So after the previous wave of unpleasant dreams, I started pulling out my magic wand (it’s clear plastic, and full of water with glitter floating in it! Yay!) and warding the bedroom before sleep. Last night I was so beat from aikido class that I didn’t do this. And lo and behold: freaky dreams.

First was something about being woken up by my computer loudly playing a Beatles track out in the studio. I woke up in a completely different place from my actual bedroom – a very dark bedroom, that felt like it was oriented along a different geographical axis, with my bed right next to the window. It felt perfectly normal to be there; the differentness only showed up when I looked back over the dream. In my dream, I lay in bed grumbling for a bit, then pulled on my robe and went out to make my computer STFU.

I poked at it and discovered that apparently I’d installed a few new screensavers before going to bed. The one that was playing was very strange; it was displaying this red/black landscape, with a shiny black demon dude doing a cheesy little dance loop on it. It felt like something 1995-vintage; the demon was clearly a bunch of pre-rendered bitmaps.

I looked at the computer’s main screen. Or what served as such. It was a bunch of cubbyholes built out of wood – real wood, not drawings of wood – with icons between them, and rubbing my fingers on the trackpad moved its pointer awkwardly around. Sometimes it would slide up onto the inner walls of the cubbyholes. All of this was, of course, perfectly normal – though iRL I don’t even have more than one screen on my computer! As I was poking around, trying to deal with this awkward interface and figure out how to get rid of this screensaver, it kept going on the main screen over to my left. The demon dance sprite was showing up more; it had gone from one demon reasonably positioned in the landscape to a whole bunch of copies of it plastered randomly about the screen, all gyrating in synch. It was, quite frankly, kinda creeping me out.

I then slipped into actual consciousness, turned on the light for a bit, and felt vaguely discomfited. It was something like 5AM. I fiddled with the iPad for a bit, reading a chapter of a book I’m working through, looking at Twitter, and whatnot, before going back to sleep.

So then there was another creepy dream!

I was in an area of a town where there were a lot of shops, and a lot of people. There might have been some kind of festival going on, I’m not sure. The roads were a bit curvy and winding. I was walking past what I think was a corset shop; there were some wicker cages hanging out above my head, with tied-up women in them, displaying the place’s wares. It was totally a fairy market by way of BDSM fantasy.

Then I became aware that I was being closely followed. By three people, I think, though the one I really remember is the old woman. Because she actually had her hand on my back as she followed behind me. I twisted to give her a dirty look and she made a noncomittal sort of preverbal noise. So I tried to ditch her by turning sharply to the right, leaving the sidewalk and entering the press of the crowd. But she followed. And then suddenly I was high up in the air – about one story or so, I think – and falling. I landed on the ground on my back with a smash. Or rather, on the entity that was clinging closely to my back.

Then I was awake, and in the sleep paralysis state. And pretty thirsty because I’d had a bit too much in the way of blankets over me and had been sweating.

Interestingly enough, I recognized the sleep paralysis state instantly this time, rather than coming to a gradual realization after three or four resets. Maybe because I was just so damn thirsty, I dunno. I tried getting up and couldn’t, then tried sort of… pushing myself back into dreamstate, just far enough to give myself a good hard push towards wakefulness. Kind of like diving a little below the surface so you can swim up really hard and leap out like a porpoise, you know? It didn’t work the first time. Or the second. But on the third it did; I immediately grabbed the glass of water next to my bed and drained it.

(And amusingly, just as I finish writing this up, my computer begins playing “Scenes From A Night’s Dream”, the Genesis song about “Little Nemo In Slumberland”. Ha. And speaking of which, the Google homepage celebrated the 107th anniversary of that strip’s inception the other day.)

This blog seems to have mostly turned into a dream log lately, hasn’t it? I need to get out more or something.

Well. That was… that was a dream.

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Scene: a clifftop park by the sea. I’m puttering with my laptop. Nick is there too. Suddenly he says “what’s that sound?”. I don’t hear anything, my ears are acting like there’s a sudden, huge change in pressure. Then we look out to sea and there’s this huge wave coming in.

There’s this moment of silence, just watching it rise up and up and up.

“Tsunami”, I say, in a normal but slightly forceful voice. I pick up my laptop and power brick. “Run”.

Then I’m awake.

