vignettes from a different world

i am lying on the couch in the living room of the old townhouse. it is night and the room is lit by lamps. i feel very ill and feverish. my mother is here. she tells me to get up and go to school. i reply that i can't, i have meningitis and i should be in the hospital. she screams at me and we have a long argument. i am intensely angry. later i wonder if i am going to die and think about what my boyfriend would do if i did. (i was violently ill before i fell asleep which probably accounts for the focus on illness here).

in the next scene i am walking to my high school. it is snowy and i am with my father. i find an iphone sticking out of a snowbank. i ask my father if it's ok to take it. he says yes, so i do. then i am inside the library at my elementary school with some other people. we are watching a movie on a projector screen. at one point there is some starbucks product placement in the movie and starbucks gift cards pop out of the screen and onto the floor. the other people and i scramble to grab them up. they keep coming, along with some lollipops and -- hydrocodone pills... i grab several pills and remark to C.W. that i'm surprised it was legal for the filmmakers to do this.

then i am working at a daycare for disabled children. i am standing on a large circular mezzanine in a domed wooden building with a rustic/old-fashioned atmosphere. there is a matronly black woman here. later i am taking a bath while covered by a white canopy to research therapies for autism?

finally i am outside, on a beautiful rocky coastline. i am listening to a lecture about canadian geography from a disembodied voice. i sprinkle green powder onto a moss-covered slope which i recognize to be british columbia. the voice is now talking about aboriginal tribes: "our friends, the mogwai, are dead..." finally the subject of the lecture changes to buddhism. i don't recall what the voice said.

the general atmosphere of these dreams is unpleasant.

slept 11:30 - 9:00, awakening and falling back asleep several times between 7 and 9

i am in a large, dark house with some caribbean women who appear to be in their 50s-60s. they are acting strangely. someone tells me that in their culture, it is considered polite not to acknowledge strangers. later i am cutting myself in the bathroom (similar to townhouse bathroom) and the blood is getting everywhere. later still, the women and i are in a room with a young red-haired child. he keeps changing in size, from the size of an average 4 year old to the size of a mouse. he crawls around on the floor. the women are thinking of adopting him.

then i am in a "hospital", which is similar to the house in colour scheme. there is a lot of wood. i am a nurse here and i am watching over a middle aged man. his hospital room is a huge cylindrical tank with transparent walls. he is sitting in the far end of the tank, attached to many machines. he is wearing a sports jersey. i leave the room and report to the doctor, a tall young woman, that he is doing ok. she decides to initiate a different treatment. the tank is filled with water and numerous small, pink, swimming creatures. i go into the tank to explain the treatment to the man, but the creatures keep swimming into my mouth and it feels very uncomfortable. i leave. the doctor tells me to prepare a powerpoint on cellular respiration and photosynthesis.

in a fragment i can't place, i am at some kind of religious ceremony. the "church" seems to be underground and has a domed ceiling with pillars that fan out at the capitals; everything is hewn of grey-beige stone. somewhat gothic architecture?

in a different dream, i am playing with dogs in a park. it is hilly, with yellow-brown grass: beside the chainlink fence is a stone chasm and then a road. a beige concrete overpass stands further away, over the road, and in the distance, a cityscape can be seen. the sky is bright blue and clear. occasionally i see a massive red balloon rising over the city. it is very beautiful.

my final dream begins as a video game but the perspective changes. it is night in a cartoonish landscape; the land is pine green, the sky dark blue and full of stars. there is a little boy here whose pupils are shaped like crosses. he sees an area where the land slopes down, inwardly-curving, to a beach; but the slope has been separated from the level land, creating a vertical cliff. he realizes that he must push the cliff and the slope back together to save the other children. there is a segment of this dream which engenders a strong bittersweet feeling inside me, and repeats several times: the boy floats up into the sky among the stars, holding on to a red balloon.

did not sleep at all previous night. napped from about 4:30 - 6 pm, took 30mg temazepam + 100mg trazodone and slept from 10pm-6:30 am; still tired upon waking.

i am on a bus with soldiers who are returning from war. they are meeting their newborn children for the first time. the babies all have square sections of their skull cut out to reveal coagulated blood and unidentifiable tissue underneath. there are black tubes coming out of the centre of these sections. in the dream, this is not disturbing to me. i just assume the babies have recently had surgery.

later i am in a large basement, which is unlike any basement i have been in in real life but which has featured in my dreams before. there is a tall french man talking (in french) about farts.

the imagery in these dreams was not as vivid as my dream imagery typically is. sometimes my vision would fade or objects would turn black.

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.

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).

seems to have been a full-fledged dream but i can't recall all of it. at the beginning of the dream i was watching a video. the video focused on a brown-haired teenage boy. he was quite thin, very pale and had reddish areas on his skin that resembled abrasions. i understood that he was very ill and close to death, although he was acting normally. he was lying on a bed under rainbow sheets in a blue-walled room. the lights were off but a window let rays of white light through. his shirt was off and i understood that this was a pornographic video, although i don't recall ever seeing anything that would indicate that. there is a strange atmosphere about this scene.

at some point the viewpoint switches: i am no longer watching the video but inside of it. the boy lives in a large house (warm hues, oranges and reds) with many other people - i recall a young blonde-haired woman. there was some controversy over the fact that the boy had been in a porn video. some people hinted that he had other videos in which he performed very perverse sex acts.

edit: i have another memory, but i'm not sure whether it's a dream or not! i was walking from my bedroom to the bathroom and i was bumping into everything. very clumsy. the setting was indistinguishable from real life but the extent of my clumsiness makes me think it may have been a dream... also the fact that i didn't see any bruises on myself on the morning... but i took benzos on an empty stomach before bed, so who knows.

