Night of Dec 28/29th, Further Unstuck

A lot of activity and adventure, packed into one long, fluid dream. The order is a bit jumbled now though.

I was at a fancy house, and thirsty, so I dug through the drawers of the fridge, looking for a beverage. There were a few juice bottles and other items, but I didn't want to take the last of anything. I took a few sips of a grape juice bottle, and considered getting some water, but it was time to run on, so I and my companions ran out of the house.

We were in a university classroom, and a student was going to present on his recent research. I was going to sit with some graduate student friends, but first we needed to make sure there was an aisle that extended all the way to the back of the seating, so people could reach the refreshments table. One or two of them needed to scoot their chairs apart for that, and then I needed someone to move down a seat, so there would be room for me in the 2nd row from the back. It all worked out, though I never made it over to the refreshments. The student gave his talk, which passed quickly. I took a few swigs from a whiskey bottle, and then thought it would be classier to poor a serving into a little clear plastic cup I had, so I did. But I poured too much, and then decided not to drink any of it.

It was time to run again. I was with a team, a new member on an almost fully reconstituted work team from the previous year. We were led by the one continuing member, a man, who knew where we were to run, and the mission we were on. We were to break into a compound, and collect some important supplies. The supplies and the goal were a bit of a mystery though. We didn't have full instructions. We started running across a park in a small town. It was dark out, and the streets around us were full of cars and bike commuters. I could run fast, and though I mostly was bringing up the rear of the team's single file running, I could pass some of my teammates when I pushed to run faster. We traveled across the town quickly, slowing only at one street crossing, where cars stopped, but I had to more actively avoid the bicyclists. There was slushy, melting snow on the ground, and I thought to myself that I could use my bicycle to commute again now.

My team got ahead of me as I was crossing the street, and I lost track of where they had gone up the path. I considered turning around, and seeing if they'd doubled back, but then I started running up the jogging path. There was a small creek surrounded by trees on the left of the path, grass to the right, but up a ways, there was a plain warehouse building. As I ran forward, I noticed that my team was running back this way down the path, and then turned along side of the building, now running perpendicular to the path, towards a small door in the side of the building. The appeared to be being chased, so I cut diagonally across the field to catch up with them at the door. We got in to the warehouse, and took a break within. The wife of the team leader was there, and made a comment about how different the team was now, with a suggestion that the old team had been poorly composed. We picked up some large black garbage bags of supplies, and started up a ramp which led to some stairs, continuing our climb. At the top of the stairs, there was a landing where we could all pause. I briefly noted that this was a dream, and swam through the air to the ceiling, before descending back down to my team to continue our mission.

We went through the door into another room/land. This room's air was a little thicker, but not in a way that slowed us. We paused just inside the room though, to take stock and assess our goals. One of the bags we carried spilled some jelly beans on the floor, and I ate some red ones. They were good. Across the room, there were a couple young women in black leotards, stretching. They were aerial acrobats. One of my team members noted that it was not a solid career path, because their bodies would age and degrade right as they were reaching the peak of their careers, and then what would they do?  I realized that this room was actually underwater, and that we were breathing liquid air. I swam up to the top of the room, where a visible, but non-physical netting marked the end of the water, and the start of air. I surfaced, and found the air very difficult to breath. It was a little hard to swim back down, but I did, and then I pointed out the strangeness of the room to my team.

My team talked for a while, with a few small negative comments about our mission, and a few questions and discussion about where we were heading and what sorts of items we were to collect. A person who looked like a young girl was hovering to my right, and I noticed something peculiar about her. Somewhere in the conversation, someone mentioned the wearing of a mask, and she might have repeated it. She seemed annoyed, and then repeated the wearing a mask statement again. She opened a glass cabinet along the wall, and started to remove pieces of her head/mask. She was slowly revealing her true face, as the queen. No one else on my team seemed to notice yet, and I was aware that she was bothered by some of their flippant remarks about our mission.

Dec. 26th or 27th, Unstuck

Among many similar instances of getting almost-trapped and then pushing through to unstick myself in this fairly long dream, I was wandering around a science building on a university campus. It was done in blues and whites and had the "biology labs" scent of such buildings. I was trying to leave it, because I was trying to get somewhere. I entered a stairwell, that had a square, spiral staircase down to the ground floor. As I descended, the stairwell got narrower and narrower, and a young man joined me.

In many dreams, I would get stuck at this point, not able to move beyond a smaller and smaller location, but I pushed on, while talking to the guy, who asked me how to leave the space. I pushed on until we got to the bottom of the stairs, into a small room, with a double-paneled metal door with a library book drop built in to the center of it. I used my strength to pry up the first metal panel far enough that I could get through, and then I pushed out the outer metal panel, and escaped the building into the night. 

