Posts categorized “Dreams”

Last week I had two great dreams in one night. The first one I call The Case of the Missing Socks:

Carrie & I lived in a house that isn’t the house where we actually live. This one was situated on a couple of acres of fields and trees. It had a porch that wrapped around the entire perimeter. The bedroom had floor-to-ceiling windows, and just on the other side of the porch opposite these windows was a rather large bush.

I couldn’t find my socks. I had some socks, but not nearly as many as I should have had. They kept on disappearing and I couldn’t figure out why. It was pretty steady, too. I’d put them away in my sock drawer and when I went to get some out there would be less and less each time. It was very puzzling to me.

Soon I found them, though: they were in that bush outside the bedroom windows. They were dangling from the branches like bananas, but it was obvious that they weren’t growing from the branches. The bush didn’t produce socks, my socks somehow ended up in the bush. I thought this was incredibly bizarre, so I asked my friends and family if they knew how the heck this was happening.

None of them thought it was in the least bit odd. They were like, “Oh, good, you found them.”

“Yes, but they were in a bush. Outside!”

“Well, that’s good.”

I tried to get them to help me figure out how they could have possibly gotten in there, but everyone just kinda thought that that’s where they ended up because that’s where they ended up. Somebody did kinda half-assedly make a suggestion, though: “Maybe the floor in your bedroom is slanted just a little?” The implication being that my socks were rolling across the bedroom floor, across the porch, and then landing in the bush.

The problem, of course, was that they weren’t rolled up when they were in the bush. They were fully un-rolled. I was getting kind of frustrated at everybody’s indifference to this very strange mystery.

Unfortunately at that point I had to use the bathroom, so I got up and took care of business. When I went back to bed I had another, seemingly unrelated dream:

Two of my friends, who in real-life are expecting a baby, went to the doctor’s office and learned that they were having a boy. They were so excited (especially the guy) that they decided to throw an impromptu “We’re Having a Boy” party. They decided to have it at my house. Without telling me or Carrie about it beforehand.

In the time it took them to drive from the doctor’s office to my house (which in this dream was actually my real house) they had planned the entire party and invited all of the guests. They all arrived at my house shortly before Carrie & I did—we had been off doing errands of some sort.

‘What the Hell is going on?” I asked the guy.

“We’re having a party at your house!” he said with a big smile on his face.

There were tons of people in the house. Must have been 40-50. My dream people were just throwing random people in my life in there as extras: Fools Play friends, Bead Factory people, etc. Eventually, though, they must have run out of people I actually know and in desperation threw in someone random.

Nathan Fillion was at the party.

But he was tiny. Maybe 5′2″ at the most. And he had his “Caleb” haircut from Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

By way of explanation, the guy who planned the party simply said, “Oh, yeah, I invited Nathan Fillion.”

It really didn’t seem like that big of a deal for him to be at the party. He wasn’t mobbed by people wanting an autograph or a picture or anything. Nobody was really talking to him all that much, so we went over to talk to him. He seemed like a very pleasant fellow, and I guess we’d known him for a while because he knew our names and stuff like that.

As we were talking a thought suddenly struck me. “I bet Nathan Fillion would get a kick out of that story.”

So I said to him, “Oh, hey, Nathan, you’re never gonna believe this dream I just had. You see, my socks kept on disappearing…” and I explained my entire previous dream to him. He agreed with me that it was very strange that nobody thought that it was weird that my socks were in a bush.

If the dream continued after that I don’t remember it very much. I should add that Nathan Fillion was wearing a sports coat over a T-shirt and was holding a yellowish drink in a clear plastic cup the whole time.

Well done, dream people! Both those dreams were excellently amusing.

I had a tornado dream a couple of nights ago! Hooray! I so heart my tornado dreams. This one was unusual in that very early on I realized it was a dream. You’ll see why:

My brother & I were looking out the back of the house we grew up in (in Kent). The sky was clouded with a pretty uniform light gray, but in the center of the sky a big swirl was starting to form. We were very excited about this, because tornadoes come from swirly clouds.

