Surreal Products and Services

to not run out of birds i’ve seen, i’m going to include dreamposting in my every-other-day posts.  to that end…

had a dream last night that was racist against southeast asian people.  you may recall i’ve had dreams that are racist against the irish, which you’d be hard-pressed to make genuinely hurtful in the usa, so “white” as they’ve become.

the level of acceptance for people from thailand, laos, kampuchea, vietnam, it’s not that good yet, so i’m not even going to say what happened in the dream.  my dream southeast asians were smart conventionally attractive professional people with fully americanized accents, but stereotypes happened nonetheless.

in this den of my own unconscious villainy, there was a snack bar with goods on offer – mostly sweets, like big cookies.  one thing available for purchase was a frozen pepsi with adds like pomegranate arils.  i eagerly made the purchase but the dream conspired to keep me from tasting my prize, didn’t seem to want to put in the work of imagining the taste and texture.

but hey, i can make this thing for myself!  it’s been years since i’ve frozen a cola intentionally, but i recall how.  basically you can’t leave it unattended.  you have to come back frequently to break up the ice and mix it in.

if you don’t slip up and get big chonks of ice, this will automagically have a texture somewhat like a slurpee, which i can’t say for some other water concoctions.  might be from the sugar breaking the crystals into smaller bits.

before that i should pre-peel the pomegranate.  i am fussy about this because i like intact arils that pop in your mouth.  i notch the rind’s surface and pull it apart, float the pieces in a bowl of water as i extract the arils.  i’m usually doing this in a chair with inadequate side tables, so i use a disposable garbage bag of some kind for rind and a zippered sandwich bag for the arils.  in the end the water doesn’t have much in it and i pour that down the sink, trash the rind, and keep the bag of arils in the refrigerator.

i like to eat them from a small ramekin or cup plain or with cool whip.  for this recipe, i’d mix them into the frozen pepsi.  i’d like to add more stuff too but the dream provided no other details.  maybe tapioca pearls like in bubble tea, but what else might be good?  cinnamon imperials?  chocolate chips?  i dunno.  suggestions are welcome…

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Gorescalator

Dreamed I got a security job at an airport.  Walking a patrol, I saw a guy with his head ground into an escalator, just a body with shoulders disappearing into the bottom of the escalator like the head got sucked through it.  As I kept going I could see chunks of bodies and blood everywhere like there was a mass shooting that basically jibbed people.

The elevators would only open halfway and people I haven’t seen for years were there, trying to get on but not trusting the machines to be safe.  By the time I got to the bottom floor, I was involved in some kind of superhero fight.  There was a guy with identical powers on each side, specifically the ability to become an incorporeal freezing mist, and use cold and telekinesis powers.

I was one of them and for some reason we required a corporeal hand to make our powers work.  This could be somebody else’s hand, and they didn’t have to be alive, so we were alternating between fighting over possession of a living host that had been knocked out, or taking a random hand from the human jib pile.

I don’t remember much else about the dream, such as who won that fight.  Might have just ended before the plot concluded, with waking up.  Usually my goriest dreams come right before waking – I think my body is telling me to wake up, rudely.

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More recently had on of those turbo dreams interrupted by alarm.  Something was taking over the world with giant flowers and i had to run away from these lady bounty hunters.  Or get smokes for my dad.  Man I wish I could be sleeping.

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Gotdam Stygian Depths

Ohhh but sleep is so good, why must I ever deny myself its pleasures?  Sometimes when woken abruptly, I will have some memory of a whole other category of dreams that I can’t usually remember or don’t normally experience.  Not good dreams, but interesting and engaging while I’m in them.  The intense sauce of turbosleep…

If I notice the sky, it has seven suns or the one sun is moving across it too fast.  Architecture is cyclopean and laying at diagonals.  The ground could be covered in tide pools.  Cartoon characters walk among us unquestioned.  One time Jack Ritter from Three’s Company dropped a bag and Minnie Mouse and a cartoon door with two feet spilled out.  I might be Homer Simpson running from the Independence Day aliens in my tighty whities.

