Bureaucracy Hurts

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…

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*.

*sorry snakewreck shippers, marawreck was canon.

Catgirl Zoo

Had a dream, felt like the raw setup and environment were recurring, but the feeling of remembering can be fake, like in déjà vu.  I was at a zoo adjacent to a small amusement park, trying to climb into an off-limits area with a better view of the reptiles.  The zookeepers caught me but I kept getting away on some woowoowoowoo nyuk nyuk nyuk shit like a cartoon character.

This time, outside the zoo, I was trying to explain why I do it, that I’m not animal thief, and while they didn’t believe me, they weren’t going to arrest me either.  I went to get a milkshake at a fast food restaurant, ran into more hijinks I don’t remember, then back, but this time…

I met a small group of zookeeperesque people who were trying to be very supportive of and help me in gender transition.  However, all their methods were geared toward me transitioning not to a woman, but to an anime cat girl.  They were trying to get me to eat cat food.

Even tho in real life I’m not pursuing medical transition (aside from an idle ambition to get facial hair removal if I ever get more money) or even more full time social transition (might if my life circumstances were much different), I was very accepting of the situation.

I didn’t like the cat food, but I was just like, This is my life now…

a couple of weeks after this, i was awakened from deep sludgy sleep by a little gastroesophageal reflux.  my acid is strong enough i can’t ignore it, had to get up to treat my throat in some way.  i had been in a dream of details worth remembering, and i tried to, but only one odd bit survived my subsequent trip to nod and back.

i had to catch a violent cat, so i was trying to wrap her in t-shirt bondage.  she still managed to bite me a few times.  what was her crime?  murder.  apparently she had murdered somebody.

the dream was also guilelessly convinced that she was psychotic (how would you know this of a cat?) and that she was transgender.  the psychotic transgender murdercats must pay for their (imagined) crimes…

Jurassic Living Room

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.

Vampire Fury

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.

*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.

Superhero Violence Deux

Had another dream about being a violent superhero and dealing with the futility of it.  This time I was The Military Industrial Complex’s Northrop-Grumman-Raytheon’s Disney’s General Electric’s M&M-Mars’s Marvel’s The Avengers’s AOL-Netflix’s The Daredevil™©, but I don’t recall perceiving the world with a radar sense because my eyeballs were blindered, so maybe the disability was edited out of my dream to comply with anti-DEI policies.

A the Daredevil™©, in case you didn’t know, was the direct inspiration for R Batts’s excessive force, because the nutflex version of the MCU was mas edgy.  First thing he does when he vigilantes out?  Find some sex traffickers and punch them over and over and over and over again.  They go splut.  I dunno about you, but I couldn’t imagine the crime of sex traffick existing in the bright sunny New York where the Revengers fought norse god The Onceler and his disposable CG army.  But there it was, and he punched it a lot.

But there’s money to be made, and big bosses don’t care how many faces are messed up for life, how many TBIs happen to underlings.  You gotta punch the boss.  So he worked his way up to the boss, and they all lived happily ever after.  I liked it just fine.  But this dream…

Some wino stole my wallet and I wanted it back.  It was in the pocket of my hoodie when I lost that, and I found other things that were in the pockets, found the hoodie, but the wallet kept eluding me.  I kept punching guys until they “cooperated” sending me off to a different guy to punch.  Eventually I was in a cheap little warehouse of goods stolen by muggers and pickpockets, wallet still nowhere in sight.  Whatever malfeasance was going to happen with my RFID card from work or my debit cards, that surely had already come to pass, and I was just wasting my time.

Violence.  Not always the solution one would imagine it to be.

Dreamposting: All Hell

I had a dream last night with nothing remarkable about it, ultimately.  I’ve worked as a security guard pretty often, and in customer service at walmrat, and more recently in phone-based customer service, and this dream rolled up all the work anxieties in one.  In the dreams I’m ashamed and worried about having lost my current job, the only office job I’ve ever had, and the only work I could possibly do to afford my mortgage.  But I’m also relieved to escape from having a job that is so emotionally and intellectually demanding, to liberate my mind after years of running it ragged.  But I’m also worried about keeping the new job, because nobody told me what I’m supposed to be doing or where I’m supposed to be going.