But there was something almost immediately odd about the swirl in the clouds. It was too regular. Too… fractal. Like this:

I was immediately suspicious, and told my brother, “I think this might be a dream.” But almost immediately an actual funnel cloud formed and dove for the ground. It wasn’t so much a funnel cloud, though, as it was a wiggly vertical tube cloud that descended from the spiral.

We were very pleased by this development; it seemed realistic enough. We eagerly watched as the bottom of the tube approached the ground.

But then *BOINK* the instant the tornado touched down it was, as if by magic, replaced with a gigantic orange tarp. Several hundred feet tall, awkwardly rolled up and bound by many ropes.

“Yeah,” I said to my brother, “this is a dream all right.”

My dream people valiantly tried to keep the dream going after that, which included us storm-chasing in a car a very tiny tornado (about 12″ wide) that was headed for Seattle, while simultaneously being “chased” (it was more just lazily following us) by an identical tornado. When we got to Seattle I think my dream people didn’t feel like accurately rendering the city, because it didn’t look at all like the real Seattle.

But what were they thinking? A tornado transforms into an enormous orange tarp? What the heck kind of dream is that?

Soon after that I switched to another dream entirely that was a post-apocalyptic story about an afterlife in which everybody got indestructible bodies that were exact copies of their real ones, but then had to live among the ruins on Earth. Also, there was an angel who was in charge of all of this who was kind of awkward and didn’t know how to comfort all of the horribly upset, recently-deceased people.

Last night I had a very vivid and awesome dream. It had a very specific, steampunk-style aesthetic.

I was in a big, castle-like fortress that was many stories tall and butted directly up against the ocean. It was made of dark brown stones and iron braces with glass windows. It was staffed by a rag-tag militia that was decked out in classic steampunk trappings: big goggles, oversized trenchcoats, long beards, enormous gloves, and long, skinny rifles. I wasn’t one of them, though; I was somehow an outsider, but an important outsider who they were trying to protect.

A massive pirate ship showed up in the water and demanded that the fortress surrender me to them. They refused, and the leader of the militia told me to get to the “safe room,” which was a big room with foot-thick steel walls just back of the command post about halfway up the fortress. The leader sent one of his underlings to make sure I was safe, but I didn’t trust the guy at all—I knew that he was secretly working for the pirates and was going to betray me to them and probably stab the militia leader in the back with a big knife. I don’t know exactly how I knew all of that, but I was certain of it, so I decided I would be safer by myself.

So instead of going to the safe room I ditched the traitor and ran off down a corridor in the fortress. Unfortunately it was a corridor lined with big windows, and someone on the pirate ship apparently spotted me because they opened fire directly at me. I was shocked at how accurate the cannons were even though I was way up the side of the building (probably ten stories or more). The cannons were busting holes in the windows and walls just inches away from me and I repeatedly had to dodge the flying debris.

By this time, though, the militia had rallied and began fighting back—with flying ships. There were two varieties. There were some big warships that looked like they came straight out of Howl’s Moving Castle (except they were live-action instead of animated). And there were dozens of little two-man airships that had rapidly-flapping wings like the airships in Castle in the Sky, but they were divided into a front section that had the wings and the pilot, and the rear section that had a cannon and a gunner. The rear section was gyroscope-stabilized so that no matter what crazy angle the ship was flying at, the cannon would be level.

The pirate ship launched some of its own airships and a couple of big flying warships of its own came in as reinforcements. A huge air-to-air and air-to-sea battle erupted. The gunners on the pirate ship seemed like they had an almost supernatural ability to lead their targets. They would fire huge bursts of 6 or 7 cannonballs at a seemingly empty area of the sky. But then, sure enough, a militia warship would just happen to move into that area just in time to get hit. The little ships were a little too agile to get hit by the pirate ship, though.

