DREAM THREAD Part Pi.Pi!

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
For the record I've still been having dreams like crazy and some of them have been really good but I haven't been able to remember them at all lately. I might remember one little element, but it seems kind of stupid to make a post of "We were in this thing and we were doing these things when this other thing happened. You had to be there."
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
What do you know? Apparently I remember the dreams better if I don't sleep well. Hot sticky night last night. Stuffy nose. Dog wanted to go out around 3:30. But it was raining pretty heavy all night so she hesitated at the door and I coaxed her to go out so I checked on her after 5 minutes, 15 minutes after that, and again around 6 (of course she didn't want to come back in so part of my brain was worrying that the rain would really get worse without waking me up and I'd find her standing, staring at the back door while drenched in a downpour.

So I dreamed that I was working for a company that was having some kind of restructuring. They had a bunch of us sitting in a conference room with big printouts of some kind of process or operations manual and we were going through it and updating it by hand. "OK. On page...37, near the top, it says 'operations manager,' that's going to be Kelly, so line that out and write in her name." But for some reason they hadn't printed mine out, so I'm trying to follow along and take notes. Meanwhile there was another group in another conference room next door doing a day long training session on how to take over some process from some other group. I was still there, going over notes after everyone else had left and the boss would stop in from time to time to check on me and we'd make some small talk about the restructuring. Occasionally the other door would open and I could see the other room, looking at a PowerPoint presentation or something.

The interesting thing about this is that it made me realize that, along with recurring dream locations, I've also literally had "dream jobs." I had one recurring dream where I work in some kind of fancy professional office--not a law office, but something like that. They really don't have anything for me to do and they know it, but they keep me around because they think I could come in handy, so they come up with busywork for me and I feel kind of pointless and wonder when someone will decide not to keep me around. I suspect this is based on at least 1 internship I did while getting my MBA. Then there's a complementary/opposing blue collar dream where I'm cleaning or doing maintenance that, I think, is off a long-term night temp job my last year of college. There was a waste processing plant where the garbage trucks would unload that would sort and crunch up all the trash for whatever happened to it after that. We'd come in at night and clean everything up for the next day--shovel up all the stuff that had fallen off the belts, jackhammer twine and videotape and such that had wound around drive wheels, etc. This was an actual job I had. I really can't remember anything about the dream blue collar job except it was similar, maybe with bits of other blue collar jobs I've had thrown in.
 

The Question

Eternal
I had a weird one again last night. (To be fair, most of the ones I remember sufficiently to recollect them here are the weird ones.)

I was with my ex and her family in some kind of meeting hall / waystation place. Like a weird mishmash of a bus station, truck stop, meeting hall, but all one thing with all those functions integral to it. Her family is just wandering around the place, but there's multiple instances of each one of them. She and I were sort of the 'black sheep' of her family because there was only one of each of us. And what we were there for was the 'birth' of a clone of one of the kids in her family.

The dream starts, though, sometime after said birth had already taken place and we're all getting ready to hit the road again. She hands me a handful of change and tells me to go over to this machine and win her some of what's in it. The machine is weird because although it looks like a bubblegum machine, it takes any denomination of coin from a penny up to a quarter, and when you put your coin in and turn the little handle dealie-bob to drop the coin into the coin box, you're not actually buying what's inside, you're playing the lottery. Maaaybe you get some of what's in the thing? Maaaaaaybe you don't. So I'm putting in coin after coin, turning the little handle, and I win, like a few times. So now there's a mountain of this... stuff. Except it's not gumballs, or whatever, it's these weird, tiny, soft candy-like pellets. Like grains of rice, almost, but they're soft and apparently nothing but pure sugar bound together with I-don't-know-what. They taste like cake icing.

Just as I make this discovery, the ex and her family are heading out and yelling for me to catch up. This is about where I start waking up 'cause the dream is starting to fade away.

IDK for sure, but I think I may have been dreaming that I was a red blood cell. :/
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Last night I woke up and after awhile I thought I couldn't get back to sleep, until I realized the last thing I'd been doing was watching a documentary on either the movie "Heaven's Gate" or "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" where either the director or the reviewer was way up the side of this stone tower/monument and dropped the other (the reviewer or the director, depending on who was higher up, at a kind of doorway) off to their death. So most likely I'd actually been sound asleep for hours, dreaming I was awake. I also watched some kind of cartoon before the documentary, but I don't remember any details of that.
 

The Question

Eternal
Haven't had any interesting ones since the last one I related from Friday night, but.

