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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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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