rowyn | Entries tagged with dreams

I was talking about dreams on Twitter on Monday, and realized that I didn't remember any of my dreams from the last few years because I stopped writing them down ever. So I may start writing bits down again. Maybe under a filter because most of them are dull. For instance: all I remember from my last dream this morning was that I was direct-messaging Krud on Twitter. I don't even remember what we were talking about in the dream: I think a Dr. Who RPG that he planned to run.

The dream that I woke up from before that was more interesting, although I remember very little of it either. The setting was "zombie apocalypse". I was with one group of survivors and we were attacked by another group, whom we defeated. Then one of their surviving members, who'd sat out the fight, threatened us with a submachine gun. I got the gun away from him, and told him to leave. He started to go, then turned and came back, with this leering, smug look, saying, "I know you're not gonna shoot me," and obviously planning to grab the gun back. I fired a warning shot, but he kept coming. So I shot him, walking the bullets up his body. He looked so surprised as he died.

As I woke up I was thinking, "What a waste of bullets." I felt regret over his death, too, but also that I'd need those bullets later (zombie apocalypse! Where'm I gonna get replacements?) and I shouldn't have used so many on one guy who wasn't even a zombie.

The funny part about this dream is that you'd think "zombie apocalypse with other humans also threatening me" would be a nightmare, but nope. No strong emotional response caused by the dream, neither fear nor anger. I've been more upset by the "surprise! it's time for the final exam in the class you'd forgotten you registered for and didn't attend all semester" nightmare.

My brain tried to make me dream about Buffy the Vampire Slayer this morning, which is particularly funny because I've only seen a couple of early episodes and the original movie. So the dream resorted to having a flashback to the movie inside the TV show (I don't think the movie is even canonical to the TV show).

The flashback was of movie-Buffy being strangled/stabbed by hands reaching through her bedroom wall (without breaking the wall; the body was apparently desolid). Then her movie sidekick (did she have a sidekick in the movie? I know my brain made all of this up) staked the vampire behind the hands.

Scene returned to the present, with TV-Buffy and whoever her friends are in her bedroom, and Buffy is saying "Of course I cleaned the blood off the wall afterwards". The wall was now covered in posters and papers from her childhood: teen star posters and childhood drawings and whatnot pinned or taped to the wall, the way kids do.

A disembodied, vaguely threatening voice said, "You know you want to see what's underneath." Buffy & co. started taking down the top layer of posters and papers, and underneath were letters Buffy didn't remember writing to a person she didn't remember knowing. They were still trying to get to the beginning of the sequence when the dream moved on.

The other bit I remember is the crew of teens moving a bunch of corpses, and one of the characters tried to start a musical number (apparently because my mind remembers there's a musical episode of Buffy even though I've never seen it.) The character was trying to talk about the obligations the dead people still had, and started singing, in Fluttershy's voice, o/~"When you have a duty ... "o/~

And the other characters answered with "They're dead," in flat, not-singing, not-going-along with this voices.

Fluttershy-girl: o/~"You still have a duty!"o/~

"No they don't! They're dead!"

It didn't really go off.

The funny thing is that after I woke up I kept trying to make the song scan in my head, with the counterpoint sung. Even though the point in the dream had been that the counterpoint wasn't sung.

I can still hear Fluttershy's voice singing that line, which makes me wonder if I got it from an MLP episode and just forgot. In which case someone will surely let me know. :)

I'm sure many of you are tired of reading about my dreams so, ( might as well cut early. )

This one I had forgotten most of by the time I work up, so it'll be mercifully short.

It unfolded like a show that I was watching: I wasn't one of the characters. There was a vampire who looked liked a young man, and a human woman who was trying to help him. I don't remember how she was "helping" or what he was like, specifically, I have a sense that the vampire was portrayed as at least somewhat cruel in the first part of the dream.

The vampire had once had a wife and son, but they were dead now. Maybe the woman was helping him as he planned vengeance.

