The Labrynth of the Mind

I took about 200mg of valerian before bed last night. As often happens, the valerian caused me to have some rather wierd and disturbing dreams.

Weddings and cruiseships

I am in the auditorium of my old high school. My brother and I are discussing people that were at my cousin's wedding. To help us remember who these people are, we take turns with a clamp holding pieces of a bench together. At times we break off pieces of it, too.

My grandparents are there also. The place is no longer the auditorium, but my grandparents' house. They are talking with my aunt about how nobody my age wants to be a sailor anymore. I happen to have been looking for jobs on board a cruise ship, so I tell them that I want to be a sailor. They are reading the requirements for various positions. Meanwhile, I log into my account with a cruise ship job website.

Flea markets and torture

I am at a fair. It is also D'ni. It is also a flea market. I am walking with a guy I used to know from a former workplace, who is also the father from "All in the Family" (which is ironic, because the guy I used to know is black). He is telling me that I don't know much about "smokin'", which in this dream is a slang term for buying and selling junk at flea markets for a profit. I imitate the Mask for no reason and say "sssmokin!"

We enter a junk shop, which is located about where Kadish Gallery should be. It is kind of dark in there, but we browse for a while. I see an old bottle of wine from the 1920's. After a while I see a bottle of something else with the date 1919 on it, and the wine bottle is apparently gone. My friend considers buying this bottle to resell. He tries to give me tips on finding antiques.

Next to the bottle of wine is a bottle of acetic acid, and some laboratory glassware. My friend asks me what acetic acid is, and I say "It's pretty much vinegar". Then I laugh and say "if we poured some of that into the wine bottle, there would be a nice explosion."

We leave the junk store, and cross the street. Things begin to change somehow into a laboratory where a mad scientist is operating on living people with no anesthetic. He hacks them up, mutilates them, pulls out their organs and intestines, while they lay on the operating table screaming. He pulls out one guy's eyeball. He slices open the arm of one guy, and puts something in to intentionally infect it. Someone explains that his plan is to let it swell up, and then hit his arms with something. This will both cause the victim pain, and somehow turn him into a zombie.

Now I see a whole bunch of zombies from the mad scientist's lab, all dancing together like some scene from Hell.

Sci-Fi Groceries

I am working at the grocery store, stocking shelves (in real life I stock shelves at a toy store). Some old women come along looking for artichokes. I help them find one artichoke, which has been put in the wrong spot.

I continue walking down the aisle, and make it to the bridge of the Enterprise. I am needed to help destroy a small planet that is headed towards the Earth. Nobody is sure what to do, but I come up with the idea of building a huge bomb. We run a computer simulation of what this bomb will do. Upon detonation, a gigantic shock wave is sent out. This shock wave passes over the Earth, the moon and the sun, but when it hits this small planet the planet is annhilated.

The great thing about this idea is that it doesn't affect the Earth. I accidentally touch the simulated Earth and it gets smashed up, but after a moment of shock everyone realizes it was just me.

Kidnapping and Chemistry

I am a spy or something similar. I am investigating a guy who has been kidnapped and tied up in a back room somewhere. His daughter has also been kidnapped, and they are trying to get information out of the father. The guy is wrapped up in some bandages, so that only one of his eyes can be seen. The captors torment him by allowing him to see his daughter being taken into the room across from him, but they never let him know what is going on.

While I am there, the captors bring the daughter out into the main room separating the two rooms. She doesn't seem to be too bad off. In fact, she is joking and laughing with the men. Apparently, she doesn't even know they are bad guys. Then they bring the father out. I think they are going to try one last desperate attempt to get information out of him.

I step in at this point, and we find ourselves pursued by the villains. We duck behind some barrier to hide. The kidnappers are hot on our heels, so I pull out a grenade and throw it at them...

...(I think this is part of the same dream. It seems to have digressed into the manufacture of explosives.) I walk into the laboratory for one of my chemistry classes. We are choosing seats. I sit next to an attractive girl I know in real life. I feel I have an excuse, because my name is written on the counter in front of me, as well as on the seat I am sitting in. We chat a little, and I think about asking her out. Then the professor begins class.

We are learning about some kind of explosive. This requires a lot of complicated glassware, including a couple of volumetric flasks and some kind of a condenser. There are only two reactants involved in this process. One is tetramethylfuran (?), and I don't know what the other one was. At this point, my lab partner (the attractive girl) leaves. The instructor tells is we have to work on our own anyway, but the experiment doesn't seem to make any sense.

Now we are outside, taking turns mixing chemicals in our glassware on the tailgate of a pickup truck. The truck is parked on the slope of a hill, so it is hard to mix anything without it spilling.

Robot Cannibal

We are looking at fingerprints. They do not seem to be useable, because we can't get anything from them when we try dusting them. No recognizable features, anyway. Then someone points out that they are made in blood, as though someone dipped their fingers in blood before touching the counter we are looking at. With this knowledge, we are able to use some chemical to analyze the fingerprints...

...(I think this is part of the same dream) My dog runs away. I go out to get her, and find she is running along an interstate. She runs into a median strip, and I go after her. She climbs up a hill and down the other side. I crawl up the hill, and peak over the edge. There is a gruesome sight on the other side. A deer or large dog has been killed and mutilated, and some man is crawling nearby. He crawls up to the carcass and sinks his teeth in. I watch in horror, realizing this is the guy from Silence of the Lambs (I never actually saw the movie). Looking closer, I see it is no longer a person but a robot. The Silence of the Lambs guy is in his home, controlling this robot.