and so to bed, to bed; my soul to share
So when I was in Portland, I picked up this book on lucid dreaming and I'm only now getting deep into it (because I had to finish rereading Cerebus, which is 6000 pages, and even though that's a comic, a lot of it is very dense text). So Step One is make a dream journal.
Which, I actually already have, I just never use it. I picked it up the other day and was surprised to discover that for a period of a few months back in 2005 I was VERY diligent about writing them down. There's like 40 pages of shit here. In a very few cases, I was actually able to remember the images from the dream. But a lot of the ones that I couldn't, I found hilarious to re-imagine.
I am aware that when other people tell you about their dreams it is often THE MOST BORING SHIT so if you just skip this and go on about your day I don't fault you. I'm only including the snippets that amused me. And that aren't hideously embarrassing.
I noticed a lot of these deal with layers of fictional reality, which according to the book, is my brain trying to tell me I'm dreaming.
1/23/05
Went to the kitchen. One fridge for each family member. "In the year 2005... Everyone will have their own fridge!" I joked.
1/24/05
The bad guys were discussing their nefarious plans, see. Mr. Incredible was there. He said, "...Unless they REbuilt it into a REAL gas station!" The bad guy boss' plan was to reincarnate into a huge red demon, which he did. I ran away and the whole palace began exploding around and behind me, torn apart with beams of blue light. I tried to take the elevator down to the parking garage but I would not let the Butler Bot in and this caused a delay and so I died.
1/26/05
A Soderbergh film about the army where a sergeant's face was exploded by a "sticky crab". His head lay open like a melon rind, cartoon-style.
[I wonder if there will be a scene like this in Guerilla.]
1/27/05
My commute to work was riding in the open head of a giant walking Statue of Liberty (a la Ghostbusters II). Pretty scared of heights. Other commuters weren't.
1/28/05
The floor kept bubbling and rising, as though pushed up by plants. Giant plants.
1/31/05
["Daryl Hannah"] said this poet starts off with a specific list of words and somehow implores the computer to come up with new ones in between. Exploring new concepts, I guess. (Which, obviously, the computer was not designed to do.) She said, talking to the camera, "If I can read about death from him, I feel... emboyned." This was a real word which I had temporarily forgotten.
[If you look up emboyned in the dictionary, you get the border between embower and embrace. Maybe she felt both trapped and safe?]
I worked in a high school, which looked like an elementary school. We were chasing a rat around the gym when SMASH a shelf broke and from above came down a kangaroo rat. This was just a "rat" the size and shape of a motherfucking kangaroo. We ran out and held the door barricaded against it. It tried to kick it open w/ its powerful feet.
Some new FF, not sure if game or CG movie - a teen boy and his child sister, orphans, working to ascend to heaven. Heaven was a physical place in their culture because exospheric hover technology had been around for thousands of years. I thought that was beautiful. The kids had 2 guardians from other planets, one machine based, one plant based. Of course all these things had Tolkienesque names which I do not recall. I just remember the temple of rocks floating in intricate patterns inside a magnetic field.
2/3/05
Read a published issue of ScaryGoRound. It was really damn good. So that's another dream where I can read words.
2/705
All dreams last night seem to have been Katamari based. Brain is obsessed. It also works temporally in addition to spatially; if I don't understand something, like a Michael Penn song or a remark of Chip's, I remain convinced I will understand it in a few minutes once my ball is bigger. Oddly relaxing but makes no sense.
2/8/05
[My workplace] was renovated... There was a giant inflatable katana hanging from the ceiling. (~50 ft. long)
I rode there on a police bike because there was a GTA cheat where you parked in a certain garage and the car turned real.
2/9/05
Met Robert Duvall, showed him how to work a director's chair.
2/10/05
Maria told a story about how she thought she had been pregnant but it turned out to be a 25 lb. tumor brought on by eating the wrong kind of pizza. We hoped our pizza was not tumerous. There were 36 inches missing from it, mirroring the 36 feet of sponsored highway in Japan connecting them to the orbital circuit (also missing). We were hungry, so we ate it regardless.
[This pizza dream is my favorite out of all of these.]
