Back to School or Else

I don’t know if other people have this dream or it’s just people like me who did not graduate high school, but last night I had to go get my diploma at near fifty years old.  I didn’t actually get through the doors of the institution in this dream, however.  This dream changed its natural course before I got there, and turned into a species of frustration dream.

Originally it was going to be my brother and I going back to high school, and down in San Francisco, so we were going to fly there.  But I couldn’t find the plane tickets at the last minute, couldn’t find my brother, and went rampaging around looking for them.  Gradually it became clear the reason I couldn’t find anything was that this was a dream, and I had never needed to go back to school, or go anywhere.

Was it a dream though?  I didn’t know I was dreaming at the time, only knew that the element where I had to go back to school was false.  Competing theories filled my head.  Was it a dream I had taken for real, or a delusion?  Was I becoming prematurely demented?  This was very upsetting, changing things into a nightmare.

At that point it shifted focus into gathering books and papers that had accidentally been left out in the parking lot, not having enough hands, all that kind of shit.  But the larger problem remained; I had no idea why I had thought I needed to go back to school, and it tore me up.

As I woke up, I had to pass through a hypnopompic state where the dream still felt real, so I was very focused on figuring out what’s real, like I could reason my way through it instead of just finishing waking up and letting the whole crisis melt away on its own.  At least it was much less emotionally intense by that point.

After that I fell asleep again, for a dream where i had a job with nebulous duties and a malevolent boss, which involved a little bit of actual cat herding.

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Catch Me if You Can

In an effort to not be AI discourse all the time blog, I try to bury those posts quickly with something else.  Here’s an extremely low effort dream post.

Ever had an indoor, or caged type of pet, and have a dream you’re holding it outside?  Then in the dream you forget you were holding it just long enough to come up with empty hands, and now your dream has become scouring the world for said pet, or just crying because recovering it will be hopeless?

I had one of those.  Also featured being underdressed in public.  Was there anything new in it?  Lessee… I was walking by this house which wasn’t mine but for some reason I was sure all the plants in it were my husband’s.  But this didn’t jar me, like, I didn’t connect that his houseplants should be in our house.  The people inside were some kinda goths, the lights were low.

I saw these huge butterflies in there and called their attention to it.  Hey, let those butterflies out.  I’m busy so I can’t; I’ll trust you to get them out of the house how you will.  Coming in to tell them that, I stirred up the bugs, and realized they were colorful and even larger than I had thought, sphingid moths.  I left for the bathroom and overheard the young lady saying a poem or spell about how she hoped to gain something by eating them.  And I knew they’d be eaten by the time I came back, so no point launching an objection.

Alright, have a good day, and don’t talk about robots.

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Dream Scheme

I had a dream that was very sensible.  No illogic or nonsense, just a pretty standard stress plot.  If I wasn’t racing to work, I would have bothered to remember more of it.  However, one element stands out in my memory.  It was not at all the point of the dream, just something within it.

There was a family of people involved in the dream stress.  I don’t remember much about them, except this.  The adult siblings were all involved in an alternate version of astrology that was somewhere between lottery and multi-level marketing scam.  You get these cardstock calendars, to which you would attach tickets that you purchased for each day, which were supposed to be instructive to your life, horoscope style.  Seemed like filling out the calendars was supposed to have a benefit as well, though I don’t remember what that was.

I remember these calendars and tickets though.  The calendars were big because they had to accommodate thirtyish days of tickets, and each of these was about one and a half by three inches.  Scratch ticket vibes in the design, though constellations were involved as well.

The oldest brother was deepest into the sunk cost of this MLMish quasireligion, and tried to guilt his younger brother and sister to stick with it when they were considering skipping a day.  Sister was the most insistent that younger brother just give it up.  After all, they had stress dream shit to do.  No time for comforting rituals.

Maybe I should design these things, work with an antisocial business major to print some up, and make a bank full of money.  Fill out your calendars, see what the future has in store for you!  The very fact I’d joke about this shows some reptile level part of myself would totally do it, shows that the damage I’m suffering from life in this shitty-ass country.

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Cologuard said Fvck You Bitch

that title may sound like another bad cancer result but no, this was just a weird dream.  i got a cryptic letter that said something like this feces was from four years before sample date, and was expressing my confusion outdoors when a neighbor explained a probable reason.

he’d had a cause to do a fecal test with mail-in results and it included radioactive isotope dating, which had a range of accuracy no better than a few years, so the letter was saying a range of possible dates for the shit.

meanwhile, side plot.  we had lost this cool unit in the cul-de-sac, and nobody had moved in yet.  i lamented to dooky neighbor that the place was nice and i missed it.

for some reason i still had access, like maybe the realtor had just left it unlocked or was having an open house in the middle of the night, and i went in, shutting the door behind me.  from outside, i started getting strange abuse, people yelling at the house.  something about hating our brush?

i was surprised by someone trying to come in the back door and scared them off, then went back to the front door.  somebody was there and i bullied him into explaining.

they were with something of a shadow HOA and were bothering me about the faults they had with the way we kept the unit.  there was a handbrush embedded in the front door, like an odd bit of hurricane aftermath.  i saw the lady across the cul-de-sac with her homies.

i yelled we can’t get it out, it’s not even our door anymore, fuck you bitch!  the last three syllables i said aloud, waking myself up.  my husband is trying to sleep sitting up and had a coughing fit.

i gave him a cough drop and told him to keep it outside his teeth to minimize choking hazard, which seems to have worked.

now i’m trying to go to sleep again.  gnite.

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spiderman said abolish ice

this is just a dreampost.  for more substantial things, look two posts back.

had a dream i was at the ice protest marching around town, being bored and confused, but committed nonetheless.  at some point i became spiderman and was running around the walls acting the fool, which people enjoyed well enough.

i decided to go crash a fashion show being put on by madonna at the mall, to make some kind of a point, but she had something for me – a special costume in different colors and a gizmo that she expected me to use to hunt down a certain super villain.

afterwards i was trying to figure out how to use that device and i accidentally fried aunt may with 8000 volts.  she lived somehow so i was hunkydory.  this was probably inspired by spiderman’s incompetence directly causing aunt may’s death in the most recent spiderfilm.  oops spiderspoilers that movie fundamentally sucked anyways, just tricked you into caring with nostalgia.

i woke up with van morrison’s domino and ac/dc’s givin’ the dog a bone in my head, for reasons, then immediately had to go to work.  be nice to have some recovery time.

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DONK

weird birding day.  was looking directly at my bedroom window when a robin flew into it like a ton of bricks.  somehow it was able to fly away afterwards, but jesus fucking christ.  my phone just wanted me to type jesus fucking morbius.  maybe i should make a wattpad account.  also i saw a bald eagle pretty well, for a good amount of time, so one happy thing.

weird dreaming night.  something like hellraiser but more elaborate.  some goofy old lady kept nearly opening the box by accident and we had to force it closed.  there was a demon with a name like anh nyeng and all his cultists had it tattooed on their chest.  lots and lots and lots of violence.  skulls getting smashed, guns, machetes.  i think the trailer for tetsuo: body hammer may have been an influence.

i just wanted to get these memories down quick, don’t miss the post before this, if you want something more substantial.

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Always Shooting Blanks

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?  🤮

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Hide the Evidence!

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.

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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 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 inside 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.

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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.

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