Many similar situations preceded or followed this one. There were also familiar "waiting for the bus in a dark city" scenes, but in this dream, the buses did come, and I was able to find money in my wallet, and when I didn't want to wait for the buses, I just walked somewhere else. I was unstuck.

Chased

I was on a university campus with the general path layout, but not topography nor quite the same buildings in parts, as my waking world one. I was walking from a park-like area (where in the waking world, there is a parking lot and a building), and through a set of buildings that used to be a test high school (very similar to waking world.) I turned around to look back at the park area, and up on a small rise, there was a large, predatory animal. It may or may not have swapped out with a grizzly bear for a short while, and then it faded away/left, and a giant brown furry beast, that I was calling something (not badger, but something close), but that was maybe like a large wolverine crossed with a large mountain lion. It had the overly muscled limbs and human-ish torso of mediocre computer animated beasts in Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, but hid a lot of the poor design with long, well brushed, chocolate brown fur.

One was on the rise, and then it was joined by another, and the grizzly bear stood around with them for a bit, but wasn't menacing in the same way. I dashed into the middle of the brick-paved courtyard between the test high school buildings, to a kiosk that had a single landline phone on the counter. I looked in a small directory book, to try to find the phone number for the appropriate agency on campus to alert.  A group of middle school children crowded around me, oblivious to the beasts' approach, wanting to use the phone for their own fun purposes. I successfully kept them at bay, while searching for the right number. Should I call a vet? were there animal control offices on campus? Nothing was showing up. This didn't seem like quite the appropriate thing to report to campus police.  For a minute while I was looking at the directory, I offered the phone to a girl to use while I couldn't use it, but she didn't take advantage of my offer quickly enough, so I took it back.

Without success at the phone, and being able to tell that the beasts were approaching, I ran onwards to the door to my building - which looked almost just like it does in the waking world. I punched in my key code, and opened the door, but while leaning across a railing, in a way that made me have to run around a ramp a bit extra to actually enter the building. **Despite this, I successfully evaded the beasts and made it indoors, where all the lights were out. I thought this was weird, and that something strange must be happening. I was only in the loading dock entrance though, so it might be localized. I dug out my key light, and produced enough light to make it down the short hall to the next door. As I reached that door, some people approached me. There was something going on, and I could either be a servant to their cause, or I'd be in trouble. I ran to escape them, by going into the heart of the building, which was a twist on the library building, with a few features/wings from past dream-libraries. For a while I wandered around interacting with people, learning about what was going on, alternating with just wandering around as if it were a normal day.

But then the pursuit became stronger,and I ran through the main reference area, with a momentary hint that this was a dream and a failed attempt to launch into flying (never mind the ceiling is pretty low in this part of the building). I ran to a strange wing that was all white, and had semi-hidden elevators down a long hall, thinking to escape to the upstairs. But as I reached the elevators, I turned around and could see a person standing still, staring, watching me, back at the hall's entrance, and I knew that they had people just watching where I was going all the time, so there was no point in trying this method of escape. I ran back at the person hoping to run him down.  I don't recall what happened at this point.

***I was back outside wandering around the courtyard, and there were campus police (primarily soft, blonde, middle-aged women) in light grey uniforms, carrying large guns in pursuit of the beasts roaming campus. That was good, but they still hadn't actually taken any out.


**Starting at this point, the order of events might be all out of whack.
***This section may be from before I entered the building, but I think it actually did come later.

Leading

Last night/this morning (eve of/ Dec. 15) I had a complex one, which I only remember bits of:

There were a lot of important people mingling, like they would at a business party. One person was favored to be in charge, but then I ended up in a small room with a handful of people, and a man who was more clearly going to be in charge. One person told of a dream they had had the previous night, that they were flying somewhere in a large, fancy airplane. And then another person said they had had the same experience. And the man who was going to be in charge (who looked like Wallace Shawn who played Vizzini in the Princess Bride) said that he too had had that dream, and that it had been a fleet of aircraft with each one of his elite group on one of the other planes. Everyone in the room had had that dream. With a look, he asked me to tell him his future, and I said that I can't always see that on a person, but then he grinned at it was written in light, shimmering blue across his teeth, and so I foretold of his coming to power and of happiness and success.  He didn't seem especially impressed by my reading though.