The point I remember most clearly is an image of the woman cuddled up the vampire, her head on his shoulder. She looked up to him, adoringly, and said, "It's a good thing you met me."

He asked why.

She gave a little giggle and said, "Don't you remember? I made you into a vampire."

There's this horrible moment of realization for the vampire. He has a flashback of meeting the woman, her claiming to be a sort of vampire groupie. He remembers introducing her to his wife and son, who are vampires. (His son is teenaged and looked bizarre enough that I remember his appearance. He had tattoos that covered all the skin on his neck and cheeks, of writhing snakes and tongues. When he did his little "vampire" thing for the woman, he could make his tongue long and snakey. The parents were somewhat self-conscious about it, but seemed to think it was cute, too. The father said something like, "He thinks it's very scary." The son gave him an "Oh, Dad!" look.)

Then the memory seemed to fade, and I got the impression the woman was keeping him from remember. But flashes of uneasiness kept returning to him. Later, they were having a telephone conversation, and iat first it sounded wholly one-sided to me. The vampire would say something like, "I know you're really a wild woman, a dangerous lunatic. But I don't care" and then go on to say something similarly queer, almost self contradictory.

Then I realized the woman was very quietly feeding him line, like a jedi mind-control trick. After he said, "dangerous lunatic," she said, "But you don't care," and he simply parroted it back, as if it were his own thought. It was like some part of him was trying to break free of her influence, but he couldn't stay conscious of that fact long enough to make any progress.

That's the last I remember.

This morning I had another mundane dream. In this one, Lut and I were returning to our parked car to find that we had a ticket on the window. We were parked near a fire hydrant, but the hydrant had its own little jut of sidewalk, so it was still pefectly accessible from the road. I scrutinized the ticket, trying to to figure out what it was for. In the logic of the dream, it was also illegal to park near a clock, and in the dream, we had a clock mounted in the passenger window of the car. We were being cited for parking too near a clock--the one in the car window.

Ooooookay. As I woke up, I had the distinct recollection of telling Lut, "We are definitely fighting this ticket."

Just so people don't get the idea that all my dreams involve flying and cool tropical islands: this morning when I woke, I could remember my last dream, and it was almost as dull as the licensing cartoon characters one.

Someone I didn't know was giving me a ride home, and we were trying to get out through a gated parking lot. (Curiously, in my dream, the gated parking lot was the one for my home, but in the topography of my dreams, it was merely re-used scenery, not actually my building.) The stranger who was giving me a ride put his gate card against the plate to open the gate, and it opened, but before we could drive through it, it had shut again. We repeated this process once or twice, with the same results, until I decided to get out of the car and block the gate open so he could drive out.

Then a boy scout troop arrived, and the gate almost closed on one of them. They all jumped back and decided to go the long way around, but it was clear to me that the sensor on the gate had to be broken entirely. I put my hand on the gate to hold it open the next time it opened, and fortunately, it's motor wasn't that strong, so it didn't close after that.

At this point, the man who was driving me had gotten out of the car too, and he told me, "You drive the car out, I'll hold the gate." He held out a big ring of keys to me.

I looked at him, feeling annoyed, thinking, I just want to get home. Now is not the time to be chivalrous, or whatever you're trying. But it wasn't worth arguing. Instead, I said, "Which one is the car key?"

He looked at the ring, and maybe it finally sunk into him how sily it would be for me to drive the car just out of the lot, because he said, "OK, I'll drive it."

I had just enough time to think, Good choice, then I woke up.

I still like the tropical island where I can fly better. :)

I just woke up from a dream and thought, "Hey, I should try to get this down like all my friends who have cool dreams."

