(no subject)
DREAM NO. 342 AND ALSO A TRUE STORY
I awoke last night from a string of unpleasant dreams to an unusual sound.
I dreampt in two distinct cycles. My recollections of the former are a bit hazy, but the impressions were very strong. First: a meal with my family at a very tacky restaurant seated in an obscure an obscure tower in some sprawling mallplex. Later, I attend a cocktail party at a haute futurist condo. It is nighttime. Drinks are served in glass carafes, shaped in tall slender rectangles arrayed in a small geometric pit inset in the floor. I drink a viscous translucent spirit from a small bowl. Glancing down into one of the carafes, I see live shrimp swimming around inside the liquid. Immediately I gag and spit my drink back into the carafe. Legs and bits of shell scrape my teeth as the fluid passes out of my lips.
Soon I am seated on a bed in a well lit rectangular room, very tall ceiling. The walls are papered in a dense fractal pattern of triangles within squares that generates a queasy hypnosis. I lie back on the bed and stare up at the patterned ceiling, marveling at just how high it is. Gazing at the shapes, a strong but ineffable feeling of terrible realization comes over me. The shapes begin to transform and fold in some forbidden dimensionality into a new and horrifying geometry. I start to scream and but the sound comes out as a hoarse gurgle and my skin becomes sallow and thin and began to peel away in husks and my eyes melt out of their sockets.
Within the dream, I awake suddenly, believing myself conscious. I am inside a hallway in a house. I know intuitively that it is a very large house, a house I am familiar with, perhaps my own house. Ahead of me, the hallway connects to another perpendicular corridor. A fitness class led at the the front of the line by a squat man with a bald head and mustache passes across the channel.
There is a door behind me. I think it leads to my room, but I realize as I enter that in fact it is a girl's room. I am not sure who she is or even if I know her. My first instinct is to hurry away but I decide against it. I am afraid to be seen leaving this area, lest someone see me and think I was up to some perverse voyeuristic undertaking. And in truth, some perverse voyeuristic desire also prompts me to stay and explore. I approach her vanity but decide not to sit down. Staring into the mirror, I realize where this room is situated within the house, and I understand that this mirror must be a two way mirror, allowing one on the other side of the wall to look through into the room. The voyeur caught in a voyeuristic trap. Indeed, staring closely into the glass, I can make out the vague movement of shapes. The chamber on the other side of the wall must be very large.
Realizing this, I become very alarmed and flee the room. The hallway is now very dark, but as I try to slink away unnoticed, a glowing cat leaps onto my arm. I hold the arm away from my body and the cat begins to grow larger and larger. I am very frightened but I now cannot move my body. I start to shout. "Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!"
I was shouting this when I woke in a start. I was still very woozy but managed to write down some of what I could remember. I believed from the length and intricacy of the dream that I had been asleep for some time, but I was only out for about 75 minutes. There are some bits on the paper where I recorded my impressions that I do not now recall. "Taking pictures" "Nick pours in a ..." Much of the writing is illegible.
Strange labyrinthine houses tend to be fixtures in my dreamlife, perhaps the grim Lovecraftian wonder of silent cyclopean crypts channeled through the lens of New Orleans' grand ruinous architecture. I can pinpoint the prompt for the image of the two-way mirror. There is a curious looking house on Carondelet and Toledano that passed frequently on the bike ride to my old job. The route to my new job takes me by the back side of the house. I realized yesterday that the place has a massive window in back that gives a full view of a staircase from the first to the second floor.
I turned on the lamp by the bed and read an issue of Heavy Metal for a while then went back to sleep. Here the dreams are less clear, but I feel this cycle was in some sense a continuation or a tangent from the prior cycle.
The gym class theme recurs. I have vague memories of a winding room with a number of open stalls containing pod-like cast iron bath tubs. I speak to a girl inside the locker room. I believe she may be Paris Hilton, or at least bears a strong resemblance. (If indeed it was Ms. Hilton, this would be her third incursion into my dreamlife.)
Later I am driving with Dave in his pickup truck on I-10, headed east. The radio reports bad weather, and looking out a cyclone is coming. We veer off the ramp just as the black cyclone tears by us. I wander around the decimated city. I am looking for my sister. I cannot find her. She turns up later at the house where I stay, badly frostbitten. We climbed onto the roof to look out at the damage.
I shuddered awake once again. It was about 3:00, and outside a car horn blared a continuous note. I was still very tired, and lay there and listened to it for a while, wondering if I was still dreaming. Soon I realized that Jill was also sort of awake and we wondered what the fuck was going on. Neither of us were quite awake enough yet to get out of bed. The horn went on for several minutes and I started to get very anxious. I wake up at about 5:30 AM to go to work, and I was paranoid about not being able to get back to sleep until then. Suddenly, there was a loud pop and our westward window was lit for an instant with a burst of red light. Three more pops followed in quick succession. We got out of bed and looked out the window. We could see that there was a fire, but the tree outside obscured our view.
I pulled on a pair of pants and we went downstairs to the yard. A car was aflame, parked outside the house just two doors down. We stood barefoot in the wet grass as the fire engines rolled up and later, lazily, the police. One of the officers stayed in the car. The other wandered slowly closer, and stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the firefighters douse the flames with water and foam.
