Posts Tagged dreams

Date: September 16th, 2011
Cate: dreams, observations + conclusions + beliefs

the wonders I’ve seen

I had the happiest dream earlier this morning: I was wandering through the halls of my old highschool, looking for the door to the staff parking lot. I’d gleefully parked my car there, since I didn’t drive in highschool and thus had never had the chance to break the rules like that. The building was empty and cavernous, but brightly lit -- and there was the steady heartbeat-like thud of a bass drum from somewhere in the distance.

Eventually I turned a corner and the music got louder -- at the end of the hall, there was a loose crowd of people. As I approached, I recognized the song -- ‘Standing’, by VNV Nation. (skip ahead to 2:10 on the video to hear it.)

And as I got closer to the crowd of people, the music got louder, until I realized that there was a concert at the end of the hall. I started recognizing people as I approached -- my family, my friends, and we were all singing:

And fighting time, so much I ask, I will this moment last forever;
Though seasons change and things come to pass. remain inside of me.
And fighting time so hard I pray that this moment lasts forever.
And will the world stay standing still -- at least for me.

… I’ve thought about what I’d like to experience when I die, and I think I can safely add this one to that list. I like the idea of losing my grip on our world, and finding myself in a dark empty space, someplace familiar, but clearly a place to pass through on my way to somewhere more important -- and then to essentially ‘go towards the light,’ until I come to a place of warmth and comfort where I can stay forever. It’s entirely fantasy I have no reason to hope for, but still. It’d be such a relief.

Date: July 11th, 2011
Cate: dreams

waste of a good ear

There’s been an accident at an all-boys boarding school: one kid runs up the hallway, fist clenched against the side of his head, while dark brown blood seeped between his fingers. He bursts into the bathroom, which is a long open hallway made of porcelain tile, partitioned into stalls by chest-height dividers. The first few stalls are already occupied, so he takes one about halfway down the row. He stands awkwardly high above the trough-style urinal toilet, unzipping in imitation of taking a piss, but slowly pulling his hand away from his ear.

The boys in the stalls around him can’t help but look, everything is open and he’s left behind a trail of red drips on the glassy white tiles. He deliberately tugs a bit and peels away the upper arch of his ear along with a blob of jellied blood. A small stream of fresher looking fluid trickles down his neck, splits across his shoulder and disappears beneath his collar. He looks at the detached wedge of skin and cartilage for a few seconds, then holds it out and lets it fall into the toilet water with a ‘plop.’ He glances around at the other boys, shrugs, and says, “Hey, it’s filtered,” defensively.

At the other end of the room, I’m taking a piss and trying not to be too obvious about watching what he’s doing – I glance down between my feet and see a pinkish stream flow across the toilet trough, then drain away on the other side of my stall. I don’t have to wait long; the boy’s detached ear bobs into view, having made its way to my end of the bathroom facility from where it was dropped. I stoop down and snatch it out of the water before it goes down the drain, holding it below the level of the stall partitions so no one else notices my macabre acquisition. It’s slippery and oily and rubbery, I run my finger along the inside of the ridge, then inspect it: dampness and a bit grit come off onto my fingertip.

Footsteps snap against the tiles, and everyone quickly straightens up and tries to look inconspicuous – the headmaster and disciplinarian saunters down the row of urinal stalls, stopping in front of the one occupied by the boy with only one-and-a-half ears. I don’t stick around to see what happens next.

fast forward to the future:

I’m hanging out with a group of strangers, playing a dungeons and dragons sort of game – but when we start playing, we’re warped into the game itself, and that’s not all; each player has a totem they take with them, something they’ll recognize from the real world, something that doesn’t belong in the fantasy world. My totem is, of course, half of an ear, that I picked back when I was a kid at school.

We press onward into the dungeon, a crumbling labyrinth of aqueducts and stoneworks, rusting chains and softened wooden catwalks. Skeletal remains of ghostly warriors inexplicably populate the murky hallways, and we fight our way through waves of undead until finally we reach the boss – it’s simply a bigger skeleton, much bigger, and with extra arms.

I don’t last long – he sweeps me aside with a giant spiked mace, and I crumpled against the wall, while the rest of my group struggles on.

