vignettes from a different world

i had to put together some christmas-themed gift bags for my classmates. i was walking to the dollar store, which i understood was in downtown toronto although the area seemed more suburban. it was sunny outside and obviously not winter. i entered the dollar store, which was more like a warehouse. i wandered around for a long time looking for gifts. i purchased some small things. i had to be careful because i didn't have much money. one area contained some creepy old dollhouse furniture. i left this area and found out that my boyfriend was here. we looked at stuff together. i found a pair of fleece pants with airbrushed bears, owls and eagles on them and i thought they were amazing, but the tag said 'size 46' and i didn't know if anyone in my class was that large.

there was a 'computer room' in the warehouse and i wanted to use my computer for some reason. i tried to turn it on but the screen was blank. a tall guy was laughing at me.

i decided to leave, so i walked a block over to the other dollar store. i hadn't gone inside when i realized that i didn't tell my boyfriend that i left. i sat down on an outdoor bench outside of a bar and tried to get wifi on my phone. i sent him a message but i wasn't sure if it went through.

then i saw a bus and i got on it for some reason. the bus took me back home in about a minute (it would be at least an hour in real life!) and i felt really bad that i had left my boyfriend in toronto.

in the first dream i was in a kind of forest area with a river (i think)? i was reading a poem that was accompanied by victorian-style engravings. i felt that this poem/drawing was incredibly significant. a sense of nostalgia pervaded this segment.

in the second dream i was on a beach bordered by a forest. it was sunny and bright. i was recording a wildlife video with my phone. i recall swimming in the water while two swans followed me. later i was editing the video to add a title and credits. the graphic design was kind of 70s-esque.

when i had finished recording my boyfriend showed up and i showed him the video. soon we were inside of the video. we were both swimming with the swans when my boyfriend noted two penguins in the water. we were surprised that there were penguins here. these penguins had a large yellow crest and a dolphin-like beak. we decided they were emperor penguins. my boyfriend wanted to go closer but i was afraid they would attack us. i had a vision of large, fanglike spines on their undersides, which were arranged in concentric circles. this prompted me to leave the water and watch them from the edge of the beach.

i had earned some "points" on a website which could be redeemed for real life goods. i went to a department store and found a pair of Yelle-themed footie pyjamas that i wanted (why?!?)

later i was at an outdoor pavilion with my boyfriend. the pavilion was apparently a kfc restaurant. we wanted to order sweet and sour chicken but then the guy showed us how they made the sweet and sour sauce: they mixed together ketchup and ranch dressing. we felt sick and ordered something else.

very mundane dreams

i am outside the mall with my boyfriend. the sky is overcast. later we are inside the mall, in a banana republic store. i want to buy some clothes for him but they are too expensive.

later i am tattooing a tall, thin japanese man with long hair. now that i think about it he kind of seems like a young version of merzbow? i am using a strange looking pen to tattoo him. i tattoo a strange grid pattern on his chest and some other small designs on his arms and torso. i keep asking him if he really wants this, if he thinks it looks ok, etc. his answers are generally affirmative. he is very hard to understand -- sounds more like someone with a severe speech impediment than a guy with an accent.

then the sprinklers in the "tattoo shop" go off. there is water everywhere. i leave.

outside the shop there are various fast food kiosks. one of them has a rack of 'sushi burritos' on the counter. i grab one and walk off without paying. it tastes quite savoury and delicious. someone behind me calls me a "fast food slut". i turn around and it is a guy and girl that i recognize to be my friend. we talk about various inconsequential things.

i am with two imaginary friends. the dream begins in the park across the street from my school; it is winter and thick snow covers the ground. we are going to go to finland so one of my friends can get a scholarship for music. we have to walk lightly so the police won't be able to track our footprints.

we reach finland in a couple of minutes and enter into a large building with beige stone walls, great windows, and domed ceilings: the university. my one friend goes into the music room, leaving us free to explore other areas. i go into another room and find a shelf that contains papers on the history of finland & what i believe to be the earliest documents written in finnish. next i enter another room whose walls are covered in racks of clothing. i understand that these clothes are being given away for free, so i take some, although it is difficult to find clothes in my size.

later, outside the university, i meet my boyfriend. he jacks off and ejaculates on my thigh. there are no emotions or sexual sensations associated with this.

then i am working at a "record store" - a large, disorganized shop that seems to sell everything except records. nicki minaj comes in and asks for some vodka. i cannot serve her because i don't have a license: i feel awkward and incompetent. however a man who works at the store ends up serving her for me.

