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.

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.

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.

Dreamposting – Fish for Dinner

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?

Fvcking Dracvla, Man

had a dream i had some kind of side hustle scrubbing the area around the tracks in the seattle metro bus tunnels for chump change, which involved busting up hijinks down there sometimes.  first i came across miho hatori who was putting on a concert with some other alt culture clown on the keyboards, and a pet monkey named “smeek.”  they were passing a roach back and forth while she sang a cover of bjork’s “i play dead,” with new lyrics that implied miho literally eats joints.  as the lil reefer butt dwindled she ate the ashes.  morrissey and some standup comedian who might have been seinfeld came thru causing incidental ruckus, fleeing an unknown menace like abbott and costello.  in the process any number of these people may have been disintegrated, which i had to explain to a bored metro employee.

the menace turned out to be dracula, played by some newer actor whose name i don’t recall, but in reasonably effective bela lugosi drag, with more contemporary textural elements, like vampires in 90s or 10s movies – like he was partially made out of stone.  i barely glimpsed him as i chased his bumbling sidekicks.  forget who they were.

the point is, i found drac’s victim: my husband, who had lost his wallet and possessions to the vampire.  i woke up while fruitlessly searching for his wallet.  before that i had found contracts of my husband signing over bank accounts and personal property to dracula, like a will.  this included the sale of a debt owed by lindsay lohan to him.

in case you missed it, as i lost my streak yesterday i’ve decided to go back to intermittent posting, so i may miss days at a time.  sorry y’all.

i close my eyes again now.

Glory Be

We are returned from the shadow realm!  Hail!

While the website was down, I had a few queued posts, so somehow, the streak continues.  Go ahead and read those, if you please.

As for me, I’m so tired I’m just gonna lay down dead now.

Wait.  I wish I could remember this dream I just had better.  Super detailed, something about young ladies that were friends, but one of them was an aquatic creature with properties of or kinship to cnidarians, even tho she looked fully human.

That amateur porn contest a local weekly mag used to run was involved, and some hijinks with the law.  Banana cream pies?  Fear of heights?  Was jellyfish girl trans?

She reproduced by cloning at the end of the dream. Some of her new selves got tangled and died, mute and mindless.  She got away.

I feel like both girls were parting ways to chase down love and glamour in their own particular ways, and one was meant to feel uplifted about it.

The main run of the plot is gone.  I cry.

Dreamposting – Gun Culture

Had a dream that I was a security guard again.  Some kind of mayhem had transpired in Seattle in the night, wherein a gun had been discharged in public.  We were all under suspicion, but one specific guy had done it, and copped to it before we got into real trouble.  Even so, there was so much going on that I wasn’t aware of his confession until it had already transpired, and was running around trying to sort out defense evidence along with my home boy Clark.  Some seagulls had been killed, and during the course of events I found their bodies floating in water, gelatinized and translucent…

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Creative Mush

Taking a day off work for reasons, might try to get some writing in on Centennial Hills.  Not sure how capable I’ll be; we’ll see.  I’m feeling odd.  Sometimes I feel inspired to create something, specific or in general, but the sauce to actually do that is a whole separate feeling that does not always coincide.  One of the last things I did before I fell asleep was randomly think of an element for a story, but didn’t write it down.  Let’s see if I can remember…

A video game where you can name your enemy, like in Pokemon, and the protagonist as a child accidentally uses their own name, playing the rest of the game opposing their own moves.  Later in life, this connects thematically to something that’s going on in the current story.

Yesterday in the morning I was having some very specific and detailed dream about machinery.  Back up, get out of the way of the guy operating the mechanical arm.  No not there, there.  Now in the back yard the red construction light got broken because the thing fell into it, and it’s your fault.  This morning I dreamed I walked into a part of my house I never use and there was a toilet spewing water like a fountain, and a few other pipe leaks, and have these been going on for months?  Calls to mind a time I dreamed the floor of my apartment was covered with moss and broken boards, and scorpions and eight-inch isopods were moving in and out of the heap at random.

The day before yesterday and the day before that I had slasher dreams.  A hillbilly family like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre was going to kill this trucker, but they were shining him on like, just a minute, gotta do this thing for your truck before we let you drive away.  Gotta chop everybody up and their trucks too.  Heaps of body parts, just another day.

Another recent dream there was some kind of deadly competition with a lady as emcee.  If we play the game right we all fight to the death, but if we defeat the emcee maybe we can leave.  Were we undead in the vein of soulsborne game protagonists?  There was a guy with dwarfism and a lot of guns, to improve his odds of defeating her I traded legs with him so he could get around faster.  Left me with short legs, waiting for somebody else to win.

The RPGs I wasted the most time with as a youth were Palladium books, which are much scorned by most of the TTRPG community these days.  Understandable, but their ads in Dragon magazine circa 1988 always worked so well on me.  I sometimes get curious what people were saying about them online and it ain’t much.  One time when I looked it up on tumblr, I found a person talking about their few meatspace RPG experiences were all with one of those games, either Rifts of the Palladium FRPG.  Whichever it was, they had memorized the rules for a “mystic” character class with a combination of psychic and magic powers.  Recently I thought of that, of the mystic character class, RPGs in general.  What is the appeal in making your own little guys in somebody else’s world?  Like a billion other dorks, I still have an embryonic fantasy RPG of my own laying in docs and on scraps of paper; maybe all of it is still chasing the weird thrill I got off of old Palladium ads.