The ongoing battle distracted the pirates from shooting at me, at least. At this point I came upon another valuable outsider like myself who the militia were trying to protect. This guy was played by Josh Hird the Maroon Fool. He was one of those very foolishly Hero types; he was getting into flying gear so he could go out and fight off the pirates himself, even though his (and my) survival was somehow drastically important. I realized that the reason he was going to risk himself like that was because the weasely little Traitor had convinced him to do so. I knew that the Traitor was going to do something bad to the Hero, sabotage him in some way or plant a bomb on him or something like that, so I decided I’d better stick with him and protect him.

Before he headed out to battle, though, he said he needed to pee. This seemed reasonable, so I quickly said that I would go with him ’cause I needed to pee, too, and that way I could make sure that nothing bad happened. We made our way to a bathroom where he took the stall and I took a urinal. These were steampunk urinals, though: brass bowls with overly complicated plumbing. They were set in the middle of the room about two or three feet off the floor, with thin metal walls in between them. I took the one on the far end and started peeing in it, only to notice too late that it was broken.

I should point out at this point that, yes, I did need to pee in real life. So I went and took care of that then went back to bed for some more dreamin’

During the course of this break I had apparently convinced the Hero not to get himself killed, and we’d escaped the battle and made our way to a research facility of some sort, and that’s where the dream started up again.

The steampunk researchers here were working on a new, super airship, and they needed our outsider help to finish it. This is when it became clear that the Hero and I weren’t just outsiders; we were from an alternate future and therefore had all sorts of knowledge that these guys didn’t have access to. They needed our help to defeat the pirates. They showed off the prototype of their airship, which was an awesome, segmented airship that reminded me of a winged caterpillar. It was very fortified but not very fast.

The Hero and I rolled up our sleeves. We had a lot to teach about rocketry, jet engines, and aerodynamics.

Stuff got kinda muddled after that and the dream rapidly lost focus. I remember a couple women with big hoop skirts and parasols, like people out of Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte. I also remember a model of the caterpillar airship flying through Christine & Lawrence’s house. So by that time the dream was effectively over.

Last night I had two dreams, one of which I remember very well and the other only vaguely:

First off, I had a dream that the movie Cloverfield had been re-made in black & white and with only 1950s style special effects. The Cloverfield monster now only had one gigantic cyclops eye as well. Its arms were still long and gangly, but looked a lot like the alien from Twenty Million Miles to Earth. Much of the movie (particularly the climax) took place in a barren hilly area with a lot of fog instead of New York City. The stop-motion animation of the monster was less than convincing. Also, the main characters were a grizzled private eye and a gritty mechanic-slash-helicopter pilot.

Secondly, I had a dream wherein I was arguing with some vastly powerful form of self-aware cosmic energy. It was mad at me and/or humanity in general, and it kept on forming itself into a 6-foot-tall tire and trying to run me over while I was trying to calm it down. It transported me to “its realm,” which looked kinda like a green-and-white computer grid with lots of crystalline and diamond-shaped formations. There it continued to periodically turn into a green-and-blue tire, which I would have to dodge while continuing to try to calm it down. It wasn’t scary at all; this vastly-powerful cosmic entity was just kinda pathetic and I felt a little sorry for it.

I heart my dream people.

I didn’t get very much sleep last night—only about five hours. So this afternoon after doing some work and delivering it, I decided to relax by playing some Animal Crossing: City Folk.

I very quickly fell asleep. And, since it was what was on my mind when I fell asleep, I had a dream about Animal Crossing. For some reason, though, it was kind of a hybrid between animal crossing and The Legend of Zelda.

For instance: The game had a cartoony, “Minish Cap” style of art instead of the regular Animal Crossing style. Also, in the real Animal Crossing, you will periodically see big bugs clinging to the trunks of trees. In my dream there was a Peahat clinging to the side of a tree. It got startled when I got to near it and started (slowly) fluttering away towards the east side of town, where there’s a big cliff. When it reached the cliff it floated up to the top of it. Luckily, in my dream a mushroom-like dog lived at the top of the cliff and caught the Peahat, dropping it back down into town so I could catch it in my bug net.