finally my two friends and i decide to visit thailand. thailand, evidently, is a large country home owned by an old lady. we are hungry, but the food here is strange. after several unappetizing choices the lady offers me a dish of fruit pieces and flowers in clear jelly, which i gladly consume: it has a delicate, sweet and light taste.

i enter into a bedroom in the house. it has blue walls and the layout is similar to my bedroom in real life. there is a sunflower on a yellow vase in my dresser. i have several vials of chemicals. i want to use a chemical that causes genetic mutations on the sunflower so that i can grow different varieties. i have to be very careful while handling this chemical because if it makes contact with my skin i will get cancer. i empty the vial into the sunflower pot but then i look at the label and realize i have just poured a great amount of acetic acid into the soil. i do not want to kill the plant so i use a vial of ammonium chloride to 'neutralize' the acid (dream self is not good at chemistry). however i quickly realize that this reaction produces chlorine gas (again... terrible chemistry...). i freak out. i get short of breath, light-headed and my vision begins to fade.

i wake up.

extremely fitful, disordered sleep. probably withdrawal from desvenfalaxine 100mg + other health issues. surreal and vivid imagery tonight. fell asleep for 1st time around 11pm, woke up every hour or so until ~3am, woke up at 7ish and fell back into fitful sleep until mid-afternoon

around 11-12pm
i am upstairs in a version of my house. i realize that my house looks different and suspect i am dreaming, so i do a reality check (breathing through plugged nose). it succeeds and i become lucid. i run outside (it is sunny and beautiful) and begin rubbing my hands together to stabilize the dream. unfortunately, it fades quickly and i wake up.


i had other dreams during the night but i do not remember them.

6-7 am
the entirety of this dream takes place downtown. the atmosphere is somewhat bleak - it's grey and snowy - but the sun is out.

first i am having a debate with Richard Dawkins and a Christian theologist in a parking lot. the debate is on the subject of marxism. many people are watching from the main part of downtown, which is several miles away; the geometry in this scene doesn't make very much sense. dawkins keeps attaching balloons to himself and floating miles into the air, carrying his debate on from the sky. at times it becomes night; the sky turns deep blue and stars come out. i complain to a friend that i can't hear dawkins from up there and she chastises me, saying i should pay more attention.

next there is a new attraction downtown: a massive tower which houses a gigantic transparent tube. you enter the tube and it shoots you up to the top of the tower, then back down. my boyfriend decides to try it. a team of middle-aged women in black uniforms pack him into the tube and i watch as he jets into the air then falls down at an astonishing speed. afterwards he mentions something about "astronaut MILFs".

then i sit down at an outdoor table where a group of unfamiliar people are eating. they arent bothered by my presence, surprisingly. i pick up a menu: some of it is in english, some of it in the Cyrillic alphabet. i decide that the cyrillic language is lithuanian (does lithuanian use cyrillic? i don't know... anyway...) i have no money to order food but the people let me eat some of their food. it tastes delicious: savoury and sweet. the dishes were primarily meat-based. at one point the restaurant owner comes over and asks me if i have any questions. i cannot reply because my mouth is full of food, but i point to an item on the Cyrillic menu for which no price is listed. she explains that this is an entire roast pig and due to the quality of the meat and the preparation time it costs around 900 dollars. she gives me a meatball from it as a sample. it tastes nice. there is a tripadvisor rating in the window of the restaurant: 5.0/10.

later i am walking through downtown with my red-haired imaginary friend from a previous dream. i complain that i am sick. she tells me i probably have problems with my liver and i disagree with some recondite explanation involving the amount of water in my body. as i discuss water the windows of an adjacent skyscraper seem to turn to segmented/striated bodies of water.

finally i am walking behind two men and overhearing their conversation. they are talking about a man who was found murdered in a dilapidated house. an old woman found him, rebuilt the house and made it amazingly beautiful, but she had left his corpse in its original position. these men had been hired to clean corpse secretions off of the furniture so the house could be sold.