2/13/05
In the deep dark circular basement of the hotel, I lived through the night, but only because of the girl spies, who knew when to clamp a hand over my gob and when to kick me awake... Those girls had The Training, which kept me from succumbing to The Fear. I was very grateful.
2/14/05
Most dreams tonight were non-story, non-event and even non-visual. It was just Hendrix. Blues soloing on and on forever.
Seeing a Transformers RTS arcade game in the lobby of a dorm.
2/16/05
Went to see new Coen Bros. flick. Civil War era crime caper comedy. John Turturro played a sharpshooter. Lots of 2.35:1 composition, beautiful blue sky, magical [musical?] sound design. The reverberating clang as John T. snapped shut his shotgun.
2/17/05
Awesome sex part with horny Chinese girl. So horny she bent double and rubbed my crotch and wouldn't come back up so I could kiss her. Fucking alarm went off before I could disrobe.
2/19/05
In this totalitarian society, you could, at any time, be summoned to The Pool. The water would drain out and the bottom would open up and you would have to fight a huge animal to the death. We had survived it 3 or 4 times but they kept putting bigger carnivores in. Before the match, they wanted me to just play but you could be shot for breaking pool rules. Jurph and Dave N. jumped right in but I was much more nervous. There was no easy entrance to The Pool, it went from shallow to deep with no warning, like a 3D maze.
2/23/05
So anyway after the weed we played some game where we all stood in a circle, taking turns shoving/grabbing each other. I grabbed Ben's hand, not hard at all, and his finger snapped off like a twig. He was in shock about it, kept smiling. I knew we had to call 911 but no one wanted to be the one to do it.
2/24/05
Saw new Spawn movie w/ Ethan. Hell sequences animated. Violator went to a Halloween party dressed as an alligator and ate all the kids. Their souls wavered [?] behind him like a snake. Lots of upside down spinny camera work, gave me vertigo. Dana Snyder [Master Shake] played Violator, Keith David played Terry. Some little kid kept screaming when he saw hell and his mom kicked him out of the theater.
2/26/05
Don't try to feed a newt salsa. It will express its disgust very loudly and try to puke it up all over the lawn. This was a prank intended to be funny, and actually, it was.
2/27/05
Playing some video game, but living it - running around in a circle on the hills by Mom and Dad's house in NH. At sunset. Had to grab pixelated 2D powerups hanging in the air. Difficult because of no depth perception.
2/28/05
Some type of party in some type of dance hall. It was quite dark and we all sat on the floor. I chatted up Janet Jackson. (No mention or even thought of Super Bowl.) I said how much I liked that all her tunes were different styles and beats, and she looked so happy to hear that she almost cried. She asked me to go on and I almost got stuck. I said I liked that Black Cat rocked and she said "Yeah, well Black Cat is metal, that's the problem with it." I didn't want to contradict her but before I could fully explain my holy love of metal half the girls in the room stood up and shook their ass in a certain way based on a musical cue. I was like Oh Christ please do not burst into predetermined choreography. I am trying to seduce a famous person here. (She was younger, and hot.)
Chip and I were out looking at stars. I realized if it is clear enough you can actually see constellations - the lines stretching from star to star are not made up. They are composed of streams of spheres winking on and off.
3/1/05
Episode of West Wing where Bartlett was blackmailed by a Panther-like group which Charlie was secretly a part of. To get away he had to take the secret tunnel. It was a strange, ovalish, beige, glass-paneled affair which led to a desert garden guarded by strange little robots which perhaps resembled giant snails.
3/5/05
Playing Jabberjaw video game which kept turning into bloody shark attack Kevin Williamson movie. Swimming through a submerged mall, got captured in some colored lights. I just wanted to repaint the lights (red to green) but I had too many objects to scroll through and I ended up biting my captors in half. Then after I was free they wanted me to eat a fellow shark but I was too full. So I saw a different cut scene than I would've otherwise, non-violently. A suckier one.
3/6/05
Ilana was teaching a high school English course which I had to take... She needed a page on anything about sociology. I was going to do it on The Sociology of the Ninja and only write about Naruto and Real Ultimate Power and Tenchu, just to make her laugh. (What works for a village may not work for a county.) ...The weird thing about this was the NYC subway trains came right into the classrooms.