The environment was a combination of more than one place I’ve done security, rolled together in a sprawling campus.  Everything was more fucked up than it had been in real life, cluttered and disorganized and half destroyed.  There was a wing of one building that was literally missing walls, looked like it had been firebombed, but that the fire was extinguished by that expanding crash foam stuff.  This was probably inspired by the video game Mouthwashing, and by the experience of seeing sloppy unseen elements of construction like insulation foam.  The parking garage was glutted with boxes of unknown merchandise that needed to be sold, but there wasn’t enough staff to sort it and get it to the shelves.  Guys were trying to move it around with forklifts or facilitate people getting in and out, but there was barely enough room to move.

We had post rotations to keep ourselves awake and out of trouble, back when I did security, and I just kept cycling through the whole complex, looking for some random guard to relieve of duty for however long, before someone replaced me in turn.  But it took me forever to find anything, exhausted and unable to think clearly.  I wonder if you can be too tired to think, even in a dream.

The main thing of note in this work anxiety dream was the overload of environmental detail.  And how apparently I think the world is so fucked up and ludicrous under crapitalism that people will literally keep working a day job for the man, even in a disaster zone.

Jongleurs of Love

I wish I remembered this dream better.  The other night the alarm woke me in the middle of scheming on a heist, with my crack team of specialists.  There was a lady who specialized in hacky sack and a guy who was some kind of juggler or master of throwing knives.  She was in her mid 20s and a lil butch, he was slim and balding and more like mid 30s.  However, their propensity for tossing things around caused an animal magnetism between them, and they fell in love.  Not like passionate tear off your shirts love, but always being together in solemn companionship love, like they’d been married for years.

Anyway, my subconscious thinks you need to have interests in common for twue wuv, and that’s probably informed by my conscious experience.  Met my husband in art school.  LTRs in the comments, do you have a lot in common with your lover, or are you on that “opposites attract” bit like Paula Abdul and that animated cat?

In other things, I’m still thinking about magic.  Was watching some dudebro play Elden Ring on yewchoob and his guy was obliged by the game play to be embraced by Fia the Deathbed Companion, and acquire “a baldachin’s blessing.”  I really like the way some types of damage in that game, like frenzied flame, deathblight, and scarlet rot, are themes that unite factions and monsters – and are themes you can take for your own, influencing in some cases how the game ends.

In particular I was moved by this odd moment in my head when the goofy fantasy notion of Death reached out a bony finger and touched my feelings about really real life tragic death.  There’s something in that.  I get focused on how magic is an extension of the will, mind over matter, but it’s also a heightened relationship with the fundamental forces of nature, the big concepts that dominate our lives like sex and love, chaos and death.  A feeling powerful enough to move one’s self, change one into something more and less than human as it passes through your bod.

Reminder I’m not trying to say magic is real.  I’m just feeling out better ways to represent it in fiction, to touch that transcendant feeling of it.

The Celebs Are at It Again

content warning:  fictional-within-fictional bestiality.

Famous bit of internet humor by internet humorist Dril:  “It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the celebs are at it again.”  Classic.  It’s not infrequent that I have celebrities appear in my dreams, but sometimes it’s so obvious.  Last night before I went to bed I saw a photoset of Julianne Moore on tumblr, then in the night I dreamed I randomly met Julianne Moore.  She was lounging on a lawn chair acting like a posh weirdo – on a grade to Maude Lebowski, but more low key and charming.  I was like, “wow she’s like that in real life, wotta character.”

When I was much younger the celebs were mostly from the media I’d spent the most time with at that age: Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files.  I would be the characters or be with the characters pretty often.  TNG had such an iconic cast.  Fucken love those guys; cannot blame people for watching Picard, as bad as the reviews have been.  I just ain’t payin’ for it or learning to pirate it myself.

