Monday, December 31, 2007

2 shorts

I gave a subscription of Smithsonian magazine to my friend Roz. She was thrilled. The first issue she received had two paper covers, rather than the normal one paper cover to protect it in the mail.

I wrote an entry in my dlog. The background color was a bit more purple than blue.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

No, I actually haven't seen any vampire movies lately... and yes I waited far too long after I woke up to type this up

Vampires were all over the place and a few people and I were trying to escape them. We ran around in a building a few times. There was a little girl who was about 5 years old who was with us. We used her for bait at one point, but she wasn't hurt despite 2 huge bites to her torso. Once, while running from a group of vampires, I tried to open a door, and it started revealing a very thick wall. I decided against going that way, knowing that those doorways in my dreams always lead to boring mires, places where I get stuck doing silly things and from which I rarely return to the meat of my dreams. I did not however, consider the fact that I was dreaming.

At one point while outside, I climbed up a sturdy, but shabbily built wood structure to escape the reach of a hoard of vampires, and while I was up there for a minute, I had the thought that it might not be so bad to become a vampire so I jumped down into the crowd, but there was a non-vampire wild dog there that almost got me - it would have just killed me (and not turned me into a vampire) so I had to scramble away so that the dog couldn't get me before the vampires could and then somehow I avoided being caught by the vampires. I think the vampires set on the dog to turn it into a vampire-dog... they were definitely doing this for my benefit too. I got the impression, that much like zombies, they had no real interest in the dog.

After I avoided the vampires I wandered down a hallway and ran into a mean vampire. He showed me that they had caught and turned the little girl. I was a bit angry with him, but not overly so.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Nose Raisin 12/23-12/24

My right nostril was clogged. I snot-rocketed it into my hand (because I'm kinda gross like that...) and caught a large, plump, black raisin. It wasn't wet, but it was plump and moist inside like one that had been soaked in hot water for a while. I looked around to see if anyone was watching and flicked it to the ground.

Donuts 12/22-12/23

Boxes and boxes and trays and trays of donuts. That's it.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

2 Women in Pink

2 women followed me around for hours in my dream, despite having nothing to do with any of the other events in my dream. The were both wearing pink sweaters, and were older than me. The older of the two didn't do much other than stay next to the younger one. I went lots of places and did many things, but if I turned around, or peered into corners I would see that they were still following me. I would smile at them to show that I saw them there, and the younger of the two would smile back. They didn't seem threatening, but they were definitely stalking me.

The only time they didn't just follow me was when I wandered into a bathroom. The bathroom was a narrow hall, with stalls on the left side as you walked in. The floor slanted downwards and as the user walked in, looking for a stall to use, they also proceeded down into an underground building via this slanting hallway. The first stretch of hall was about 10 toilet stalls long, then it turned to the right with a flat section about 3 stalls long. It switched back to the right again for a longer ramp section, perhaps 20 stalls long and then switched back again to continue down into the depths of the earth for an undetermined distance. The first 13 stalls were filthy, so I walked right by them to the first full switchback. When I went into the very narrow stall (both of my shoulders brushed the walls) I turned around to close the door. At this point I saw the women coming around the first turn. They saw me, and the toilets (which were pretty damn gross) and turned around and went back outside. They were waiting near the exit when I left.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Another note about Amore Messiah

The stars in the giant black room are the only night sky I've ever looked up to see in a dream. Also, they were by far the highest up thing I've looked up to see in a dream. The only other "upward capping" I've looked at are indoors ceilings in low-ceilinged rooms and broad hallways.

Amore Messiah

I was on a quest. I had run around the world finding phone booth shaped boxes that held special powers of travel (somewhat like the Dr.'s Tardis, but weaker). I had found 14 of 15 boxes and was now seeking the final one. My world was hilly and forested, though in some places the trees lined up and turned into living bookshelves, creating a library.

The final box was hidden within a distant star. I and my companion traveled to a powerful being's lair, a giant hanger-sized room of pitch black night, with all the stars in the universe spread across the ceiling. In this room we could sort through the stars to find the box. The being who lived there did not mind our presence, but did not want to mingle with us. We found a vaguely illuminated trunk filled with thin books at the far end of the room. Within one of the books was the clue to which star to pick. I pulled out the books one by one, piling them into my lap and my companion stated whether it was the correct one. In this manner we sorted through billions of stars in a few minutes.

