vignettes from a different world

terrible recall tonight

1. i am working on a group project with unfamiliar people. we are in the auditorium of my elementary school. we are on laptops and we are running a program with a neon green and red on black colour scheme. there is some anxiety associated with this dream.

2. i am waiting for the bus in the snow with an unfamiliar girl. the atmosphere is very bleak.

3. i cannot remember anything about this dream except that i became lucid at one point! i simply realized that the circumstances of the situation were unrealistic and deduced that it was a dream. sadly my lucidity faded very quickly -- before i could do anything of interest.

4. false awakening. i am in bed in my room: very tired and disoriented. windows 7 error messages pop up and disappear constantly, obstructing my vision. i wonder if i am dreaming but decide that i am not. i am afraid that i am going insane.

i was watching a scene from a movie where a female version of batman was fighting a redheaded woman in a red superhero suit. the dream would alternate between movie scenes and visions of two iphones, one with a grey back and one with a red back, moving around and colliding with each other.

there was another dream where i found a beautiful fur-trimmed leather coat at a thrift store. a strange woman invited me to her house because she had clothes she wanted to give to me. the dream faded before anything else happened.

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.

first i am trying to sneak in to a children's arcade. i don't remember anything else about this dream.

then i am on a hilly cliff-edge with a woman who seems vaguely familiar. the ground is blanketed with snow. there are several white and orange cats roaming around. we realize the cats are coming from an area further ahead so we follow the path to there, but we find that it is blocked by thick shrubs. the woman remarks she hopes to get into that area someday. the ground slopes softly to the right and we walk down there, but as we continue down the slope we gain momentum and lose control. the woman slips and accidentally touches a snake. there are 3 snakes here: one with yellow and black stripes, which she touched; one tawny brown coloured; and one whose pattern i don't remember. the woman is afraid the snake is venomous and she wants to get medical attention. i follow her to a building that resembles my school; it is night now. i have brought the snake corpses with me. at some point they turn to globs of pink flesh. i enter the school and the woman is gone. there are two boys at the top of a stairway with a metal bucket. they instruct me to put the flesh in the bucket and i do so.

then i am outside the school again with a girl. we see a dead man's body and i remove another glob of flesh from it. this one is lighter pink and fat-streaked. as we reenter the school the girl remarks that i should hide it, so they don't know i'm adding human flesh to the bucket. i try to throw it into the bucket when the boys aren't looking, but i miss. they don't seem put off by the fact that it's human flesh, however.

i wake up with severe abdominal pain.
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short analysis:
in the dream i considered the snowy landscape to be part of the dominican republic. this explains the presence of snakes and is attributable to the fact that a friend who had visited gave me a ring from there the day previous.

the brown snake looked and moved exactly like a large snake i saw in a forest a year or so ago (i live in ontario-- generally the only snakes you encounter here are tiny green garter snakes - this one was brown, 5 or 6 inches around and quite long... unusual sight to see on a walk in the forest. it didn't scare me at all, in fact i was curious -- and in this dream i adopted the same attitude towards the snakes, although the woman was terrified).

the dead body and the globs of flesh didn't disturb me in the dream; it was all very matter-of-fact. i wonder, upon waking, if these images of bodily mutilation can be explained by the severe pain i was experiencing. although i did not feel any pain in the dream, the body-horror type images could have been a sort of alternate perception of it -- a symbol of pain, so to speak.

i was at my grandmother's house & my dad told me that the "liberty tank" had arrived in our yard. i went to look at it: it was a tank with red and blue stripes on the side, and the part where you sit was made of glass. there was a crash test dummy inside and at first i thought it was a real person: it was a young boy with striking blue eyes, slumped over as if dead. i remember thinking he looked russian. my dad removed it and assured me that it wasn't real. we climbed into the tank (the interior was just like the interior of a car) and began driving around. i noticed many people clothed in military uniform and i mentioned that i'd like one of those outfits. my father was driving recklessly and i remarked that he was going 80kmh in the middle of downtown; he disregarded this. we got out of the tank and entered an orange silk tent where there were many foreign people clothed in furs. i remember nothing else.