Monday night a human cat like Puss in Boots was being chased by competing bands of fantasy adventurers, running up and down buildings.  One building had condensation like a cold cola and I wiped off the entire surface with a wave of my hand.  I think this is the only state in which I have dreams in the genre of high fantasy.

When the alarm ripped me out of it, the glamer fell away.  I had Everybody Dance by Chic stuck in my head badly before I fell asleep and it came right back, asserting the continuity of waking life as distinct from the world of imagination.  I’m being driven to work as I compose this.  Ugh.

Ooh-ooh clap your hands.

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OMG It’s Full of VVitches

Rambling incoherent dream the other night.  Our house was across a busy urban street from a house where a coven of vvitches live.  I’m spelling it like that because their communion involved chanting the word magic and floating in the air like the iconic moment from that film, tho in this dream they mostly kept their clothes on?  But they were masturbating, I remember that.  One of them was trans, all of them were very Hot Topic.

One night I saw a streetlamp fall down and shatter by their house, but couldn’t see well enough in the dark to see who did it or how.  In this dream my husband’s social stand-in was some kind of punk rock lady, and I was manmoding, still pants sectional tho.  Anyway, for some reason we felt the need to keep going over to the vvitch house, investigating them, trying to discover some big secret that would … defeat them?  Learn them to respect municipal infrastructure?

I found a cool bracelet in a charred pile of dubious stuff and resolved to steal it, tho it would need some repair.  We discovered their coven leader was a dracula of some kind.  My husband got swept up in the vvitch communion.  I defeated(?) their coven leader while that was going on, and they lost their powers, falling gently out of the sky.

My husband hadn’t been as brainwashed by magic magic magic as the rest, and shook off the spell, said some judgy words to them, and we went home.

As derivative as this was, probably no artistic use for it, but it was vaguely fun.  Maybe the flavor could be used in an RPG sesh, not like I’m doing that much lately.  The cool bracelet is the exact sort of detail I’d love to lift from a dream, make use of.  Like custom craft the bracelet in real life.  However, on waking, the design wasn’t that cool.

Why was I so antagonistic to vvitches?  I should be down with ’em.  Don’t be such a puritan, dream me.

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Plague Etiquette

Had a disease dream the other night, wish I’d taken better notes when I woke up.  I think we were in some kind of post-apocalyptic enclave or military installation, armed and waiting for an unknown threat.  Meanwhile, a plague was doing the rounds, inexorably getting everybody sick.  We were just waiting our turns and trying to avoid standing too close to each other.  But sometimes there ain’t shit you can do about that.  Like in my household in real life.  By the time somebody knows they shouldn’t be breathing all over everybody else, we’re all infected.

A guy came into the room to grab a pillow.  I reflexively stood up, like, what are you doing in here – let’s keep our social distance.  But he looked alarmed and upset by my impulse display, and I realized there wasn’t any point being rude.  I gave him a nicer pillow than the one he had been grabbing.

Another guy on my squad started to show signs of the illness – crusty eyes, slimy face.  I gave my best kindly expression and let my heart fall.  It was time for all of us to get it.  Maybe we’d live.  We’d certainly find out.

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Superhero Violence

Sure is fun when superheroes punch.  Nobody gets brain damaged or killed by it.  Biff bam boom.  This is less true when you get into edgier edges of the genre, like martial arts films where the punching goes on for hours and eventually some people get killed.  But if Captain America is punching a guy?  Spiderman?  Batman?  They just fly away and bounce, knocked out.  Beddy-bye time.

This was my problem with R Batts, as much excitement as that revisit to batmannery generated.  The initial trailer showed him beating on a guy to the point where IRL he’d be looking like Emmett Till, emphasizing that by having the other dudes in the gang watch the violence in mute horror.

This comes up in my dreams.  Last night I dreamed I was Spiderman, and I had to beat these super-powered bad guys.  But when does a beating stop?  In comics and movies it stops with the KO.  In my dreams, much like in real life, a person isn’t necessarily going to lose consciousness before the point where they become crippled or die.  So I punch this guy until he’s at a disadvantage and he’s still tusslin’.  Then I push his head against the ground hoping he’ll black out.  Instead his superpower finds final expression when he phases through the ground all the way to hell.  I said, damn, tell me he didn’t die!  I don’t want to kill people!  But his girlfriend was like, no, he’s dead.

