I was watching some bit of movie cosplay presentation that shaded into blurry B&W footage – probably a night vision camera – of a squat little four-legged robot poking its head out of some shrubbery, then skittering towards an ATM where it was assaulted by a few riot cops. Then I woke up and started trying to type it up to post – but the clunky C64 keyboard I was trying to type it on was wrapped in plastic, and the delete key was hidden on its back. Soon I got distracted from this anyway, by Erin's little sister, who was having major problems living with her parents and was on the verge of moving out to live with her SO who her parents did not approve of. In part, this involved her gender issues. I said, yeah, it's a good idea to find a safe space where you CAN explore these issues and figure out what's right for you; good luck, and I hope you can eventually come back and reconcile with your parents. She gave me a disdainful look like that was the last thing that would EVER happen, and I was filled with sadness.

Then I woke up.

Me and a dream companion had driven up to the besieged house. Outside was dangerous here; monsters might pop ut at any minute. We went in. I turned left, accidentally being rather rude by cutting between a piano-player and his piano; neither he nor his waiting audience noticed, but I knew I’d committed a major faux pas.
Through what was described by the narration in my head as a series of darkly comic misunderstandings, it was determined that I and my companion were there to perform a memorial service for several dead dogs that were lying about in the middle of the room. As my companion prepared to do this, I felt a prickle in my hand: it was one of the large cats that roamed about the house, politely but insistently demanding I move over by a… bicycle? I think. The cat mewed; I looked at the bicycle? and found an obvious loose nut on the stem?, which I tightened as best I could with my fingers. This seemed to satisfy the cat, who stalked off without a thanks or even a nod. Just “you have hands, come fix this thing, okay it’s fixed I don’t need you any more” kind of attitude. Which I found oddly endearing somehow.
Then there was a fish outside, swimming in the air low to the ground. In a gravelly voice just made for trailers, it said, “THE ATTACK OF THE SHARKBOAT!” as it swum towards the house, with menace in mind. Nothing horrible happened; instead, it bit on a baited hook that pulled it into a stream that ran beneath the house. My viewpoint followed it, where I saw it get flung off the hook into a tunnel full of rushing water that drew it inexorably into a large cartoon mine. Which exploded, shaking the camera some, and destroying SHARKBOAT!!!. The force of the explosion seemed to function to reset the trap.
And then I woke up. With that trailer voice repeatedly saying “ATTACK OF THE SHARKBOAT!” in my head.

I should note that “SHARKBOAT!” contained the concept of “it’s a boat, and it’s a shark, it’s twice as menacing as either by itself!” within that compound word. It’s not a boat for sharks, it’s a boat that IS a shark. Like a particularly low-budget SyFy movie of the week. Or at least that’s what the doomed idiot monster-fish wanted people to think was attacking.

I was going down a dark corridor. It wasn't my destination, but I came to a door leading off to my childhood room. Or, rather, to a half-assed copy of it. The windows were wrong, and half-open. There was a general aura of CREEPY about it, and I paused in the doorway for a moment, then just kinda rolled my eyes and was all “it's just a dream symbol for something”. I then drifted lazily through the air to the windows, and closed them. And then I pulled the shades down. The left one went down okay; the right one was a struggle. There were a bunch of plush toys perched somehow on the strips of wood between the panes that I needed to either not disturb or somehow pull the shade down between the plushie and the window, there were shelves pushed up right against the edge that were in the way of pulling down the shades. And the shades seemed to be made of repurposed garbage bags; they were translucent black and flimsy.

Finally I got the shade down. And then I woke up. It was about 2am and I was pretty thirsty.

There was stuff before it – something about mixing a deadly poison potion through a videogamey method of just clicking on the ingredients, and something about moving from the safe room I was in to another one that was a little risky because the game had ended there or something – but it's gone now.

I think the most interesting part about this dream is the way I recognized a repeating symbol, along with a spurious emotion. My sleeping brain likes to bring up I AM IN MY CHILDHOOD BEDROOM AND SOMETHING IS WROOOONG OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS now and then. I usually secure it without much problem, but the way I just threw off the warning emotion and got down to work was new. I was conscious enough to be analyzing it all as a Dream Symbol, even while I was still acting in the dream. But not conscious enough to go “hey wow I'm dreaming lets fool around!”.

I feel like this may be the back of my brain that believes in magic saying it's time to start banishing before going to bed again; it's been a while since the last time I did that. The Scientist rolls her eyes and scoffs, but then the Pragmatist points out that if the Magician is gonna keep us awake if we don't do this, it's probably easier to just let her do it, hell maybe she's on to something. And the Dragon rolls over and opens one eye and mutters something about it being four in the fucking morning and we'll do it tomorrow night, right now we just wanna get some fucking sleep, okay? So that's sorted then I guess.

Just a fragment.

I was in a furniture warehouse/programmer’s collective. While talking to one of the programmers, one of them asked about all the plastic stuck to my arms. It was all where my tattoo of dragon wings SHOULD be, except the wings weren’t visible. I was unconcerned about this, figuring it had something to do with the fluorescent lighting in the warehouse. As I started paying attention to that area, the outer edges of the wings started to dimly appear on my flesh as areas of slightly darkened and roughened skin.