3/11/05
When the CIA finds out you've done something illegal they approach you and the choice is basically join them or die. That's why it's so full of crooks.
Saw The Passion of the Christ Recut, actually it was just a prequel. Ended in the garden where the other began. Turns out Gibson had shot all the nonviolent preachy stuff his detractors accused him of not caring about. Some Red County natives in the back of the theater said, "Well, that was STUPID!" A white-bearded, bald professor type in the front said, "Look at the pointless indulgence. It's brilliant." He meant because by its compromised nature it was a statement about the current tense religious climate.
3/16/05
[At the ad agency I worked at] the presentation ended and another orker said to the client's group, "So how are our beards?" which was a metaphor (also a reference to a recent successful commercial) meaning how strong is our clout. Ironically tho all the orkers did have beards, huge ones (and this guy's still had shaving cream all over it), many of which were striped in different colored patterns like a calico kitten.
4/11/05
A couple having a very heated philosophical/political discussion, then one of them gets horny, and they begin to disrobe, then make love, never able to stop making points. (This was Chris Onstad's idea.)
5/1/05
I was on a TV show, not the kind you shoot but the kind you live, - no I don't mean it was a "reality" show, I mean we were all genuinely experiencing this fictional reality that Joss Whedon had created... Anyway we were out by a chain link fence in front of this house near where a girl disappeared. This Asian NPC kept insisting the creepy guy in the house was an abductor and a cannibal and I kept saying no, you're crazy, she's fine somewhere. (Like Ducommun and Hanks in The Burbs, I guess.) But deep down I knew something was very mysterious, and I could feel we were nearing the end of an episode so something big would happen. We turned away and heard a scream and a crunch from inside. Change to slow motion as the house launched itself up and over us. We continued to run as the house landed in front of me (upside down), missing crushing me by a few feet. Behind us the giant face of the abducted girl rose against the bright blue sky. She was now over 100 feet tall. Next week we would find out how and why. My dog, who'd also gone missing, came running up. He now had a third eye and a science hero costume with blue plastic and chains and dials. I knew that had to be the end of the ep, so I brought him in front of everyone, said "Look my dog's not dead!" and wept.
5/2/05
I had a small part in Rushmore, during the zombie attack. It was only this one other girl and I, so we were outnumbered and beaten to double-death in the classroom.
Which, I actually already have, I just never use it. I picked it up the other day and was surprised to discover that for a period of a few months back in 2005 I was VERY diligent about writing them down. There's like 40 pages of shit here. In a very few cases, I was actually able to remember the images from the dream. But a lot of the ones that I couldn't, I found hilarious to re-imagine.
I am aware that when other people tell you about their dreams it is often THE MOST BORING SHIT so if you just skip this and go on about your day I don't fault you. I'm only including the snippets that amused me. And that aren't hideously embarrassing.
I noticed a lot of these deal with layers of fictional reality, which according to the book, is my brain trying to tell me I'm dreaming.
1/23/05
Went to the kitchen. One fridge for each family member. "In the year 2005... Everyone will have their own fridge!" I joked.
1/24/05
The bad guys were discussing their nefarious plans, see. Mr. Incredible was there. He said, "...Unless they REbuilt it into a REAL gas station!" The bad guy boss' plan was to reincarnate into a huge red demon, which he did. I ran away and the whole palace began exploding around and behind me, torn apart with beams of blue light. I tried to take the elevator down to the parking garage but I would not let the Butler Bot in and this caused a delay and so I died.
1/26/05
A Soderbergh film about the army where a sergeant's face was exploded by a "sticky crab". His head lay open like a melon rind, cartoon-style.
[I wonder if there will be a scene like this in Guerilla.]
1/27/05
My commute to work was riding in the open head of a giant walking Statue of Liberty (a la Ghostbusters II). Pretty scared of heights. Other commuters weren't.
1/28/05
The floor kept bubbling and rising, as though pushed up by plants. Giant plants.
1/31/05
["Daryl Hannah"] said this poet starts off with a specific list of words and somehow implores the computer to come up with new ones in between. Exploring new concepts, I guess. (Which, obviously, the computer was not designed to do.) She said, talking to the camera, "If I can read about death from him, I feel... emboyned." This was a real word which I had temporarily forgotten.