… and that’s it.

So, this one has easily traceable origins: the kid with the sliced ear comes courtesy of Let Me In, the american remake of swiss vampire film Let The Right One In. The bathroom is just one of those places that’s kind of an architectural fixture in occasional dreams – I think that my concept of public bathrooms (particularly rows of urinals) is some sort of deep-seated childhood thing. Bathrooms in my dreams tend to be cavernous porcelain lined things with open facilities and this constant echoing sound of rushing water and muffled voices. Weird, huh? Anyway. The dungeons and dragons scenario with skeletal badguys is Fable III, and the totem is I N C E P T I O N obviously.

My somewhat morbid interest in my classmate’s severed ear is interesting, since it’s not really something I’d be likely to do in real life, but in the dream it was something I really wanted to do, I think mostly for the thrill of the forbidden nature of the thing.

Date: November 16th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: making the zombies real

It was a convention akin to PAX – my housemates and I had managed to get into the main event, where some company was poised to make some sort of fantastic announcement. Showing off, they peppered the seating with flatscreens that you could plug your laptop into and play with your friends while you were waiting.

We were making fun of one super nerd, skinny and small with long ratty brown hair, who was wearing what looked like bear pajamas, and saying everything stupid thing that came into his head loudly so that everyone else would hear. Me and Ryan speculated that he was the Molly Monster, reincarnated as a bear.

Finally, the presentation started – and my perspective sort of faded, picking back up after it was over, and we migrated out of the event hall. I caught something out of the corner of my eye, and, telling Andrew and Ryan to wait a few seconds. I ducked after a shady looking guy, and my suspicions were correct: he was selling a new kind of drug that basically enduced group-hypnosis and let you explore a fantasy world, accompanied by anyone else who had dosed at the same time. Naturally I wanted to try some – and we were headed back to wherever we were staying for the night anyway, so I bought 3.

Later, at the house, we had somehow brought the annoying nerd back (I think he was hitting on me,) and after we more-or-less drank him under the table (it didn’t take long before he was passed out on the couch) we excitedly cracked open the packaging on the drugs. Ryan suggested that we do them like cocaine – he demonstrated, popping his capsule open, pouring out about a tablespoon of chunky white flour-like powder, then leaning in and snorting it up one nostril.

“Whoa – it comes on fast,” he warned, as Andrew and I followed suit.

My vision was swimming, blurring and twisting, darkness bleeding in from around the edges, and we all sort of slumped forward onto the table to enjoy the experience. There was about 30 seconds where we were all paralyzed, blind and unable to move, except that we could still talk before the game started -

“Who’s that on the couch again?” Ryan asked.

“The new Molly Monster, remember?” I reminded him.

When I opened my eyes, I was lounging on the couch in a log cabin. Ryan was standing unsteadily against one wall, and Andrew was sprawled unconscious over a chair.

“Have you been up long?” I try to ask Ryan, but there’s a noticeable lag between my trying to speak, and the words actually coming out, so I end up sort of slurring the words.

Andrew fidgeted, then opened his eyes – and within a few minutes, we were all walking around, shaking off the effects of transitioning from the real world to this new one.

The rules of this new Dead Rising game were simple – you were given a safehouse, which contained a bunch of weapons to get you started, several exits, vending machines and/or stocked refrigerator, and furniture to nap in while you were recovering from outings. After three days, the several exits would become unsecured entrances, and you’d have to defend yourself against as many waves of enraged zombies as you could, using all the weapons and tools and allies you’d found from the surrounding territory up to that point – until finally you had to duck back into the saferoom, and end the game, getting points for each piece of ordinance, each rescued survivor, and each zombie kill.

I found the melee weapons stash on the back porch: lengths of pipe, aluminum baseball bats, complicated looking sword/cudgel things, night sticks (which Ryan decided to wield two of) and legit mace-and-chains, which I said I’d hold onto. Andrew found a glock and remarked that it looked like something that had been used in a movie we’d seen, so he would take that.

Afterwards, we had a few awkward moments where the game was still giving us time to explore our safehouse and the border of our property – the zombies were all at half-opacity, we couldn’t swing and hit them, and they weren’t aggressive. So we sat up on the roof, drinking out of the maltov cocktails we’d found – which turned out to be filled with brandy.

