Today I had perhaps the most bizarre series of dreams I've ever had. Perhaps that's because it was taking an 11 o'clock nap between lectures, maybe it's being somewhere new. Maybe just because it's Friday the 13th... To increase the weirdness, many of the dream fragments became lucid, or I would realise that I was dreaming, causing me to wake up. Then I'd look at the clock, see that I still had time, and go back to sleep for another round.
I don't recall what happens in the first piece, but I have a feeling that it involves doing something I'm not comfortable with - perhaps stealing from somebody's room.
In the next piece, a large man looms out of the undergrowth towards people walking down a path. "I am GRIM FACE!" he announces, removing one of his hats and flipping back the hood of his hoodie. This, I decide, is clearly a serial killer situation, so I run for the campus police station. When I reach the police station it is a medical centre and I wander around it opening doors and looking into consulting rooms and apologising. Eventually I find a secretarial room which contains a phone whose large buttons are labelled not with numbers, but with syllables of people's surnames. The FamilyPhone is the one object I've most wanted to take back from a dream since the legendary Orange Thing Made From A Balloon that I still remember with curious longing from a dream when I was ten.. When I return to the putative crime scene someone is handing out identity sketches, but they are really only biro doodles. After I finally got up, I realised that the identity sketch / doodle was a crude caricature inspired by film I've seen of Emperor Hirohito signing the Surrender of Japan at the end of World War II- round face, wireframe glasses, top hat, and wing collar. If that's not weird, I don't know what is.
I see myself waking up in my room, a but a version of my room rotated 180 degrees so that it opens onto the kitchen instead of the hall. All is lit by golden afternoon light. A group of people are sitting at a table in my room. I get angry and demand they leave. One by one they comply, and then I wander out of "my room" into my actual room and find a tray filled with rows of labelled Beanie Babies.
Interspersed throughout the dream fragments are trips around a fantasy version of Canterbury that owes more-or-less nothing to the real thing: Parabolic ringroads swoop uphill and down, the sun is white and the ground is gold.
The Ur-McDonalds: My French housemate has taken me to a McDonalds in town. I start to twig that something is wrong with the joint when I saw that all the workers were dressed in blue, not red. The next sign was that the counter staff were ignoring us and actually talking to each other: "I don't want to complain, but I know that when something goes wrong, they'll blame me". At this point, they switched to speaking in French. I don't speak French. I think spending time with the aforementioned housemate and her French pals must be rubbing off one me. At last, realisation dawned: I turned to someone else seated at the counter with us and said "This is tripped-out. Emilie has managed to find us the only McDonalds in the world that still has counter service. Which they stopped doing in 1958.".
The Tale Of Genji's Tale: I am wandering a dream version of my campus, which is decked out in more autumnal colours and seems to be made out of movies, carrying a copy of Genji's Tale from the library in the home town I have left behind. I am worried: How will I return it and avoid massive fines? I look inside and find that it has been renewed for six months and doesn't need to be returned until 2007. What a relief!. I remembered later that yesterday afternoon I was looking in the Japanese section of my new library and noticed with amusement that all the 1000+ page copies of Genji's Tale are only available for one week loan.
Having realised at this point that I am in some sort of Lucid Dreaming Cutup, upon waking (more or less) I decide to close my eyes again and visualise a mouse cursor. When it vanishes, I will know I am dreaming again. I do, it does, and, lo, I realise I am dreaming again.
Interlude With Sea Green Wolf: Wandering through the sort of no-place background that you couldn't get away with in a TV dream sequence, I find a female friend from back home. Her normally dark and curly hair has been fashioned into a bizarre barnet: Straight; Red with a silver stripe down the middle; Long but with shaved sides. Sort of a mixture of the worst of David Bowie and Brian Eno's multifarious hair-dos. Things proceed as they sometimes do in dreams, and soon I am reading the preface to a thesis she has written.
...and I acknowledge the debt this work owes to the works of Charles Bukowski, the song Tjllaka by One, and the strange British author Sea Green Wolf...
In all, it's made me sort of worried to go to sleep. What could possibly follow that?