[If you look up emboyned in the dictionary, you get the border between embower and embrace. Maybe she felt both trapped and safe?]
I worked in a high school, which looked like an elementary school. We were chasing a rat around the gym when SMASH a shelf broke and from above came down a kangaroo rat. This was just a "rat" the size and shape of a motherfucking kangaroo. We ran out and held the door barricaded against it. It tried to kick it open w/ its powerful feet.
Some new FF, not sure if game or CG movie - a teen boy and his child sister, orphans, working to ascend to heaven. Heaven was a physical place in their culture because exospheric hover technology had been around for thousands of years. I thought that was beautiful. The kids had 2 guardians from other planets, one machine based, one plant based. Of course all these things had Tolkienesque names which I do not recall. I just remember the temple of rocks floating in intricate patterns inside a magnetic field.
2/3/05
Read a published issue of ScaryGoRound. It was really damn good. So that's another dream where I can read words.
2/705
All dreams last night seem to have been Katamari based. Brain is obsessed. It also works temporally in addition to spatially; if I don't understand something, like a Michael Penn song or a remark of Chip's, I remain convinced I will understand it in a few minutes once my ball is bigger. Oddly relaxing but makes no sense.
2/8/05
[My workplace] was renovated... There was a giant inflatable katana hanging from the ceiling. (~50 ft. long)
I rode there on a police bike because there was a GTA cheat where you parked in a certain garage and the car turned real.
2/9/05
Met Robert Duvall, showed him how to work a director's chair.
2/10/05
Maria told a story about how she thought she had been pregnant but it turned out to be a 25 lb. tumor brought on by eating the wrong kind of pizza. We hoped our pizza was not tumerous. There were 36 inches missing from it, mirroring the 36 feet of sponsored highway in Japan connecting them to the orbital circuit (also missing). We were hungry, so we ate it regardless.
[This pizza dream is my favorite out of all of these.]
2/13/05
In the deep dark circular basement of the hotel, I lived through the night, but only because of the girl spies, who knew when to clamp a hand over my gob and when to kick me awake... Those girls had The Training, which kept me from succumbing to The Fear. I was very grateful.
2/14/05
Most dreams tonight were non-story, non-event and even non-visual. It was just Hendrix. Blues soloing on and on forever.
Seeing a Transformers RTS arcade game in the lobby of a dorm.
2/16/05
Went to see new Coen Bros. flick. Civil War era crime caper comedy. John Turturro played a sharpshooter. Lots of 2.35:1 composition, beautiful blue sky, magical [musical?] sound design. The reverberating clang as John T. snapped shut his shotgun.
2/17/05
Awesome sex part with horny Chinese girl. So horny she bent double and rubbed my crotch and wouldn't come back up so I could kiss her. Fucking alarm went off before I could disrobe.
2/19/05
In this totalitarian society, you could, at any time, be summoned to The Pool. The water would drain out and the bottom would open up and you would have to fight a huge animal to the death. We had survived it 3 or 4 times but they kept putting bigger carnivores in. Before the match, they wanted me to just play but you could be shot for breaking pool rules. Jurph and Dave N. jumped right in but I was much more nervous. There was no easy entrance to The Pool, it went from shallow to deep with no warning, like a 3D maze.
2/23/05
So anyway after the weed we played some game where we all stood in a circle, taking turns shoving/grabbing each other. I grabbed Ben's hand, not hard at all, and his finger snapped off like a twig. He was in shock about it, kept smiling. I knew we had to call 911 but no one wanted to be the one to do it.
2/24/05
Saw new Spawn movie w/ Ethan. Hell sequences animated. Violator went to a Halloween party dressed as an alligator and ate all the kids. Their souls wavered [?] behind him like a snake. Lots of upside down spinny camera work, gave me vertigo. Dana Snyder [Master Shake] played Violator, Keith David played Terry. Some little kid kept screaming when he saw hell and his mom kicked him out of the theater.
2/26/05
Don't try to feed a newt salsa. It will express its disgust very loudly and try to puke it up all over the lawn. This was a prank intended to be funny, and actually, it was.
2/27/05
Playing some video game, but living it - running around in a circle on the hills by Mom and Dad's house in NH. At sunset. Had to grab pixelated 2D powerups hanging in the air. Difficult because of no depth perception.