—

Analysis time!

  • PAX is a gaming convention in Seattle that Andrew and I have gone to for the past few years. It’s always been a big deal, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it had fixed itself in my mind as the prototypical convention setting.
  • The nerd sounds like a variety of people we could’ve met at the real life PAX, or even people I knew from college or highschool.
  • The bear pajamas were identical to the bear suit that the main character wears in Serial Experiments Lain, the cyberpunk anime I’ve been watching lately.
  • The Molly Monster was a real guy that Ryan and I met at a halloween party – he’s now right up there with Karma Kurt on the list of ‘people we meet who are high on something and have alliterations for names.;
  • Also, we met Karma Kurt on a camping trip with another friend of ours, who used to pass out on our couch at parties, much in the same way that the bear-suited nerd did.
  • Dead Rising 2 is a real game, and the whole concept of your safehouse being unimpeachable, but only provisioned with basic supplies, the treasures being outside with the zombies there to stop you from getting to it… that’s the game, basically. I played a demo/preview version a month or so ago, and thought it was fun.
  • Speaking lag – we were playing a game after all. Also, my brother and I were voice-chatting while playing a game called League of Legends last night, which may have contributed.
  • The glock – I don’t remember what Walter Sobcheck wielded in The Big Lebowski, but we all understood that it was that character that Andrew was referring to – the character he’d dressed up as at one of our previous halloween parties.
  • Also, Ryan and Andrew and I have been known to get together and play Left 4 Dead 2, which is another multiplayer zombie video game, though very different from Dead Rising – we just played last week, in fact, while Andrew’s friend was visiting.
  • Oh, and the maltov cocktail brandy at the end was probably Metaxa, our house’s favorite brand of brandy, which I myself was enjoying a sip of before I went to bed.
… I think that’s all the stuff. Super interesting, right? I went to bed at like 2:30 AM, and woke up a few hours later – it’s so early in the morning, and I haven’t had enough sleep, but somehow this dream still woke me up. Crazy! I’m going to try to go back to sleep now – hair cuts and DMV visits need to happen tomorrow-today-whatever.
Date: July 9th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: repairmen

I was doing some computer work for an asian family (vietnamese, maybe) just up on SE Foster where it splits off from Powell. They seemed nice enough, and considerate enough to stay out of my way while I worked. They lived in a trailer home type thing, a spacious one, but still just a line of rooms all the way to the back. I’d driven my broken down black jeep over to their place, and it’d died just as I reached their street – I managed to push it up next to their trailer before going in.

I wasn’t the only one doing some work for them – they’d hired a group of three other guys to fix some other mechanical and plumbing stuff in the back of the vehicle. I saw them as they walked past, and didn’t think much of it – until one of them started kicking the father guy. Just beating the shit out of him, knocked him to the ground, then kept going, standing above him and kicking him over and over.

“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” I yelled, on my way over to help – but one of the guys, a big black guy (possibly the actor who played john coffee in that green mile movie) – stepped up to me and asked me what my problem was.

“What is this shit?” I tried to say, but he was already throwing punches at me, which I was trying to catch in my hands and push away, but I’m really no good at fighting, just good at being pretty dogged about staying concious despite pain.

But at least fighting with me distracted them from the family, who had three kids, a grandmother, and the father and mother, all living there. The kids were screaming, and despite everything, I managed to tackle the guy who turned towards them after saying he was going to make them shut up. I guess I passed out at some point, though, because when I woke up, I think I was at burger king or something, and mom was there. I couldn’t tell if it’d really happened or not – I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I ran back to the house, not really sure if I wanted it to have been real or not. My car wasn’t out front at the house – but I had woken up at a fastfood place not to far from where it all happened, so it couldn’t be fake, right? A dream within a dream?

There were police up the block, surrounding the smoldering remains of a burned down building – the parents were out front at their trailer, and the kids were up the street, playing foursquare in a park. I wandered over to join them.

“Did you know those other guys?” One of the kids asked me.

“Nope, I just happened to be there at the same time.” I said.

I was way better at foursquare than they expected.

