I’ve been having the insomnias, and with only 2 days of sick leave in tha bank, I needed to get it under control.  I’ve been doing Zzzquil and melatonin every night.  Well, until last night.  I was so tired, I felt like, maybe I can do this with just a lil’ help.  So I only did the melatonin.  I woke up at 5:30 and it took a while to sleep again.

When I finally did get to the land of nod, it was a furious mash of dream waste.  Stock BS in elaborate detail.  I was at some kind of christmas event in the gold-drenched lobby of a hotel that was grading into a mall.  Looking for a place to sit I found some show for kids was the best spot, and took a seat there.  Conscious of the possibility I’d be seen as a pedo, I avoided looking at anything but the show.  I had a ziploc bag full of melty holiday cookies to eat.  The show was live entertainment at first but became a montage of celebs in holiday specials.  Charles Bronson was in the mix, with a grotesquely squishy face and surprisingly high singing voice.

At some point the dream switched to being about FreethoughtBlogs and the administration thereof.  One of the bloggers that posts less often was on a tear.  This wasn’t a real FtBer, but was something of a median persona as a middle-aged dude.  He had a regular enough post about politics or computer programming or something, but randomly at the end of it and without warning, he embedded a video of himself fully naked, masturbating to completion.

Seeing a chubby middle-aged dude masturbate to completion is not a turn-off for me when I’m awake, so in the dream I was copacetic with it, the full ethical ramifications beyond my sleeping mind.  I did, however, consider the possibility other people may be bothered, and wondered if I’d have to go in the back channel to reconvene an FtB ethics committee about it.  I think he was starting to attract comments from people wondering what the hell he was thinking by the time the alarm got me.

Possibly something in waking life put the kernel of that dream in my mind.  Who can say?
–

These dreams go on when I close my eyes, every second of the night I live another life.  No, I’m not gonna embed the Heart video where the camera became allergic to Ann Wilson’s plus loveliness.  But I am going to tell you about my recent dreams, as if that was interesting, haha.

This will be a short one.  I didn’t make an effort to remember the dream well right when I woke up, and it was some time last week I had this?  Anyway, I was an evil clown.  Just for a minute, but that’s kinda weird.  It was one of those dreams that changes perspective, like movies change who they follow in different parts.  So it was basically one of the scenes that follows Jason around while he’s slashin’.

I shot these teenagers in the head with a crappy little revolver, but it got the job done.  One dead, two dead, three, four.  As I was killing these kids, I felt no especial joy or malice or anything.  I had only one thought:  Am I doing this wrong?  I’m supposed to be scaring them first, aren’t I?  I’m doing this wrong.

So now you know what lurks within the heart of the killer clown.  Mild self-reproach.

–

Content Warning:  Sleazy Energy, Dreamposting

I’ve been waking up with the sun around eight and then having to try to go back to sleep, or just resting an hour til my alarm goes off and hoping that counts for something.  This morning though, I was able to return to sleep.  I used the time-honored method of having a quick wank, pardon my French.  This was, I think, a mistake.  With the limited time I had left to dream, my mind went to unsavory places.

Dreams about being naked or in one’s underwear probably come from noticing, in your sleep, that you are underdressed – and then incorporating that into the plot.  Much like nightmares about your teeth falling out seem connected to noticing that you have teeth, and your dream generatin’ brain piece thinking of the most obvious thing to do with that information.  So I became aware, in my dream, that I was only wearing underwear, and I set off in search of my clothes.  At some point, I was petting or snuggling with a piglet.  # Just Dream Things.

Along the way, people seemed to either mildly rib me, or sleaze on me – saying suggestive things, or assuming I was a rent boy or something.  One of the sleazers looked like either J. Allen Brack or Aron Ra.  He wasn’t trying to get with me, but he was explaining to me how his hedonistic posse would have parties where they watch somebody playing Elden Ring on a big screen.  His favorite part was (something not actually in the game) where a three-headed monster lady with pale flesh was dying and blood pooled up between her legs in the shape of pubic hair.  I quickly moved along.

At some point I was obligated to lay down.  I may have been talking with somebody, or trying to keep my head low to avoid being seen in my underoos.  The piglet from before rolled up on me from the side.  I wasn’t initially looking its way and it started snuffling at my face.  This may have been caused by my cat IRL.

The piglet started speaking to me in a manly voice, on a grade to Werner Herzog.  It seemed to think our prior snuggling was a sexual experience, and was giving me the business about it.  “Did you enjoy it when we made love, or did it feel awkward?”  I glanced over and saw that the piglet was wearing girly lingerie, and it kept badgering me.  It was repeating the question “Did you enjoy it when we made love?” but altering the second part of the sentence, like a poem.  I suspect this part of the dream was inspired by the Nine Inch Nails cover of Queen’s Get Down Make Love, which opens with a sample from the 1962 version of The Cabinet of Caligari.