Been listening to Maharaji’s Seward Park again.  My boyfriend said it’s a novelty song.  The casio dog bark effect?  Come on.  But I say no.  It’s incredibly dated and corny, but for its time, it was a very legit hip hop song.  So cool.  Rappin’ Duke by John Wayne was a novelty song.  Seward Park ain’t that.

Mish mash mush.  These are all things that could be converted into new art, written or visual or something else, a video game, a poem, a song.  Will it happen?  Maybe this post is the closest any of the creative slurry gets to achieving expression.  Almost certainly it will be.  But u kno, all we are is dust in the wind, and our daydreams even more so.  Take it easy.

Peace!

Fvck You Willem Dafoe

Had a dream I was temporarily roommate to a young white lady, conventionally attractive except her eyes were a bit buggly and heavily lidded, an art major at the University of Washington.  We were in a fictional version of the U District of Seattle, owned by this one specific scummy business guy.  He was known for chasing trendy artsy aesthetics, making the place a corporate version of New Orleans, with giant colorful murals on every storefront in a faux eclecticism that was way to crisp to be authentic, big white lettering on every business in a similar font family.  These were mostly restaurants.  The internet was free for tenants but shitty, I had a theory he was getting the service free via Alaska somehow and using it as an enticement to stay in his otherwise extortionate little kingdom.

Weirdly the businessman wasn’t the villain of the dream, but if I fictionalized it, he would be.  Instead the villain was one of the girl’s exes, a violent restaurateur played by Willem Dafoe.  He was younger in the dream, maybe in his early forties, but she was super young, in her twenties, the relationship possibly from her late teens.

None of that came out at first.  I thought her eyes were interesting and offered to draw her after the friends cleared out for the night.  There were typical dream distractions – suddenly I have to clean the non-present cat’s litter box and water dripped in it that was making it all clump up, just miscellaneous BS.  Again, this would be edited out if I made a story of it.

We got on OK, but when it was bedtime, we went from having a vague conversation about memories to entering a shared dream state, where it was lucid but we didn’t really control it – just our own actions within it.  Similar to Inception, but the setting was the actual history of the area we were in.  We kept getting separated, like when the storefront we were in suddenly changed into an abandoned grocery store, with us on opposite sides of a wall.

One or both of us were responsible for us being trapped in the magic dream due to a psychic power we hadn’t disclosed to each other, that was activated in the other’s presence.  Something like The Shining, but dream magic.

Through this all we’re occasionally being harassed by Willem Dafoe, but we usually get away and it isn’t full-on violence, just a menacing demeanor.  Also through it all I was discovering her back story, teasing it out in serially interrupted conversations.  She was the too-young girlfriend of bullying Willem, and came back to his neighborhood for college partly because of a lingering obsession of her own.  She related a memory of being cradled in his arms, him using some grody language about how she was supposed to be the best lay.  She told me “I was supposed to be the pussy he came back for.”

We got back to a version of our apartment and I was like, “Let’s make sure he isn’t still with us.”  I looked out the window and there he was, standing halfway around the corner of the building like Michael Myers, his own eyes bulging, big smile on his face, bouncing in place like a Fleischer cartoon character.  I said, “Fuck you.”

He started coming at me, faster as he came, with a big black combat knife in his hand – one of those jobs with openings in the flat part of the blade.  As he drew near, I kept saying, “fuck you fuck you,” again, faster as he came.  My boyfriend heard me cussing as I stirred in my sleep, and woke me up IRL.

Anyway, I think Willem Dafoe seems like a decent dude, but apparently his cinematic villainy was working for me in a way I didn’t notice.  Acting as mind control.  He Inception’d me.  Not cool.

IANAG Dreampost

I am not a Gamer™ but video games can be an excellent source of fuckery for frustration dreams.  Last night I had a dream about being in some kind of MMO where the game had been designed to punish people for small failures.  There was an urban area that normally had mud splashed up from the road by rushing vehicles that knocked your character down if you didn’t hop just right.  During a patch, maybe an event thing, the rushing vehicles were gone – no more mud.  Cool.

But then I found out trespassing on the streets at night causes some unbeatable giant robots to show up and annihilate your character.  Alternately, if you’re in a corner a robot can’t reach, you’ll get a freaky murder fetish lady like Orin from Baldur’s Gate 3 to do the deed.  I knew the game wouldn’t let me kill her, but thought maybe I could get a ring-out victory by throwing her off the side of a building.  It just teleported her right back to the spot.  On one play-through I was with these orphan NPCs and I figured she’d kill them while I was watching the “you died” graphic.  Instead she recruited them to be murder kids.

You return to a hub in the game when you die, like Agartha from The Secret World.  To keep your death from feeling meaningless, they motivate you to go after your body.  In Everquest and Ultima Online originally, it was to pick up your equipment, which stayed with your corpse.  In FromSoft games, it’s to pick up the currency of the realm, souls or blood echoes or whatever.  I don’t remember what it was in my dream, except it was important, and walled off by instant death.

Worse, there was some kind of a stat penalty, like all my stats were reset to a sad base level.  There was a machine at the hub that was supposed to give you a little boost that you could customize before heading back out into the game world, but instead it drained all my stats to zero.  I thought it was a glitch, but no, just an evil design element.  The machine also split me into three versions of myself with straight zero stats, and I had to get all their stats up again individually before I could re-merge them into one, which I had to do before I could even go try in vain to get my equipment from behind the murder squad.

Sweet dreams are made of these.