I was just sitting here and kinda zoning out, and I remembered a recurring dream I used to have when I was a kid; this one was plenty weird.

I would have this recurring dream, when I was a little kid, that I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other kids. It was a round room, made entirely of concrete; the materials and the smells were very reminiscent of an indoor public swimming pool, for anybody who's ever experienced one of those. Probably not many of you have. Smell of chlorine, everything's concrete and metal with round holes, etc.

Anyway, I'm sitting on this sort of concrete bench that's built into the wall all the way around the room except for the doorway. In the middle of the floor is this round hole. It's me and all these other kids in this room, we're packed in there tight, sitting shoulder to shoulder. This guy comes in wearing a lab coat and a face mask, and he starts passing out plastic bags. With feet in them. Brand new human feet. Because of course you see... it's time for us to change our feet.

And sure enough, all of us have worn out feet. Holes in them, and so on. One kid's got a hole worn clean through one of his feet. So this guy is passing out new feet, one bag per kid, the other kids are taking their old feet off and tossing their used feet down the hole in the middle of the floor. The guy starts looking at me kind of annoyed like 'cause I haven't taken my feet off. Pretty soon he's ignoring me and the other kids are giving me dirty looks.

But y'see, I can't go taking my old feet off, 'cause the guy hasn't given me my new feet yet. I'm not just gonna go hobbling around on leg-stumps with no feet on them.

Pretty soon all the other kids have walked out on their new feet and I'm still sitting there. Voice comes over a loudspeaker and tells me that I can't leave wearing my worn-out old feet. I yell back they didn't give me my new feet yet, but somehow I know it's just a speaker and they can't hear me. That was usually about the time I'd wake up.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Had one last night. There are probably riffs about the virus in it, combined with a home renovation I'm doing, unexpected expenses, and of course the rain that came down like a bastard most of the night:

A bunch of people are gathered together at a big old house for some to-do and a big storm hits that we've got to weather. I'm on the back balcony/fire escape, looking out at the vehicles in the parking lot. Some of the convertibles, their roofs are coming loose. The guy who rode his motorcycle is not happy. I'm also checking out the eave on the roof, which overhangs the balcony. It is thoroughly soaked and the wood is rotted. I'm trying to resist the temptation to tear of rotten edges of the roof--not entirely successfully.

Go back inside to kill time and there's this fake fireplace set up. You know, like for a Christmas display. It's either brick printed on corrugated cardboard or brick printed wrapping paper, taped to the wall in the shape of a fireplace. Then there are assorted cards and trinkets taped/tacked to it. I'm looking at it and more than a couple had those little electronic players like they have in some novelty greeting cards and I set too many off at once so I can't hear any of them clearly. On top of that, some of them are apparently old, left over from previous Christmases because they are sentimental so their batteries are getting low. I feel a little guilty that I've wasted some of the battery on irreplaceable cards.

That's about when I woke up.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Well, my fucking computer just ate most of this post and as I was typing it I realized it didn't make any sense anyway, so I'm not going to waste time typing it all out again. Long story short, I had another dream that I wasn't actually in, it was like I was watching a TV show--specifically a classic Tom Baker "Dr. Who" story, only those old stories were very linear for the main character having a time machine; lots of "we've got to get back before we're too late!" Um, Doc? You have a TIME MACHINE. You can get back before you left (as long as you don't tell yourself not to go or something). The story was more like "Inception" or even the end of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," where they keep telling themselves after they do whatever they're doing, they need to go back in time to set up a booby trap to get them out of whatever trouble they're in at the moment. Or even the TNG episode with Mark Twain, where they find Data's head in a cave in San Francisco.

Something got stolen in the middle of the plot that was the key element of the plot so the Doctor had to go back and recover it and replace it immediately after it disappeared so that the events that had already happened would unfold the way they were supposed to instead of forming a paradox. I'd explain it more, but it was a lot of typing. And the more I typed, the more I realized how much the dream was changing while I was having it. It all made sense at the time because, Dream Logic, but typing it out, it was total gibberish.
 

The Question

Eternal
This isn't so much about a dream I had as it is about a series of recurring dreams which it just occurred to me I haven't been having anymore.

Specifically, I'd have nightmares (in my case, nightmares aren't 'scary', per se, just irritating) about being stranded in a tiny shit-ass town with the only available shelter being a crusty old house and having no way to get back to my relatively nice (small but very modern) apartment in my relatively nice city.