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rather odd dream, made me a bit uncomfortable when i woke up. a quick analysis - the theme of this dream seems to have been derived from a) a uh, porn video that i watched recently that involved a man who resembled the one in the dream and b) a documentary about a hospital for disabled vietnamese orphans. i am not sure why my subconscious decided to combine them, but there you are.

the "strange atmosphere" i talk about was an odd sort of calmness... i would define it as acceptance of, and contentment with, one's impending death.

fitful sleep tonight. various fragmented dreams. not well recalled. content is quite shallow except for the last fragment.

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my father and i are driving in the country at night. in a recessed area on the side of the road sits a dollhouse & a wicker shelf that was in my childhood bedroom. the shelf is full of stuffed animals -- i remember one was a dragon. i take some of them with me because i understand i will be going to the hospital soon.

i am then at "the hospital"; it's a distorted version of the townhouse i lived in most of my life. the lights are off. the stuffed animals aren't with me. there's nothing hospital-like about the surroundings; it's just the main floor of the townhouse. there are 2 bro kind of guys visiting a middle aged woman who has tuberculosis. they talk about how she is defecating blood.

i decide to escape. i am suddenly in bright, sunny, warm-hued "downtown toronto" -- nothing like downtown toronto really, just big glass buildings and an immense urban atmosphere -- adrenaline rush, i'm running through beautiful streets, i crest a hill on a cobblestone road and i yell "santa maria! santa maria!"

i am back in the "hospital", i don't remember how this happens. i'm in the darkened townhouse kitchen. there are two nondescript tall men watching me -- the guards. i understand i am here for mental reasons. i think i am fine, but i accept my hospitalization with equanimity. i open the fridge and eat some kind of pastry with a raspberry on top. i hear a voice narrating lil wayne's current medical situation. i wake up.

later: something about a girl at school, i don't quite recall what she looked like - generic teenage girl, probably around 13? she's very bubbly and excitable, a little obnoxious, but she takes an interest in me and i'm glad that someone finds me nice to be around. we are rehearsing something and she starts rubbing her body against mine. i am a little uncomfortable. i point out that it seems dirty; she laughs. next we are talking to each other on a bus. i remember that her backpack is very focal in these scenes. it's a jansport style backpack, mainly white with yellow, lilac and blue thunderbolt designs. we get off the bus with some of her friends and we are in a dark city area. one of her friends is wearing - hard to describe this - platform shoes with the platform made of hard black plastic; they are hollowed out in increasingly smaller concentric circles, like the pattern of a mining pit - goes clear through to the other side. i remember thinking this is really cool, actually i still do. we walk through a bridge-tunnel. we realize that the bridge has no railing and is thus illegal to walk on. the girl comments that she should have removed her shoes (they have a specific name -- it's very german -- i understand that its named after the guy who invented the pattern) and now the people on the adjacent, legal bridge would know she walked on the illegal bridge, because the opening of the tunnel has the same pattern as her shoes. i find this remarkable. a boy with us comments that he's seen the same pattern in greece and i understand that i'm in some kind of european country. the atmosphere in this scene is very nice, everything's lit by soft incandescent streetlamps.

then i am in a distorted version of a thrift store i frequent. my stepmother is getting married, today, and she wants a pink themed wedding. she gives me 5 dollars to buy a dress and she also wants me to look after a young girl (age 3-5, black hair, olive skin). i notice that the girl is wearing lipstick and eye shadow and i think to myself that her father is awful for making her look like a slut. i ask her if she likes wearing eye makeup and she says yes. i can't find a pink dress at the thrift store so i go to a version of the victoria's secret pink store. i find something and i try to steal it but i fail somehow. then an employee asks us to leave. i am frightened for a moment but then i realize it is just because the store is closing.

then i am inside of a south park video game (??) it looks terrible, like some awful game you'd see on newgrounds in 2005 or sth. top-down view, white background (snow) with a grey line representing the road and brown blocks representing buildings. i understand that it was made to be terrible on purpose. i have to go somewhere in the game but every time i try to go there i am transported back. this goes on for a very long time.

finally i return to real life. i am in a different store. this one has bright wooden floors, white walls; it is very open and spacious. the girl and i are standing in front of a white shelf which houses a scattered assortment of strange toys. she takes interest in a toy which seems to be some kind of japanese thing based on jersey shore?? i realize i have spent a very long time in the video game and i should have returned the girl by now; my stepmother must be wondering where she is. the girl's face has changed - her eyes are very dark and there is a swollen red area under her eyes (similar to the famous picture of omayra sanchez -- if you're going to look this up be warned that it is disturbing).

the room has darkened. my stepmother appears. the girl is lying on the ground. stepmother is angry. she tells me that the "death squad" has been informed and people from all over the world are searching for her. i break down crying. i understand that the police will be coming to talk to me.

i walk over to the edge of the room and beyond a short banister is a beautiful landscape. it is hard to describe its beauty in words. i am high above the ground; i can see the peaks of mountains and clouds moving through the deep & light blues of the sky. below me, miles below me, are vast rolling hills and lush greenery. rivers flow through the land. the immense scale is very very difficult to describe. i understand, somehow, that this is Iceland. i want to get closer. there is a very thin wooden tree trunk that i jump over the banister onto. the landscape more beautiful now and I understand that this is not only iceland but Heaven. i almost cry.

i know the police are coming for me soon and my life will be awful. i debate whether to let go of the tree and fall into heaven, or face real life. heaven is so beautiful. i let myself slip a little but then i grip the tree again.

i wake up.