Bubble

I have the flu, so my dreams have been weird or unsettling. This is a few nights' of dreams gathered into one entry.

The first night, when I was just coming down with the flu, I felt like garbage and had weird fever dreams where friends were inviting me to LuLaRoe (it's a garbage clothing MLM) parties and trying to sell me things. I kept waking up angry and wanting to be left alone, then falling back to sleep and having the same dream over again but with a different person. Why my brain was obsessed with people trying to sell me MLM shit, I have no idea, but that was all I dreamed about the entire night.

Last night, I dreamed about 3 different people who were dead, those dreams where you forget they're dead and they're alive again and then you wake up and realize they're dead. The first 2 were dead pets (a cat and a rabbit) and the third one was my stepfather. I woke up from the 3rd dream thinking "Wow it's been a while since I've seen stepfather, how come?" and then woke up a little bit more and remembered that it's because he's dead and started crying. The crying did not help my already-flu-congested face. On the other hand, at least I got to pet my dead rabbit for 15 dream minutes, and she was as soft as I remember.

Dream 1:
I am a member of some sort of death camp or something. This starts out as a run of the mill nightmare - I'm terrified of being executed. The people running the camp use some sort of liquid, rather than a gas, to execute prisoners - it soaks right through clothing, rubber boots, etc. (it doesn't matter) and kills you pretty much instantly. The chambers they keep/use this stuff in look like 1960s era technology. One of these chambers malfunctions, spilling the liquid all over the place - it kills a bunch of little kids who are walking single file through the hallway, but it also kills a lot of the officers who are leading/marching them along, as well as the ones operating the thing... as soon as they realize what's happening, they start trying to get away from the liquid creeping along the floor. I overcome my horror at the situation and decide to escape, but not before locking the heavy metal door behind me. Because f*** those guys.

I escape and it's some sort of heavily forested environment. I am half-dead when I encounter a band of orcs. They decide not to kill me. Eventually, I join their ranks, after a few rites of passage (I'm a dude in this dream). During all of this, there are some skirmishes over territory. One of their older (and more respected) members is old and ailing. Their way of dealing with situations like this is to hasten the warrior's death, rather than letting it drag out. With a great deal of ceremony, they build a pyre, and set him atop it wrapped in ceremonial robes. He's doused with some sort of flammable liquid and they set the whole thing on fire.
I get mortally wounded in one of the border skirmishes. It's a gut wound, which means I'm going to die slowly and horribly anyway. They wouldn't normally allow the honor to an outsider, but I've proven myself to the group over and over again, so I've earned the same honorable death. The dream ends with me climbing atop my own pyre and being set alight.

Dream 2:
I dreamed that I was walking by a bus stop with my brother. The landscape was flat, more like the Midwest than where we currently live. A coworker of mine (T) was there waiting for the bus. My brother and I were going to a bar on a local riverboat (it was John's or Jack's or something). We invited her to come along, but she only had 11 minutes until the bus arrived, so she didn't have time to hang out at the bar with us. She'd been standing at the bus 76 stop, but realized that she needed the bus 71 stop around the corner, so she said she had to go.

My brother and I continued onto the boat. We saw that there was somehow an amusement park on it, and there was a spinning ride that was called The Eagle. We went up the steps to the park (the bar was below) and debated getting on the ride. While we were discussing it, the boat departed from the shore. I pointed out that none of the various rides had safety measures (like railings to prevent you from getting too close to the ride while it was in operation). M and I agreed that it was too unsafe, and decided to head down to the bar.

As we make the decision, the riverboat starts to tilt. Something's wrong, and the boat is starting to sink in the water. It hasn't fully sunk, and the staff is trying to calm everybody down, saying the situation is under control, even though it pretty clearly isn't. The bar starts evacuating their patrons to the upper deck, since the lower deck is getting perilously close to completely flooding.

The boat tilts even more, and water rushes across the deck. Somehow the whole thing turns completely upside down. My brother and I have moved close enough to the edge that as it gets submerged, we're able to avoid getting trapped underneath the boat. We hang on the edge of the capsized boat while I try to figure out if we can make it to shore by swimming, or if we should stick close to the submerged boat and hope that enough of it stays afloat that we can hang onto it. I decide that it's too far to shore, and any rescue operation is going to be looking for us here. I suggest to M that we stay with the boat.