I guess I’ve had these wings long enough – almost a year since I first started getting them done, and very close to “finished” – that my dream-self is starting to have them as well.

I dreamed I was returning to some kind of class after a couple of missed sessions. It proved to be a special class: Ricky was coming back to the school. He said something about being glad to be back and got a round of applause from the class.

Then people started slipping out of the classroom, citing things they had to do. I was about to present my quick version of the homework I’d just struggled to half-ass through when I woke up.

I was watching a musical number involving five Steve Martins and five Richard Pryors. They were all smiling and wearing nothing but powder-blue bathing suits, and doing a slow routine involving five trampolines. They hadn't started jumping on them yet, they were just walking around them, with the Martins and Pryors slowly swapping around to a doo-wop soundtrack. Either the trampolines were standing on their edges, or they were suspended above each other in a row with the camera looking down on the stack, and the Martins and Pryors were moving around them in zero gee, I'm not sure.

This was a metaphorical demonstration of how a truly stable consciousness could not be achieved except by a union of two minds that had been at all five levels – biological, software, and I have no idea what the other three levels were any more. Group minds? I dunno.

Before that, the Steve Martins and Richard Pryors had been a dragon and a raven who were married. I think. Man this was a weird dream.

The musical number got more complex when there were people sitting in folding chairs with the Martins and Pryors weaving around them. Then a woman near one of the further-away Martins looked down at his trunks, and snickered; he cracked a joke that I couldn't hear and started laughing. Then I woke up.

It's 5AM so I think I'm just gonna go back to sleep.

I'd been stuck in a classroom with a bunch of school teachers. They were all watching a video about the headmaster's plans for global domination. And it was definitely a headmaster, not a principal – I guess this dream was happening in England, despite the lack of an accent.

I slunk out halfway through and started packing my things. I could still hear the narration carrying from room to room. “Give them to me while they are young and I will own them forever”, details about brainwashing methods, etc. I really didn't want to listen but I couldn't not.

The headmaster came out when it was done. He was apologetic, but now he'd have to kill me. So he set his invisible dog on me. Well, not completely invisible. I could see hints of it if I knew to watch for it. And I could see its spine. I grabbed its head and broke its neck the first time – it was a tiny thing at first. I resumed packing, then suddenly I was maneuvering around, using my full suitcase as a weapon. The intent was to crush the dog with it, and I thought I did – I put my whole weight onto it as well – but then the cloth sides of it started bulging, and I realized the fucking thing was eating its way through the suitcase and everything in it.

I fled. To the kitchen, where I found myself rummaging through a drawer of oversized things in search of a couple of big, hefty knives. I abandoned several pairs of scissors and some weird specialized knives. Eventually I had a couple that I… well, I didn't feel confident in them, but I felt less not confident in them than in anything else in that drawer. And not a moment too soon, for there was its spine hovering a foot or two off the ground as it came trotting in, otherwise invisible.

I struck. And started chopping rhythmically with one knife, while stabbing randomly with the other. Eventually it was in two pieces. The front was still trying to get to me, so I kept chopping at it until it gave up. And then I woke up, aching like crazy due to pulling a muscle in aikido last night.

The chopping may have been based on construction sounds outside. Not sure. I just really wish I'd kept having the dream before that, where my mother was tempting me with some really good pie…

Also, as mentioned tangentially above, I pulled a muscle last night. One of the core muscles attached to my ribs, so it's hard to find a good position to sleep in that doesn't put stress on it. I'm going to have to get it looked at and be sure it's not fractured. Assuming it's not, the Internet tells me it'll be achy for a couple weeks. I may be spending a couple days in bed with an ice pack and lots of pillows.

Stuff from my dream last night:

• Someone costumed as the Third Doctor. Well, not really. That's what he said he was, and that's what my brain totally agreed he was, but I don't think the Third Doctor was two stocky guys without heads, both wearing a thick red cape styled like dragon wings, with big plush dragon paws attached to the corners which were being used as mittens.
• A couple of fantasy races lining up for battle. Continuing the dragon theme, Pathia was hanging out with me as we wandered around behind the lines, scoping out the coming conflict and telling me about her sexual conquests in the last time this kind of fight happened.
• The next amazing, bizarre innovation in digital comics: Homestuck was now using gesture recognition, so you now had to make wanking gestures in mid-air to turn the pages.

There was also some kind of lengthy spy/chase thing but I can't remember details beyond that it was pretty damn weird, weird enough that I may have thought it was kinda weird even while dreaming, which is pretty rare for me. I think it involved being chased through a few different realities after sneaking out of a large glassy office complex. In a way very different from being a dream about “Decrypting Rita” would have involved an office building and multiple realities, which I feel I have to clarify now that I type that previous sentence out.

Anyway, guess I'll get out of bed and get ready to go to this weekend figure drawing session in an hour and a half.

In my dreams, I now seem to expect to be able to touch printed text to select and copy it.

There was more – me writing down a complicated dream/memoir/something in a horrible text editor on some combination of my old c64 and Amiga, meeting my mother in an oddly truncated and completely empty room that my brain insisted was the living room of the house I grew up in – but I can't remember it well enough to say anything about it.