Later/seperately, I was in a large, airy gymnasium, and a high school friend, Shawn was running a food cart that was very tall. He was high up, so I was looking almost straight up to talk with him. The food cart menu was a many paged affair, carved lightly into sheets of tinfoil. S suggested that he could teach gym classes at my college, since he had experience teaching high school gym. I was dubious that he would have the right type of gym class experience for the weird classes taught at the college.

Delayed dream post 2

More backdated dreams

On the eve of Oct. 24, 2013, I had this one:

This morning between when my alarm clock first went off and when I actually got up, I had a very visually-detailed dream, in which this woman walked down a gravel path behind a house I was living in, with a thin, but long, light grey cat in a baby carrier. When she got near my house, the cat jumped out of the carrier and ran into the swampy field opposite my house, past the path. The cat encountered my cats in the hillocks of grass and muddy low parts, and they tussled and splashed mud all over. I ran out to intervene, and the woman ran over and grabbed her cat. My cats were all shiny and fluffy on their muddy perch in the mist. And I stood back to look at them. The lady had started dropping various stretches of crochet work around the muddy field, and I thought to myself that it was just making things messier. She turned to me and pointed out all the ivy and other weeds growing around the yard and closer to my house, ivy in the trees and growing on the back of my house. She said I should clean that all up and then things would look good and the crochet work would make the place beautiful. I said something about how I was only renting so I didn't care about the ivy, and when she gave me stink eye for that, I said I was a perfectionist with ivy, so if I started pulling it out, it would be a gigantic project.

Nov. 16/17

In addition to a variety of increasingly positive (they started out a little freaky, but got more fun as the night went on), weird adventures in my dreams last night, at one point I was laying on the back of a blue airplane flown by "Bonjour Airlines" holding on like Atreyu riding Falcor, watching some crazy futuristic city landscapes pass underneath.

Dream Mess

I've been having a lot of not-quite-remembered dreams for the past few months. And then I've had some briefly-remembered dreams that I never got around to writing up here.


Sept. 10/11

I was wandering around in a place like the town I went to high school in in Wisconsin. People were doing things slower than I was used to - I wanted to walk quickly and my friends would stop and read all the signs and look at everything. I came to understand it was because there was nothing to do there, so there was no need to go faster to get somewhere that there was still nothing to do. I befriended a scraggly raccoon, but my slow companions pointed out sores on his shoulders. I suggested we release him in a big open field/land near where we were, but my friends weren't sure that would be safe.

Sept. 11/12
I had a really detailed dream of walking around in a building that was a "fixed up" high school / museum (in the off-season and in some sections of the building year-round.) From the outside, it was like any older high school, a big stone building, very early-1900s. But when I walked in, they had "restored" it to it's recently rediscovered pinkish-sand colored stone carved walls, like something out of ancient Egypt or the rose city of Petra. The carvings weren't particularly Egyptian though, they seemed older.

Of course, since the building doubled as a high school (which struck me as weird) they had up those thick glass protector walls that museums put in front of walls of ancient carved stone. After wandering around with Robin through a couple halls, we came to a door where people were lining up for guided tours through some of the back rooms where the conservators worked. I was concerned we'd have to purchase a ticket, but they just waved us into the group that was starting then. As we were about to go through the doors, I turned around to take a photo with my camera, and did so, but the flash was accidentally turned on. So then I fumbled with my camera for a few seconds to turn off my flash, as these three men, who had been caught in the flash photo walked towards me and made sure I understood that I shouldn't use flash. They were pretty beefy and wearing colorful striped robes over their bottoms, with a piece that came up over their shoulders... in a sort of Mayan take on an Egyptian guard look.

We followed the tour into a series of rooms that were more 19th century wood-lined large open rooms with lots of shelves and tables of stuff, and grey haired old man conservators working in various rooms and talking about the various artifacts they were studying. After a few photos here and there, we were led past a table being set with all sorts of delicious looking beverages and sweets. Most of it was for a fancy party or could be purchased or something, but as we left the room, the guide said that we each could have one of a particular sort of item, and picked up a blueberry topped white soft shortbread-like cookie and handed it to me to eat, which I did.

Invasion of the Skating Shrimp (Night of Mon/Tues May 27/28)

I was somewhere before this part of the dream, but that's gotten fuzzy now.

Walking in a large crowd across a large bridge, perhaps the Steel Bridge in Portland, heading towards a very large city across the water. I turned to my left and saw two women, African exchange students, one carrying a baby who was her nephew. I knew them, and they caught up to ask me a question about where we were going.

I talked with them for a minute, facing their way as we walked. As I returned my gaze frontwards, my eyes passed over creatures just below the surface of the water not far below the bridge.
There were many, giant bright red and bright blue shrimp creatures. They were all much larger than people, perhaps the smallest of them were the size of a rhinocerous.