9-10 am
i am in a large, disorganized country house in which the dominant hue is deep yellow. several teenage boys live here. at some point i begin writing a short story about living in this place. as i write the story, by narrating it in my head, the scenes play out in my vision.

the opening scene is rendered in Poser-style primitive CGI. a generic model of a man -- hairless, no identifiable facial features, no genitalia -- jerks around erratically within a cubic matrix formed by grey rods which connect red, yellow and blue spheres to each other (think of a 3d molecular model). the background is blank white. there is a soundtrack of erratic, metallic electronic music, something like aphex twin, but more aggressive.

the next scene takes place within the country home and involves the boys. i cannot remember specific events, besides one where a boy accidentally burned my arm with a cigarette and i punched him in the face, but i recall that this scene was very long and involved a great deal of violence + homoeroticism.

the final scene is staged in a massive, darkened room. there are two glowing crystals here, one green and one blue; i understand that these represent Zeus and Hera. one of the boys is here too, floating naked in midair and dwarfed by the dimensions of the room. the crystal discuss various things. at one point a thunderbolt strikes. there is no definitive conclusion to this scene.

the story replays over and over in my head, at least 5 times, in the perseverative manner of some fever dreams. i am very proud of the story i have written -- to me it seems to address lofty, complex themes and it takes me on an emotional journey; i recall being impressed by the complex syntax and clever wordplay of my writing. my story, i believe, transgresses and deconstructs the entire institution of contemporary western literature...

in another dream i am at a swimming contest of some sort. i need id to enter the changing rooms and i do not have id. i try to sneak in through the back door, and i succeed, but i become lost in the maze of changing rooms: there are dozens of different rooms, separated by ages as well as by gender. i eventually find the correct one. i get changed, go into the pool and begin the contest which apparently involves me tackling people while demanding they tell me what subgenre a random metal band belongs to.

the winners of the contest are me & my friend M.M. the prizes are books -- a compilation of Hesse's Siddhartha & Steppenwolf and some imaginary tome of Faulkner's. (my subconscious loves namedropping, apparently.) M. chooses the Hesse book and I am a bit disappointed because I had wanted it (in real life i would have preferred faulkner!). i look inside the Faulkner book and there is a picture of a beautiful blue-walled estate with exquisite Gothic architecture, which takes up the majority of a small island. i am awed at its beauty. this is Faulkner's home, I understand; the island has some absurdly long and comically French name.

fell asleep around 12, woke up around 3, went back to bed, finally woke up around 7

12am - 3am
a long and complicated dream about a tall girl with red hair. in the dream we were good friends. there was a very jovial atmosphere, unlike most of my dreams.

then a dream where i discussed lucid dreaming at length -- without actually becoming lucid.

3am-7am

i am at a strange clothes store with my boyfriend. the store mainly sells lolita dresses but contains a large variety of different clothing items as well as miscellaneous objects. at the far end of the room there is a passage to a second room which is brightly lit with many large windows. the store owners, a middle-aged asian woman and her teenage daughter, work here, making all the clothes from scratch. we talk to the two women for a while. there are many items of clothing hanging on racks here and i discover a finely crafted leather jacket with luxurious fur trim; i ask the younger woman how much it would cost and she tells me "about a month's salary". we leave this room and return to the main part of the store. there is a dress i would like to buy here, but it is too expensive. instead, my boyfriend and i decide to buy two dvds. these "dvds" come in vhs cases with elaborate box art; the one my boyfriend buys has art that's a slightly altered version of the dark side of the moon cover, and mine is a complex pattern of organic plantlike shapes. we understand that these movies are beautiful works of art and that watching them will change our lives. we trade the shop owners a large pyramidal prism for the dvds.

then i leave the store and enter into a shady urban area at night. i am now running away from three young white men who want to mug me. i see my dad's car parked on the side of the street: i get in and we drive away.

i am at the "doctor's office" for a checkup. the doctor's office is a large circular mezzanine located in a tall cylindrical structure. everything is made of brushed metal and creates a sort of sci-fi atmosphere. a red and yellow cylindrical tower rises from the centre of the structure. my father is here also. i am naked. the doctor says that i am very underweight and my father is greatly concerned by this. to demonstrate how thin i am the doctor picks me up and begins shaking me around.

then i am in a house. there is a dog here, a small cream-coloured husky. i understand that i will soon have to leave here forever. there is a feeling of great sadness.

next i am "downtown" with a chubby teenage girl. we wander into an alleyway and open a door to a dilapidated corridor. there are three doors here, each with windows; from what i can see through the windows, this appears to be some sort of child sex ring. the rooms house a number of female children, ages 8-12; they are all naked. the girl and i enter one of the rooms and we're relieved to discover (by looking at a framed poster on a wall) that in fact, this is not a child prostitution operation: the children are just working for a cereal company! this makes complete sense to us.

we enter another room. this room is white and contains several young girls who are all clothed in 50s style blue-white dresses. they have various deformities; it soon dawns on me that this is an institution for the mentally disabled. one of the girls tries to bite me. we leave.