I had found the 15th box and we had control over them, but an evil threatened us and the universe. There were four of us leading my side and a swarm of corporate drones working for the other. A conference of CEOs was being held in a cafeteria at the end of the world and we were too close to it. We sneaked past them, and out into a glade on the edge of the forests and tree-libraries. One of my companions had 15 little shortbread cookies, the size of backgammon pieces, and he gave each of us a few. We had to eat them one by one, and revisit each of the boxes to activate them and then we would be stronger than the drones. I went to the closest box (which now looked like a microwave), opened the door and ate one. The biscuit melted in my mouth and I thought the words "Amore Messiah".

I ran around to another box located up in a bamboo watch tower. The words continued to echo in my head. I had one biscuit left and I knew that my companions had visited all of their locations. I ate the biscuit, knowing that its being eaten would not negatively effect its being activated when I reached the box. I ran through a library forest and met up with my companions. I couldn't see the final box, but it was near enough. We stood in a square, about 2 meters from each other, with other followers gathering around. The four of us started jumping slowly, hovering in mid-air and dropping back down in a delayed manner. We would jump up and then lean back in the air in an arch and then sink back down to land on our feet. The chanting of "Amore Messiah" filled the air.

Note: This is one of my only dreams, ever, in which a saying in the dream is both remembered and at all understandable upon waking. Even more impressive to me is that I had this dream in the middle of the night, awoke, and then went back to a dreamless sleep for hours before awaking again still holding the memory of this dream.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Experiment

A science teacher decides that my class should try out some sensory deprivation experiments. There are 3, each for 3 people in the class to try, and the one I choose to do involves spending 3 days in a metal sphere, in the dark with 2 of my classmates. We can bring a bag of things to keep ourselves entertained, but our main mission is to lay inside on the platform-seat that goes around the entire inside's edge and experience the sphere. After 3 days we will have started to use up the oxygen in the sphere, so the next part of the experiment is to see if we can get to the end of a long corridor off of the sphere (an airlock), decompress, and then get out of the sphere.

I'm not sure what the other 2 options were anymore, but at some point I did know that one of them was very similar, but perhaps in a bunker either under the sea, or in the ground, or in space... though I'm not positive. Somehow it seemed a little more risky than the one I decided to do. It also was the 2nd experiment to run, so I would have had to wait 3 days before I could do it.

I and two other women packed up our bags and were escorted by the class to the sphere. We got a tour of it with the class before everyone else left and sealed us in. One of the two girls had a disposable, green camera, and I wished for a minute that I could go grab my camera. But then I thought to myself, "what am I going to take pictures of, the dark?" We all wore bathing suits, and I snuck a little piece of clear tape in with me on my finger.

The days went by quickly. Someone brought a board game - it looked like a cross between Scrabble, Monopoly, and Parcheesi - but we never felt like playing it. Instead, I used its box as a sneaky place to store my piece of tape. It marked where I was. We all lay down and drifted off into trance-like dreams. Over the course of a few days we would individually wake up and see each other lying there. After a few minutes we would lay back down. After a while I started to think that it was probably time for us to try to get out, but my spheremates were enjoying the experience too much. I didn't worry about it and continued to lay there.

Then a bunch of our other classmates started coming in and visiting us. They brought little streaks of light with them, making the sphere a tiny bit brighter. I couldn't understand how they were getting in without ruining the seal of the airlock, but it seems that the airlock must have just been functioning properly unlike my thinking abilities in my dream.

They didn't try to bring us out, but we started discussing when to leave. I thought that we should leave very early in the morning so that the decompression chamber wouldn't be closed for the night, but the paparazzi would still be asleep.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Wandering Around

I'm with a group of friends, wandering around Seattle. One of them is an older man, who has lost all his teeth. He did his own dentistry though, and now has functional teeth made out of a toy of primary-colored plastic strips with crudely serrated edges. He has layered them about 5 strips wide so that he has a good biting surface. They look bright and happy, and they seem to work - he just ate a burger.

