nightmare

All I took was some melatonin. This is the kind of thing I dream after taking valerian.

You Monster

I am dangling on some contraption above a platform. I am able to control it, like an elevator. I get uneasy, and lower the thing a bit, because it is swinging back and forth. I am able to get to a point where I can drop onto the platform...

... I have a wife or a girlfriend. I am walking through the living room of my grandparents' house. As I walk by a corner, I see a box in which I know my wife/girlfriend is. One of her legs is sticking out, at a weird position. She crawls out. Earlier, she was beautiful and intelligent. Now she is horribly twisted, and acts like an animal. She has been mutated into a disgusting creature, and I may be as well. We crawl along the floor, on our way to do something. I forget what. I decide I like her even though she is disgusting now, and try to hug and kiss her. Her mouth is gaping and ugly, and she kind of writhes as I hold her.

We crawl out into the sunroom, where my grandfather is sitting. The girl makes eye contact with him, and stares. As she stares at him, she straightens up and looks normal. She tells me that looking into his eyes is curing her.

"Does this affect you at all?" I ask my grandfather.

"It doesn't seem to," he starts to say, but then changes his mind. "Yes, I think it's starting to drain me."

As I look, he begins to lose the life in his eyes, and his speech becomes dull. His eyes change from blue to a weird brownish, lifeless color, like my girlfriend's.

"How do I look?" he asks me. I decide to try some humor.

"You have fangs," I say in a poor attempt at humor. He doesn't look good, and my girlfriend is starting to degenerate.

Fortunately, I wake up here.

Me vs. the Nazis

I am at my grandparents' house. I find out that my grandmother works for the Nazis, and is part of a top secret plan. She lets me in on it, because she thinks that I am going to be a part of it. But I have no intention of being a Nazi. I decide to escape, so I make an excuse to leave the room. My granparents have a refrigerator in the garage, so I think perhaps if I go out that way my grandmother won't know I'm leaving. But they have a burglar alarm system that makes a noise to let people in the house know if someone is opening a door. So when I open the door to go outside, I know that she will know where I am going.

I quickly open the door, running to my car before she can catch up to me. I pull out my keys, and start the car as fast as I can. I know that if she didn't catch on before, she will now that she hears tha car start. As I back my car out of its parking place, I can see my grandmothers car being backed out of the garage. She blocks my way as I try to back into another area to turn around, so I push the car into drive and try speeding away. She quickly pulls her car in front of me, and my heart races as I try to find a way out. The excitement wakes me up.

I took 800 mg of valerian before bed last night. As often happens after taking valerian, I had some very unsettling dreams. Perhaps not so much what others would call nightmares, but so vivid as to be hard to go through.

Nursing Home

I go to a nursing home to visit my great aunt. She is supposedly suffering from Alzheimer's, but seems to be bright and talkative. In fact, she is almost a little overbearing. She keeps talking real loud, laughing, and telling stories. I wonder if she really has Alzheimer's, or is somehow cured.

Death of my Father

My father goes to a doctor's appointment. On the way, he calls me, and tells me that he is dying. There is nothing I can do to save him, as he is having a heart attack right on the spot.

For a while after this, the dream is spent in tears. This dream really felt like RL, due in part to the valerian supplement. I go home, and my mother informs me that they found my father's body. I say that I know. We cry together. After a time, I think that perhaps I should try to go on with life as usual.

I look up. My father is sitting on the couch. "Enough of this crying," he says. "What are we going to do tonight?" We look at him, and my mother says something about how loved ones will appear after their death when you are in mourning. He disappears, and I go back to crying. He shows up again once or twice, and appears to act like nothing is unusual. I know it is not real, though.

A little later in the dream I am talking with someone. We are discussing grief, and how I shouldn't cry too much. I bring up a part I read in CS Lewis' "A Grief Observed" where he talks about giving in to tears as almost a self-indulgant pleasure. I say that an honorable person should not do that.

Baseball

I am at a basebell game, watching the Cleveland Indians win some kind of championship game. They hit the winning home run, and it comes my direction. I am unable to catch it, and it goes out of the stadium. I get really excited about the Indians winning.

Still happy and excited, I walk down the street, leaving the stadium. I look at the yard of a house on my right, which is just behind the stadium. I see a baseball sitting in the yard, and can see a path in the snow running from the direction of the ballpark, as though it had landed and then slid across the ground before coming to a stop. I know that this is the home run winning baseball. I pull it over to me with my foot since there is a wooden fence around the yard and I don't want to trespass. I am about to pick up the ball when I realize that perhaps if it is in their yard it rightfully belongs to them. I debate about this, knowing that the winning ball will be worth something. I think that the honest thing to do is to bury the ball under snow, and send a letter to the owner of the house telling them that the ball is in their yard.

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.