 I paused, thinking about taking a photo, but not having a camera on me, and other people looked at them.

We walked on, continuing to cross the bridge, but then the giant shrimp creatures started pulling themselves up onto the bridge, and walking across the bridge, and the dropping back over the other side into the water.

Out of the water, they were a shimmery metallic brown color, and glistening wet, almost slimy. They didn't seem to acknowledge the existence of the people walking on the bridge, and so we continued, warily, to walk. One somehow caught the arm of a man near me, biting into it. The man kept quiet as we helped free his arm, but his nearly panicking almost brought the attention of the rest of the shrimp monsters on us.

We got into the city and time passed. The shrimp had taken over the city and perhaps even the world. To get food, we had to go on daring missions to raid bodegas for old canned goods. We would go when the streets were deserted of shrimp giants, and once we had our haul, we'd throw old, rotten milk containers and other smelly foods down dark alleys and then run. The scent of our decoys luring in all the nearby shrimp, as we got away, climbing up the beams of modern architecture high rises.

It became winter and the shrimp couldn't survive underwater in the freezing temperatures, and instead skated on the frozen lakes and rivers. At first they skated like hundred-legged cockroaches might, on the tips of their sharp little legs, worming back and forth across the ice quickly and in great masses to stay warm. We caught glimpses from the tops of high rises we squatted.

One day, we received an invitation from The Shrimp inviting us to one day of amnesty, for an ice skating party. The shrimp looked more cartoony at this skating party, which we of course attended. Great masses of shrimp now stood on hind legs and wore ice skates. They towered over even the tallest people, twice their height. We skated around, having a lovely time, but wary of the shrimp. They stuck to the thicker ice, while the people could skate out over thinner ice. We came to a plan. We would create a conga-line of skaters, humans at the front, skating in circles again and again on the thicker ice. The shrimp would join our line, at the end of it, and as we got faster and faster, our circle would get bigger and bigger, and then we would skate out over the thinnest ice when the shrimp were caught up in the fun, and lose them to the depths of the icy water.


Note: This marks over 1 full month of nightly dreams.

Two nights of poorly written up dreams

Night of Sat/Sun, May 26/27

1. We were vacationing in a nature preserve. It started in the woods, but went out over a shallow, calm ocean. We hiked out on a boardwalk/wooden platform walk for a long time, and finally reached a small visitor-info and hotel island, but it's just a rest stop with visitor info and a bathroom. The hotel had disappeared. We paused there and looked at a map and saw that we could continue out over the water, but that it would never reach land again, it dead ends out over the ocean. So we're going to have to head back. The sun is setting and it gets dark, and I worry about seeing our way back on the narrow walkway.

2. Driving in van, but behind drivers seat, can't reach pedals. Get stuck in giant ruts on dirt road, get out to group-lift it out of ruts, kajigger the back end and it bounces and becomes a better-suspension-having subaru outback. Get back into van, still can't reach pedals.

Night of Sun/Mon, May 27/28 (Memorial Day)


We check into a hotel, where I had long ago booked a room for a conference. We have our cats with us, and the room doesn't seem cat friendly, even though they checked us in. There's a balcony that looks out on a river, and the bannister doesn't seem safe for the cats. The river is rushing, and the cats are curious. I want to change hotels, to one that is more cat friendly.

I'm in a dark mall, near the hotel, where my conference is taking place. Brother A is there. I use the bathrooms, which are a bit weird. I run into A outside of them and we walk, perhaps in the direction of the hotel again.


I'm at a dinner, and there are tables of food, and I'm in front of one with many platters of skewers. I'm looking at them trying to decide what looks good to eat, and I touch one, to get a better look at its contents. Right when I notice a small pink shrimp on one end and decide to not take it, a woman comes up and is pleased that I've chosen the thing she's responsible for. So I have to take it. Next/later there's a fancy dessert table. I'm thirsty and interested in fresh fruit, but there is none. Just dry biscuits spread with chocolate ganache and bowls of mixed nuts. I'm looking at this, and scooping some onto a plate, when a fancy lady says, "A-mond fruits" (like almonds, but pronounced eh-monds)

Night of Sat/Sun, May 18-19

Travel and waiting, travel and waiting. I was at an event, but it was preparatory for more travel and another event. We were transporting a large vehicle of some sort... perhaps towing a boat, or driving a boat, maybe on the water or on the road. We had stopped at a large mall slash hotel place and parked part of our transport in an open-air parking complex nearby, and I had spent time in a hotel room. We were coming back here to spend more time, but first we had to deliver the vehicle, or maybe its cargo.

