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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In real life, it seems like organized crime and the FBI were nearly as bad as each other, by turns.  If you want to point to feds fighting the Klan, you have to remember that one of their informants killed children in an act of race terrorism.  To what extent did taxpayers foot the bill for that atrocity?  Or suicide-baiting MLK, blackmailing gay people, etc.  We can also point to mobsters who did a few good things, like fighting against domestic nazism before the US got involved in WWII, giving some charity back to their communities, etc.

Probably on balance the mobsters were worse.  Those guys are fucked-up monsters.  The feds have “protect people from criminals” in their job description and surely lived up to that ideal in at least a half-assed way once in a while.  The job description for mobster is “do nasty shit that is illegal for a good reason.”  Any good they achieved was optional and incidental.

This is a dreampost tho.  Why get into all that?  I believe these opinions influenced a dream I had recently.  It took place in a Prohibition era setting, with cops and robbers treated as a source of humor.  It was all in good fun there.  Zany hijinks, Keystone Cops shit.  But near the end of the dream, there was a chase scene that took a dark turn.

Cops were pursuing crooks when a car full of civilians got in the way.  There were a lot of people, like it was an open-topped bus.  The cops didn’t stop blasting at all, firing tommy guns through the crowd to hit the mobsters.  The first wound was a guy getting a fingertip blown off, followed by a lady getting shot in the back of the head, with the exit wound in her eye socket.  Not as big as it would have been in real life, tho it was disgusting.

This is normal enough for my dreams.  Gotta bring on the gore the closer I get to the alarm clock going off.  Wake up time.

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Had a dream that nuclear czar was a job title that existed for each nuclear weapon, of which there were only a few dozen in existence.  It was a hereditary title that had been passed down from Europe before taking its modern form in the USA.  The dream took place in the late medieval period, following a widowed nuclear czarina in a Penelope situation.  A crappy noble guy that had squandered his fortune came seeking hers, as she was not wed, but high castle walls and loyal servants ran interference.

First, it was a group of young ladies that blocked the suitor in his efforts; later it was me, in the mode of an ambiguously employed jester-thief-vizier.  I either low-key betrayed her or just failed in my duty, resulting in the suitor gaining access.  She was obliged to marry him, to spend years watching him squander her fortune.

The sheisty czar was talking about how it was perfectly natural that he had lost most of her money on a timeshare, when she snapped and asked me what the hell she was supposed to do about all of this.  I replied, “I’m really surprised this guy isn’t in chunks by now, spread from here to the Danube.”  We started killing him and I woke up shortly after that.

I never did find out how she was in charge of nukes several hundred years before they were invented.

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Had a dream that I was a third level thief in d&d and I was cut loose for some r&r by the party leader.  I decided to pick up some loot and some levels, wandering Fantasy City and getting into hijinks.  As part of that I decapitated Medusa, but later her head rolled out of the bag and paralyzed me.  In the dream medusas also needed to touch you to do a proper petrification and because she hadn’t, I was only 10% stoned.  That was enough to have me unable to move.

I had the impression she could just regenerate or otherwise come back, but slow enough that she wasn’t up and at me immediately.  She was having a sense of humor about it and said she would unparalyze me, but in the meantime, we just had a conversation – me partly petrified and her a severed head.  I said I was considering picking up a level of cleric and asked if she had any suggestions, so she tried to sell me on a minor god of aberrations.  I was not interested.

I got de-stoned enough to wander away, ending up in the modern world, where I stole a workman’s overalls from a construction site to fit in, then wandered around looking for better stuff to steal.  I crossed paths with a sheisty child that was also prowling for loot.  He had a reputation that was growing in the media and journalists were trying to interview me about him for a thinkpiece.  I shook those guys off, just wanted to get some sleep, and found a place to do that.  On top of a small bus, on a bed of trash, these other hobos started talking to me, keeping me awake.  I noticed that we had the same construction overalls, presumably jacked from the same spot.

Shortly after that the alarm woke me up.  There were more details now lost to time, but nothing in this is powerfully interesting.  Still, you never know what use you might have of some information in the future, and as an artist, for me, that includes subconscious information.  One vexatious element lately – I’m starting to have dreams about trying to sleep and being unable to do so.  Ain’t that some shit?

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Had a dream I was at work, trying to walk someone through getting signed into a government website.  The security key involved the song Love Hurts by Roy Orbison, like interpreting the lyrics or pressing buttons at certain moments in the song while it plays, or living down to the story it tells.  Feel bad about your relationship in the right way so the website will let you in.

You know when you can’t sleep so you roll over and see if the other side will work better?  You ever feel like you’re doing that so much that to an outside observer you’d look like a rotisserie chicken?  You ever get restless leg feeling in your entire body?  You ever have difficulty sleeping because the morning sun is ripping thru your blinds or shining all the way thru your curtains?

We’re working on some of that, but other issues there are not the sort of thing where there is a fix.  At least I got a dreampost out of this one.  A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman tiptoed to my room last night…

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This one’s so short, have another dream detail.  Woke up by alarm and had to immediately workmode, so I remember nothing else from this.  I was in an ill-omened marriage between a superhero and a mermaid.  We had a child that was an octopus or aquatic ant, like half a foot long, a thing that had to be kept in an aquarium.  We were talking what our next child should be, like when cis people are saying whether they want a boy or girl, but I was suggesting a scorpion would have a good combination of our qualities as people, earnestly.

