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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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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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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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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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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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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Didn’t get enough sleep and passed out pretty hard around noon, close to an hour.  Woke from an intense dream.  Lot of weird stuff going on, but I was trying to do a followup work call in the living room when these two freaks came barging in the front door with no permission – a vampire master and his wacky minion.  Very kramerish intro.  They presumed they’d be welcome because they brought a lot of pizza.  I actually did recognize them from somewhere and presume a prior acquaintance, but have lost that info since waking.

My husband asked me to guess what we had in the oven.  I didn’t know, and he made me look.  It was a living fish, with enough water to swim in.  My husband is vegetarian with a pescatarian allowance, based on the principle he could bring himself to kill a fish, but not any other animal people use for meat.  I wanted to ask him if this was, for him, a test of that principle, but could barely speak for some reason.

Still, he understood me, said yes, and asked me how you cut off their heads.  I said you cut through the gill area starting at the bottom, and as I explained, realized I was already doing that to a fish in the living room.  Oops, he meant to kill it himself!  He was in the kitchen and I tried to ask from around the corner, is the fish still in the oven?

But I could still barely speak.  I realized my eyes were closed and tried to ask if I was imagining the fish in front of me, but in doing so, I woke up for real, crazy winter sunlight streaming in my front window.  Woof.  Hey what about the pizza?

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