… and that’s it. WEIRD! This was kind of a super immersive dream, pretty specific stuff happened, and it had that whole aspect of re-waking up and still being in the dream. maybe I was close to waking up AFK at the same time as I was blacking out in the dream?

Date: August 11th, 2009
Cate: dreams

harry potter dance party! (dream)

Apparently my dream-center wasn’t feeling like generating any new content last night – so it mashed up a bunch of old stuff.

I went to CMD, to either drop something off or pick something up, and noticed a big long table sitting outside, which people were beginning to set with food. I went in through the front doors of CMD, and although the decor and the people were the same, the layout was a lot more like another web agency (I forget what it was called) – there was no lobby or elevator, just a stairway going up to an overlooking second-floor, where all the people were currently in a meeting.

I snuck in like a cat, making no sound, only briefly knocking into something with my backpack – above me, someone (I think it was Jeremy) glanced down, noticed me, but grinned and nodded, and didn’t report me – he was on my side. After I did whatever I was there for (don’t remember what) I left. Outside, the parking lot was  like a weird combination of three places: the real CMD parking lot, the playground and field outside of Richmond Elementary (where I went to K-5th) and the Gorge Amphitheater – so a field, some pavement, a fence around the whole thing, except for an entire border made of a huge jagged canyon cliff.

For some reason I noticed that there were a bunch of fence peices in the dumpster – big red slats with points on top, nailed into two cross beams, with posts at either end. I was considering taking them for firewood, or maybe to give to my parents to use in their backyard, but I couldn’t seem to pull them out, and get them on my car. But I kept trying it – I suddenly realized it was dusk, and just starting to get dark.

Behind me, I heard a bunch of people shouting – I turned around, and saw fireworks going off, and a crowd of people gathered around the tables I’d seen earlier. I ran over, and found – ready for this? It was Harry Potter’s birthday party! None of his wizard friends were there – it was just him, a bunch of people more or less my age, and suddenly, I was there too. I don’t know if Harry knew who I was, or actually if he’d noticed that I was there, but I wasn’t told to leave or anything, so I just joined in, eating, talking to the random people around me, occasionally shouting “Happy Birthday” in chorus with my fellow party-goers.

Then, the party started to wrap up – the lights dimmed, people drifted away, and Harry sort of hooked up with a girl that was there – I was spying on them as he convinced her to let him give her a kiss, and I suspect they would’ve done more, except that it was a false ending to the party! The lights suddenly came back on, and dance music was pounding! Some skinny black guy in tight jeans and an open shirt bounded over, and pulled Harry into a little synchronized dance routine, which we all tried to copy. Yay! Dance Party!

… the end. (I had some other facet of this dream that involved an amusement park, which I think I’d dreamt about before, running around between the stalls, the rides, the tents and RVs where the staff lived while they were running it… but I barely remember it.)

Let’s think about what we’ve got here. CMD is where I used to work (and where I’ve been told I’m actually not allowed to b re-hired,) Richmond is my old elementary school, the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington is where I’ve gone for three years now to see the Sasquatch Music Festival. CMD is usually on my mind in some way or another, since I liked working there, and my two roommates (and lots of my friends) still work there. I’m not sure about Richmond, but last night I was looking at the list of acts I’d enjoyed at Sasquatch, so that’s where that’s from.

The big red fence slats that I wanted for my parents back yard were in fact the fence that used to be in their back yard – I remember it as a kid. It was rotting and falling apart. It got torn down, but my parents have been having trouble with the neighbors’ kids coming into their backyard and messing stuff up, so I wanted to put the fence back to stop that. Possibly the reason that I couldn’t get the fence to move is because I couldn’t when I was a kid either – it was too strong to break apart, and I know I played around with doing that back then.

I just had a birthday party, and I was just watching this thing about Harry Potter in a rap battle with Voldemort – see, there he is, and there’s the black guy, and there’s all the people who aren’t his wizard friends, but who like him nonetheless.

So it’s a bunch of random stuff that I had bouncing around in my head, and my brain was like, “I can make a cool remix out of this!” Iiiinteresting.