My favorite part of the dream, though, was that there were Octoroks running around all over town. They were absolutely harmless, and you could catch them in your bug net if you wanted. They always traveled in groups. There would be a large one in the front and then four or five smaller ones would follow it around in a straight line. Then my dream people got absolutely stumped. What do you call a group of Octoroks?

Y’know how you call a group of geese a “gaggle” of geese, a group of fish a “school” of fish, a group of crows a “murder” of crows, a group of buzzards a “wake” of buzzards, etc.? Well, my dream people wracked their collective brains to try to come up with what to call a group of Octoroks.

What they came up with was a “shelf of note” of Octoroks. “Note” as in the sense of importance or consequence (as in, “Nothing of note happened”). So there were all these shelves of note of Octoroks running around my Animal Crossing town.

I thought that was so absolutely bizarre a choice that I had to wake up and write it down. At first, though, I only dreamed that I woke up and wrote it down. I had to catch myself and say, “Hey, you didn’t actually do that. You’re still asleep.” Then I woke up for real and, like Abraham Lincoln, wrote “Shelves of note of Octoroks” on the back of an envelope.

I don’t mean for this website to turn into just a chronicle of my dreams, but I keep on having such awexome ones that I have to write them down! Case in point: last night…

Jack Black of Tenacious D fame lived in the back of an Australian zoo/museum with his new bandmates. Meanwhile, a middle-aged couple were arrested by a SWAT team (in a scene very much like the one towards the end of Brazil) for living an “alternative lifestyle.” Upon reading about this in the newspaper, Jack Black became so enraged that he briefly transformed into his John K animated version and declared that he wasn’t gonna just sit there and let the government dictate how people lived their private lives. Except he swore an awful lot when he said it. 

Back to his non-cartoon version, Jack Black sued the government and went to court, giving an impassioned speech in front of a white-wigged judge to the effect that it should be illegal for any public government anywhere to legislate private morality.

He promptly lost the case.

Six months later, though, he re-sued on some technicality. The case dragged on for months, during which time an extremely agitated Jack Black continually berated the Judge and jury for being “the man” and being hypocrites, “because who doesn’t like to smoke a little now and then, y’know? Yeah, you know!” He singled out a librarian-looking, middle-aged woman in the jury and began doing his soft-talking seduction voice on her, trying to get her to admit that she smoked pot. She was absolutely aghast.

Eventually the general public caught wind of Jack Black’s courtroom shenanigans and totally got behind him, cheering for this buffoon to actually win! In the end, exhausted from having to deal with this idiot for so long, the Judge and jury actually gave in and ruled in Jack Black’s favor! The “alternative lifestyle” couple was set free!

I (a court reporter at this time) went down to the zoo, which was also partially a museum, and found Jack Black’s bandmates hanging out in an unlocked cage in an artificial cave watching some TV. I asked them where Jack Black was, and they said he was probably around somewhere, as he’d just gone to get a burrito.

I waited and he eventually did come back, munching on his burrito. He led me on a brief tour of the museum portion of the zoo, where he seriously orated his beliefs in the importance of preserving the environment, and how he wistfully longed for those turn-of-the-century days when Australia was a much wilder, freer place.

The funniest thing about the whole dream to me (aside from the half minute where Jack Black became a cartoon) was that it was never actually specified what the couple’s “alternative lifestyle” actually consisted of. Everybody in the dream seemed to know, but it was never actually said by anyone, so I have no idea what was so “alternative” about them!

I have to tell you about this dream I had last night. It was one of the craziest in recent memory. I didn’t actually dream it in order, but I’ll try to have it make more sense here:

Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor from the Superman movies, Danny DeVito from the Romancing the Stone movies, and Sandra Bernhardt from Hudson Hawk all teamed up to bring about an apocalypse. Their plan: to use two tiny, gold-filled barges in a small pond on the side of a hill to perform an arcane ritual during a lunar eclipse to summon Unicron. 

I’m completely serious.

My brother, Geoff, and I were all secret agents (who were staked out in the house I grew up in) who were supposed to stop this from happening. 