The earliest part I can remember is watching a movie. It's a Woody Allen movie, and it looks like a kind of "making of" for "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" It's being filmed in China, and I guess the idea in the dream is that, instead of dubbing a bad Chinese film, he's shooting new footage to splice into one. Early on, I'm watching a scene between a man and a woman, speaking Chinese, and Woody Allen is working with someone else MST3King the scene, deciding what dialogue to dub over it. Then it switches to Woody Allen, driving back from the shoot with his female lead riding in the car next to him, and he's talking about the movie they're making. He starts out talking about introducing the antagonist, and saying he thought he might reduce the part of the villain because the guy wasn't coming out too well. The woman--I think her name was "Sun Li"--is having a hard time following his conversation. She says something very obvious about what the scene they shot that day was, and he gives her this look, like she must be an idiot. I remember it annoyed me at the time. Then he starts talking about the age of the woman who played the original lead in the film they're re-making. She was, he says, an old woman--65--playing the part of a young woman, and he thinks this was a foolish choice on the woman's part. "She looked good for an old woman, but an old woman shouldn't try to play a young woman's part." The implication is that Sun Li, who's supposed to look just like this original star so that they can combine the new footage with the old, is the same way. It's really, really insulting. Sun Li makes a nasty remark about Woody Allen's own age.

Then they get back to the mansion, and Sun Li wanders off, while Woody Allen meets a cute young American woman and they briefly try to speak French to each other, but it's clear Woody Allen is only goofing off to show that he doesn't know French at all. I don't remember exactly what came next, but it segues to the three of them--Woody Allen, Sun Li, and the American woman--looking "for real" for the treasure that the protagonists in the movie they're making are looking for. They're out in a field, searching, and the implication is they're about to find something, then the movie ends. I think, I wonder if that would have made more sense if I started watching from the beginning?

From there, my dream switched to the much cooler part, which is where I dreamed about 'finding the lost treasure' myself. A narrator is describing some of the events to me as they happen, but this time I feel like I'm part of the scene instead of merely watching it. I'm floating over a blue ocean. I know that people say you don't dream in color but this dream was definitely in full-on Technicolor. The ocean turns into an island--my narrator labels it Tahini (yes, like the food, though I think my subconcious was trying for "Tahiti" or at least something evocative of it). The first part of the island that I see seems to undulate with blue-green grass. The grass seems to blend in with the ocean I just left, so that as I'm traveling further inland, it always looks like I'm just about to fall off into the ocean again--but it turns out to me more of this beautiful grass. It's green when I'm directly over it, but fades to blue in the distance.

Eventually, the grass turns into a jungle, and I start seeing living creatures for the first time. In another dream, they might have been monsters, but I'm not at all afraid of them. Instead, I am filled with awe and wonder. One creature looks a little like a brontosaurus-sized gila monster, but its skin has the appearance of wood, and it has huge, expressive eyes I'm leaning against a tree overhanging a river, watching it, when an alligator with smooth, black-brown skin comes slithering up the tree. "Excuse me," he says, and I get out of his way, apologizng. The smooth alligator-thing sounds good-natured and friendly as he heads off into the jungle. He's grousing without rancor about his part in the earlier movie: "Angry, he calls me. Just because I happen to look, to a human, like I'm snarling, I get billed as "Angry Bob." Sigh." Another of his kind sympathizes with him.

The narrator is going on about people searching this island for "the treasure of Tahini" and I'm rubbernecking everywhere, looking at all the incredible sights and the fantastic creatures. I think, in response to the narrator, How could they possibly miss it?

Then I woke up.

That was at about 5AM, so I think I'll try to go back to sleep now.

I took a nap this afternoon, and had a dream that I didn't remember until just now. In it, Gen was playing a new web-game. "Clone Wars." The participants made armies out of little icons, and Gen's all looked like variations on Feep or her Gen-cat persona. Then she got beat up by someone who was playing a sleaze army of badly-drawn identcal icons. I found out about this because she was talking about on Sinai, and we all sympathized. Gen plotted revenge. I remember she was re-doing the designs for her icons.

That's about all I recall.