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July 26, 2006

D-list-guest-star-a-palooza

I've been struggling all morning to keep the details of this dream fresh in my mind, but it's fading quickly.

Our story begins with me slipping discreetly into a high school gymnaseum to film my sister's graduation to a DVD. After this bit of backstory, I find myself meeting up with a group of friends, played by Mario Lopez, Amber Tamblyn, and some other equally familiar faces. At this point, we embark on some kind of heroic quest. Now, this is the really interesting part of the story, but, unfortunately, I've forgotten most of it, except for the fact that we were pitted against a fairly standard rubber suit monster who claimed to be Satan (though we didn't really buy it), and some plan that involved sucking out all the knowledge in the brains of people using a pink goo called tretonin. Also, there's a race against time to cross a mall in order to get to the last soft pretzel stand before it closes.

Eventually, we get separated, and I am racing down the interstate to rejoin my friends. I get confused about the exit I want to take from a cloverleaf, and end up on a ramp that abruptly ends, as it was closed for construction. I get out of my car and try to work out a way arouind it. Climbing down through the construction, I steal a pair of power drills, but eventually fail to make a jump and fall into what appears to be a high school auxilliary gym below (That's the little side gym next to the ream gym where they make the girls go to learn folk dancing and the proper use of tampons while the boys learn wrestling and how to check for testicular cancer in the main gym). I stumble out into the main gym, where I cut across a graduation ceremony in progress, and get chewed out by my mom (played by Stockard Channing) for ruining the film of my sister's graduation.

I start to get wise as to what's happening, and race back to the highway off-ramp, and jump, again, into the auxiliary gym. Again I walk back into the main gym, and again I get chewed out by Stockard Channing. I come to understand that I've found myself in a time loop, and try to work out a way to make it all come out right. I go back to the beginning of the loop, and this time stay in the gym. I try to convince Stockard Channing about the time loop by showing her the DVDs I've already made of the graduation, the last two times through the loop. But before I can make much progress, I am distracted by the need to remaster a set of home made seaQuest DSV Video CDs. When I find that the foil is peeling from the discs, destroying them, I start to understand what's wrong. I explain everything to my friends, whereupon J'accuse and.... It turns to that Stockard Channing is not my mother, but Satan in disguise. This isn't a time loop: we've all been captured and are trapped in a hallucination as he uses the tretonin to extract all of our knowledge. The time loop is something *I* created to preven Satan from getting any of our knowledge outside of the loop. A montage shows us being covered in pink goo, and something with Mario Lopez breaking a steam pipe, and this all leads to me formulating the plan for our escape and victory.

Unfortunately, just as we do the "fade to the next scene so that the audience doesn't learn the details of our plan until we actually show it in operation", a telemarketer woke me up to bother me.

Once I'd hung up on him, I managed to slip back to sleep and had another dream. This one involved my trivia team showing up three hours early for an important game. We mean to kill time in the nearby shops, and I am drawn to a box I see through a window: several in a series of four foot tall Transformers. They've got Optimus Prime, Soundwave (though under a different name), and Megatron among others, though the price is a bit steep for me, and yet it's so hard to resist. For some reason, my girlfriend's father is here, and she joins him for a bit as he makes a pile of waffles in order to try out the pile of secondhand waffle irons he's just acquired. Meanwhile, I find a big plastic tub full of what look like 30's tombstone radios -- though their cases are made of brushed steel instead of wood, which I find strange and confusing. The sign on the tub explains that they had no idea how to fix them, so they just stuck four random tubes in each one. They vary greatly in size; some are about the size you'd expect, but many are very small, about the size of an oil filter, and the one in the front is huge, about the size of an actual tombstone. A tag on it gives the price as $1,998.

I catch up with another of our team members, who tells me that the owner of the toystore has decided to roll anthing we want to buy here onto our bar tab at the trivia game -- which sounds like a strange thing to do, but I make a connection from the name of the toy store and realize that the owner must be the same man as the bar manager. I go back to retrieve my girlfriend and tell her father about the radios, as I think this would interest him, but they have gone somewhere else. So I make a waffle instead, and burn myself on the oil. As my girlfriend returns to attend to me, I remember how much I wanted to make a point of not forgetting the previous dream, which wakes me up.

April 19, 2006

They like me, they really like me

The thing about dreams is that there seems to be a force in the normal human mind that doesn't want you remembering them. Even if you can keep your mind around it, because it's built by your subconscious, it often won't make any sense in the retelling.

All this is by way of justifying why I haven't posted any of them recently. But the streak ends for today.

Last night I had the most amazing dream. Even now, the details are starting to fall apart, and the trials of the day are starting to interfere, but the most basic feelings from the dream still persist.