Unfortunately I was distracted by having to deal with an enraged (and strangely small at only about 10 feet tall) Optimus Prime, who had arrived on earth in his day-glo dune buggy and was driving it around the city like a maniac, looking for those who were in league with his arch-enemy Unicron.

I eventually got him to calm down some, but the time I wasted in dealing with him meant that the united villains had time to initiate the ritual! Mike & Geoff called me to tell me that they’d pinpointed the location where the ritual was taking place, so I hopped in my car and started driving north on the freeway to get there. I looked off to my left and saw the moon for just an instant before it was completely enveloped in black. Not just a lunar eclipse, this was unnatural, black-magic black. It was a portal! I had to hurry and stop the ritual before Unicron could cross through!

Suddenly, though, the black disc of the moon got all distorted and stretched out. I asked Geoff (over the car’s radio), “Is that supposed to happen?”

“Um… I don’t think so,” Geoff answered.

Pretty soon the moon suddenly blinked back to normal. Had the ritual succeeded or failed? I drove on, arriving at the side of the hill just after dawn.

Disguising myself as an elderly black gentleman, I secretly parked the car out of sight and climbed the hill, pretending to be merely out for a morning stroll. I soon came across the site of the ritual and saw what had prevented it from happening: there had been a small landslide that had filled half of the pond and buried one of the barges! We’d been lucky.

The villains’ henchmen, dressed in the red uniforms of the aliens from the V miniseries, were busy draining the rest of the pond and digging out the barge. One of them saw me and shooed me away with, “Hey, you’re not allowed to be here!”

“What’s going on?” I asked in my elderly black gentleman voice.

“We’re just cleaning up a landslide,” the henchman said. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

I glanced down the hill towards the pond where I saw the three main movie villains all acting very upset. Sandra Bernhardt was so upset that she was drinking the bottle of Champagne that they’d planned on saving until after they’d summoned Unicron.

I made my way back down to the bottom of the hill and was confronted by a confused but unreasonably attractive young Japanese woman who wanted to know what was going on. I kind of hit on her while telling her that it was just some forest workers cleaning up a landslide. She giggled and thought I was a charming old man. Something seemed suspicious, though; she seemed very out of place.

I excused myself and made my way back to the car and drove back to the house where Mike and Geoff were. For some reason they were making elaborate, extremely risky plans to retrieve the gold barges. But I got the sense that they didn’t want to retrieve the barges to stop the ritual, but because they wanted the gold! They’d gone all greedy! And I was certain the plans they were making were going to compromise all three of us (if they hadn’t already), so I quickly gathered my things and slipped out of the house through the backyard.

That night the trio of villains had cleaned up the hillside and pond and were ready to try again. There was a funny scene where they all waded into the pond up to their waists except for Danny DeVito, who was so short that the water came up to his chin and he had to tilt his head back to keep from getting water in his mouth. They stood in between the two barges. Gene Hackman kept on having to shove them apart because they kept on drifting together, threatening to crush the trio.

They looked up to the moon and started calling out things like, “O Unicron, great and powerful! We implore that you hear us!”

After doing this for a while Gene Hackman and Sandra Bernhardt got bored and waded ashore, but they told Danny DeVito that he had to stay in the pond for the ritual to work. Sandra Bernhardt started drinking more Champagne. Danny DeVito was upset, especially when as a side effect of the ritual the pond water started to rise! There was even wacky background music as Danny DeVito struggled to stay afloat and keep the barges from crushing him!

At some point I had a conversation with Optimus Prime in which we realized that even if we stopped the ritual this time, someone might try again and succeed later in the future. The only way to be sure was to destroy Unicron completely. At that, my dream cut to a scene of a Unicron-sized Optimus Prime grappling with Unicron.

What was the ultimate outcome? I have no idea. I’d like to assume that Optimus Prime won, but my dream ended with Danny DeVito still struggling in the pond while Sandra Bernhardt drank Champagne with Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. So I guess I’ll never actually know.