Date: January 28th, 2009
Cate: dreams
1 msg

police, unlicensed guns and firebombs in my dreams

I don’t remember all of it, but here’s what I do remember: I was on my way up a windind road to a church. There was a residential community situated amongst the hilly area surrounding a higher bluff, and that’s where the church was – very dramatic. Everything was sort of quasi-wild-west, broken down, chipping and fading paint, boards and bricks sort of looking. I don’t know why I was going to the church – and in fact, once I got there, it was time for me to go home. It was getting dark, and it was cold, so I walked hurridly down the sloping lanes, twisting my way through the hills towards the highway below.

Then, in front of me, I noticed a man, standing, staring back behind me. I realized that his face was lit by an orange glow, and as I came closer to him, I glanced back over my shoulder, and saw a gout of flame. The church was on fire! It was on fire, and it was throwing this orange light everywhere. I commented to the stranger that it was weird that it was burning so brightly, and he pointed to the moon – which was huge, and a deep reddish orange as well.

I continued down to the freeway, realizing that it was too late to get home the way I’d planned (whatever that was) and I’d have to choose between walking one direction along the highway back to the city, or across the highway and up to a camping station where I could rent a cabin for the night. However, as I reached the bottom I noticed that the man from before was following me – a little freaked out, I kept me hand on the knife in my pocket as I continued along the highway. Eventually, as I came around a bend I saw red and blue lights flashing – an abulance, and some police cars. Someone had been hurt. I run to see what’s happened, and so does the silent stranger – it’s a heavyset man, soaked in blood, lying on the ground. He looks familiar, but I can’t think where I know him from. The man I met before is inconsolable, however – he obviously knew the victim. He crouches and cradles the man’s head in his hands – and then looks up at me.

Nightmareishly (although in my dream I wasn’t at all scared) his face starts to bleed, red fluid squirting from his eyes, and nose, and mouth, running out of his ears, from underneath his fingernails, and everywhere else, I assume. He dies horribly in front of me, lying in a spreading puddle of blood, draped across the body of the other man.

I don’t know how I get home (to my parents’ house, not the HoytHouse) – but I’m pretty shaken up my the whole experience.

The next day, my family is standing outside their house, watching my brother James ride up and down the street on his little razor scooter – and somehow we’re all holding pistols. Dad has a shoulder holster, and he asks me if I’ve found a good holster for mine yet. I show him my leather hip holster, and he approves. Just then, a female police officer appears, and asks James to see his firearm permit. He doesn’t have one, of course. Next she asks to see mine – I obligingly reach into my back pocket for my wallet, and start flipping through the cards. After I’ve gone through one stack of cards without coming up with it, she gets impatient, grabs my arms, and starts pulling me over towards her car, parked across the street. I protest, trying to pull away, which of course counts as resistance, and she slaps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. She throws me into the car (into the driver’s seat, for some reason) as I try to explain that if she would just look in my wallet, which is now lying on the sidewalk, she would find the card.

She walks back across the street, but rather then looking at my wallet, she takes my whole family inside, then walks right back to me. She tells me to start the car, but I can’t drive it – the front passanger-side wheel is completely busted. The tread is torn off, the little pole that sticks into the middle of the wheel to turn it isn’t even inserted correctly. The hub cap is lying in front of the car. She’s pissed, and goes back inside my house – I manage to open the car door, and circle around to look at the tire. I try to put the peices back together, when suddenly my mom is there – “Why are you helping her?” she asks. I try to explain that I’m attempting to expediate my release, when the police woman comes back outside – but before she reaches the car, a couple of young black guys skate up on their roller blades.

“Is this po-lice bitch giving you trouble, dog?” asks one, circling around. “This is how you deal with the po-lice.”

Abruptly, he pulls out a huge handgun, with some sort of attachment on the bottom of the grip resembling the battery on a cordless power drill, and plugs the officer with several rounds.

“Yeah, bitch, that’s what you get! You’re free now, dog!” he yells to me, skating past her body and collecting the handcuff keyes, then throwing them, along with the weird gun, into my lap. It goes off and fire a bullet into the dashboard of the police car.

So now I’m sitting in a beat-up police car with my mom, with a murder weapon in my lap and my own pistol still holstered at my waist, and a dead police office lying in the street. An ambulance pulls up (just like in Grand Theft Auto, they always seem to know when someone is dead) and the attendant walks cautiously up to the window of the car – I hold both my hands high in the air, and tell him to take the gun off of my lap, and out of my hip holster. He looks scared of me.

