Love in Dreams and a Rat-sized Mouse

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.

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GodDAMMIT Dreampost

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…

 

 

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Dreampost – Way of the Samurai

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.

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Dreams, Superheroes, Trans Biz

Content Warnings – mild internalized transphobia of the subconscious, pop culture-influenced ableism, boring dream stuff.

I remembered a dream when I woke up this morning, which doesn’t always happen.  I suppose I’d been thinking about TV shows I wasn’t current with as I went to bed last night, including The Flash.  The Flash has spent a lot of time with heavy duty villains making everybody lose hope and mope all season long, which is funny for something that was ostensibly more lighthearted than The Arrow.  Anyway, the most recent plot also has super-gaslighting and super-mental illness stuff going on, say about that what you will, and it influenced my dream.

To streamline the language I’m going to write this as if I’m certain of what happened in the dream, where I am not.  My memory of it is not perfect, but “or maybe this” after every line really kills reading comprehension.  Proceeding thus,

I was waiting for somebody to run an errand and to kill time I was told it was OK to bum around the abandoned insane asylum for ghosts.  I was the Reverse Flash, but not in total arch-nemesis mode, just chilling with the heroes awkwardly, but for the moment I was alone.  The asylum was empty and boring – no “environmental storytelling” to thrill – so I bailed.  The people I was waiting for caught up to me and we went for a stroll through a grotty run-down zoo that had nothing but unhealthy-looking birds.

I was with Cecile and some other random characters from the show and we were getting bad vibes from the birds but trying to ignore it, eating our potato chips.  During the conversation somebody mentioned The Flash having a weird relationship with gender, relating somehow to his superpowers.  A spooky old lady passed by us and we were like, ooh spooky.  We noticed the birds were being cruel to each other – not caring for chicks, squabbling over food, and so on.  The Flash met up with us and said he’d do something about the depressing bird park, and took off again.

Everybody went their separate ways and the dream went to some hapless random guy (also me?) walking the park.  He came to a fake looking cemetery with weirdos in bad samurai costumes, and talking to someone on his phone described them as “Rorouni Kenshin cosplayers.”  Turns out they were spooky Japanese ghosts, causing the park’s bad vibes with their “died-in-a-war” attitude.  They pursue and murder the random guy.

Back to me, el Reverse Flash.  I’m in the filthy bird park and I notice it still has alarming vibes.  I see a spoonbill ignoring its chick, and its bill is malformed into weird grubby strips at the end.  I run into the future because that’s something speed boyz can do on The Flash.  The park is looking nicer, I guess Flash made good on his promise.

The place has more people, more food, but there’s still a crusty edge there.  The Flash had traveled back in time and bought the park and devoted years of his life to offsetting the harm the birds were doing to each other, never knowing it was from the samurai ghosts, and he went insane.  He’d also transitioned and become… the spooky old lady from before.

Now I was the Flash, old ladying around the place and feeding colorful popcorn to my pretties.  Caw caw.

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