2/28/05
Some type of party in some type of dance hall. It was quite dark and we all sat on the floor. I chatted up Janet Jackson. (No mention or even thought of Super Bowl.) I said how much I liked that all her tunes were different styles and beats, and she looked so happy to hear that she almost cried. She asked me to go on and I almost got stuck. I said I liked that Black Cat rocked and she said "Yeah, well Black Cat is metal, that's the problem with it." I didn't want to contradict her but before I could fully explain my holy love of metal half the girls in the room stood up and shook their ass in a certain way based on a musical cue. I was like Oh Christ please do not burst into predetermined choreography. I am trying to seduce a famous person here. (She was younger, and hot.)
Chip and I were out looking at stars. I realized if it is clear enough you can actually see constellations - the lines stretching from star to star are not made up. They are composed of streams of spheres winking on and off.
3/1/05
Episode of West Wing where Bartlett was blackmailed by a Panther-like group which Charlie was secretly a part of. To get away he had to take the secret tunnel. It was a strange, ovalish, beige, glass-paneled affair which led to a desert garden guarded by strange little robots which perhaps resembled giant snails.
3/5/05
Playing Jabberjaw video game which kept turning into bloody shark attack Kevin Williamson movie. Swimming through a submerged mall, got captured in some colored lights. I just wanted to repaint the lights (red to green) but I had too many objects to scroll through and I ended up biting my captors in half. Then after I was free they wanted me to eat a fellow shark but I was too full. So I saw a different cut scene than I would've otherwise, non-violently. A suckier one.
3/6/05
Ilana was teaching a high school English course which I had to take... She needed a page on anything about sociology. I was going to do it on The Sociology of the Ninja and only write about Naruto and Real Ultimate Power and Tenchu, just to make her laugh. (What works for a village may not work for a county.) ...The weird thing about this was the NYC subway trains came right into the classrooms.
3/11/05
When the CIA finds out you've done something illegal they approach you and the choice is basically join them or die. That's why it's so full of crooks.
Saw The Passion of the Christ Recut, actually it was just a prequel. Ended in the garden where the other began. Turns out Gibson had shot all the nonviolent preachy stuff his detractors accused him of not caring about. Some Red County natives in the back of the theater said, "Well, that was STUPID!" A white-bearded, bald professor type in the front said, "Look at the pointless indulgence. It's brilliant." He meant because by its compromised nature it was a statement about the current tense religious climate.
3/16/05
[At the ad agency I worked at] the presentation ended and another orker said to the client's group, "So how are our beards?" which was a metaphor (also a reference to a recent successful commercial) meaning how strong is our clout. Ironically tho all the orkers did have beards, huge ones (and this guy's still had shaving cream all over it), many of which were striped in different colored patterns like a calico kitten.
4/11/05
A couple having a very heated philosophical/political discussion, then one of them gets horny, and they begin to disrobe, then make love, never able to stop making points. (This was Chris Onstad's idea.)
5/1/05
I was on a TV show, not the kind you shoot but the kind you live, - no I don't mean it was a "reality" show, I mean we were all genuinely experiencing this fictional reality that Joss Whedon had created... Anyway we were out by a chain link fence in front of this house near where a girl disappeared. This Asian NPC kept insisting the creepy guy in the house was an abductor and a cannibal and I kept saying no, you're crazy, she's fine somewhere. (Like Ducommun and Hanks in The Burbs, I guess.) But deep down I knew something was very mysterious, and I could feel we were nearing the end of an episode so something big would happen. We turned away and heard a scream and a crunch from inside. Change to slow motion as the house launched itself up and over us. We continued to run as the house landed in front of me (upside down), missing crushing me by a few feet. Behind us the giant face of the abducted girl rose against the bright blue sky. She was now over 100 feet tall. Next week we would find out how and why. My dog, who'd also gone missing, came running up. He now had a third eye and a science hero costume with blue plastic and chains and dials. I knew that had to be the end of the ep, so I brought him in front of everyone, said "Look my dog's not dead!" and wept.
5/2/05
I had a small part in Rushmore, during the zombie attack. It was only this one other girl and I, so we were outnumbered and beaten to double-death in the classroom.