The flying car landed. It didn’t need much space – just the hundred feet or so of the curiously low-speed intersection in the middle of the highway. It rolled to a stop right at the shoulder.

The driver and I consulted our phones, working out where I had to go next. We were a little southwest of the sixth point in my journey; we couldn’t agree on whether I had to go up the road or down it for a little while. I knew I didn’t want to overshoot, as my map showed a strongly directional plume of radiation going to the southeast from around my next waypoint.

(it’s worth noting that for once my smartphone was fully functional in my dream. I don’t think it was quite the one I have in waking life, but it actually functioned like I expect one to instead of being a crude 1970s-era approximation like I used to get.)

We put the car in reverse and rolled back to the other side of the intersection. A tow truck pulled up but we didn’t need it.

Then there was an edit and I was meeting my contact for the sixth point. A big, bald dude. I could tell it was him because there was a tribal-stylized 6 on the right half of his face. He was just coming back from the grocery store.

Then I woke up.

Well that dream sucked.

Every now and then I get these dreams where one eye is open, and I can’t wake up. Usually after I’ve waken up and gone back to sleep, but not always.

This morning was definitely of the “woken up and went back to sleep” variety. And it was the absolute worst because I knew I was stuck in that state from the very first time I “woke up with my eyes not working”.

I’d been having a dream about getting lost on the way to some weird menial day-job after taking a bus across the city. I came to the place my girlfriends were living and bemoaned the fact that they never came home to sleep with ME any more. Then I think I drifted off to sleep in a bed there. And then I half-opened one eye and saw my glasses sitting atop my iPad, from where I’d left them when I woke up earlier today and went back to sleep.

I wandered out into the studio and into the kitchen. It all looked perfectly normal. As I passed through the studio, my feet kicked some cardboard boxes that were still there from unpacking from Rainfurrest, but that weren’t there in my dream rendition of my apartment. (Which, now that I look back on it, was generally (a) a little bigger than the real thing, and (b) cleaner.

I decided to try going into the bathroom to pee. The toilet is never Quite Right in my having-to-pee dreams; I figured that should help me wake up. On my way back through the studio I was stopped by a dream person who was absolutely fascinated by something I was wearing on my feet; he tried to drag me into a conversation about it but I was resolute on my “try to wake myself up by failing to pee in whatever was in the bathroom instead of a toilet” mission. I went to where the bathroom should be, which was instead an opulent second bedroom. The dream person followed me, taking on something of the aspect of Ashy, all dressed up in their finest foppish finery. There was another smaller dream person puttering around but I don’t remember them doing anything in particular.

I went into the bathroom. Which was larger than my real one, and shaped a bit differently. And, most importantly, just had an empty place on the tiles where I expected the toilet to be. No pipes sticking up, just a clean spot in the middle of the kind of stains that accumulate on the floor around toilets. “Well, I could clean around it more easily now,” I briefly thought. I unlocked the door (which had a circular window in it and was locked by a latch around eye height, rather like the changing rooms at the vintage shop I patronize, instead of the usual opacity and latch by the doorknob found in most bathrooms) and went back out into the opulent dream bedroom.

Out there dream-Ashy was still talking to me about something. What, I don’t know. I wasn’t paying any attention; I was entirely focused on the fact that I was stuck in this threshold state with one eye open in the real world and I wanted to WAKE THE FUCK UP.

Then I went back into the bathroom, without locking it. And this time where the toilet should have been there was this alien… contrivance. Some sort of spherical thing made of porcelain, with a few little holes in which water laid. It looked like a cartoonist’s idea of what would be found in the bathroom of an intergalactic dive bar. When I looked away from it and back, it was something else entirely. Something even less appropriate for peeing on or in, that I can’t remember how to describe. There were 4-5 shapes it would cycle between when I looked away. Almost but not quite in an order. Some of them were these sculptures, with mesh over holes, and wooden faces peering out at me. I called Ashy’s attention to this. And then I was like “whatever, I’m going to see if pissing on it will wake me up”. And I took my penis out, aimed, and let loose. To be rewarded by the sensation of moistness spreading around my loins as if I’d pissed myself. But I still didn’t wake up.

Then I was back in my bedroom, running around screaming for help and seriously regretting that I’m currently living alone. Would I be stuck like this until my body died? Not a pleasant prospect. I say I was screaming, but I wasn’t – I could tell I wasn’t actually making a single sound; I could tell that my mouth was muffled against my pillow.