I was expecting a few friends to stop by for something. Just two of three, and not for anything big, but I was scrambling around to get everything ready. At this point, I notice someone walking down the street toward my home. It's a friend of mine, but not one of the people I was expecting.

And then another. And another. Pretty soon the whole thing had evolved into the Power Walk from the end of an action show title sequence. I will point out that, with a couple of exceptions (My girlfriend, etc.), none of these people were actually people I know, though many of them seemed to be 'based on' people I know, and they all seemed familiar, with their own backstories and half-remembered shared histories.

And they filed into my home, forming a line (to what end, I'm not sure), and as I walked along this line, sharing my half-remembered reminisces about our shared histories in a scene not unlike that one from The Three Amigos, and the thing I remember most clearly, aside from the oddness that all these people from my (admittedly fictionalized) past would randomly decide to drop in on me at the same time, was the overwhelming sense that all these years, during which I had thought myself to be impoverished in friendships, I actually had accumulated all these dozens of people who thought of me as a friend and cared about me enough to stop by for a visit.

And that was really, really great.

There was more to the dream, a sort of Canterbury Tales-style series of shorts which I gather were the reminiscences of my past history with each guest (Okay, that kinda cheapens the dream to realize that I dreamed a clip show). One of them involved planting a surveilance bug on a gangster at a fancy restaurant, then escaping by leaping from the mezanine into a swiming pool below (the lead role in this sequence was played by that guy who plays Logan on Veronica Mars). Another involved a series of daring rescues of kidnapped psychics from the evil shadow-military-industrial-bad guys. The Noxema girl played the heroic psychic who scanned the mind of each captor for the code to unlock the captured psychic, I played the guy whose job it was to hold off the guards while she did this, and Michael Shanks played one of the captured psychics, who surprised us by using his godlike powers to paralyze all the bad guys during a key scene.

October 27, 2005

Two in one week? I must be watching too much TV

Last night's dream was unusual (well, maybe unusual for you, not so much for me) in that it was told in the third person. I think my affinity for TV and Video games has permanently damaged the way my subconscious views the world.

Anyway, last night's dream involved the characters from the new WB series Supernatural. I want to point out that I don't control what I dream, much, and can't be blamed for the taste of my subconscious. I only half-watch the show, since I don't really like it, but I'm giving it a chance because it has much in common with a number of shows I do like.

In this story, Sam and Dave Dean have been baited into going to find their non-canonical six year old sister (or maybe someone else's sister; I'm not sure), played by my own sister, age 6. Something or other goes wrong for them, and the FBI shows up, intent on taking them into custody. Dean (I assume, though which one is which is something I can never keep straight), gives up without a fight, in order to buy escape time for Sam, who hides in the little girl's bedroom (played by my own sister's bedroom, age 21).

He does not hide for long, however, and soon peeks out in preparation of making his move. The FBI Agents must have been trained by the guards in Castle Wolfenstein, since they don't notice him hiding in plain sight. Outside, the rain has picked up, and some of the stones are coming loose, making the way treacherous (The setting is, it seems, my childhood home, relocated to the top of a pyramid in Chichen Itza). Sam starts to rescue the little girl, but then decides not to (the reason for this is hinted at later) after an unseen conversation. Instead, he hops in a truck and drives away, leaving the agents bumfuzzled. (In fact, I get the distinct impression that these FBI agents are intentionally playing along, since they seem to really know deep down who the heroes are in this story, and they're only trying to catch them in the first place because it's important to the narrative structure.)

It's sort of implied that he rescues Dean immediately thereafter, but this happens offscreen as the narrative follows the little girl. She's taken back to an FBI installation where they've set up what could be loosely termed a boarding school where the children and younger siblings of heroes from Speculative Fiction Walking-The-Earth shows are kept in protective custody. (Presumably, this is where David Banner's sister, Kwai Chang Caine's nephew, and Cade Foster's son go, though they won't be appearing in this dream. There is a twelve-year-old kid who mentions something about his dad looking for a one-armed man, but he gets cut off).

She deals with a complex robotic vending machine. It seems determined to give you what it thinks you want, rather than what you actually want. It's voice activated, but responds to any command as "pick something you think I'd like", so it's a race to pound out the number code for the confection of choice before the robot picks something else for you. We are told, either in a voice over or in her conversation with the Sympathetic Female Agent Character, played by a cross between Gillian Anderson and that new girl on CSI: NY, that she's perfectly happy to be here, since she's effectively an orphan and even she knows that Walking The Earth is no kind of lifestyle for someone her age, so she'll just ride it out here with the other kids until the series finale where there will surely be a touching reunion scene.

