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.