 

So that’s how that dream went. Big and long. Totally referencial too – I was recently chased by a slightly unreasonable cop, I’ve fired a gun before, used a power-drill with a battery attachment like that, I’ve dreamt about the landscape around the crumbling town in the hills and the freeway below before (which would’ve eventually linked into my underground open-car mass transit startion and the secret underground enterance / LARPing dungeon that leads into OMSI) – and I have a knife in my pocket. It was like an adventure. Some of my dreams are almost fairly straight forward ‘what if’ senarios, where I sort of put myself in a situation then work out how I’d respond to it. Is that escapist, or something else? When we get truly immersive virtual reality, I hope there’s a ‘lucid dream simulator’ feature.

Date: December 27th, 2008
Cate: dreams, matt's life

why do people in my dreams remember more then me?

So I woke up from a dream, early this morning, and after a bit of thought (and not being able to fall back asleep), here’s what I realized: in the dream, one of the people told me about something that I had forgotten – and after they told me, I remembered it. This is weird to start out with, since the person in the dream was obviously in my own head to begin with – and if they remembered it, why didn’t I? But it was even weirder because this person is a real person that I know, and the even they were referring to involved other people I know, but the actual even itself happened in a different dream that I had a month or so ago! So not only did this person in my head remember more then me, but they remembered my own dreams better then me. What’s up with that?

The only way I could imagine that working is if some portion of my mind was filtering everything else going on and sort of ‘managing’ what showed up in my dream – so that inconsistencies didn’t arrise. In this case, I ‘remembed’ the event, but my dream self hadn’t yet, so it had to be related by the dream version of this other person, and then the ‘manager’ part of my brain allowed my ‘dream self’ to remember it.

Anyway, it was striking and weird and worth relating. And now it’s like 8, and my eyes hurt, and I can’t fall back asleep. I’ve decided to listen to some old ‘classical’ music – Beethoven, Mozart, and Vivaldi to start with.

Date: September 30th, 2008
Cate: dreams, matt's life, things to think about

declarations and faces

Last night I was adrift in a flood of vivid dreams. I didn’t know that they were dreams, but I had complete control over myself – they were a lot like real life. In one, I was sitting at a computer in the public library, along with some friends from CMD – in the ‘conference room’ adjacent, there was a speaker giving a lecture.

We heard him say, “Sometimes little jack and jill have to be told that there just isn’t any money for college, and they’re just going to have to deal with it!”

Thorin, my boss when I was at the agency, objected – “So basicly you’re saying that my upwardly-mobile daughter has no opportunity for vertical growth?”

After their argument somehow got carried out of the conference room and into the main section of the library, everyone was paying attention. After several rounds of accusations and defense, the man said indignantly, “I suppose you want everything to be however you want it, don’t you?”

Before Thorin could answer I jumped up and declared, “We want a life full of comfortabilitity [sic], or none at all!”

Not quite sure what to make of the statement, everyone looked on bemusedly.

Later that day, we went to a party at a huge house – somehow, I found my way back into an unused room, which turned out to be where you had to fight the boss (not Thorin, this was a boss in the video game sense). I don’t remember how I beat him, but I managed it, and then somehow won the right to use that room as my bed room. I moved all my stuff in, set up my bed, then lay down to sleep – but I couldn’t fall asleep. I knew that if I rolled over and looked at the outlet next to my bed, I would see something scary.

Unable to take the suspense, I looked – and there was the boss’ face, instead of the outlet, with cords stuffed in his mouth. As I stared, its eyes suddenly flipped open and stared back at me. Suddenly I was caught by a sort of air-current, like there was a strong win blowing me closer and closer to the face, which was shifting to resemble my own! My vision blurred, there was a roar in my ears, and just before I got too close, I woke up (in my dream), thrashing around in a tangle of sheets. It had only been a dream… within a dream.

So – faces of people I defeated which suck me in, and ‘an uncomfortable life is not worth living’. Weird. The experience with the face felt similar to when I tried Salvia, especially the weird air current / invisible force pushing against me, which was nearly identical. It also felt a little like that Call of Cthulu computer game, the way my vision distorted and sort of pulsated as my attention was fixated on the face.