The dream followed him into hell then, where he woke up feeling refreshed, the damage of violence falling away.  But he was in hell, so more tussling ahead.

My husband never liked superheroes because he identified more with the kind of weirdos they fight against.  The late Wesley Willis was not consistent about this, but it did come up a lot in his poetry.  Fighting with superheroes, not thinking of yourself as the person they would save.  This was not my point of view growing up.  I could be a superhero in my imagination.  I’m starting to feel it tho.  The idea one can punch this fucked up world into making sense is absurd on its face.  The face you’re punching.

Now we have Watchmen, The Boys, Damage Control, etc., looking at the other side of superheroics, with varying degrees of success and varying degrees of horror content.  I’m not really into those either.  I’m just pointing out a thing, not making any case for a way to address it, or saying it needs to be changed.  In the vast realm of comics I haven’t read, there is almost certainly one that would make me say Yeah, that’s it, but I’m not enough of a comic fan to be all that curious about it.  Feel free to drop recs anyway, or just talk about related subjects.

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Gotdam Aliens

Main post for day isn’t ready yet.  Lil dreampost for you instead.  What kind of recurring dreams do you have?  I have, over the years, occasionally dreamed of Aliens.  The most remarkable of those dreams had me as Sigourney Weaver in BA mode, doing gymnastics to get away from the mother alien.  But it got too exhausting and I gave up hope, letting her get me.  The mother alien gave me an abortion with a clear plastic tube and some kinda gizmos.  Good times.

Haven’t had an Aliens dream in a long long time, but I did the night before last.  I was in some kinda scifi scenario, on a space station maybe?, and a single alien caused so much ruckus the whole structure busted apart.  The survivors were left floating in spacesuits.  I found my cat Hecubus, who in this dream was still a shaggy kitten, floating in space – without any protection, exposed to the void!

Somehow he wasn’t dead or exploded, so we got him to some kind of space vet.  I ended up at a spaceport bumming around waiting for a flight.  I found out I was supposed to pilot the spaceship, but realized I’d forgotten my wig, so I went to see if I could by a bandana for my bald-ass domepiece.  This is the first time I’ve ever had a dream that directly related to gender expression issues from my waking life.  About how one would expect it to go.

I was late getting back to the spaceship and Lemmy Kilmister made fun of me.  He also complained there wasn’t enough time to finish cooking this roast suckling pig, so the only way to keep the meat from going to waste was to freeze it, which would keep it from cooking up as nice when it was thawed.  He was giving my vibes of a tall metal dude from my high school who had same last name as The Elephant Man.

I’m so tired but I can’t sleep.  Good daynight.

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Dreamposting – Close Again

Feeling sick and shitty on Tuesday the 11th, I did that thing where I wake up before dawn to go to the bathroom, and on getting back to bed fall into turbosleep.  Woke up after ten, from this dream.

I was helping make a video game on a contract basis for etcn mxck, working with these other two guys, who happened to be the brothers in the band Twin Tribes.  Mostly I was working for the brothers, and they were dealing with the creep more directly.  We were doing ground work for somebody with less technical knowledge to come in and make the game – putting together assets and animation and test levels, etc.  There was an AI system for NPCs that needed tweaking – they wanted to be able to have a crowd realistically moving around a public place.  The shitty rich guy insisted on having the brothers come in for a meeting, and I got dragged along.

The building was a huge corporate thing with every level secured in a haphazard of rfid locks and poorly manned security checkpoints, escalators and elevators didn’t all get where you were supposed to be.  Architecturally inspired by the Seattle Public Library, I think.  The brothers and I got to where we were supposed to meet mxck.  We walked around the corner and boom, there dude was, and he told us to get in bed with him.  It wasn’t a very big bed, but we were able to crowd in.

So there’s four people on this bed.  Apartheid Junior, Twin Tribes, and me.  It’s shifting and awkward and our heads keep bumping into each other.  The point is, in this dream I was so close, yet again.  I could just reach out and put my fingers through his eyeballs.  I could grip his throat and push in on the larynx with my thumbs.  Pop.  I coulda got him, and I definitely thought about it.

