Well. I’ve never had a dream end by having everything go pixelly, then bring up a LIVES REMAINING: 2 screen.

So let’s rewind. How’d I get there?

I was riding my hovering cardboard tube through a narrow, dimly-lit underground tunnel. My three companions were all clustered on one tube ahead of me, urging me to move fast. I got hung up with navigating the obstacles, in part because I wasn’t anywhere near as skilled with riding a hovering cardboard tube (they could stand on it like a skateboard, I was sitting on it with my legs dangling off the sides), so they pulled ahead and vanished round a turn. Then the lights came up and there was a mass of children screaming from above (or at least I was told it was children, I couldn’t see them at all) and an absolute rain of little wrapped-up candies. I pressed forwards through this, ducking to get under some of the stone arches that made the passage more complicated.

Then the water rose. It was black and cold. Evidently my tube hovered at a modest height above the GROUND not any surface, as I was now waist-deep in water. And the lights went down, replaced by guttering candles above me. I slowly came to a stop because, well, freezing. And my viewpoint lifted up to third person. Which evidently now was of a squat little cartoon character. Who kinda reminded me of Cerberus the Aardvark, so I will call this character that.

There was cheesy hair metal playing in the background. I recognized it but didn’t like it.

Cerberus looked up at one of the candles and it started to go pixelly. Then this amorphous low-res black blob reached out for him, surrounded him, and drew him up off the submerged hovering cardboard tube. I said, “Elk-elf! Come back into the panel!” – and then everything went black, except for the low-res text with the lives remaining counter.

And then I woke up.

—-

Before that things had been much more fun. There had been, in reverse order, zooming through the city on these hovering cardboard tubes with a cute nerdy lady and two cute guys, there had been lying on a couch tangled up with said lady and flirting with her (and examining her huge, intricate in-progress tattoo – it was going across the back of her neck and shoulders, and was this complex thing with heavy blacks and bright colors, kind of abstract shapes with jungle cats emerging from them). There was an advertisement for some projection rig that covered about 180° of the room in front of you, though only a couple of the games for the video game system plugged into it could use that whole display. There was a movie I was going to see that was advertised as combining some philosopher with cute animated antics; for a bit I was running around trying to avoid its hummingbird-winged main character, who was pursuing me trying to give me an advertising pitch. It was perfectly polite when it finally caught up with me despite me swatting at it with a book.

Also at some point (I think before I went in to see the movie, with the woman I would later be flirting with being one of two people behind the ticket counter) I was emptying out my purse. Which held about four times as much stuff as should fit in it, including an ELECTRIC DRILL that ran even though it had a long cord that was plugged into nothing. When they saw that they took me down to the special MAKER LOUNGE instead of the movie.

I kinda want to go back to sleep and see if I can get back to flirting with the lady in the blue dress and the abstract jungle tattoo, but last night I told myself that I was going to quit sleeping all damn morning like I’ve been doing for a while. It’s almost eight so I guess I’m gonna get up.

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.

Continue reading →

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.