We go around the city looking at the exteriors of apartment buildings. It's gray and drizzling rain wherever we look, but it doesn't rain on us. We go into a huge apartment complex that has an open courtyard. The first floor is mostly used as a covered, outdoor parking lot. Every parking spot has a different sign, indicating how much time (60-90 minutes on average) one can park there, or how much gas one has to park there (usually about 5 gallons). There is a little filling station where you can buy gas for $5.95/gallon. One of my friends who is a taxi driver comments on that. He thinks it's expensive, but he has some logic to make it sound like he'll make lots more money and that he should work longer days. Instead of 60 hours, he now plans to work about 80 hours per weekend, maybe even 90. I don't quite understand how he won't spend all his earnings on gas, but he's a smart guy, so I figure there's some taxi driving money-making stuff I just don't understand.

We start looking inside the building. The first apartment we look into is very brightly painted in about 5 different purples and reds and yellows, and maybe a blue. It has no furniture and is a very long, empty room. Someone walks down to the end of the room where there are sounds of a dining hall in an adjacent hallway. I look into a room near the front door and there are about 8 people around a cafeteria table eating. They are all men, I don't know if they really had any food in front of them.

We go back out into the car-park and find a stairwell. We start climbing up the stairs, which are narrow, have no railing, and require us to go single-file. At each switchback, one of us (in order, and rotating through our group) has to take a turn doing some dangerous manoeuvre to flip around some clothe that's hanging our way to keep us from all falling off the stairs.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

This morning

1. I'm in my living room and I hear some chittering noises, so I look out my front window. It's snowing and while the snow is coming down slowly, the flakes are big and it's sticking. Two little gray-squirrels (who happen to be a little brownish) chase each other across my sidewalk and pause about 2 feet from each other. The one in back picks up some snow, balls it up, and throws it at the one in front. He's hit in the head. I do a double take, but what I just saw is reaffirmed when the back squirrel does it again.

2. I'm on a bus to school and I'm running a little late. I'm not too worried though, as I am on the bus and it's not that far that I need to go. But then, somehow, I've switched to the bus going in the wrong direction. I pull the cord and get off at the next stop. I go across the street and wait at the correct bus stop. A bus pulls up but it's not the 49, it's the 44. I know that goes to my school, but the bus looks old and bound for a long trip, so I don't want to risk it. I wait a few more seconds and then I need to go to the bathroom. I go find one, and put down a lot of stuff that I seem to be carrying. I "use" the bathroom (I don't think I really did anything in the stall though). Then I struggle to pick up and arrange all my stuff again. I realize that I have to sort through some other stuff and I go to a dorm room that I've been sharing with Becca. She's got a flight to catch and our clothes are all together as we've been sharing them. I flip through a pile of shirts and make sure she doesn't forget all of hers.

Friday, December 7, 2007

Swimming through alternate realities

I'm at a large swimming pool, full of people, but I only really notice one of them. He's in a black shorts-style bathing suit, which matches my black bikini. He's in the pool, and I dive past him and swim a bit. I turn around and talk to him from across the pool. We swim a bit more and then I "awake". I'm in my bed, Robin's in the shower getting ready for the day. I'm about to get up and make some coffee for us, but I lie there for a minute thinking about the swimming I did the previous day, and about how I'm going to go swimming again this afternoon. I am super excited to go swimming again. And then, this evening I'm going to follow that up with a trip to the Banya (a Russian bathhouse... a reputable one!).

Then I really wake up, and Robin wakes up with about 7 minutes to get out the door. I make no coffee, but I lay in bed. I'm not going swimming because I don't have a pool that I like. I'm a bit annoyed, but I'm probably really going to the Banya tonight.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Hovering

I have a skill in dreams that I never before thought about much in waking life. I can brace my elbows (on nothing) and hover around, just off the ground. My feet can brush the pavement, or I can be a little higher up. I can do this up to about a full story or so off the ground. I can also just do this in place and swing my legs around. It's different from flying, which I can also do when I remember to do it. Hovering happens in a healthy majority of my dreams as I walk around. It's faster and lazier than walking, and it's a nice sensation of coasting and smoothness. It almost always begins when I'm on a sidewalk, mostly when I'm waiting at a crosswalk.

