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.

–

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.

–

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.

–

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.

–

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.

–

Ohhh but sleep is so good, why must I ever deny myself its pleasures?  Sometimes when woken abruptly, I will have some memory of a whole other category of dreams that I can’t usually remember or don’t normally experience.  Not good dreams, but interesting and engaging while I’m in them.  The intense sauce of turbosleep…

If I notice the sky, it has seven suns or the one sun is moving across it too fast.  Architecture is cyclopean and laying at diagonals.  The ground could be covered in tide pools.  Cartoon characters walk among us unquestioned.  One time Jack Ritter from Three’s Company dropped a bag and Minnie Mouse and a cartoon door with two feet spilled out.  I might be Homer Simpson running from the Independence Day aliens in my tighty whities.

Monday night a human cat like Puss in Boots was being chased by competing bands of fantasy adventurers, running up and down buildings.  One building had condensation like a cold cola and I wiped off the entire surface with a wave of my hand.  I think this is the only state in which I have dreams in the genre of high fantasy.

When the alarm ripped me out of it, the glamer fell away.  I had Everybody Dance by Chic stuck in my head badly before I fell asleep and it came right back, asserting the continuity of waking life as distinct from the world of imagination.  I’m being driven to work as I compose this.  Ugh.

Ooh-ooh clap your hands.

–

Had a disease dream the other night, wish I’d taken better notes when I woke up.  I think we were in some kind of post-apocalyptic enclave or military installation, armed and waiting for an unknown threat.  Meanwhile, a plague was doing the rounds, inexorably getting everybody sick.  We were just waiting our turns and trying to avoid standing too close to each other.  But sometimes there ain’t shit you can do about that.  Like in my household in real life.  By the time somebody knows they shouldn’t be breathing all over everybody else, we’re all infected.

A guy came into the room to grab a pillow.  I reflexively stood up, like, what are you doing in here – let’s keep our social distance.  But he looked alarmed and upset by my impulse display, and I realized there wasn’t any point being rude.  I gave him a nicer pillow than the one he had been grabbing.

Another guy on my squad started to show signs of the illness – crusty eyes, slimy face.  I gave my best kindly expression and let my heart fall.  It was time for all of us to get it.  Maybe we’d live.  We’d certainly find out.

–