I took some pictures of the car when I got home from work. The remains were very beautiful.
I awoke last night from a string of unpleasant dreams to an unusual sound.
I dreampt in two distinct cycles. My recollections of the former are a bit hazy, but the impressions were very strong. First: a meal with my family at a very tacky restaurant seated in an obscure an obscure tower in some sprawling mallplex. Later, I attend a cocktail party at a haute futurist condo. It is nighttime. Drinks are served in glass carafes, shaped in tall slender rectangles arrayed in a small geometric pit inset in the floor. I drink a viscous translucent spirit from a small bowl. Glancing down into one of the carafes, I see live shrimp swimming around inside the liquid. Immediately I gag and spit my drink back into the carafe. Legs and bits of shell scrape my teeth as the fluid passes out of my lips.
Soon I am seated on a bed in a well lit rectangular room, very tall ceiling. The walls are papered in a dense fractal pattern of triangles within squares that generates a queasy hypnosis. I lie back on the bed and stare up at the patterned ceiling, marveling at just how high it is. Gazing at the shapes, a strong but ineffable feeling of terrible realization comes over me. The shapes begin to transform and fold in some forbidden dimensionality into a new and horrifying geometry. I start to scream and but the sound comes out as a hoarse gurgle and my skin becomes sallow and thin and began to peel away in husks and my eyes melt out of their sockets.
Within the dream, I awake suddenly, believing myself conscious. I am inside a hallway in a house. I know intuitively that it is a very large house, a house I am familiar with, perhaps my own house. Ahead of me, the hallway connects to another perpendicular corridor. A fitness class led at the the front of the line by a squat man with a bald head and mustache passes across the channel.
There is a door behind me. I think it leads to my room, but I realize as I enter that in fact it is a girl's room. I am not sure who she is or even if I know her. My first instinct is to hurry away but I decide against it. I am afraid to be seen leaving this area, lest someone see me and think I was up to some perverse voyeuristic undertaking. And in truth, some perverse voyeuristic desire also prompts me to stay and explore. I approach her vanity but decide not to sit down. Staring into the mirror, I realize where this room is situated within the house, and I understand that this mirror must be a two way mirror, allowing one on the other side of the wall to look through into the room. The voyeur caught in a voyeuristic trap. Indeed, staring closely into the glass, I can make out the vague movement of shapes. The chamber on the other side of the wall must be very large.
Realizing this, I become very alarmed and flee the room. The hallway is now very dark, but as I try to slink away unnoticed, a glowing cat leaps onto my arm. I hold the arm away from my body and the cat begins to grow larger and larger. I am very frightened but I now cannot move my body. I start to shout. "Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!"
I was shouting this when I woke in a start. I was still very woozy but managed to write down some of what I could remember. I believed from the length and intricacy of the dream that I had been asleep for some time, but I was only out for about 75 minutes. There are some bits on the paper where I recorded my impressions that I do not now recall. "Taking pictures" "Nick pours in a ..." Much of the writing is illegible.
Strange labyrinthine houses tend to be fixtures in my dreamlife, perhaps the grim Lovecraftian wonder of silent cyclopean crypts channeled through the lens of New Orleans' grand ruinous architecture. I can pinpoint the prompt for the image of the two-way mirror. There is a curious looking house on Carondelet and Toledano that passed frequently on the bike ride to my old job. The route to my new job takes me by the back side of the house. I realized yesterday that the place has a massive window in back that gives a full view of a staircase from the first to the second floor.
I turned on the lamp by the bed and read an issue of Heavy Metal for a while then went back to sleep. Here the dreams are less clear, but I feel this cycle was in some sense a continuation or a tangent from the prior cycle.
The gym class theme recurs. I have vague memories of a winding room with a number of open stalls containing pod-like cast iron bath tubs. I speak to a girl inside the locker room. I believe she may be Paris Hilton, or at least bears a strong resemblance. (If indeed it was Ms. Hilton, this would be her third incursion into my dreamlife.)
Later I am driving with Dave in his pickup truck on I-10, headed east. The radio reports bad weather, and looking out a cyclone is coming. We veer off the ramp just as the black cyclone tears by us. I wander around the decimated city. I am looking for my sister. I cannot find her. She turns up later at the house where I stay, badly frostbitten. We climbed onto the roof to look out at the damage.
I shuddered awake once again. It was about 3:00, and outside a car horn blared a continuous note. I was still very tired, and lay there and listened to it for a while, wondering if I was still dreaming. Soon I realized that Jill was also sort of awake and we wondered what the fuck was going on. Neither of us were quite awake enough yet to get out of bed. The horn went on for several minutes and I started to get very anxious. I wake up at about 5:30 AM to go to work, and I was paranoid about not being able to get back to sleep until then. Suddenly, there was a loud pop and our westward window was lit for an instant with a burst of red light. Three more pops followed in quick succession. We got out of bed and looked out the window. We could see that there was a fire, but the tree outside obscured our view.
I pulled on a pair of pants and we went downstairs to the yard. A car was aflame, parked outside the house just two doors down. We stood barefoot in the wet grass as the fire engines rolled up and later, lazily, the police. One of the officers stayed in the car. The other wandered slowly closer, and stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the firefighters douse the flames with water and foam.
I took some pictures of the car when I got home from work. The remains were very beautiful.