had a dream last night i was an armed security guard and got into a point blank gunfight with a guy.  i shot him, but it didn’t put him down in one hit – just “microstaggered” him, in gamer parlance.  that kept him from shooting me, but he was still trying, so i shot him again and again.  he didn’t die, but at last he gave up.

i called the post “shooting blanks” after a common slang term for impotence.  this is because the usual freudian assumption is that if a penis hoster dreams of having an ineffectual weapon, they are fearing the day their virility fails.

now i don’t love the diminishing of my sexual powers.  they were far too much until i was about twenty-two, then they were ok until around forty, now they’re pathetic.  why did it have to be a high speed burn?  i’d take being massively less horny as a child in exchange for more years of ok as an adult.  but it doesn’t matter that much.  there are things i value above the humpty dance.

besides, there are other obvious interpretations.  this could be from feeling powerless against evil in my daily life.  i doubt that is relevant in this case because while i thought of my foe as dangerous, i did not feel he was evil.  we just happened to be on opposite sides.

this could be from the mind just seeking details, like the way awareness of teeth leads to dreams of teeth falling out.  i was aware of a gun in my hand so i dreamed it sucked.  it’s just easier to imagine failure and deterioration than to imagine superlatives.  i remember examining the gun after the fight and seeing the barrel was comically skinny, haha…

that would be a funny dream, the inverse.  gun too powerful.  i only wanted to wing him, to disarm him, but my massive load of white-hot lead dissolved half his torso and made his blood flash to steam.  sexy?  🤮

–

Had a dream I got away with murder.  It wasn’t fun or cool, just nerve-wracking and subsequently exhausting.

I was television’s Rahul Kohli (i wonder if i’m more apt to dream i’m a beardy actor if i’m going to scruff irl) and together with my friends I accidentally killed one of our cohort.  Even tho the whole squad plus an anonymous blackmailer knew it, even tho I was on the edge of tears and acting mad sus when anybody approached me, nobody ever quite seemed to figure what we’d done.

My fictional family randomly showed up at the murder scene while I was trying to hide evidence and wouldn’t leave.  I had a box of stuff sent by the blackmailer, that my dad kept trying to grab.  I almost yelled, “What do you want out of this?”  He said, “You know what I need.”  It was the children’s book my little sister insisted on having read to her at night.  The book had cryptic threats that the blackmailer had tucked in like bookmarks and I had to try to pull them all out before I handed it over, plus page thru to make sure nothing else was written on the pages.

Later my home boys were with me while I was trying to sort the evidence and one was looking thru my sketchbooks, which again had been annotated by the blackmailer.  I had to beg him not to look because the books contained personal art.  U know, sex stuff I was secretly into.

An FBI agent told me I was the prime suspect but by that point in the dream I was too emotionally exhausted to care.  I came back to the suboptimal place I’d stashed the blackmail box and tried to move it somewhere safer, but realized there were no guarantees.  I was doomed to live with the stress of possible discovery.

I woke up with the original version of Time Is On My Side stuck in my head – rather the opposite message of the dream itself.

–

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.

–

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.

–

This dream started with the usual kind of bullshit.  I was in the car, my husband behind the wheel bordering on a panic attack because he doesn’t know how to drive any better than I do, and we were trying to make decisions at highway speed.  I wanted to help him but I couldn’t make myself stop trying to explain the song “God Wrote Cum Junkie” to my homeboy Jeremy, who talks very little and was giving no feedback.

This transitioned into yet more of usual kind of bullshit, in bathrooms because IRL I had to go to the bathroom.  In this part I was a young doofus of the kind that must get his ass kicked and learn kung fu in certain movies.  Except in this dream, my destiny was to become a murder victim.  Martial arts gangster types (yakuza?) were going to murder me for an accidental transgression against Kung Fu Laws.

The dream switched perspectives to have me in the role of one of those gangsters.  The plot was supposed to be that I feel sympathy for the bozo who is about to get offed by my homies, and turn on them to save his life.  But I couldn’t get over my sense of honor to betray them, until it was too late.  On seeing previous me’s brutal death (lightly strangled and sawed open from stomach to sternum), I snapped and attacked my homies to avenge him.

Still in a filthy restroom, I quickly killed the guy who did the deed, leaving just the lady among my criminal colleagues.  I offered to just drown her as a mercy – less painful than what I did to the first guy.  She agreed and I started trying to drown her in the sink.

People kept coming in to use the bathroom, including a mom and her children.  It was taking forever to drown my homegirl, and the mom explained to the kids that there was nothing they could do – it would be like trying to save a baby bird that fell out of a nest.  Yakuza ladies getting waterboarded to death = the circle of life.

This felt grody but I also felt committed to the path, that I couldn’t make myself stop trying to kill her.

Anyway, this is the second time within a short while that I’ve had a dream shift to a different perspective, and from that perspective, watched my previous self get murdered by criminals.  That’s a heckuva recurring theme.

–