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.

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Froget’s Thesaurus

I had a dream last night, think the location was a recurring one, where my home is an apartment or condo above a mall.  Moving anxiety lingers in the form of boxes of personal possessions left in public locations, impossible to move in one go, left available for any rando to snag.  I was trying to get those stray items up and moved into our unit, some cell phone salesman was giving me the business low key, and rats had gotten in, were causing mayhem.

My errant stuff had been left in a series of glass display cases along the stairwell, and in harvesting the goods from them, I accidentally disturbed a terrarium setup for frogs.  A little plant was in there with roots plugged into tiny plastic tubes, and I had unmoored the roots from the tubes.  The central experience I took away from this dream was this: trying to fend off a crowd of tiny colorful semi-transparent frogs long enough to plug roots into tubes with one hand, in this terrarium.  The frogs were cute, kinda like Breviceps rain frogs, but this was an annoyance dream.  Good to wake up.

Regarding the title of this post, I like to call frogs “froges,” which sometimes turns into “froget,” pronounced fro-jay, rhyming with the guy what made Roget’s Thesaurus, if I ever read that name right.  And as thesaurus just means treasure, behold a treasury of frogs, first from midjourney version 6.0, then niji version 6…

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Is This Real? Dare I Dream?

Our bloges having been laid low for an outrageous amount of time by one scam email, do I dare to dream that it’s over?  I awaken to find freethoughtblogs dotcom loading… Perhaps it is a fluke, and our woes are merely waiting in the eaves to pounce again.  Time will tell, but for the moment, oh…  sweet freedom!

edit to add:  Since the last time you saw me, not much to report.  I had a few half-interesting dreams and lost most of them to the alarm clock.  Been workin’ overtime.  House is still a mess from moving in months ago.  We got an ant infestation and seem to have successfully quelled it, for now.  And… I’ve had some random thoughts and forgot them before I had a chance to share.  This blog was my random thought collector.  I was lost without it, apparently.

edit to add:  In one of those dreams I got to be a ciswoman having gaydy sex, tribadism-style.  Nice, but there’s always some BS going on, it’s never what you’d conceive of in your waking hours as “goals.”  In the other dream there was some kinda battle royale kill-or-be-killed situation with different people or small factions trying to eliminate each other for the right to survive.  The more overtly baddy guys were about to get the rest of us when the “good guys” decided hey, why are we being good?  No solidarity, man.  I felt like there was some real good plot idea in there, something to do with the way the baddies were acting, that I could have used for a story.  Maybe it wasn’t as clever as it seemed in the early AM.

edit to add:  Oh yeah, one more thing that happened.  Not to be a starfucker on main or le problematique, but my boyfriend made elon musk’s ex-gf say “ooh” a couple of times.  Probably old news to people who hobnobbed with celebs on twitter before it became the xitter, but feels kinda wild to me, that sometimes you can interact with thems.
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We Live in a Society

Had a very believable dream Elon Musk had leveraged wealth and affection of his fellow wealthy to be cast as the Joker in a new Batman movie. In the trailer they’d taken some Joker lines from previous films and cleverly rewritten them as an “inspirational” techbro sales pitch. His Joker costume was weird, kind of a Lego Joker kigurumi. No bueno.
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The Blade of Lord Shiva

content warnings: ultragore, violence against women

Dreamed I was a South Asian teenager who was the only boy on a co-ed lacrosse team.  One of the girls was sick and had to sit out the game, so the others were all pissed off or sad, anticipating a big loss.  I was like, what’s the big deal?  Play just to play or go home.  They disagreed and my subconscious chauvinisms said, “girls are all the same. gotta have it all.”

The dream time skipped to the aftermath of the game.  At that point I was no longer the boy – it was third person – and the team’s mothers were presenting them with gifts.  They had lost; call ’em prizes for worst place.  “Lori I bestow upon you this shovel, that you may dig your own grave.”

When the line got to the boy, he was blood-flecked and all pumped up, like he has just defeated some guys in hand-to-hand combat, and was ready for more.  The dream’s camera eye was over mom’s shoulder, as she handed him a machete, like a princess bestowing a sword upon a knight.

“For great victory in battle I bestow upon you the blade of Lord Shiva.”  The boy roared in triumph.  The camera moved to where we could see mom’s face, and it was a flat plane of glistening bone and bloody meat.  The front few inches of her head had been cut off.

I feel like the story implied by the time skip was of a lacrosse match turned into a brutal fight, during which boy’s mom was mutilated.  The game was lost but the fight was won by the co-ed losers.  Anyway, yikes.

