task of the month dreams
First off, I'm really sorry that this is SO long. It took me half an hour just to type it all up- and I type fast! But it was really one of the strangest dream experiences that I've had. This is the first time I've ever played around with any of the dream techniques that I've read on this site, so I'm excited about it. The first part of the dream, I was non-lucid and it's really long. Then I became lucid for a while. Then I woke up briefly and attempted a WILD. In which a chance encounter with Julian Assange causes me to get mixed up in his trial… I’m riding in the back of a chauffeured car with my husband. We see Julian Assange hitchhiking on the side of the road. He is wearing a black suit with black shades and he has a Blue Tooth in his ear. He looks like a Secret Serviceman. We pull over and offer him a ride. He climbs in the front of the car and asks us to take him to the Austin capitol. He says that he expects there to be a huge crowd of curious people lined up along the way to see him, and that we will probably have to fight our way past people at the capitol too. Then he spends the remainder of the ride alternately texting on his Blackberry and talking on his Blue Tooth. Meanwhile, my husband and I roll up the divider between the front and back seats and we have sex. We arrive at the capitol. There are no members of the general public waiting at all, but the place is swarming with media. The capitol building is also a courthouse, and Julian Assange presents himself to the judge. My husband also drops me off at the capitol as my workplace and my school are just a few blocks away, and he takes the car and continues on to his own job. I’m walking with my backpack when a crowd of reporters surround me and usher me into the rotunda. They are all asking me questions about having sex with Julian Assange. Apparently someone snapped a blurry picture of me having sex with my husband in the car, then they saw Julian Assange and me get out and assumed I’d been with him. I try to clear up the confusion, but everyone is shouting at once and I can’t get a word in. One of the reporters puts a television camera in my face and a microphone. Everyone else goes silent because this guy is with the BBC. He asks me very loudly, “Did you have consensual sex with Julian Assange?” I know this is live television and I’m flustered and embarrassed. I look into the camera and say, “No.” The crowd of reporters erupt into gasps and howls. I’d meant “no- I didn’t have sex with him” but they interpreted it to mean “no- it wasn’t consensual”. I heard them screaming accusations at Julian Assange and they were asking me if I planned to press rape charges. I tried to leave the crowd, but they blocked my way. Finally I become disgusted with the whole thing, and I want to put an end to it as quickly and easily as possible. I announce in a loud, clear voice that we had consensual sex, that he did not rape me and that there was no story to be had here. Just two adults having consensual sex! I ask them to leave me alone. They lose interest and allow me to leave. Off in one of the side wings of the rotunda is a short, plump friendly looking lady dressed in gypsy clothes. She is leading a mule by its reins. A young gypsy girl stands next to her, dressed in a colorful shirt and a black lace shawl. The woman calls me over to her. She explains that Julian Assange is the father of the young girl but that he refuses to pay child support and she asks me for help. I tell her that I hope things work out for her but that I have no connection to either Wikileaks or Assange’s sexual assault case. We shake hands and I turn around to leave. I exit the rotunda and the grounds outside are covered in sand. The area is completely empty, but as I start to walk to the street, I see my brother sit down in the sand with a plastic shovel and some pails. “Are you really going to build sand castles?” I ask him in disbelief. My brother is in his 30s so this seemed very strange to me. He looks embarrassed at first, then adamantly maintains that there is nothing wrong with an adult building sand castles. We laugh about it. I ask him why he is here. “I heard that Julian Assange was going to appear in court today and I figured there’d be a big crowd here to see him so I came to witness the public circus. But when I got here, there was no one here but reporters,” he explains. “Yeah, I was surprised too. Last year, when the pope came to visit, there was a huge crowd,” I answer. “Well that makes sense,” my brother says, “since the pope is really famous. But I saw an even bigger crowd here a few years back when ABBA came.” Then for a little while we discuss ABBA and how they have some really great songs despite their reputation of being a cheesy disco group. Then I tell my brother that I have to rush home to call my mother-in-law as she was sure to watch BBC and get upset when she hears me saying that I had consensual sex with Julian Assange. I need to go home and call her to explain. We say goodbye and I walk home. In which I fly around the mountains and become lucid… This is a continuation of the long dream above. My house is a one-room cabin with large windows. I look out the windows and see beautiful and imposing mountains lining the landscape. I think for a second that it is odd to see such majestic mountains in Austin and I wonder if I’m back in the Himalayas. I stare at the mountains carefully though and realize that the peaks are too low and smooth to be Himalayan peaks. They appear to be snow-capped, but when I look more closely I realize that the snow is actually the color of caramel and it is spread along each softly rounded peak like icing on a cinnamon bun. This is such a beautiful sight that I lean far out the window so that I can look up and see the top of the mountains. From this vantage point, I’m able to see that actually there are three ranges of mountains with valleys between them. The second is taller than the first and the third’s jagged and steep peaks reach high up into the clouds. Mountains this tall don’t exist outside the Himalayas, I think to myself. For a moment, I consider how I went so quickly from Austin to Nepal, but then I’m too rapt with the sight to wonder about this. I step out the window and start to fly to the mountains. I am daunted by the steep face of the third range. I realize I don’t have the skills to climb it and that if I tried, I’d fail embarrassingly, but I’m pretty sure I could conquer the second. Looking for a good path, I fly along the ridge that connects the first low range to the second. It seems like an easy hike up the first and then it is just a matter of walking along the ridge until I get to the final climb up the peak of the second. I fly around this peak looking for the best climbing path. I decide that it might be easier to see it all if I go up higher than the third peak, and I soar up above the clouds and look down. Suddenly I see