Posts Tagged dreamscape

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: 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.