Dream 3:
I am at a museum. There is a huge (like 50 feet tall) tank of water. It's set up so that when you touch it or it comes in contact with a conductive object, lights and patterns flash through it. They drop a metal ladder into it and I'm worried that it's going to break the glass as it scrapes against the side. They're demonstrating the effects that it produces, but the effect right now is underwhelming - all of the lights and colors are inside a little box that a scuba diver in the tank is holding. I was expecting the whole tank to light up. I decide the whole thing is a waste.

Dream 4:
For some reason, I have a collection of Barbie dolls and My Little Ponies. Some of the Barbies are themed (like one has tiny Sailor Moon costumes and there is a Darien doll). Another has a white dress, and I have a package of clothes with long white gloves and high heels, and am thinking about opening her and putting the gloves and heels on her.
I am organizing these toys. They are on what looks like a store rack, but they're mine. I want to play with them, but I realize I'm far too old for that, and that if I open them it might ruin any value they have to collectors.
I am going to play with one, but then my mother starts a fight with me, and when I come back to my Barbies, the mood is ruined. I get some ponies out, but they are only made of colorful stiff cardboard, so I'm disappointed. I toss them up into the air, and they rise higher and higher, and are picked up by a gust of wind, and disappear into the sky.

Dream 5:
I am flying a kite. It's a very large kite. I am with a blonde girl with chin-length wavy hair, and she is watching me fly it. Rather than a string, the kite is attached to a bolt of fabric. It's difficult to hold onto the spool because the wind is so strong and the kite is so large.
The girl asks if she can fly the kite. I hand her the spool and she tosses it into the air. I get angry and say,"Why did you do that? Now I'll never get my kite back!". The spool bounces through the air across the field. I run after it and manage to grab it. The girl asks to fly it again, and promises she won't throw the spool again. I'm an idiot in this dream, so I tell her fine, she can fly the kite as long as she doesn't throw the spool. I hand her the spool, and she throws it again. I yell at her again.
I look in the direction of the kite, and there is a huge rainbow in the sky. It is so brilliant and intense that it looks solid. I want to take a photo of it, so I dig through the car (which is a subaru SUV) for a camera. I find what I think is my camera and turn it on, but when the shutter extends from the body of the camera, I realize it is not mine, but belongs to my friend. I frantically begin digging for my cheap little point-and-click. I find it, but it won't take a photo no matter what I do. I'm getting very frustrated because the rainbow is fading. I start trying to take a photo with my camera, but it doesn't work, and when I finally get a photo, the rainbow has faded to traces of red. I'm really disappointed, but a faceless friend (the one who owned the other camera) reassures me that he got a good photo of it, and he will share it with me once he gets it off his camera. I feel somewhat better.

Dream 6:
I am in a rundown sort of house. There's a great-room that leads to two bedrooms and a bathroom, and above it is a closet, bathroom, and bedroom. I am staying here with my aunt, and have just arrived, but apparently my aunt is She-Ra.
I'm trying to find somewhere to put my coat away. There is a coat closet at the top of some rickety stairs. I shut myself in the closet because I want to be alone. After I eventually put my coat away, I begin to look for a bathroom. There is a bathroom in the downstairs bedroom, but it's IN the bedroom, and I'm really uncomfortable about this because there's no way to lock the door even though there are 50 different controls for the lights. I head upstairs where I know there's a bathroom. I wander through some bedrooms, but I can't seem to find the bathroom, even though I know it's there. For some reason I end up in the coat closet again. I hear some yelling and crashing, like someone is having a tantrum in one of the bedrooms next to the closet. Suddenly the wall collapses. I guess the Hulk is living there too, because he's peering through the crumbling wall and looks as confused as I am.
"What are you doing in there?"
"I just want to find the bathroom "

Original journal entry dated April 28th, 2002:

I woke up with blood under my fingernails, and all over my blankets for that matter. I don't remember any of my dreams but I guess I must have been having more nightmares. In any case, I tore my face up but good and was hoping that nobody would notice this morning, which they didn't, which is good.