The celebs don’t always fare well in my dreams.  When I’ve been Fox Mulder or Dana Scully, it would sometimes be in conflict against monsters I could not hope to defeat – using a wimpy peashooter against a raging werewolf, that kinda shit.  Of course, there’s when I was Ripley from Aliens and the queen alien gave me an abortion.

The worst case tho was from when I had my appendix out and was drifting through wakefulness and dreaming with vividness.  Janet Jackson was in a music video where cheap special effects were used to make it look like she’d just given a wolf a blow job.  The music came in and she bellowed the chorus, “Dog Sex!  Why did you make me do this?”

In the dream, I thought to myself tsk, tsk, tsk.  I can’t believe the things they’ll show on MTV these days.  But then I awoke to find that MTV was not to blame, nor was Janet Jackson’s agent.  It was nobody’s fault but my own.  Sorry Janet.

Surreal Products and Services

to not run out of birds i’ve seen, i’m going to include dreamposting in my every-other-day posts.  to that end…

had a dream last night that was racist against southeast asian people.  you may recall i’ve had dreams that are racist against the irish, which you’d be hard-pressed to make genuinely hurtful in the usa, so “white” as they’ve become.

the level of acceptance for people from thailand, laos, kampuchea, vietnam, it’s not that good yet, so i’m not even going to say what happened in the dream.  my dream southeast asians were smart conventionally attractive professional people with fully americanized accents, but stereotypes happened nonetheless.

in this den of my own unconscious villainy, there was a snack bar with goods on offer – mostly sweets, like big cookies.  one thing available for purchase was a frozen pepsi with adds like pomegranate arils.  i eagerly made the purchase but the dream conspired to keep me from tasting my prize, didn’t seem to want to put in the work of imagining the taste and texture.

but hey, i can make this thing for myself!  it’s been years since i’ve frozen a cola intentionally, but i recall how.  basically you can’t leave it unattended.  you have to come back frequently to break up the ice and mix it in.

if you don’t slip up and get big chonks of ice, this will automagically have a texture somewhat like a slurpee, which i can’t say for some other water concoctions.  might be from the sugar breaking the crystals into smaller bits.

before that i should pre-peel the pomegranate.  i am fussy about this because i like intact arils that pop in your mouth.  i notch the rind’s surface and pull it apart, float the pieces in a bowl of water as i extract the arils.  i’m usually doing this in a chair with inadequate side tables, so i use a disposable garbage bag of some kind for rind and a zippered sandwich bag for the arils.  in the end the water doesn’t have much in it and i pour that down the sink, trash the rind, and keep the bag of arils in the refrigerator.

i like to eat them from a small ramekin or cup plain or with cool whip.  for this recipe, i’d mix them into the frozen pepsi.  i’d like to add more stuff too but the dream provided no other details.  maybe tapioca pearls like in bubble tea, but what else might be good?  cinnamon imperials?  chocolate chips?  i dunno.  suggestions are welcome…

 

Gorescalator

Dreamed I got a security job at an airport.  Walking a patrol, I saw a guy with his head ground into an escalator, just a body with shoulders disappearing into the bottom of the escalator like the head got sucked through it.  As I kept going I could see chunks of bodies and blood everywhere like there was a mass shooting that basically jibbed people.

The elevators would only open halfway and people I haven’t seen for years were there, trying to get on but not trusting the machines to be safe.  By the time I got to the bottom floor, I was involved in some kind of superhero fight.  There was a guy with identical powers on each side, specifically the ability to become an incorporeal freezing mist, and use cold and telekinesis powers.

I was one of them and for some reason we required a corporeal hand to make our powers work.  This could be somebody else’s hand, and they didn’t have to be alive, so we were alternating between fighting over possession of a living host that had been knocked out, or taking a random hand from the human jib pile.

I don’t remember much else about the dream, such as who won that fight.  Might have just ended before the plot concluded, with waking up.  Usually my goriest dreams come right before waking – I think my body is telling me to wake up, rudely.

More recently had on of those turbo dreams interrupted by alarm.  Something was taking over the world with giant flowers and i had to run away from these lady bounty hunters.  Or get smokes for my dad.  Man I wish I could be sleeping.