The alarm clock woke me brutally and I had to race through my morning routine as usual, then get to work.  I’m surprised I remember any of it at all.  But should I be glad?

–

Had a dream lately where I, once again, remembered I can fly.  Some people asked me how and I showed them.  We flew around grubby slightly apocalyptic version of downtown Seattle a while.  In my flight dreams, I basically jump hard and follow it up by pushing my center of gravity in my preferred direction.  It has stops and starts like the swimming of jellyfish.  When you can fly, what’s it like?

–

Content Warnings:  Unreality, Starvation, Violence, Torture, Animal Suffering, Animal Death.

I have access to sensitive information at work and Saturday morning I had a dream that I went to prison for accidentally disclosing some of that information improperly.  This prison wasn’t a very secure structure but it was a given that if we tried to escape we’d die, so we didn’t.  I didn’t know anybody and everything felt very dangerous.

They gave us food that was amazingly vile.  There were hard boiled eggs made from some kind of reconstituted matter, the whites breaking up into irregular chunks, the yolks green and slimy – possibly rotten.  The bread was basically cardboard with some tiny amount of food like substance in the press to make it easier to swallow.

I couldn’t eat the food for two days and began starving to death, which is silly because how does two days pass in a dream and also that’s not long enough to starve to death.  I expressed my suffering and a prison guard attended to me.

She led me outside.  For some reason she forgot that my problem was hunger and led me to a highway underpass where feral cats lived.  She wanted to give me a cat for companionship and dug out a large but bony cat, long-haired grey tabby and dirty.  The cat was amenable but I thought it would for sure be hurt or killed in the prison, or even by the guard that was with me.  She was brutish and seemed to bristle with barely restrained violence, even with words of kindness in her mouth.

I declined the cat and she started picking up others from the same stretch of dirty highway grass.  I knew she was going to hurt them and discouraged her with each in turn.  I knew she wasn’t going to leave until she had killed one of the kittens.  At last she came to a kitten that had been born conjoined at the head to a dead twin.  I nodded consent and she used some kind of implement to split the heads apart.  I woke shortly after.

 

Sunday (today) I had a much better dream.  I was working in a generic open office space, no cubes.  Funny it’s never my actual office but then, I’ve been telecommuting half the years I’ve worked there.

I overheard somebody dealing with a supervisor, where they needed to get something signed off by a specific person.  That person was unconscious or incapacitated, but still sitting at a desk there.  The supervisor cheesed the letter of the policy by holding a pen in the unconscious guy’s hand and writing his signature with it.

I grew suspicious.  Somehow I figured out that sus sup was actually a Russian spy, along with one accomplice.  They had a small external hard drive they could use to defraud millions of americans and we had to get it back.  I yelled for help and everyone in the office scrambled to catch the spies or at least get the hard drive back.  Or so I thought.  They were acting like dream people, where you ask them to do one thing and they can’t comprehend it or manifest the agency to do it.

Frustrated, I took off in pursuit.  The supervisor spy’s accomplice got away, but I ended up in a tense upstairs downstairs elevators and parking garages pursuit with her.  By that point in the dream I was a woman, I think, so it’s not too weird I got into a big fist fight with her.  She was a skinny little blonde lady over thirty, TV actor energy, but she could rumble in tha jungle.

The whole time we were having some kind of philosophical debate about how it’s wrong to do crimes, with moments of “if only you knew the power of the dark side.”  It was perversely romantic.  By the time the alarm woke me up, I was feeling some affection for my foe.  Enemies to lovers trope, haha.  I like action dreams.
–

I had a dream last night that I don’t remember well, outside of these few specifics.  I’ve never had a pet mouse or rat or been interested to, but in this dream I had a mouse that was the size of a small rat.  It died and we had to report it to some government agency.  As a small animal, for proof of death I was able to submit his entire body through the mail.  We received the body back along with a partially calligraphic letter offering official condolences on our loss.

I noticed his body was in perfect condition.  While cool to the touch, I kept feeling like there were little movements in him.  Lo and behold, he woke up.  I was happy to tell my boyfriend he was, in fact, alive.  The report of his demise was made in error.

I was so happy, in fact, that I felt a sense of relief and of love for the little animal, unadulterated by conscious self-awareness and bitterness.  Pure love, quickly forgotten on waking.  But I had a sense that I lost something in the transition to waking life, that I should have stayed asleep.  You ever fall in love in a dream?  Have a friend or lover or relative in a dream who does not exist in real life, where waking up felt like a real loss?

