions running around in the store. They were a really odd colour of green, like the new leaves in spring time, and they were about six inches long. They were running really fast, and could jump really high. I didn't know that until later, so I climbed up on a table to get away from the scorpions. Then I saw one jump up on a cashier's station and run along the cashier's arm. She screamed and shook it off. Then one was running towards the table, and jumped up on it. I am really scared of scorpions, so I tried to get away, but it didn't matter because it was running towards an open window that the table was pushed up against.

Another scorpion came in through the window and was running towards another girl (who I didn't know) on the table. She stamped her foot down really hard on it as it ran by, and squished its head. But then, all of the other scorpions started to attack. They would run towards people and jump up at them. It was so strange, they could jump about 5 feet in the air. We were trying to stamp on them and kill them, but they would jump up in the air and try to sting us.

And then I woke up. I still can't decide if this was worse than the spider dream I had a while back.

• The girlfriend of a friend: For some reason, he was away for a while, and she confessed to me that she was lonely. I thought a long time, and then told her that I liked her a lot. She smiled, a sad smile, and said she knew, even though outwardly she thought I pretended to hate her. I said, "But what about him?" She said she loved him, but she was anybody to him, which made sense. I took her hand, and brought her away from the room, which was full of people. We talked, and she laid down on me while we talked. It was erotic, but not really sexual. Somehow, it wasn't really cheating. But the rest of the dream, a blur, was me escaping while he chased me in his boat of a car (A Chevy of some kind) which strangely reminded me of the Dukes of Hazard. I think maybe she was flirting with me at the club the other night, or I want to remember it that way.
  
• The four Canadians of the Apocolypse: There was a block party of some kind on my street, which is silly because I live in the boondocks. But at the fair, a pair of sisters from Canada that spoke only French said something like "Can we have your belt?" I have a cool belt, but I knew what they really meant was that they needed a leash for their dog, a big black labrador. I brought them home with me, and searched for a leash, but could only find some twine. Meanwhile, their brother, a cute frenchman with a thin mustache and a beret, showed up and offered to help me look. While we searched the garage, I found an old painting of the Four Horsemen, and realized that these siblings and their dog were actually the subject of the painting. Despite the inference, I said, "Cool." I think I wanted the older sister. Maybe I'm sexually frustrated. Or the world's going to end. Or both.

When I was a kid my family pay our respect to the Vets by visiting the Pearl Harbor Memorial. There's a movie sequence. Boats to check out. Flowers to scatter. As a result, once in a while I have a dream about me being what I suppose is a spy sabataging a ship yard full of battleships. Or some other deal with the war.

Which side I played I have no idea. First I visit an office building to get my fix of mission data. Then I would implement them. One of the things I'm suppose to do is distract the ships. I have ballons I would set off to get the ship guns to shoot at them. It's funny. Seeing the sluggish gun barrels from half a dozen boat try to follow a ballon that's everywhere at once.

So there's silly, birthday ballons. And then I would attempt to plant backpacks of explosives on the pier next to the ships. I always put them in the wrong place and want to run back and move them. But just like the coyote vs. the road-runner sequence the bomb fuse would be fixed and too short. It turns out that I was afraid to return and rearrange the deposits. And since the bombs are in the wrong place and ineffective--the ships stay afloat.

I make my way back to the harbor office building. I find myself going through a hidden door in one of the admiral's private office and walking straight into a (think Being John Machovich) cave of sorts with rock linings and torches for lights. In the cave the admiral I am meeting show me a meditation box. Which is really like that game where you take pieces of support wood pieces off of the bottom of the arrangement, and hope that the result isn't having whole construction crumble on you.

What's the name of the game? Jinga I think. Anyway. The admiral would tell me, "Wish for something and take out a stone." (It's long stones--not wood sticks--still with me?) I did as instructed, repeating for subsequent wishes. I didn't give much if any thought to what to wish for--but I did wish I suppose. Something new happened, another stone fell loose (not the whole arrangement) as a result of my taking a stone, and the admiral looked at me. And I realize in his or her eyes that there's was a price for my wishes. I realize perhaps the fallen stone symbolized death. Someone died at that instant.

Anyway. I think this dream might have been brought on partially because of the October 2000 attack on the US Naval ship in Yeman. I wish I could bring those seamates' lives back. So much more to do on Earth before things are better.

When we arrived at my old school, there were police cars moving around. For some reason, my new girlfriend's father was on the top of the hill, by the campus, and I had to avoid the police cars. As I moved on up, I realized that the police cars were actually school buses with reflective red and blue lights. Suddenly, the sun was up and I was talking to some of the Lower School parents who were outraged at my appearance.
I walk past them and arrive at a BP, where I wait for Thad and some of my other friends to get in the car. This is vivid. The sun was out, blue sky, and somehow we were trapped in the gas station. I woke up while Thad was looking for some beef jerky.