I dressed for a party in the dimly lit hotel room. My things were in the leftside drawers of a long, low dresser. I left and got in an elevator with a number of people. It was crowded. It stopped at the incorrect floor for me, but most people were exiting, and I decided I'd just walk the extra distance, so I exited and walked across an open-air mostly-cement structure, up some cement stairs approaching where my vehicle was in the parking structure.

A tall, menacing gangster in a long cape with a bit of a hip flare to him and two henchmen approached me in a fairly open space before the main parking area. They demanded the money I was carrying, and I dug into my two front pockets of my dress to give them all of the coins in them, hoping that they'd ignore the lump of my wallet in my back right pocket. I gave them the coins, and then lay down on the pavement face down, worrying about my wallet. After I laid down though, the bad guys were replaced or pushed out by a tall, similarly-flowing-20s-gangster-suit-dressed super slender woman who held no ill-will towards me. The henchmen were replaced by a large group of average looking adults arranged in a diagonal grid, as if they were about to engage in a fancy choreographed group dance.

One of the people in the group, near me, was D (RIP), with his hair cut short in the style of his weekly haircut [of last night's dream]. He was stuck in this group, in a form of purgatory - not unpleasant, just unfinished/unending, but temporary in that it can be passed through when one is ready.

There was a sense of enlightenment/nirvana/white patterns on the edge of the whole... but it was just beyond most people's grasp/awareness. There was the whole, but this was additional. I could see and touch the manifestation of enlightenment, but it was somehow exterior or additional to what most were aware of. It seemed obvious, and weird to be exterior.

Weeks and weeks of dreams

Since April 27 or 28 I have had vivid dreams nightly. They started as hard to remember, frantic, strange things that would disappear upon waking, but were clearly there when they were there. Over the past few weeks, they have continued, a couple per night, but finally calming a bit since Monday or Tuesday May 14/15ish.

I still haven't remembered the majority of them, but I recall the tone of them more, and some I have been able to remember bits of, to write up here, as I related them in other venues, briefly, right after they occurred:


Night of Fri/Sat, May 17/18
D's (RIP) Hair - haircuts weekly causing anxiety despite the knowledge that it would grow back perfectly by the end of each week. His widow still widowed despite his continued existence, a blue sky, and a little trail of tiny white cloud poofs out the window.

Event Day, with tropical sidewalk morning wedding banquet, to which I was not invited, but for a woman with whom I was not acquainted, and so it did not matter... plus I was to see all the same friends at a party that afternoon, except I had not packed appropriate clothing. Plus, J was missing his right arm below the elbow, but had a double-arm down to that point. J and AR were the most prominent people in this dream, though EH merged with J momentarily.


Night of Thurs/Fri, May 16/17
I woke up one minute before my alarm clock went off, with a major pain in my back, having had this dream that I pinched my back/spine somehow and asked R to massage it and then he pushed on it worse, which woke me up. Other dreams were had, but this erased them.


First calm dreams - Night of Tues/Wed May 14/15
I was reading my diary from when I was a kid - but there were way more entries than I ever really wrote in a diary and it started out like my old pink diary, and then progressed to become like my Ramona Quimby fill-in-diary and as I got older - to like 11 or 12, the pages started to have fill in the blank stuff and very 90s photo/drawing pics of him and it kind of jumped between "reading" the diary and looking up from it to see myself at 11 or so but I was a way more outgoing and cool version of me. Before that I dreamed that I was in a large bathroom, but it wasn't really a scary/gross-bathroom anxiety dream


Vaguely Remembered - Night of Sun/Mon May 12/13
There was an ant on the bottom of my foot, so naturally I dislodged it, and naturally then there were bees all over my legs and arms. I accidentally squished one of them and then was concerned the rest would start stinging me. I stumbled out onto a porch while someone went to find some incense to smoke them away. I did something that made them all fly off, but I can't recall what it was.

Show

In the middle of other dream events, I wandered into a small old theater where a music performance along the lines of Current 93 or People Like Us or Swans or Tear Garden was going to happen. A bunch of my friends were there, though most of them were already in the performance space finding seats. I ran into a couple people, including DB at the concession stands, where we bought ice cream cones and popcorn.  It was his birthday.

We wandered into the seating area, and on the left, back side of the space, I found a group of friends including AR, RS, and RB-L. They had taken a cluster of seats, and while there weren't many seats around them, in the back row of their cluster, RB-L was alone and had some empty seats, so I asked if I could join her. I was going to do that, but first I wandered back out to the concessions area.