I guess the reason I don't have those nightmares anymore is that in real life I'm now stranded in a tiny shit-ass town with the only available shelter being a crusty old house and have no way to get back to my relatively nice (small but very modern) apartment in my relatively nice city.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
I got burglarized almost a year ago. Professional job. While I was out walking my dog on a Sunday morning they busted the latches on a bedroom window with a big screwdriver and took ONLY my guns. Police recovered one of them. It was tied for the one I wanted back most. That's another story. The other one was a '94 Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine that was my first gun. I won it in a raffle. Wonderful "fiddleback" stock. My Dad polished it until it looked like glass. One of the last guns I'd pick to solve a problem but absolutely irreplaceable, given that my Dad died 20 years ago.

Anyways, the dream! The location changed to the Wisconsin farm where I grew up and around a year after the burglary, the guns turned up, stuffed into some barrel in some outbuilding. Don't know if (in the dream) they were there all along or the crooks brought them back for some reason, but not only were all my guns back, some ones of my Dad's which we hadn't realized were missing were there too. (Of course the idea that Dad would lose track of guns is absurd; the reason I was even able to report a few of the guns is my Dad wrote down their serial numbers.)
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Fairly involved one this morning that was part coronavirus response and part that Star Trek with the flying space amoebas that take over Spock (which was on last night before bed) and maybe a few other things.

I had this bus. But it didn't work so I had to pull it around like a draft animal (it must have been a balsa-wood bus, more on that later). Then I was in the way of another bus and I felt bad because I couldn't pull it along very fast but the guy couldn't get around me. Then at some point I had to lift the bus up onto/over something, so I found this handy asphalt loading dock on the sidewalk. As I was maneuvering the bus up it, the business owner came over to tell me it wasn't permitted to put more than 15# on the ramp because of coronavirus regulations. I looked at him with this "that's stupid" expression and he let it slide but warned that there was a $100 fine if I got caught. At this point I rhetorically asked if the ramp would hold more than 15# and made eye gestures to the asphalt street next to it that dozens of cars were driving on.

At this point the bus isn't a rusted out school bus anymore, it's a rusted out Greyhound that actually runs, but the radio doesn't work right. And I'm not in a city during the summertime, I'm in the woods in winter. Think helicopter footage of a pack of wolves hunting a moose. There may or may not have been someone with me because the radio turned on for news of what was going on but then I turned it off because everything was deserted by then I heard voices--which was apparently important. A fairly good-sized family comes running out of the trees with their dogs and I know they're being pursued. I start loading them on the bus but the Dad is screwing around, along with their big dog. When everyone else is on, the bandits/Cossacks and their pack of dogs and chickens(!?) came out of the woods. The Dad was almost to the door but the dog fell down and he went back for him. Now they're on the wrong side of the bus so I'm trying to maneuver in the snow and grass to get them next to the door. At this point we're surrounded and I'm worried about the chickens infiltrating under the bus. The Dad picked up the dog and made it a step or two before falling/getting knocked down and surrounded. At this point I know they're going to kill him but I also know I can't open the door and there's nothing I can do. Happily I woke up about that point.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Dreamed that I left my fridge opened and all the food went off. Forgot about it until this evening when I opened the fridge and thought "oh the food is fine."
 

The Question

Eternal
Not much memorable about last night's except that toward the end of it I was standing in some kind of industrial kitchen and somebody's screaming. So I wander around until I find the source of it and there's a guy collarbones deep in some kind of meat grinder. But like a weird tabletop meat grinder of some kind, like there's a grating flush with the top of the table, this guy's sticking up out of it from the collarbones up, screaming, while stacks of sliced bologna are kind of tumbling out of a square cutout in the side of the table.

So the guy's getting literally turned into Oscar Mayer lunchmeat, except the part of him sticking up and screaming looks like a really bad animatronic puppet from a very low budget '80s horror movie and I'm just standing there staring, wondering how the fuck he's screaming when he's got no lungs, and where the fuck the red plastic ribbon is coming from that's showing up on the bologna the machine is turning him into.

I don't even have "normal person" nightmares.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Dreamed that I left my fridge opened and all the food went off. Forgot about it until this evening when I opened the fridge and thought "oh the food is fine."
It's always trippy when you have a super mundane dream and later realize Reality is different.
 