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Where Everybody Knows Your Name

a dream, more sensible than most, at least in summary mode, where the inconsistent reality and messiness is not visible…

the ted danson and rhea perlman characters from cheers found out the space for the old bar had become available again, and while they didn’t have the money, they wanted to hatch some kind of crazy scheme to help rhea get it for herself.  the bar itself was long gone, torn out for a business that had since gone out of business, but she was wanting to get the back office area of it, which was intact, and for which she was feeling nostalgia.

there was a fancy art deco mural in back of the office which seemed to have a secret door, and they wanted to get in to find out what it was concealing.  maybe they thought it was a treasure that could help her afford the place.

ted found a way to break into the building from the roof, but they got split up and the story followed rhea’s perspective.  i feel like i was her, but perspective is flexible in these things.

there were businesses on that side of the wall, with a big open central area ringed by a staircase.  i / rhea figured out how to break into their shit, where i found ominous notes.  ultimately i unsealed the vault from the other side, unleashing giant hypercarnivorous monsters with camouflage abilities like in the movie relic.

while i fled, things went back to third person, focused on one of the business guys, played by edward james olmos.  he was repping his secret society and lamenting their failure at monster containment, as one of the monsters dragged him down the stairwell, eating him alive in gory chunks.

not sure because the dream is rapidly fleeing memory, but I think the reveal of monster-hiding cult may have helped rhea acquire the place she wanted.  end on cheers theme.

why would i dream i was rhea perlman?  it’s been a thousand years since i watched cheers and i only recall broad strokes of the show.  i feel like either the show’s writing or rhea’s acting* made her the most relatable character on the show – frequently sympathetic, loyal to ted’s sportball gigolo.  did she have romantic feels for him that would never be fulfilled because he was out of her league?  i think so?

unrelated, i’d like to remind folks i do not have a policy against “necroposting” and am ok with people commenting on posts that have already come and gone.  i would have liked more response to my three mega spooktober posts, at least to know if any of the jokes and references landed with anyone.  thanks.

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*another case of lady actors doing the heavy lifting

Racist Against the Irish

Is my subconscious mind racist against the Irish?  Insert “it’s more likely than you think” meme.

So I was dreaming stuff inspired by my actual childhood (a lot of walking around with my siblings punctuated with tedious domestic strife), but mashed up with TV’s The Sopranos – a show I only have a pop culture impression of.  Dad was fully Tony, the rest of us were characters that didn’t exist.  My sister was getting a ride from one of Tony’s boys, who was trying to molest her even tho I was in the backseat.  We tussled a bit, then parted ways.  Tony beat him to death while feeling slightly bad about it.

They leave a calling card for some Asian gangsters to frame him and dump the body in a crowded police precinct lobby.  For some reason the crowd broke into song.  No dance, but they did do a light show with laser pointers.

Cut to some kind of meeting with the Irish mob, led by a modern “Ma Kelly” type.  She praises Tony’s cooking  (she was holding a calzone) and then intros her daughter with, “All rise, for ‘God Save America,’ from the musical ‘Annie’.” (nonexistent)  The girl starts lalala-ing the intro for uncomfortable minutes, until her mom interrupts with, “why don’t you sing something nice by Metallica?”  She meant to imply Metallica’s (nonexistent) patriotic song, and cut the mic when the girl guessed wrong (“Sad but True”).

This all took place in a sportball field by an underpass, with colorful fall leaves strewn about.  The mostly Irish audience were falling down drunk, like in another dream where they had to fight ninjas and were so insensate they didn’t mind getting slaughtered.

At the end of the dream I’m Junior Soprano again, waiting in a car with my sister, and I tell her, “It’s great how you don’t kill people who bother you.”  She’s dismissive but I’m like, “You and I both know that’s a real skill, c’mon.”

The End.

Racism against the Irish in the USA isn’t the same thing it used to be, of course.  Irish people were allowed to be considered white and that’s all she wrote.  Now they’re actually part of a problem like the rest of us honkies.  Aside from some very weird anticatholic throwbacks (are there any left since Jack Chick died?), nobody here is racist against them in a meaningful way.

Except me when I’m asleep.  What’s up with that?
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Dream Lover

Had a dream where a young lady janitor was trying to flirt with me because she was deformed and too eager to please anyone who was not totally rude about it.  I was trying to politely move along.  This trend in my dreams is feeling narcissistic.  Anyhow, she was green-skinned and had three eyes, tho the details of her face changed a bit from one moment to the next, and while janitorial uniforms are getting less formal these days, the black mesh shirt over black X pasties was a bit wacky.  The outdated goth style might have influenced me to wake up with “More” by Sisters of Mercy in my head.  Weird morning.

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Pardon Me, Ma’am…

Content Warnings:  Ableist Nightmare Stuff, Unwanted Advances.

Had a dream where a man on the bus confessed his love for me.  This was nightmarish, though I wasn’t feeling the elevated fear typical of that dream state.  The man was very deformed, of course.  He had a face on the back of his head that he spoke with.  Both faces were partially skeletonized with missing noses, and one was also missing eyeballs.

The bus isn’t a good place to holler at a stranger, I think.  My brains were taking that lesson and dialing it up to a million.  I’m just taking note of this in case I want to incorporate elements of it into horror writing someday.

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