My last dream this morning before I finally got out of bed involved hovering. It was a brightly lit, white-sky day and I was walking down the sidewalk, street on my right, approaching the intersection. Two men were ahead, one in the street on the right, one on the perpendicular bit of sidewalk I was approaching. When I got to the crosswalk, I leaned onto my elbows and started hovering. I paused to have a brief interaction with the men, we talked about something. I hovered out into the crosswalk, then up and to the right, into the middle of the intersection, except that I lifted up to about 10 feet up in the air above the men's heads... maybe 16 feet up total. We talked some more, though I don't know about what, and I lowered back down. I went to the man in the street, and I woke up.

I continued to think about this dream for a while, until I realized that hovering was a dream skill. That is, I knew I could do it in dreams, but my brain was confusing dream memories and waking memories and suggesting to me that I had, in the past, used this skill in real life. It took me most of the day of thinking to put the memories in the correct compartment. Not that I ever really believed I could hover, but it was truly an uncanny flipping of my vision of reality for a good portion of my day as I worked to process this. I think most of the problem was in the fact that I've never taken much time when waking to think about hovering, but I've done it so much in my dreams that it seems fairly normal.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Nov. 13/14

I'm at a nice, dimly lit restaurant, but I'm not really there, I'm just watching. Frasier and Miles Crane (of Frasier the t.v. show) are at a table chatting. One of my friends sits down at the table next to them, and I actually enter the scene and sit with her. George Clooney sits down at our table. He is wearing a casual suit and an eye patch. A few more of my friends arrive, as does another George Clooney. This one is wearing a sweater and has no eye patch. We all chat for a while.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Recurring themes/settings

Outside: Always either bright and cloudy, or a well-lit night. The sky is almost always a solid white or varying shades of deep/dark blues without any stars or clouds. Nighttime in cities means late at night with ample street-lighting. Occasionally a dream will start at twilight and progress into a darker night. Nighttime outside of cities brings indirect light from undetermined sources. It never rains on me. If it rains, I don't get wet.

Inside: During the day, indirectly sunlit. In large buildings, usually bright florescent lighting, well dispersed like at SPL's central branch in the stacks. During the night, light ranges from the same level of dark colors, but ample lighting as outside, to very dimly lit rooms. Dimly lit rooms are creepy. Light switches don't work, but sometimes I can will more light into a room. Once I threw a gorgeous pattern of light onto a ceiling that resembled the light and shadow patterns one might get from an intricate lamp or chandelier. Haunted houses have different lighting in every area.

Bathrooms: Never functional. Often giant, open rooms full of hundreds of different toilets, each with their own problems. Sometimes just a few stalls without toilets. Filth, overflowing water, dim lighting, mustard yellows, and hauntedness abounds. I used to get trapped in these, but more often now I find someone to lead me out of them, or just do a quick pass-through on my own.

Mirrors: Always functional, sometimes more than functional, never doorways, but occasionally threaten vortexes.

Cities: Almost always the same city, but different neighborhoods. Buses rarely show up if I'm at a bus stop, but sometimes I'm on a bus. Cars rarely exist. People on motorcycles sometimes give me a ride to somewhere new. Once I was in "France" and that city was distinctly different architecturally - colors were different too - a darker gray sky, and the buildings were sand-colored rather than black and metal. Very few people on the streets, though I sometimes have an entourage.

People from real life: Often manifest as two distinct people. Upon waking, it will take me a while to realize that they were both the same person, just different manifestations. Once recently, this tipped me off that I was dreaming, when two very similar manifestations of a friend entered an elevator with me.

Elevators: Rarely function properly, often take me to the wrong floor, or I get stuck in them; often end dreams. I prefer the stairs.

Stairs: Often emergency-exit style stairwells. If I'm running, I can hold the banister and fly around turns. This is fun, and speeds me up. In old mansions, there are always at least 2 stairwells. At least one of them will be falling apart in places, and at least one will be particularly more haunted than the others, but often more solid.

Wish fulfillment

Nov. 9, 4 am-ish: A former coworker of mine who has a lot of credit card debt runs into me. She is rich! A few months ago she left her business card on the front desk of a doctor's office and they put her info into the payroll database. She's been getting checks from them at an irregular frequency in varying, but large, amounts. She shows me her latest for $8,978.56. I ask if she's been able to pay off her debt, and she says yes, plus she's saved over $60k now. I joke, "you could pay off most of my debt!" and she replies, "Sure, how much do you want? I have more coming."