It’s nothing now, but funny how our minds can do that to us.

–

Content Warnings:  Suicide, Vomit, Drowning, Trump

 

Picture this.  It’s a medium overcast day on a shore somewhere in New Jersey or New York, with a view of the city skyline in the background.  Maybe it’s a slightly woolly golf course or a nature reserve of some kind but it looks like The Mere of Dead Men from Lord of the Rings.

Trump has called a strange press conference with few people present, and it is being filmed from a high angle – a helicopter perhaps.  But something is wrong.

The people above the water are frantic, trying to help or trying to flee.  Below the water’s surface, a few senatorial looking men in suits are clearly already dead.  Trump himself is eight feet deep, chugging from a whiskey bottle.  He lets it go and a cloud of yellow vomit puffs out of his mouth before he stops moving.

Having been filmed live, even if news channels have hesitation to show the footage, Trump’s moment has close-cropped animated gifs popping up all over the internet.  People are bewildered but kind of euphoric, some are celebrating.  Hey, I don’t live in Kansas.

I can’t believe it, though I want to.  I run here and there, test the boundaries of reality, slap my face, ask everyone I see, look at every TV or computer screen.  Everything is telling me it’s real.

Before I fell asleep last night I started coughing, so I put in a cough drop.  I had woken up briefly some time before dawn and not knowing what to do with the dregs of the drop in my mouth, I pressed it between my right ring finger and pinky.  The flesh was sticky there, which I noted and also conspired to make me believe I was awake, that it was real.

When I finally did wake up, well, you know what world you live in.  My fingers were sticky from the cough drop.  That piece of shit-ler is still alive somewhere.

But man, for one shining, drawn-out moment in my heart…

 

 

—

Random stuff from my dreams this morning.  My artist friends had been complaining about this supervillain guy stealing their stuff and corrupting their files.  I think he was called The Spoiler or The Leech (yes I know there are comic book characters with those names) and he was a fit but smallish guy in a yellow outfit.  I had an art job to do for my brother and his wife who had a Japanese / Polynesian -themed  webcomic (not real).  The Spoiler messed up my files and we got in a fight.

He was very wimpy.  I beat him extremely badly.  In my mind I was trying to teach him a lesson with pain, not necessarily cripple him for life.  I left him on the landing of stairs outside my apartment.  Later I overheard some neighbor ladies talking shit about him and one randomly mentioned he’s only eight years old.  Yes, he has the body of an adult, but is actually a child.  I’m like WTF I wouldn’t have done that if I’d known.

I go to check on him.  Somebody had dragged him down the stairs and left him by the bushes like garbage they wanted out of their way but wasn’t their responsibility.  He was paralyzed in a position like imitating a dead cockroach, green foam around his mouth, but his eyes worked and he looked at me as I approached.  I said I’d go call an ambulance.

Back in my apartment the dream suddenly became hyper-detailed and realistic as if I was awake.  Two young ladies (blonde, one with short hair, not too glamorous) were there talking about their D&D game and how they were waiting for the DM to get back.  I was like, BS, this is a dream, I’m not your Dungeon Master.  There were cupcakes on the table and I tried one, to test the dream.  Tasted a bit bland but like a fairly convincing coffee buttercream.

I had to go back outside and there was a handsome nine foot tall black guy with a twelve foot long samurai sword.  He was unnaturally tall but realistically proportioned, wrapped up in voluminous blue robes like Marvel’s “Cloak” or a mysterious Mœbius comic character.  I knew he was there to chop off my head.

He went to do it but I interrupted him like, no man, don’t.  This is a dream and I know that, but it’s all realistic and I don’t want to experience what it’s like to be decapitated.  He was disappointed and tried to convince me to accept my fate.  I ran up onto the apartment stairwell.  He was like, “Where are you going?,” and I was like, “In here were you can’t swing that big sword.”

To prove a point he went past me into the stairwell (I backed down into the parking lot) and started rushing up and down the stairs unnaturally fast, waving the sword.  The stairwell began to slide endlessly down in place, an infinite supply of stairwell replacing it so he never ran out of stairs to use for his display.  I took the opportunity to force myself to wake up.  Wasn’t very easy, wasn’t terribly hard.

Sometimes when I first wake up I feel so comfortable and free from pain that it’s tempting to lay in bed forever.  This was one of those mornings, which makes me wonder if that painlessness is tied to some specific stage of sleep being interrupted.  Also at some point in the dream DL Hughley was being very upset that these guys filming a college commercial thought he should go back to school to learn how to polish his podcast.

–