i was chris pine with more scars, in a 1980s-ish tv miniseries about ghetto seattle under futuristic fascists.  i was buff and resistant to damage, so a hero of low-key resistance types.  i started with amnesia, but found out my name, and used it combined with voice recognition at a government computer terminal to recover information about myself.  turns out i’d been a nazi commandant in a corny uniform, and there was video of me being executed in an electric chair.

i used the access i gained to get into a secret hall of the building.  i walked past hospital orderlies and nurses that looked just similar enough to be clones, with the youth and looks of models, but not prettied up – casual and sinister looking.  there were creepy bodies on gurneys, doors open to bright unknown rooms, and as i neared the end of the hall, stacked monkeys recreating ghoulish poses from baroque art.

at the end of the hall, an evil old lady sicced flying monsters on the masses.  they flew past me and i ran after them, leaving the facility.  i helped some people i know survive the onslaught, and some bystanders and poultry as well.  the poultry included a hoatzin chick that was very clingy.

one of my homies was a psycho™ clown, but a nice one, which gave him super strength.  he used it to help fight the monsters.  then the fascists activated a sleeper cell of super crones in our midst that has been living as regular grandmas (inspired by cookie clicker?).  we had to beat them to death as well.

there was a lot more to it, but it’s fading fast.  overall artistic impression of it was somewhere between jacob’s ladder and V and a lightly solarized 1960s stop-mo horror film and mannerist painting with goya witchcraft themes.

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I recently saw some guys talking about aphantasia and it got me wondering about how much of our internal lives is misunderstood because words fail to fully communicate just what’s going on in there.  I could easily imagine somebody assuming they have aphantasia because the images in their mind aren’t as sharp as a photograph, they’re more the idea of an image, and – at least this is my understanding – aphantasia is a more profound lack of ability to visually imagine than that.

In that same conversation a guy mentioned his inner voice being different from his own when he was a child, and that’s funny to me because my inner voice doesn’t even have a voice.  The thoughts are verbal, but they don’t have a sound, as the pictures I call to mind are ideas of a picture that are incapable of approaching the fullness of any object beheld by my waking eyes.  There’s nothing abnormal in this, I’m sure.  I can imagine visual things, as an idea of the visual – very distinct from an actual image and very hard to put into words, as an experience.

These subjects are ripe for a comment fest where a bunch of people chime in with their own sense of imagining and their own experience of thought.  Hit me up.  But this is one of my alternating day posts, where I hew to set themes, and I’m gonna wedge this one into Dreamposting.

I have different levels of sleep, which might correspond to neurological states, or may just be different flavors of the standard REM.  But those flavors are quite distinct.  Typical dreams I’m wandering through sketchy environments having plots play out in slightly incoherent ways that follow repetitive versions of waking experiences or plots from tv, movies, video games, etc, or are inspired by such.  There may be some striking images that arise, which I describe in these kind of posts.  What I perceive as dreaming at a “deeper level” is more intense.

That’s where cartoons are more likely to appear, such as the dream where I was Homer Simpson trying to run from the Independence Day aliens.  Images can make less sense there.  I’m also more likely to notice disastrous or intense things in the sky or other elements of the environment.  Ships moving too fast at the horizon, multiple suns, volcanoes or nuclear blasts that fill the whole sky.  Gore is more bizarre, people living through deformities or mutilations where survival would never be possible in real life.

I can’t easily think of a specific dream where this particular phenomenon arises, but it has happened many times in the past – more often when I was younger – and I just wanted to talk about it for a moment.  Basically, in the middle of a dream I notice there are unusual numbers of a given feature on a person.  Three to five eyes is not unusual, or multiple tits, too many or not enough fingers or toes (no tired AI joke here plz).

The funny thing is that if you asked me to draw a person with multiple eyes while I was awake, I’d place them in more sensible positions on the skull.  In the dreams, they are always in the same horizontal line with the regular eyes.  The most common way this appears is a third eye in between the usual two.  This magically has no impact on the shape of the nose.  There really is no sense of underlying anatomy in these situations.

Even though it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that in a dream, and I can’t be positive it was a feature of deeper dreams, I believe that it was.  The reason?  In those dreams I am never aware that I am dreaming, and when I’ve seen multi-eyed people, I never questioned it.  I had no emotional reaction at all, really.  The one of these dreams that I can sorta dimly recall more specifics about, I was making out with a lady who had these extra eyes, and I didn’t skip a beat in the kissyface maneouvres.

I was going to make a song reference here but even beginning to type the words annoyed me.  Guess which one.

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