No idea what was up with that or where it was going.  Probably inspired by Shipwreck and Mara in GI Joe*.

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*sorry snakewreck shippers, marawreck was canon.

Too tired from cumulative lack of sleep, I took a half day off work and slept in.  I dreamed my condo had some combo of features with apartments I’d lived in, and I was still trying to rest on the couch while weird bullshit was going on around me.

My husband came down to tend his houseplants and I had to explain why I wasn’t working.  Then I tried to watch tv.  There were multiple tv sets and I was watching some crappy horror movie on one of them, which was kind of an adaptation of nightmares I’ve had before.  When I tried to use the remote it would turn neighboring tvs on or off, or mute them, so I had to point the remote control very precisely.

We were also talking between moments of dialogue, about some company like those lying piss artist de-extinction guys who were supposedly making big dinosaurs out of birds, like that dino-chicken project.  As a “taste of the future” they developed a similarly miraculous technology of big fancy holograms.  The holograms projected from drones that could move with them, so they were like cartoon dinosaurs that could hang out.  The drones could push things around so they had some limited ability to interact with the environment.  Similar tech has appeared in scifi shows, nothing too creative in this.

My old ex-roommate Jed was living here and left to go out, and saw these holo-dinos at the door.  Assuming I would like to see them, he let two into the condo – a pair of pachycephalosaurs about nine feet long.

They were rambunctious and leapt over the counter into the kitchen, knocking down houseplants and tvs and pottery and dishes, destruction all around.  I managed to push them out the back door, and one left but the other stuck around, waiting to be let back in like a dog.

My husband was uncharacteristically chill about this.  I kept thinking about how I needed to get up and start work anyway, dreamed I was doing that, dreamed I realized I was dreaming and really did it, then finally woke up for real.

Instead of leaping into action, I took the time to write up this dream.  Gotta have blog content.

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Had a pretty elaborate dream, nothing noteworthy about it except how well I could remember it at the moment I woke up.  Some weekend days are really good for this because I don’t have to launch myself into work mode immediately upon waking, more time to possibly go back to sleep, feel things out.

That white dude from f/x’s Legion and that white lady from fox’s Bones starred in a movie that changed tones and subject repeatedly.  Started out as a gentle buddy comedy thing with the white people as part of a circle of friends, where Bones knew Legion’s wacky secret – he was a vampire.  But all that meant, at this point in the dream, is that he couldn’t eat food and had to drink blood instead.  So at the restaurant there were mild hijinks while he pretended to eat his food.  No risk of a blood frenzy or need to pretend the blood he smuggled in was tomato soup yet; his appetite was under control.  Maybe she was a medical professional and helped him get a supply from the hospital?

But he needed some kind of surgery that would involve anesthesia, and didn’t realize until moments before he went under that this would cause him to become an undead vampire.  Heretofore he had been a living vampire; dead vampires were more powerful but more edgy.  This was one of the few times in the dream where it was less movie and more first person.  I was him as I tried to put them off the procedure with mild protestations, but they stuck needles in my neck to knock me out.

I don’t know why but at the same time a kind of vampire apocalypse happened.  Elsewhere in the hospital, people were getting turned into vampires who would in turn slaughter other people, some amount of which would also become vampires.  Shades of 30 Days of Night or  … that other one I reviewed on here.  Shit, forgot the name.  No worm tongues tho.  When Legion woke up, he was suddenly more grey*, sometimes with glowing eyes.  He slaughtered the doctor and nurses for blood real fast, and busted out the door of the operating room in the form of a blood mist that congealed into his humanoid form instantly, and went stalking the halls for prey.

The dream lost track of its own rules and situation a number of times.  This is one of them.  Presumably he was on a rampage to get more victims for bloodsucking, but instead he just went into edgy action hero mode against the hospital vampires, killing them with kung fu and bunches of knives that it made no sense for him to have there**.  As he ran down the halls he’d sometimes be on all fours, bouncing from floor to wall to ceiling and back, blood tentacles splatting into place and bursting free wherever he came to land.

Meanwhile the vampire apocalypse wasn’t totally mindless.  Either the first vampires who came in were directing the new recruits, or the new recruits had spontaneously developed a crude pack mentality.  They were methodically opening every hiding place to get people to kill.  One of them found Bones and tried to kill her, but she successfully defended herself.  Was she now a vampire as well?  She wasn’t leaping around and wilding out, so I think she was supposed to be in living vampire mode.

Bones had to get to Legion or otherwise escape or help defeat the horde.  Legion had to beat the horde and get out, and either forgot about Bones or didn’t expect her to be stuck in the hospital as well.  The homies would never connect, never meet again, as my waking destroyed their little world.

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*I wonder if grey murder-vampire mode was inspired by the episode of Count Duckula where one of his ancestors was resurrected and wanted to kill people, and the butler kept mixing up which one was which, even tho the murder guy was obvious to kids watching the cartoon because he was an all-grey version of Duckula’s design.

**Another obvious influence for this is a scene from Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror.

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