And then I finally woke up. With a gasp. And with a full bladder and no wet spot on the bed. And a LOT OF RELIEF. I was very definitely AWAKE, none of that muzzy “eh I’m awake but I’m still dreamy and might go back to sleep” stuff.

This is the closest thing to a recurring nightmare I’ve ever had. The “can’t wake up for real” dream. It is never fun. Usually it takes three or four cycles of getting up with my eyes “stuck on one image”, fumbling my way out of the normal bedroom and into increasingly strange dream versions of my place, and being reset to lying in bed before I realize what’s going on, but this morning I knew it from the start. That’s unusual, and I don’t know what to think about that. I guess I’ll see if I recognize it this fast next time. And maybe I’ll know that the toilet trick never works.

Does anyone else out there have this kind of dream? Got any strategies for dealing with it?

This dream is jumbling up rapidly. It involved, not necessarily in this order:

– a male harpy with a penis on his forehead. He pressed it into a guy’s forehead, slowly, and stayed there for a while; when he drew back there was a bloody hole and his victim was dead. “Don’t worry,” the harpy said. “He’s safe inside me.” (There was an implication that this skull-fucking involved completely copying the personality, in a rather rapey way.) Then he was coming at me. I was holding him back with one had, as the other fumbled with a rusty revolver. I pulled the trigger several times but to no avail. Fiddled with the magazine, then suddenly pulling the trigger took a LOT more effort. Over a half a minute or so I managed to squeeze it, shooting this mind-fucking harpy guy dead. This bit, I think, happened on a train.

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This dream started in my studio. It was night, but I had the front window open. A car pulled up in front of the building, and a couple of my neighbors got out. One of them was wearing this fluffy white fox? costume. I stuck my head out the window and said “Wow! Nice fursuit!” as she climbed up the stairs; she nodded, and proceeded around to the side of the building where her entrance is. (My apartment building is a small one, that doesn’t have a foyer or anything – ground floor apartments like mine open directly to the outside, upper ones have short stairs up to their doors.)

Then I went into the bathroom and things got decidedly stranger.

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Tonight in my dreams I was running. A lot. And when I ran… everything slowed down. I could feel all my muscles moving. Think about how to deal with my next step. Contemplate the biomechanics of every step for maximum speed. I experimented with how I moved my legs, and never really found what felt like the RIGHT way to move them for the speeds I was casually attaining.

I would have been able to run faster if I’d been wearing shoes, or barefoot; I had to keep worrying about pulling up my socks. At one point I pulled them up mid-stride, it was awesome.

Every step seemed to take ten seconds or so. And I wasn’t getting tired at all. I felt like I could do this forever. “This is what it’s like to be Rita”, I thought as I soared down a street in slow-mo.

At one point I found myself on a raised platform, partially in a tree. I could leap up, hang on a limb, and swing to the next, still on slow-mo. I could start to swing to another one, decide it looked too weak, and divert to a different one. I only did this a bit before going back to running. I also ran up a slanted wall, then casually leapt off the top; I caught myself for a moment on a protruding decoration on the wall, but it felt unstable so I let go, and slowly drifted to the ground, where I easily absorbed the shock of landing with my knees.

Then I dreamed I woke up. I wanted to reach for my iPad and record this dream. My bedroom was a mess; there was a half-disassembled bike in my bed, there was a multicolored construction of balloons on the floor, there were a couple little flying robots of some kind flittering around silently. I ignored all this and picked up the iPad, then plopped it into my bed. I pushed the bike out of the way; as I did, I heard a sputtering, buzzing noise from the iPad. I pulled it from under the covers to discover that it was plugged in – but the cord was blackened and almost melted in some places, and hooked to a janky-looking little power adaptor that felt way too warm. I unplugged that right away.

Then I woke up for real. Well, assuming this is real.

As I wrote this, I could hear fire engines rushing out (I live on the same block as a firehouse). I decided to go check on the extension cord my iPad is plugged into. Just in case.

The running in the dream was amazing. It felt perfectly normal for time to slow down around me as I ran. I was just noticing it for the first time, is all. I was trying to decide if things looked darker when I was in this sped-up personal time; sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. I am really hoping to have this dream ability return at some point! At the very least, I hope I can recall how it felt a couple chapters of Rita down the line; there’s going to be a sequence with her running for the pure joy of it.