Not sure why this dream didn’t end with me killing the bastard.  I probably woke up right before doing it.  Anyway, say hi to my coworkers in video game development.  They make goth music and probably do not make video games.

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Dreamposting: Ejection Seat

Ejection seats are things you only ever see in older media, like cartoons from my youth, or the even older war movie genre that influenced them.  They showed up in my dream last night, which -unusually- had a punchline.  Not much of a punchline, but we’ll get there.  It began as a dream about embarrassment and titties and the usual business, but evolved into a movie of the nebulous post-apocalyptic scifi dystopia common to cheap scifi in the ’90s.  Let’s say the stars were Gary Daniels, Billy Blanks, and Shannon Tweed.

Billy and Gary are new in town, part of a quasi-military organization that took over with no resistance because there was no local government.  Shannon’s people welcomed their new overlords, and she was showing Billy around town.  She kept getting pestered because she owed her boss a debt that could never actually be paid off, company store style, but muscle boy was a good distraction in the meantime.

The invaders set up bombs all over town for reasons, and had to use them with little warning to destroy the place.  There was just barely enough time for people to evacuate, and they did.  But Billy and Gary got held up past that last second, and needed to use these experimental ejection seats.  Something manufactured by their employer, but never tested.

Billy looked Gary in the eye and said something like, “it’s been an honor working with you sarge,” and Gary is all, “at ease soldier,” you know, tender affection.  Then they looked at the sky and pulled the lever.  It shot them up and away from the city.  Did the parachute open?  Did it get enough altitude to escape the explosion, and to catch enough wind to slow their descent?

Cut to a distant shot.  The ejection seat has disappeared from sight, and two fifty dollar bills are floating on the wind, away from their presumed crash and death.  Shannon gets the money, thinks, I’m homeless now, but this’ll help with my debt.  Her boss surveys the destruction of her city and sez, “you realize you owe me for this.”

Wocka wocka wocka, roll credits.

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Dreamposting – Cat Jobs

In terms of the queue, this post was written ten days ago?  I had trouble sleeping, then fitful and shallow sleep, then passed out real hard and had heavy, sludgy dreams for an hour before the alarm got me.  I was in a murky disgusting house with some fire damage, but stuff had just been moved in on top of it, crap like paper towels and housewares piled in the sides of halls waiting to collapse underfoot.

There were multiple tracks of things going on.  Some girl child was crawling around on the floor trying real hard to seem disgusting and insane, eating cockroaches while leering at people and such.  Mostly I ignored her.  My late old sickly cat Mochi was there and I was trying to pet him.  He was real playful, which I remembered he had been for a brief moment the day before he died, but for some reason the memory of his death didn’t stir a recognition of incongruence in the situation, of the fact I was dreaming.

Somebody had left a cat with the job of selling food services, with a little outfit and cardboard sign stuck around its head.  The cat was trying to do this job, meowing to bring in customers (from the street? thought I was in a house), until it got something caught in its throat.  It had eaten some of the food that was left with it to demo the goods – rice and eggs cooked with soft yolks – and I helped dislodge it with a kitty cat heimlich maneuver.  I doubt I did it correctly.  There is a correct way IRL to help a cat barf.

Before during or after this, I was hanging out with some guy talking about jobs and the feral child said she was giving up looking into work with my employer because she heard the job sucks.  “Why would I want to do that?”  I threw out some salary figures that could be impressive to a youth that doesn’t know better and she thought about it.  Though by this time she was a hairless sphynx cat.

I asked the guy I was hanging out with, “Why can that cat talk, when the other two can’t?” (mochi and barfy) … About this time recognition of the mixed up details and the alarm converged and I woke up.

Years ago, my husband (then boyfriend) had a dream that he woke to find I had called off work sick.  Then he realized, “You called off sick, but Momo didn’t!  Oh no!”  So we had to help our cat Momo get dressed in a little outfit and make sure she got on the bus, didn’t run away.  I was a security guard so Momo was too in this world, and the outfit was scratchy blue polyester pants and collared shirt.

Anyway, cats should obviously get jobs and pay some bills.  Skivers.

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