The Question

Eternal
The worst ones are where you get your hands on a shitload of cash and realize, as you start waking up, that it isn't going to follow you into the waking world. :(
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
The dreams have been off the hook lately. Unfortunately they've been so complex and odd that they'd be impossible to explain even if I remembered more than snippets of them when I wake.
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Had one this morning that was perfect but I forgot it--until I was driving somewhere and it came back to me: I'd moved to a new state and needed to change my drivers license over. But this state wasn't just bring in the old license and they give you a new one. They had a 2 part test. The first part was a fairly straightforward knowledge test, where it asked questions like what you do if a light is yellow and who has the right of way and stuff. The other part was they had this cabinet of 24 or so drawers (kind of like an old library card catalog). Each drawer had an item in it. You had as long as you wanted, but you had to open each drawer, memorize the item and then take a test on what was in which drawer. And here's the kicker: You didn't just have to pick "tennis balls" you had to pick how many tennis balls were in the drawer.

I took the test multiple times because I couldn't hold the knowledge questions, remembering what was in every drawer AND how many in my head at the same time. At some point I bitched about it and some manager came out to show me how easy it was. By the end of the dream I was like "well, I guess I'm going to drive around without a license from now on." [Oh, and he said it was because when you're driving you often need to think about more than 1 thing at a time without getting distracted or impaired. ]
 

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Fairly involved story last night--although it quickly got so incoherent even my subconscious wasn't able to make it all make sense. At some point I'm going, wait, this is some bullshit right here.

Anyway, as I remember it, "we" were stuck in the house because of rotten weather. Stuck there all day but at some point we ran out of something and I had to go to the store to get it. Because of current events, I decided to carry concealed. But then...[it gets hazy the reasoning]...I decided that wasn't a good idea. Some combination of that I wasn't wearing the coat that would conceal the holster, I was for some reason also wearing a military pistol belt with a canteen (and since it was a regular leather belt holster, the pistol belt had to go over it and was too tight to be buckled, the brown leather holster didn't go with my predominantly black outfit, and the idea of walking around in a store with a Punisher T-shirt and a pistol (I have no idea why I was wearing a Punisher T-shirt) seemed stupid. So I went out to my car to stick the pistol belt and the pistol in the trunk. Since I was just popping out and coming back I didn't bother with a coat and needed to get back inside ASAP because it was brutally cold out but I couldn't find my car. There was another Mustang right about where I'd parked but it clearly wasn't mine. Then I realized I was 1 row over. BUT there were police cars/lights coming. It was legal for me to be carrying, but it's always better to be safe than sorry so I'm trying to not draw attention to the pistol. As I'm sticking the stuff in the trunk--where I (in the dream) also have another pistol and an AR15--the cops start setting up and getting on the radio. There's someone barricaded in a store (it's like a strip-mall parking lot and this is like, a free standing restauraunt/bar in the parking lot). Concerned Good Samaritans who are armed are lining up to help the cops. I'm grumbling because I don't want to get involved, I've got my shopping to do, and it's cold out and I don't have my coat (although by now the cold subplot has gone away) but decide to grab the pistol and go help.

Meanwhile, Ernie Hudson--or a dream character played by Ernie Hudson that I apparently know at least in passing--realizes I've got more guns in the trunk and asks me to loan him one to help out. I'm not at all thrilled with this, but it's kind of hard to say no. I do refuse to give him the AR15 and ask him if he actually knows how to handle a gun before giving him the 9mm. At this point I'm keeping one eye on him to make sure he doesn't just walk off with my gun and go over the the cops to ask if they need any help. I tell them I also have an AR15 if they need more firepower but they've got theirs. At this point they say something like "Oh, we'll be emptying a few clips at them, but we've called in a bomb and when that arrives, this whole area is going to be fucked."

I think at that point my subconscious just couldn't come up with anything else. I did make sure I got my pistol back from Ernie Hudson because it was time to get the heck out of there before the police dropped their Bomb.
 

The Question

Eternal
Had a slightly annoying-with-an-interesting-twist one last night. Dreamed I got home to find cop cars all up and down my street and a big police van in my driveway, then they tried arresting me for being in possession of vape stuff. Except in the dream it wasn't illegal, the head cop on the scene just didn't like it and was going around arresting people for having the stuff so he could have his underlings seize it as evidence. So he was just mobbing around the town stealing everybody's shit and tying it up in connection with bogus arrests.

So I just made all my shit disappear, Q style, then when I realized I could do that, made all the cop vehicles disappear and magicked Head Cop up onto the roof of my house and told him HE was being detained, the sum total of all those actions making him screaming mad.

Said head cop, by the way, was William Shatner. That was the Interesting Twist.
 

The Question

Eternal
I've also noticed that I can start exhibiting more or less total control of the dream environment + props + characters in it, but only just as I start to become aware that I'm headed back toward wakefulness. Still, fun times are had in that narrow window of opportunity.
 
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