The computers in the library are probably a childhood throw back of some kind, as I definitly spent time on the library computers when I was a kid, waiting for mom to get off work, or there with my classmates on a school trip. Thorin has a daughter – I guess he would be defensive of her given the opportunity, but I can’t think of anything in particular this relates to. My mispoken sentiment (‘comfortabilitity’ is not a word) isn’t even a true one – I would rather live any life then no life at all, rather be uncomfortable for the rest of my life then lose it. So not sure what that’s about.

Dreams are so much fun.

Date: September 7th, 2008
Cate: dreams, matt's life

don’t play with nuclear reactors.

Last night I dreamt that I was living in a weird little village – mostly basic shacks, quasi-colonial-style houses, lots of dirt and gravel roads, but there were a lot of industrial infrastructure elements too – big pipe junctions, areas where the air was thick with power cables, a field of solar panels outside the village, et cetera.

I was friends with three other kids there, and one day while we were exploring the various buildings of the village, we ran across some sort of huge machine, with knobs and levels and dials and blinking lights, which we decided to play with. We changed the settings to see what would happen – and it started to heat up, setting off alarms, threatening to explode. We quickly changed everything back, and it was okay again.

Then, for some reason, we made it into a game – over the next few days, we would return, and see how close we could let the thing get to overloading without it actually happening. We had no idea what would actually happen if we messed up. We let it get closer and closer, but never too close.

Until the night that I snuck in by myself. I turned everything up to full, then stood watching all the readouts go up, flash red, and the alarms go off. I watched the impending overload entranced – until I snapped out of it as I suddenly realized that it had gone too far, and was past the point of no return!

I ran, taking dark hallways down under the ground, closing big heavy steel-and-concrete doors behind me as I went, trying to find a place to hide, not only from the blast, but from what I’d done. Finally, I hit a dead end – it was a damp room, with loose plastic covering the floor and walls, which were dirt. The room was rocked by what seemed like an earthquake, and I heard a roar as the machine exploded – a tiny puff of smoke woofed out from the crack between the floor and the door.

Everything was quiet. After several minutes, I started retracing my steps, opening door after door, avoiding hanging wires and pipes venting steam, until I reached a door that was melted shut. I found a ladder to crawl up, leading to an access hatch in the solar power field. As I stepped outside, I realized I had come out too soon – towering above me was a growing mushroom cloud, and a fog bank of smoke was climbing the hill towards me. I knew it was too late for me too – I already had radiation poisening, I felt my skin start to itch…

mushroom cloud over city

What is this one – fear of natural disasters? Repressed guilt? I don’t think I feel guilty about anything right now… hmm. Well, other then the things I always feel guilty about, and I think I’ve more or less dismissed them over the years – oh well.

Date: September 7th, 2008
Cate: dreams, matt's life

Please don’t shoot me

Last night, I dreamt I was wandering aroud the basement level of the art institute – but like most dreams, it was a sort of amalgamation of all the things I associate with the non-school-areas of AIPD: industrial decor, twisting pipes and hanging wires, valves with little luggage tags on them, scuffed poured concrete floors.

I was taking a shortcut to get outside after class, when this security guard found me. He told me I wasn’t supposed to be there – then immediatly started shouting at me to get down on the ground or he would shoot me. He was holding a gun on me, and I really thought he was going to shoot me no matter what – I was crying, I was so scared. He took my cellphone and my camera, and I tried to protetest, but he had that gun. Finally he asked for my wallet, and I tried to really slowly pull it out of my pocket in a completely non-theatening way. He pulled out my ID and looked at it.

Meanwhile, class had let out, and there were at least a couple dozen students walking past – but they weren’t doing anything to help me. Most people pretended to ignore me, like nothing was happening.

Finally, the guard accepted the fact that I was a student, and let me go, but refused to apologize or admit that he’d done anything wrong.

security guard watching

I guess the dream touched on a few key elements – my school, the cool industrial decor, my aversion to authority, fear of guns, and recent upswing in reports of abuse of power by people in positions of authority.

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