next, my boyfriend and i are attending a music performance at a coffee shop. we arrive after the performance has finished, so we offer to put a tv show on to entertain the others. i want to put on a show about a frog without a tongue, but my boyfriend is intensely disgusted by this. i decide to put on a show about dolphins instead. however, all the dolphin shows i can find are crappy cgi videos; we want to look at real dolphins. the song vox humana - deerhunter is involved somehow. (absolutely amazing song, listen to it).

i am with my boyfriend and some other people in a deserted warehouse. the room is vast and light is streaming through windows far above us.
there are various items scattered around and we are browsing for things of interest. i find a strange object with rounded corners, shaped like a laptop, with a dim LED screen: i understand that this is a PDA from the late 90s. i find this interesting but my discovery is quickly overshadowed when my boyfriend finds an intact vintage arcade cabinet. he calls this a commodore 64 although it clearly is nothing of the sort.

the setting switches to a dark room. we are all seated around a table. the arcade cabinet has changed to a small laptop and i am still holding my laptop/pda thing. my boyfriend starts playing on the "commodore 64" and as usual my viewpoint switches so that i am in the game, observing. he is playing some kind of shitty mario romhack. the background is all black, the characters are neon and they appear to be wearing strange masks. then i begin playing a game on my laptop.
in this game i am an angel flying above an amusement park (very bright, green grass -- looks a lot like rollercoaster tycoon). there are brown platforms in the air. at first i can't figure out how to control my character properly: but then four white rings appear around my character signifying the vectors in which i can move, and i am then able to control it.

there is another dream that involved a country backyard and dogs? i do not remember anything else. i recall that at one point i approached lucidity, but i did not fully realize that i was dreaming.

very busy, haven't been able to sleep much - ruining my dream recall. some fragments tonight:

1. i was in a distorted version of downtown (bright colours, very sunny) with my boyfriend who now had massive dreadlocks cascading from the back of his head. i found that very unattractive but i decided that he is my boyfriend, so i should deal with it. we entered an empty furniture store. it was hexagonal with large windows on every side; the carpet and most of the chairs were green. we sat down on a couch. we wanted to kiss but we were afraid people would see us through the windows, so we just cuddled a little. suddenly the room started tilting from side to side. we heard the store owner coming in and we ran away -- but he was actually glad that we visited his store and he gave us smoothies.

2. i am with friends (the only one i recognize from real life is M-----) in a huge department store. we are wandering around and i was stealing things. i recall spotting a stick of men's deodorant that was selling for 80 dollars, so i decided to go to the women's department and steal a similar product. i never found the womens department but i stole some books.

then it is night and we are downtown. we want to go to a bar (i don't drink irl) but the only way to enter is through a third-story window. my mother is wearing a red shirt and lying motionless on the sidewalk a few yards away; her body seems shrunken. we pay little attention to this. i try climbing up the building's many roofs (roof-awnings? what's the architectural term for those) - dead ivy vines cover the building - but i can't make it to the top floor. at one point my mom gets up -- she's acting normally, wants to join us.

3. i am at a public indoor pool with a lot of other people. there is a young girl in a wheelchair there and a fat middle-aged woman is saying rude things about her. i tell the woman off and people applaud me.

4. i am reading a website about a spa. the company is from quebec and much of the website is written in french. i don't recall what the text said now but i remember that upon waking i remarked at the fact that it was sensical and grammatically correct -- strange because text in my dreams usually makes little sense in terms of content or syntax -- especially strange because french is my second language!

one part mentions that they have special tools for relaxation or something to that effect. the text is a link, so i click on it. it brings me to a page that displays various styles of bongs (they're all blue and silver and quite elegantly designed). there are also prices for "asian massages" for women and men. the prices are all in the 1-2k range. so i come to the realization that this is a brothel where you can smoke weed.

i decide to visit.

the spa is an outdoor pool. it is very sunny and bright outside. the geometry in this scene is odd - i think i'm floating above the water or something. a girl arrives, but no sex acts transpire, at least that i can remember. i wake up.

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quick analysis:
i've had many similar dreams about department stores. my dream-stores are always massive, labyrinthian, with blank white walls and floors and an eclectic assortment of items.

the image of my mother lying on the ground probably comes from the time i saw a hipster girl lying face-down on the sidewalk in toronto (with her ukulele of course). she wasn't drunk or sick or anything, i think she was trying to be artistic or protest something, but it was just silly. the police made her get up. there's also another dimension to this image i think - my mother was an alcoholic while i was growing up and to this day i have a strong aversion to being around any drunk people... especially her.

almost all the dreams i've catalogued so far have had something to do with sex. generally, dreams with sexual themes are very rare for me. i haven't had any changes in my real life that could trigger this... maybe my subconscious is just trying to embarrass me.