I gather the narrative was intending to follow the Sympathetic Female Agent Character from this point, but all she got as far as doing before I woke up was to retrieve from the vending machine a stale, cloth-flavored creme-filled chocolate cupcake and eat it. Very slowly.

October 24, 2005

Looks like a fish. Moves like a fish. Steers like a cow.

[3 points]

Okay, I know I haven't done this in a while. Lots of trouble keeping them in my mind for the length of time it takes to get downstairs to the computer.

But today, dear readers, I remember a thing or two. It involves... My basement.

There was quite a lot I've forgotten of this dream, but at the climactic scene, I entered my basement carying... A Fish.

In the dream this fish was identified as a cod, but it looked a lot more like a beige grouper. But my plans for the fish were cut short when I found that the shelving I had painstakingly (really; I smashed the hell out of my thumb with a masonry hammer while putting the damned things together) put together had been smashed down, turning my worldly possessions into a gigantic pile. I set myself to the task of reassembling my shelves. This plan, however, I abort, realizing that it would be easier just to load an earlier saved game.

This done, I hang the haddock-shaped cod, and set about curing it for dinner. To this end, I cut into the 50 pound bag of salt I keep in the basement, and stuff salt into the gaping maw of the fish. But I notice that there are blue chips in the salt. About these, I ask my dad, who dismisses my concerns. Thus allayed, I move on to stuffing a catfish similarly.

For some reason, this set me on a quest to find a 7-11, but that's a tale for another night.

September 20, 2005

Just some good ol' boys

Well, I have pieced together a fair bit of my dream last night. As usual, it made far more sense when I was asleep.

In the first part of the dream, I gather I was in a race. Other vehicles included the General Lee, a Corvette ZR-1, and Viper. Not a Dodge Viper: one of the fighter jets from Battlestar Galactica. My own vehicle was a race car I invented for a story I wrote when I was a kid, a sort of hybrid between an F-1 and a swamp boat. I don't actually know who won the race, since me and the Viper stopped at a drive-through to pick up lunch, and this seamlessly led to my cleaning out the refrigerator, a journey of discoverey that revealed many interesting foodstuffs I'd forgotten that I had.

This (naturally) led me into an episode of The Tomorrow People. There was some kind of alien cloning plot going on, and, naturally, we had to deal with it. Now, I was a mere novice Tomorrow Person, but I was able to deduce the company acting as a front for the evil plot. As luck would have it, John had been financing his private life by freelancing as an accountant, and theirs was one of the companies in his portfolio. Thus, we were able to use this as a pretext to infiltrate their operation. A clone secretary attempted to seduce me, but I was able to fend off her advances while the others reprogrammed a clone (played by David Verrey) to off the other conspirators (being unable to do it themselves).

So this is more or less when I woke up. But after a long and pleasant phone call from the lady of my affections, I must have nodded off again, because I remember having the very clear and distinct sense that she'd crawled into bed behind me and was pressed against me, whispering affectionate things in my ear (this was a very chaste dream, but even if it wasn't, it's not like I'm going to tell you lot all the details, as those are between me and her). This was one of those rare, very tactile dreams, and even though it was fairly obvious that I was indeed dreaming, it was still several minutes after I'd snapped all the way back to consciousness that I could suppress the urge to look around, under the bed and such, to see where she'd gone.

September 13, 2005

You must die! I alone am best!

In last night's dream, I was following some folks to Ocean City. On foot, though I was making pretty good time. I was getting hungry, and passed a McDonalds I knew was on the way. Sadly, though, it was abandoned. Fortunately, I saw that this was because they'd relocated to a brand new and spectacular glass-fronted facility down the road. But McDonalds was not to be for me, since just down the road a bit, I saw a small mall wherein there were far superior vittles to be had. When I arrived, I was first drawn to the chinese food kiosk, but quickly decided I'd rather go to the deli. At the deli counter, a man and his wife were discussing the special offer. For an extra dollar, you could spend fifteen minutes gathering as many knick-knacks from the shelves which covered a far wall as would fit in a small basket. The man and wife were convinced that there was some kind of trick, with the size of the basket or the time limit being rigged to prevent you from getting anything useful. As the vendor assured him there was no trick, I inspected the far wall. It was full of neat little arty knick knacks and oversized books. So I had put my dollar down even before the man ahead of me had, begrudgingly, gone over to the wall. This means that my decision was uninformed by what happened next: the wall retracted to reveal this amazing alcove of toys and wonders, essentially a large toy shop, guarded by a free-standing fireplace.
A satanic Santa-like fgure guarded this wonderland, and explained, in stilted, poetic language, how the game worked. My understanding came to be that he and everyone else inside had fifteen minutes to gather as much stuff as they liked, but they could only keep it if among his take was one particular object.
I am caught in the throng that moves toward the alcove, and forced up a staircase to the top of the fireplace. But the density of the line is such that the fifteen minutes expire just as I reach the top, where I would otherwise have been expected to jump down the fireplace to enter this alcove. Of course, as I have paid my dollar, I am now next to play the game. When I reach the contestant's enterance, I find a coin gumball machine, which, I now understand, delivers a tiny little brass model of the particular object I must find. I insert my token and an given a small brass model of some kind of model train freight car.