recall has been terrible the past few nights. thinking of taking up awareness-enhancing/LD-inducing techniques again but that's difficult when you're very busy irl

the dream began in the townhouse basement. it was dark. i don't recall what i was doing there. later i was trying to change the colour scheme on an ipod? then i was with my uncle in a version of my grandmother's living room. some other people were there but i forget who. he put on a blues song which i recognized as frog eyes - time reveals its plan at poisoned falls (i assumed that this version was a cover of the "original" blues song). i sang along to it. then it was very dark and i was sitting at a computer. i was trying to make a fake kickstarter for a tablet so that i could make money. i recall having significant difficulties with this.

then i am hanging off the side of a bed and trying to get a pin that has fallen underneath. B---- is watching me and making sarcastic comments. there are two lollipops under the bed, one wrapped and one unwrapped. i cannot reach the pin. i recall that i need the pin for sexual purposes (what in god's name are those purposes? i don't know.)

finally i am watching a woman dance in an empty room (concrete floor and walls; dirty; colour scheme is desaturated, dark teal). she is nude except for a pair of pink panties and i am not able to see her face. on her lower back (left sacral area) she has many deep wounds, which are (insufficiently) covered by flesh-coloured bandages in the shape of bows.

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there's not much to analyze here, but a few things i found worthy of comment:

i often have dreams wherein my subconscious is able to replay a musical piece entirely from memory and it is always flawlessly accurate... in real life my musical memory is nowhere near this prodigious (i tend to recall only lyrics and vague ideas of the vocal delivery). i really wonder what about the dreaming state allows me access to greater musical capabilities & how i can come to harness this ability in real life.

in most of my dreams that have sexual content the sex object is female... in waking life i consider myself heterosexual, i'm in a happy relationship with a man and i don't really find myself attracted to women. it's interesting, therefore, that it's mostly women who appear in my sexual dreams and i find myself wondering why. i have a vague idea that i find male sexuality more threatening than female sexuality and thus sexual situations involving women are simpler/"easier" to dream about, but really i'm not sure.

1. i had stolen four pieces of chocolate from somewhere. i was in a bedroom with blue walls (distorted version of real life). i set the chocolate down on the bed but it was soon covered with ants. i put two towels on the bed and some sort of leather tarp to prevent the ants from getting at it. then i was in an unfinished basement and my mother was arguing with another woman? i think i traded the chocolate for some kind of educational children's toy -- it was a transparent model of a head with an open top, you could stick your hand into the "brain" which was a bunch of tiny blue gears...

2. i am at school and i am given an opportunity to study different ecosystems. i choose to study one with a chinese name. i am given a large petri dish. it contains murky green water with small white particulates swirling around the centre in a floral pattern. however, goopy orange and white organic growths begin to appear in the petri dish and ruin the pattern. i try to remove the slimy growths but they keep forming. at one point my ex starts working on the same project beside me. he is doing even worse than i am. i am angry at him and i get second-hand embarrassment at his failure.

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.

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.

i dreamt that i was in the bathroom at my old townhouse. i was sitting on the toilet drawing on my laptop while pouring a bath. suddenly i heard a loud beeping sound. i wasn't sure whether it was coming from outside or whether it was in my head. i plugged my ears to check. i could still hear it with my ears plugged. i became afraid that i was going crazy.

then i woke up... it was my alarm.

dreams tonight were very mundane, can't recall much of them

i had a very long dream about being in a public outdoor swimming pool. there was a girl there who was making sexual advances on me, and later an autistic boy who was trying to show me pictures of a tv show or something? also a blonde guy who i think was antagonizing me. at one point i sustained an injury to my leg and i was afraid that the pool water would infect my open wounds.

then i was at school. the entirety of this dream took place in one room, with grey floors, white walls and harsh fluorescent lighting. a tall middle-aged woman with red hair, ostensibly a teacher, was berating me for not finishing an assignment.

finally i was walking through a distorted version of downtown with two rappers. they were talking about their lives and i found it very inspiring although i can no longer remember what they said. the weather was dreary: overcast & slushy. we walked together for a long time; at one point i became separated from them and was attacked by a group of kids who threw rocks at me from across the street. it was painful. one rock was very large and hit me on the head; in the dream i could feel my consciousness slipping away and my body collapsing. i came close to fainting but i recovered. after that they left me alone and i regrouped with the rappers.

then we parted and i was sitting in deep, fresh snow on the side of the street. i was with some other people & we were telling jokes and laughing with each other.

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.