The first dream was about a city. I think it was in England. It was old, and I was in the past, maybe Puritan times, I dunno. It was somewhere cold, rocky, and misty.
There was a plague in the village, and there was always a procession of corpses being carried to the graveyard. I suppose, then, that the plague was bad, but not so bad to the point where they couldn't bury all of the bodies.
And yet, everybody was dead. Maybe not DEAD dead, but dead inside. Except that one man murdered his wife, and then the Priest came and they took away the body... one more dead person, despite the cause, didn't matter... and then, either I died or my wife died, but I can't remember which. But there was a crazy, crazy old lady in one of the more dilapidated houses, and she wielded an axe... nobody went there, and maybe she died of plague, or maybe she DIDN'T die because nobody went there. But my wife died (I was male in the dream). Or maybe I did. And they said a few prayers, and everything was washed over with gray... there was an old stone building, it was haunted... come to think of it, the whole town was haunted... and all muddy... it was miserable.

And then the other dream. My brother and mother and I were living in bare shacks high up on stilts, in the mountains. It was snowy and windy and very cold. They had wooden planks for floors, and the wind whistled through the chinks. When I looked out, I could see the tops of pine trees.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:


Nightmare #1:
I had a nightmare that I was in this deserted ruined city-place, and there was nuclear ash everywhere. The city was quasi-inhabited by the ghosts of children, who told me that I couldn't leave because nobody leaves. I tried to leave anyway, by climbing over a crumbled wall and biking down a deserted and shattered highway. I could bike a LOT faster in my dream than in reality - in fact, I was amazed by the speed at which I was going. There was something nameless and terrifying behind me, and I didn't want to look back because I knew that if I did I'd see nothing there but a tremendous wall of brute evil force... like a visual shock-wave from a bomb blast... and then I opened up my eyes, I was lying in bed in the pitch-black and felt something sitting at the edge of my bed. Something like a man but not a man. It terrified the hell out of me. I could feel it there like... a dead weight... solid as a rock. I was paralyzed with fear, but finally gathered the courage to lunge for the light. When I turned it on - of course nothing was there. Perhaps that was when I really woke up and the nightmare ended, or at least I hope so.

Nightmare #2:
There was a house that was - how can I put it? - unfolded. It existed in more than three dimensions, so to speak, and was very frightening to experience. There were ghosts living in it. There seem to be a lot of ghosts in my dreams. One of them was a sort of... respectable old gentleman, who would be kindly if he weren't so sinister in a way. The house was a labyrinth, and I kept getting lost and becoming very afraid.

Nightmare #3:
I had a nightmare that I had died. In it, my mother and brother and I lived in an old Victorian mansion. I couldn't move on, and wanted very badly to communicate with them, but the only time I could was that split second when they hovered between sleep and waking. At night I was chased by hell-hounds, and was sort of held back by things that I thought of in my dream as "death-bones".

Original date 03/19/2006:

Took a nap, huge mistake

Had one of my nightmares and woke up feeling very unwell. I hate how they make me feel physically ill. I feel like I'm going to vomit. There wasn't anything particularly disgusting (to see) in it, but the nerves alone make me feel so queasy. This one came out of the blue and was very weird.

I had a nightmare that left me feeling ill, very ill... physically so, not to mention being coupled with the panic of half the lights in the house not working.

I dreamed that I lived alone in an apartment, on the first or second floor. There was a floor below me. Nobody ever saw the people who lived there (that I knew of). Everything was almost always dark in my dream - even lights were dim.
I dreamt that I temporarily sort of... descended from my own apartment into the apartment below. It was very dark, and there were very deep shadows when you could see anything at all, and there was a sort of shrine there, and there were two childlike entities, and they were whispering to each other, and there was a third entity, much smaller, like a baby.

I know I need to write this down but it makes my skin crawl just writing it down.

In any case, I felt that something was very wrong about this, and I ascended again. I don't know how or why I did this, except that I feel that in my dream it was nonphysical.
In my dream everyone heard odd noises that came from the apartment below mine all of the time. They bothered us immensely, but nobody ever spoke of them.
There were policemen who frequented the area, very fat jolly men, but they would not go near the place, or talk about it.

I dreamt that something happened with the family across the way, possibly (or possibly not) dealing with the apartment below. There was some sort of... incident... a loud and unmistakeable sound of some sort of scuffle, and of a baby (?) being killed... but everybody in the complex was too terrified to say anything, and then there was the other (possibly connected) incident that night with the family across the hall...

