Abortion Action Nonsense

I had a dream that started with people talking about a young lady who just had an abortion.  There was some sensitive discussion about whether she was going to attend thanksgiving with the folks, about her feelings, and about how people should respond to her presence, help her feel okay without pressing the issue.  Sensible shit like that.

But instead of a family dinner, the imagery pivoted to that of a a quasi-futuristic nightclub with black light and strobes.  The girl was dancing, when another group of young ladies invited her over to talk.  Suddenly the music stopped and the lights went up -focused on our young protagonist- and the mean girls started saying bullshit like “you tortured your baby.”

At first it seemed like she was going to cry, but then she started beating their asses.  As Carl Douglas said, everybody was kung fu fighting.  Guns came out, seemed like the cheap end of action show from late ’90s TV or cable.  Somewhere between Johnny Mnemonic and Cleopatra 2525.  God that show was weird.

There was an older lady character, I think, myself?  My perspective shifted a lot in this dream.  I was a Carla Gugino type.  I tried to protect the young lady, to have her back in the fray, but I kept getting attitude.  This led to a pivotal confrontation, during which I told her that a judge had reversed a decision, that a crime she had done was no longer considered self-defense, and now we were both wanted for murder.  The mean girls were actually bounty hunters.

The young lady was like by idgaf, and the action started up again, blasting and karate kicking and running around.

I lost track of the young lady and went third person again, following different tracks of the fight.  Viola Davis was there, in a role more demon than human, walking down the hall setting death traps in these sci-fi pods as she went.  A monster fell into one of the traps, and she used long steel claws to rip out its eyeball.  She was smiling and babbling to herself as she moved on to another trap.  I have to say, the cheese and meat in those traps looked pretty damn tasty.

I was trying to get away and stepped into an elevator that I hoped would be empty.  There was a corporate dude there and he got word on radio that there was shooting in the building, that he needed to escape.  He presumed I was a security guard for the building and asked me to protect him.

I used this as cover for my escape.  I believe the original girl escaped by transforming into a white serpent with patches of orange and black goldfish scales, and swimming through murky water.

I don’t remember anything else about the dream.  Anyway, shows that my inner attention span for gentle human drama is highly limited, but I could do whack action movie bullshit all day.

Release the Beasts

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.

Three Times Three Eyes

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.

Awkward Murder

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.

Murdercat Management

I had a dream that was some kind of medieval fantasy scenario where two opposing sides of a battle had to alter the battlefield to make sure they did not get killed by roaming leopards, and to arrange it so that the other guys were.  Not sure if I was a character or an omniscient watcher, but as I reflect, it was definitely a video game or board game situation.

In fact, if you abstract the idea far enough, there are certainly video games that operate on the same principle.  There is a damaging / dangerous / deleterious presence on the playing field, and the opposing sides can, within constraints, change the barriers and openings on the field to protect themselves or harm their opponent.  I’m not an encyclopedia of gaming history, but let me know if you can think of one like this, in the comments.

And if you can’t think of any, and are fairly certain this is a new cool amazing idea that will get you a bank full of money, have at it.  I don’t care.  Throw me a farthing from the back of your lambo, or don’t.  Hell, I’ll let you have the name, tho it’s not very snappy.  At least it’s alliterative.

Murdercat Management, coming soon to an arcade near you.

Jenny McCarthy sang Trans Rights?

I had a dream a young lady in a black wig came into my place of work.  This was Jenny McCarthy, younger than she would be in real life, fallen on hard times that she will never experience in real life.  She was reporting income from a singing gig at a strip club, because she was receiving a need-based social benefit with eligibility tightly linked to those numbers.

As I was trying to get access to her benefit record for the purpose of placing this work report, her social security number was showing on two lines, where one had to zigzag between them to get the sequence, and each zero was replaced with an ascii character of a double zero.  Do those even exist?  She was sitting right next to me and I had to dissuade her from looking at the screen while I sorted this out.  I told her that normally she’d be on the other side of the counter, please don’t read this stuff.

Somehow that changed in the course of the conversation to where I was willing to let her sign into gmail on my computer, to download her pay stub.  It was a pdf full of hyperlinked images, looking like a porn site.  I was trying to understand which number represented her gross income and accidentally touched one of those links, forcing me to close my browser immediately before the malware could load.  Then I had to get back in and start over from scratch.

In waking life, I’m under pressure at work to not use the hold button.  I just try to do my inputs quietly while people yak at me.  She said she wanted to regale me with an original song about trans rights, and launched into it.  I had to ask her to be quiet twice, while nearby coworkers were on phone calls.

She started playing with one of those coworker’s hair, like a stripper might do to somebody during a lap dance.  Then Patrick Stewart came, in character as her strip club manager, in a black toupee of his own, tousling her wig hair.  I got that he was playing a character even tho I didn’t feel the same about her, and wondered why he was still doing shitty parts when he could have retired long ago.