Early 2006?

It's a bright sunny day and I'm in my apartment in Portland. I've just walked out of my bedroom to the bathroom to do my morning mirror-stare. I look in the mirror and notice that things don't work quite right in it. Scariness potential abounds and I know better than to stay there. I'm slow and stuck, I have to grab the door frame and pull myself through with all my might. Once I'm out in the hall things are sunny again though.

I walk out into my living room and greet my cats. I see a stick and twig broom that Robin's aunt gave me a few years prior and I decide to go flying. I pick it up, take a seat, and Soma hops on. I encourage Robespierre to join us, but he refuses. He intends to stay with my physical form. I persuade him to just try the broom, but he weighs it down. He and Soma both get back off, and I go on without them.

I fly out my front door, across the parking lot, and out over the street, staying on the second-floor level at which I started. It is still bright and sunny, despite the sky being all white. Half a block from home, I fly above two men walking down the middle of the street. One is tall, skinny and blue, and the other is not tall, but not short, red and round. Otherwise, they are average people. I pause to ask them a suggestion of where to go, and they point north, down a cross-street, saying that there are some really good looking men in a town just a few blocks that way. I take their advice.

Earliest recurring dream

I'm not sure when this started, but probably very early and before more fleshed out dreams started to stay with me. It occurs most often while I am falling asleep, rather than in deep sleep. It happened the most when I was 8 or 9.

Early version: Sepia tones. Inside a vertical rectangle little particles drift about lazily, with a lot of space between them. They might bump, but are not crowded. All of a sudden it gets busy and crowded with millions of little particles crowding up the rectangle.

This would make me wake up suddenly, filled with terror. It often took a long time for me to be willing to close my eyes again.


Later versions: Sometimes incorporated into fuller dreams, once set on an airplane, where people were calm and in their seats, then cluttering the aisles and moving frantically in turbulence. When in fuller dreams the cycle can often repeat multiple times without waking me up. It is also far less scary, though still unsettling.

Variations: When I was 7-10 years old, while falling asleep, I would have half-dreams where my bed would float up the wall till it started to turn to float across the ceiling. At this point, gravity would take hold and I would tumble out of the floating bed into my awake bed. I would wake up with a start, but no terror.

From 9-12 or so, I was able to control the floating sensation sometimes, so that my bed was a teeter-totter of sorts, though this was in a mostly awake state.

Nov. 8/9, 2007

I'm in a house, which is strange, but not quite haunted. I am with people, and there are other people there as well. Someone/thing is not exactly after me, but I'm avoiding them. Something is in the basement 22 floors below the main level, and I walk through the yellow kitchen into a gray stairwell to go towards it. My group of people gets waylaid one by one on the way through the house and kitchen, so that I am alone by the time I enter the stairwell. I consider going on, but decide to wait for them to catch up. Alternatingly, I peek through the barely cracked door back to the kitchen, and down the stairs. I wait.

My earliest dream memory

Early 1985, I am 4 years old: I'm outside my house, on the right side of it if you were looking from the street. There's an outhouse there, which shouldn't be there, and my 7 year old brother is sitting on the toilet. I know this because the outhouse is built out of screen doors. My dad holds my left hand as we wait for my brother, but a clown interrupts. I don't like clowns, and I really don't like this one. He grabs my right hand and reaches into the outhouse and grabs my brother's left pulling us away from my house and my dad, pulling us to the circus. My brother's pants are around his ankles, but his shirt is long.

We're at the circus, which is a gray, cement-block-walled auditorium, much longer than it is wide. We're on a stage which takes up most of one short wall. Folding metal chairs provide audience seating, but for now it's just clowns milling about. I'm in a gray jumpsuit and being forced to ride a large men's bicycle and my brother is in a gray leotard and pink tutu and has been pushed out onto the tightrope. A crowd arrives and fills the seats. My parents are in the front row, center seats, and I call out to them to save us, but they don't recognize me.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

1st blog ever

My title is a bit of a lie. I've blogged a little on tribe and facebook, but this is my first dedicated to blogging blog. And it even has a bit of at theme. I've decided to record my dreams here. I may stray into other things though... we'll see.