The family in the apartment across from me was a 'normal'ish family, with a husband and a wife and a son who was around 10 or 11 years old. I went over to check things out after one of the policement visited my apartment to check to see that I was ok. When I visited the family, I noticed that they had been interrupted while eating dinner, and that the little boy's bowl was unclean.
For some reason, I knew that it was a... aggressive? Challenging? move... but I offered to clean the little boy's bowl for them... they seemed reluctant, but allowed me to do so, and I took it to the sink in my own kitchen and cleaned it.
The policeman followed and chatted to me a bit, and then we went back to the other apartment, so that I could return the cleansed bowl to the family. When I did, I told the policeman that I wanted to say something about the odd sounds that I heard from the apartment below me.

The two policemen there (there was another, fatter one who had hung around with the family this whole time) looked very terrified. The family looked very frightened also, and the mother told me, "Don't mention such things". The other policeman told me, in hushed tones, "Those things are cower-worthy", to which I held up my hands in appeasement and said, "I'm cowering, but something needed to be said."

Then the dream ended, and I woke up feeling very ill, scared, and paranoid.

FURTHER EDIT:
Incidentally, on the earlier dream...

There was some sort of knife involved in the sacrifice/slaying. I don't know how I understood this in the dream, but I did.

Original dream dated July 04, 2008:
Dreamed that Reese and I were trying to get home from an airport called Mariana airport, and we couldn't. Mom was supposed to pick us up, but never showed up, so we took the bus instead. Somewhere along the line, it turned into Reese driving her jeep, and we got stuck in traffic on the Interstate. It turned out that Mom had never planned on picking us up and there had been a miscommunication. For some reason, we lived in a 2-story white house.

I had a dream that my pet rabbit had a heart attack and was dying, so I wrapped her up in a purple towel and cried while she groomed my head.

Original dream dated July 05, 2008:
I had a dream that I was working on rules for a D20 game, and they turned into rules for the world...

Somewhere along the way, we got invaded by alien wasps that climbed up your nose and replaced your brain, stealing your soul. It happened to me, and I wasn't technically supposed to get another 'chance' at working things out in the world, but for some reason, I was given one. I had to abide by the rules I'd written, though, which stated that if you lost then it would rain forever and everything would be covered by 500 feet of soil over the next few thousand years. I escaped from the original area (which was quite dangerous) with some friends of mine, including a tall brown-haired man. We got to a coffee shop and tried to figure out what to do. We were sort of stuck in there, at least one of us was covered in blood, and I realized that we were all doomed unless I recovered the book I'd been working on and revised the rule set. The brown haired guy offered to run through the rain for several miles to get it, but it was very dangerous out there and there were zombies, and I argued that if he died it was permanent but I could revive myself... the dream left off there.

Original dream dated 02/19/2006:
I had this dream that a whole bunch of people were back from the dead. Not zombies... just suddenly not dead either. Including my old pet cat, Abby, whom I loved more than anything on the face of the earth.
However, all of the people who had returned were also going to die again soon. For some reason, in my dream, I thought that the best way to commemorate Abby's passing (and soon, her passing again) was to eat her remains. Hell if I know what goes through my head, it was a dream. Except that we put her in the pan and started cooking her while she was still alive, and when I realized "oh my god, what the hell am I doing?!" her paws were all charred and she was halfway cooked. She didn't seem to be in pain and she didn't seem to hold it against me, but I knew that she was going to die again very very soon because of what I'd done... my mom rationalized it by "She was going to die anyway" except that it wasn't good enough reasoning for me because it meant that she was going to die sooner than she would have died on her own...
So anyway, I held my half-cooked cat for a while and cried. On to the next dream...

So then I dreamed that there were 2 teams of people. All of them were female. One of them was 3 different people, and one of them was composed of a team of one person, cloned 3 times. The second team sat on top of some very tall poles and had little white explosive balls that bounced off of everything and anything. The first team's job was to get the balls from them. The second team got no weapons or anything at all, but their position was very secure. The first team got a whole bunch of gadgets and toys.

So, the first team got really close - they had to because their weapons didn't have much range (one of them was a fan attached to a rope). The second team threw 2 of the 3 balls at them, which they managed to whack away from themselves with a flashlight, and the explosions the balls made were really big. The first team managed to kill 2 of the 3 clones, but the third one was impossible to get to.

Finally, after talking with the clone for a while, it came down from the pole. It had originally been a girl, but now for some reason was a boar. The leader of the second team talked to the boar and told it that she wished that it could see something really beautiful so it would appreciate life.
There was also a cat. The first teams' supervisor came up, and the boar was afraid of him, so it ran back up the pole. He wanted to talk to the cat, but the cat was also afraid of him.

Then I woke up.