Didn’t have to work today so I went back to sleep after the alarm went off and had a much more elaborate dream than usual, that I could remember some significant amount of detail from.  That sometimes makes me think, oh, should I make a story out of this?  Especially when it’s a more substantial plot than getting lost in an airport.  But no, I don’t think I will.  The scenario was a very well-trod one for sci-fi these days, and the core theme was too macho – look at his guy, what doesn’t kill him makes him stronger, he’s so cool.  Anyway,

The earlier part is harder to recall specifics but there was a giant hole in the ground kind of structure.  There was architecture to it, like a real building courtyard, but no windows save the distant skyhole, suggesting it might be subterranean.  Like that prison in the third Bale Batman, but it was less prison-y.  The architecture was large, light-colored sunny bricks; there were decorative shrubs in ledges and cracks.  I don’t recall any cells, I think people just slept in the corners in the open area.  There was some element of compulsory combat.  People got up every day to fight for some dubious reward.

A fancy lady had some importance, and addressed the masses from a suspended platform in the middle of the hole.  She was of the people who had cast everybody down into the hole but not necessarily hated because of it.  The invisible gaolers of this scenario started shooting star-shaped projectiles at her from the high walls.  She was injured but not killed.  The prisoners decided at that point that they liked her, and they’d avenge the outrage.

This led to a series of riots wherein everybody would just beat down every nook and cranny of the structure until they found hidden stairwells they could use to escape.  In the process, all died, or were defeated and put back in the prison – along with new replacements to shore up the numbers to a similar level.  By this time in the dream, that was the point.  Prisoners were stoked into disastrous revolt and watched for entertainment by unseen masters.  The survivors that were returned had their memories erased, the new blood were taken by unknown means for unknown reasons from somewhere more like our modern world.  This aspect may have been inspired by the TV series Wayward Pines.

During one of the planned riots, a guy got far enough he reached the “overworld.”  This was the reward, and his memories were restored.  Or were they?  He was some kind of semi-rich asshole who, along with several other similar types, were regular competitors in the game.  Maybe his wealth came in part from reward money.  He had fancy dinners in a clean, bright city with his fellows in victory.  But something was amiss.

There were very few people in the city – much less than one would expect for the number of businesses and streets.  All I ever saw were the victors.  One was a lady who clued our protagonist into other details that were off.  Buildings had been lazily painted, books all had blank pages, and so on.  He determined that he was in yet another simulated environment with no apparent means of escape.

As the dream went on, I forgot the new location had ever been posh, and it became quite slummy.  The people there were much like the prisoners in the first part of the dream, but they had some kind of light industrial jobs to do.  The hero again tried to escape and was dropped back in with his memory erased over and over again.  He would look for an exit, muscle his way through, and fight whatever guards lurked out there.

Among those guards was some kind of human/insect hybrid with a bad attitude.  I think it was the same individual and he regenerated between fights.  During one of the escape attempts, the hero was fighting this bug and they exchanged words.  The bug said he only existed for math – as long as he killed three escapees before he died, he was serving his purpose, and didn’t care about anything else.

The main dude remembered bits more on each cycle.  Not a full memory, but just an instinctive knowledge of what he needed to do.  Part of that was making improvised body armor out of tape, cardboard, aluminum foil, whatever, but he began to run out of raw materials.  He kept fighting, turning into an archetypal he-man, but as part of that instinctive knowledge, came to realize he’d never fully escape.  He was trapped.

When he got to a certain point in the daily combat routine, he had defeated enough enemies to not be under constant threat, but instead of pressing on, he turned back.  He went to the home of a lady prisoner who may have been the fancy lady from the hole scenario, in a new life.  She and her (friends? family?) did not have his wisdom, did not know about the imprisonment.  There was a storm outside, water damage creeping through her apartment, and our hero could feel the presence of the secret stairs and the menacing guards outside her thin walls.

She didn’t finish her ravioli and it was getting dry on the table, so he tossed it in the garbage for her.  She was feeling ill and he wanted to just stay in and comfort her, but first he went to one of those apartment walls, parted the secret door, and told the guards to fuck off.  Nobody was going to cause trouble that night.
–

The night before last.  That morning again, after a brief return to sleep.  Last night again.  That sunuvabitch the Sandman has been giving me bad dreams.

Saturday morning’s dream I only remember one part.  Annoyance dream.  I was hungry and nobody was helping so I went to cook some freezer fried chicken in the oven (this is something I almost never eat IRL).  Somebody was already cooking something and I just let my tray partially squish theirs.  When it was time to get the chicken out, I was like, oh shit, I turned up the heat so the stuff somebody else was making is probably burned.  I tried to get it all out quick as I could.

But my dad was in the way and didn’t know what to do with himself.  He needed to get from one side of the opened oven door to the other, and was so befuddled I had to tell him every step of the action like he was a trained dog.

Sunday morning I was in a brutal fight at a house party and my very young nieces got their throats cut.  Not lethally, we had to apply pressure to their tiny necks while also not suffocating them, until the authorities arrived.  Waking time arrived before help did.

–

My boyfriend just woke from his slumber to tell me about a dream.  I was a security guard again and Elon Musk got the top of his head blown off by an assassin.  Somehow people didn’t immediately know who the body was and I had access to abscond with it.  He didn’t know why I wanted Elon’s body but he went along with it.

Then it transitioned to an annoyance dream, where I had given up on whatever designs I had for the corpse, and we were just trying to figure out where to get rid of it.  While we were doing that, I asked him to look on the internet, find out if people knew he was dead yet.  Reddit was the first place he looked, and no, the world was not yet hip to the scheme.

Anyway, he’s trying to go back to sleep now.  Good luck, my dude, and may the bodies lie concealed forever.
–

–

Another night during my battles with insomnia I had a vivid dream with cinematic scope.  Kyle MacLachlan in Dale Cooper mode played a government bureaucrat who by twist of fate was put in charge of a British industrial ship, during a time when a weather crisis had messed up global trade.  Most of the ship’s crew had been allowed to go home with a generous buyout, so the skeleton crew that remained was able to just maintain the boat in a lazy mode.

The plot of the movie revolved around a decision by Kyle to have the crew do something positive with their idle time.  This was treated feel-good and uplifting.  He got them to build a floating city to help with homelessness.  It was originally going to be in a foreign country – they got the parts somewhere like Indonesia or the Philippines – but they negotiated to have it parked outside San Francisco instead.  The city charged $100 rent to floating city tenants.

Years later Kyle was married to somebody from that crew and looking at retirement.  The couple were toodling around the ocean on a personal craft, and by talking to some aquatic hobo, found out the floating city was then moored in the neighborhood of Long Island.  They went to visit and found various people of limited means living there.  The landlord types had complaints about the students being rowdy and polluting.  They also talked about other issues in the community, like finding a humane solution for pest control, since feral hamsters had become the city’s rats.

Despite not being a class of people who would ever need income restricted housing, the couple settled there, for poetic reasons.  At this point in the dream the couple became my boyfriend and myself, and my brother was hanging around as well.  I had to take care of my cats, which included the late Momo.  For some kind of basic care, I had to routinely cut off all of Hecubus‘s legs.  It’s OK; they would grow back.  I was pondering to myself that maybe I could get away with not cutting off those legs this time around, or only cutting off one of them, and my brother was finding it bizarre that I ever had to do it in the first place.
–

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?

–