The iPad not working is a common theme in my dreams. Sort of. This is the first time I’ve tried to use the iPad in my dreams; usually it’s my phone that I pull out and fail to use. Often this is because it’s not actually my smartphone; I’ve had an assortment of attempts at building one with 1970s and 1980s tech show up instead of my Nexus One. And for all the time I spend in front of my computer, I almost never dream about it. I’ve dreamt about mucking once or twice, when I was doing that a lot, and that’s it.

There was also something about my mother, my friends back home Jennie and Jason, and an outfit I was wearing for a while whose bra matched the dress. I changed clothes a couple times in this dream, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before.

This was not quite a nightmare but it had this foreboding feeling, as of at any moment something might jump out and turn it into horror.

There was this complex/mine on an alien planet. Made by unknown hands and found abandoned, it looked like nothing more than endless institutional corridors – say, those found in a college – with occasional elevators. Why people were exploring this was never mentioned, but they were. Enough that there seemed to be some kind of company set up to deal with this exploration.

There were some places you shouldn’t step because unspecified Bad Things would happen.

I met two people in the complex’s rec room who had gotten into one of the elevators (which seemed to have no actual buttons?). One of them, standing on their hands, pushed their nose against the wall where mutations might be, and said they were pressing two – and the elevator started going down, and down, and down, and down. They had to call for an emergency teleport out. Nobody knew what was in the depths of this place, and they weren’t eager to be the ones who found out. People vanished regularly here.

I, personally, was in the edge of this place, just sitting there listening to their stories and drawing the people. Then we poked at the TV and found this Tezuka-era cartoon about giant robots or something, with a name that stared with O, that morphed into a feature done by the Fleischer studios that I was excited to see because I’d only ever read about it. Said feature seemed to involve Bimbo and Betty Boop, and doesn’t actually exist – it was full of the insanity of their shorts, rather than the Disney imitation of their actual features. I wasn’t sure if the carpet here was Safe to step on, so I really didn’t get out of my chair.

Then I was fooling with a complicated air conditioner control panel. Which seemed to have a slightly malign presence hanging over it.

I discussed this with Tobias the Adequate for a bit – he was working at wherever this panel was. It might have been part of the alien hallways from before, I’m not sure. We walked around as we talked; suddenly we rounded a corner and he was gone, replaced by Jason Wodicka on a bicycle, zipping away rapidly and still conversing. I started running after him, through a tunnel that became grassy hills with winding paths. I was able to make some time by cutting straight down the hill across the paths, and catch up to briefly exchange the next couple sentences.

Suddenly I was on a bike myself, following along – but we shortly came to a dead end, a concrete ledge with a long drop-off. Jason situated himself in the middle of a pink square painted on the concrete and pedaled off, landing heavily but unharmed on the ground below and zipping off. I was not so confident; I looked around and found that I’d biked a little further, right to the end of this ledge. Where the concrete was painted red. And a little before the pink area was another red one. I surmised that this meant “safe” vs. “unsafe” – or maybe “barely doable” vs. “impossible” – and wanted to have a look around to confirm my theory. As I did, more people started showing up on their bikes and not taking the jump.

I looked out a window (the architecture of this place was nonsensical, I was clearly outside already) and scoped out some funky jumps that, in retrospect, seemed like they belonged in a platform game. There was color-coding; these were calmer colors like yellow and blue, but were still pretty impossible for me. I had to gingerly hang out the window and stretch to grab an overhanging wooden structure to look at this stuff; it was incredibly precarious and dangerous-feeling. This side path seemed to involve swinging through some holes in structures put up solely to provide a jumping challenge, catching some kind of air current ride or something, going up a level and back, and looping around into the window beside me. I didn’t try it, just turned around and dragged myself back inside. With no help from any of the people waiting for my report. Dicks. They just went en masse to their bikes and started taking the same jumps I was looking at before.

I discovered a sloping path that hadn’t been there before. Some people were going down it to make their bike jumps. I was going to get mine and do that when I woke up.

The striking thing about this dream, overall, was the sense of looming menace. Nothing bad ever happened. But I felt like something was about to go horribly wrong throughout the whole thing.