At this point, the dream shifts slightly, and I am a mere spectator in the holding area; playing the game in my place is the boy Goku of Bragonball fame. As he searches for the freight car, I notice and point out to my companions how amazing is the motion of the toy Optimus Prime robot I can see jumping about and doing kung fu outside of the holding area. It is now that I come to understand that the game is somehow rigged, as there would be horrible otherworldly consequences for the demonic plan of the game's organizers should anyone win. To stop me revealing this, the organizer, a Corrupt Corporate Executive type, and his henchman, Peter Lorrie, try to kill me. As I fought him off, twisting him into various pretzel configurations, Goku finds the freight car, but is barred access to the holding area to turn it in. He instead pitches it at the organizer, who ignores it, so it bounces off of him and disappears.

This is a problem for me, since Peter Lorrie is still trying to kill me, and while I've got the advantage over him for the moment, as I can't actually do anything to hurt him, I'm going to have to struggle with him pretty much until one of us gives up. Young Goku is forcibly ejected, and the organizers rejoices, since now he's just got to kill me and let the clock run out, and their evil plan will be safe for another day. But I know better, and Goku returns minutes later in his adult SSJ4 form, sure to use his instant transmission and super-speed to re-find the freight car and force the organizer to accept it in the time remaining.

Will he? Well, I might have found out had I not been awakened by a wrong number call.

Such is life.

September 10, 2005

All your base are belong to us

Let's see. I swear this all made some kind of sense when I was dreaming it.

There was something to do with a produce stand. I don't exactly recall what it was, but the produce stand was in the same place as the farm where my family has always bought our Christmas trees.

Then there's something where I was on a train, dancing with this girl I know from karaoke. It was fun and somehow I actually had moves. This shoulda tipped me off that it was a dream. Unfortunately, she saw something that tipped her off and reverted to her natural state, being in reality a small snail-like alien. She ran away, and I gave chase, because, alien snail or not, she's a friend. Also, that seemed to be where the plot was going, so I wasn't about to let the good bits happen off-stage. She explained that she'd seen someone who might expose her presence to the government, and therefore had to go on the lam.

Now, I can not explain how this is possible, but you've probably had dreams before, so you can maybe empathize with me when I say that the segue felt totally natural and organic as I transitioned into a 1942-style primitive flight sim. Of sorts. It was not so much a cheap 8-bit plane as it was, well, me, in my trenchcoat, walking over the image of enemy installations and gun turrets, tossing bombs down on them. Of course, I got shot down a couple of times and had to start over, but eventually, I got to the other side, where there was a television providing my in-train movie.

This movie was interrupted by a video-voice-mail from, of all people, my former girfriend (the really great one, not the crazy one). Her message was intercut with a montage she had produced to summarize her feelings toward me. I started to get the general drift of this, and it was positive (Funny how while awake, I am painfully pessimistic on this subject, yet my dreams are universally hopeful). Unfortunately, before I could get a handle on the specific, my sleep was rudely interrupted by the credit card company, wanting me to take advantage of a spectacular new opportunity.

You know, if I can figure out how, I think I will.

September 07, 2005

Sleepjaunting

And, one day in, the whole thing falls apart. I barely recall any of what I dreamed last night. Here's what I do...

1. The Tomorrow People
2. My Karaoke friends
3. Strippers
4. Groundskeeper Willie

September 06, 2005

Theme Ingredient: Bat Guano

Stars shining bright above you,
Night breezes seem to whisper, "I love you,"
Birds singing in the sycamore tree,
Dream a little dream of me

I have from time to time been told that I'm better at recalling my dreams than the average person. But I've really been slipping lately. They say the best way to improve your ability to recall your dreams. So, whenever I can recall enough of it, I'm gonna start adding my dreams here. They won't appear on the index page since, well, I don't want it to. I reserve the right to hold back anything that's too freaky, and, of course, levels of detail will vary based on how much I remember. So, here's what was woven into last night's REM excursion...

The narrative of this dream was coherent at the time, but since I can't adequately explain it, here's a list of things that were there.

1. The deck around my parents' swimming pool.
2. My former girlfriend (#1) (Third consecutive night)
3. BATS!!!
4. Iron Chef (Second night since Friday)

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