I finished my work, she was gone, and I wanted to tell a coworker about it, enough that I violated a privacy policy to do so.  Then I noticed Jim Carrey sitting on floor, leaning against a pillar, and thought, shit, ex-boyfriends are a category of people we particularly do not want to disclose information to.  I hoped he hadn’t heard me.  Ho-hum, I woke up.

the muddy burner

i had cause to think of my sister recently, briefly during the podcast, but apparently that was enough to invite her daemond into my sleeping mind.  i had to rush to work this morning so i don’t remember much, but she was definitely there.  the environment and setup was a bit like my vvitch dream, with my sister being part of a dubious feminist collective living across the way in a muddy ruin.  they would occasionally go out on raids to harass or harm tools of the patriarchy.

my dad and my husband and i were there, standing in judgement.  are you witches sure those people deserved to get bewitched?  only one of them was left behind on the latest run – not my sister – and the leftover lady said they got their marching orders from the goddess.  i poked around in the moss and mud and i found an old-fashioned cellphone.

remember when flip phones were a thing?  there were even cheaper phones available that had no fold.  what should those be called?  stick phones?  i had one for a pretty long time.  here it was, face down in the grime.  wiping it off, i saw it was just the same as the one i used to have.  in real life, my husband and i had the same kind, bought at the same time.  in the dream, my sister had been included in this package deal, and i knew this one was hers.

she had kept it going, bought the minutes, somehow dodged the sunsetting of 3g cell tower capability, and was surreptitiously using it to give the witches their targets.  that’s no goddess you’re following.

 

Tha Bomb

I had a dream I was looking for a place to use the bathroom and walked in on Tom Petty while he was about to pee.  I said, “Sorry bud, that’s just typical of public restrooms,” and he said, “It’s just typical of dreams.  You should know that you’re dreaming.”  I realized then that Tom looked a lot older than he did in this dream, before he died.  Instead of waking up, I dreamed that I woke up, and the dream moved along to something else.

I walked in on a mafia goon and his rough-hewn girlfriend.  They had been shooting heroin and having freaky sex, tho I didn’t catch them in flagrante, exactly.  They had strange bandages over the inside of one arm and over their left eyes.  Like clear tape holding down yellow strips and a bit of filthy gauze.  They were paranoid that I would rat them out to his father the don, but I assured them I was no snitch.

My perspective shifted and I was somebody else, who was hanging out with the mob dude.  I watched him having the previous me blown up with a suitcase bomb, and asked if it bothered him that he killed an innocent man.  Of course it did not.  I had a newspaper with a pic of gavin newscum on an article asking why he’s so soft on organized crime.  I told the mob guy that I think that the governor is on the take.  Maybe not from his family, but one of the others.  He didn’t have anything to say about that.

You’d think with all the mafia dreams I have that I must watch a lot of those movies.  I don’t.  I have no idea why this comes up all the time, much like my subconscious racism against the Irish.  Weird shit.

Some Dream Girls

Had a dream this morning I wanted to remember but failed to write down.  All that remains is some broad strokes that don’t sound all that interesting.  But still, this dream had characters, and characters are worth noting if you’re a writer.  I might need those at some point.

There were two young white ladies, one blonde and one with medium brown hair, driving somewhere.  I was in the back seat, along for this ride.  There was an exchange between them where the blonde was feigning incompetence to get the brown-haired girl to do something for her, but I knew it was an act because we were in the blonde’s car, and it was modified like the millennium falcon – her own handiwork.

Very vague, not very useful, but it puts me in mind of a few things.  One, I like millennium falcons, even if idgaf re: space shooters™ anymore.  The car was a drab grey four door sedan, kinda 1980s lookin, with an almost 1960s style interior.  Everything was grey and the area under the dash was exposed, her modifications visible there – extra gizmos.  We were on bench seats.  A millennium falcon, to me, is a junky badass of a vehicle that is also, at least sometimes, your home.  It’s a fantasy -winnebagos are a bad fuckin’ idea- but I like this in the realm of imagination.

Two, I like wacky ladies.  They were probably directly inspired by my drive-by impressions of the sitcom characters from 2 Broke Girls, and I remember little about them, but it could be a seed of something more elaborate.  I’m thinking of Stella Star from Starcrash – a very successful adventurer while also being a goofy fool – hans olo if he dressed like vampirella.  Like the anime girls from Gunsmith Cats maybe.  I dunno.  It’s a seed.

That’s all.  A quick note to my future self.

Dreamposting: Annihilation

Been having apocalyptic dreams again lately.  A while ago I had a dream that alien colonizers had annihilated nature and enslaved all of humanity.  Was it conventional slavery or some kind of mind control?  I no longer remember, but I do remember it was at a preposterously cosmic scale – stars being arranged in rows.  I was in a spaceship, but I don’t recall if I was planning some suicidal resistance gesture or just trying to survive for a few minutes.

The newer dream was more of a supernatural apocalypse.  The entire world had corroded away under something like a super fungus, including rocks, earth, water, all physical substance.  Left in its stead was a sloppy approximation of the annihilated world, populated by sad and confused ghosts that were trying to convince themselves that there was still some kind of concrete reality that they could live in and depend on.

I was in a room where part of the floor had corroded away, and people were discussing what could be done to repair it.  I knew that was futile, that the place was on the verge of dissolving forever, but I let them have their plans.  Is it better to have a false hope or a hopeless truth?  It probably depends on the situation, but my dream self was leaning toward the former.