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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Darren Naish is zoologist famous, and I follow his Tetrapod Zoology blog from time to time.  There he’s talked about his hobbyist efforts at increasing the population of frogs.  Since his own pond reached a point where it produced a surplus of tadpoles, he thought to donate those taddies to other people, carrying them hence in buckets.  This had a miserable failure rate, often 100% mortality in transit.

David Cronenberg’s movie ExistenZ featured virtual reality units that looked like a pulsating frog that plugged into your spine via a tooth on a string of intestine, if I’m remembering that right.  These were assembled in a shoddy factory with little conveyor belts of biological chunks.  That movie debuted in 1999, but I had almost the exact same imagery occur in a dream I had around 1987.

I was headed into a factory to observe things for some reason.  To work?  To gain entrance, one had to squeeze a woman’s naked breast one time.  I was about eleven years old at the time, you know what interests were percolating, but this was a cold and impersonal situation.  Was the woman even alive?

Inside the factory, there were conveyor belts of mutated and mutilated bodies and chunks of fish and amphibians, being used for I don’t know what.  The conveyor belts broke down and emptied into five gallon buckets half filled with water.  I looked into one.  I remember almost nothing else about this dream.

This one story factory did not have an especially high ceiling, and was also similar to the one from ExistenZ, but with less bamboo.  Me and my siblings had to walk long distances sometimes in Seattle, which meant passing many faceless little utility buildings that could hold any kind of business.  Maybe they were full of Daredevil ninjas distributing heroin for The Hand.  Maybe they had a bunch of scamway victims paying off their losses with light day labor, threading spiral binding into pamphlets for other pyramid schemes.  The one story faceless warehouse near you – what lurks within those doors?

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