an amazing sight. There is a ridge connecting the tallest of the first, second and third ranges, and on each peak is a hexagonal landing pad of some sort. They look like helicopter landing pads only they are much larger. Each pad is connected with a runway. This is impossible to see from the ground. You must be up in the sky above the mountains to see it. I marvel at this for a little while and keep flying higher and higher. Then from behind the third range, I see a gigantic house towering over all the tallest peak. At first, the house is beautiful. It is made of brightly colored panes of glass. But when I glance away from it for a second, it changes. Now it is made of pieces of scrap metal, old tin roofs and garbage. It looks like millions of shanties from the Dharvi slum stacked on top of each other up into the clouds. I stare at it for a while and ponder all of it. It is absolutely impossible, I realize, for any of this to be happening. At that moment, I become lucid. I fly down into the valley in front of the tower and see all sorts of huge mobile statues made of scrap metal. Most of them are beautiful, and they all move in the wind. Most of them contain spinning flowers and pinwheels. They are fun, colorful and creative. I’m absolutely delighted to be dreaming these things. I fly back over the lowest mountain range, the one with the soft, rounded peaks covered in icing. They are gorgeous. Even though I know I’m dreaming, I really feel how beautiful nature is and I’m very happy. Then I see another mobile statue. This one is metal pole on which many shelves have been welded. The shelves are connected to the pole with gears that look like clockworks and they all spin around. At the end of the shelves are giant but dainty multi-colored tea cups. I fly up and down this mobile statue and realize that I’ve dreamt about this before. I try really hard to remember when I’ve seen it before, but thinking about this causes the dream to disintegrate and I wake up in my bed. In which I attempt to WILD and possibly succeed… I have just woken up from the dream above. I have an atomic clock in my bedroom that projects the time on my ceiling. It is almost 5AM. I’m laying on my back, and I can see the window by my bed and feel my husband’s body next to me. I think about what a cool dream that was and also how my body still feels heavy with sleep. I have not moved at all. I know the alarm clock will go off in a few minutes since we have it set for 5. I close my eyes again and think about what I read on this website about WILD. I’ve never tried WILD before, but since I’m so relaxed and heavy with sleep, I figure this would be a good time to try. I let my body relax some more but I keep thinking to myself “I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming”. This goes on for a little while and then my body feels like it is jerking awake- the way you feel when you fall in a dream and it jerks you awake. Then for a little while the room feels like it’s quaking and I hear a really loud sound. It is similar to what is sounds like when as a child I used to stand underneath the trestles and watching a train pass by above me. This went on for a very short period of time and then it stopped. I could feel myself still in my bed with my eyes closed. I wasn’t sure if I was asleep or not. I opened my eyes and I was still in my bed beside my window, but I was in a different room. Strangely enough, I was very calm at first. I just lay there and looked around. Then I got up. From then on, I had this strange compulsion in my body- I could not slow down or be still. I felt like my body was in a constant state of movement and all I could do was steer its direction. It was like I was hovering above the ground. I went over to the door and decided to see if I could pass through it without opening it. I did, and it was easy. Then I was standing on a banister of a spiraling staircase in a three story house. I went down the first flight of stairs and heard someone moving around below. I shouted “hello” to whoever it was, but no one answered. My voice sounded really loud and it echoed. I could feel my vocal chords vibrating in my throat, and I wondered if I really said hello in my real body laying in bed. It took a lot of energy to shout and I was afraid that I’d wake myself up if I did it again so I decided not to talk anymore. I was still standing on the second floor and I looked out the window. I decided to try to fly, and I leapt from the banister out the window and flew out of the house. Then I was standing in the yard. It was dark, the stars were bright and there was a pine tree beside me. I looked up at the sky and decided to fly towards the stars. They were big and beautiful and shining. I flew and flew as high as I could, but after a while I got tired. They were just too far away so I started to sink back down. It was lovely falling slowly through the sky back towards the earth. I passed a satellite along the way and it had a microphone on it. I leaned over and shouted “hello!” again. It sounded strange again and it took a lot of energy. At this point, I became a little giddy and silly. I don’t know what happened, but I started to feel like I was losing control. Part of the problem was this constant state of compulsion that my body felt. I had to keep moving and I didn’t know how to slow it down so that I could think. My mind started racing and I got really crazy. I started doing loops in the air and just laughing hysterically. I was falling in standing position with my feet towards the ground. When I was eye level with the roof of the house where I started, I saw a giant purple and pink plush rabbit sitting on the roof. It had to be 15 feet tall. It was an Easter Bunny stuffed animal but it had a menacing face. It was wearing a top hat. I hovered in the air around it for a while and wondered where it came from. I was pretty sure I did not dream up this rabbit- but here it was, as real and detailed as can be. I was also surprised that it did not scare me. I knew I was dreaming so I wasn’t afraid of it despite its menacing face. I flew back down to the ground and entered the house through the backdoor on the first floor. There was someone in the shower and I decided to go see who it was. I ran in a crazy way towards the shower, pulled the curtains back and shouted “Boo!” but before I could see who it was, the alarm clock went off and I woke up. This whole dream took just a few minutes though it felt like an hour. After I woke up, I started to question the whole thing. To be honest, I don’t know if I really had a WILD experience or if I just dreamed that I did.
Updated 12-29-2010 at 03:33 PM by 38879
This is the first time that I’ve written down keywords for dreams as I remembered them in the morning. These are all dreams that I had between snooze hits on my alarm clock. I've been wanting to do that since I started this journal but I either kept forgetting or I didn't have time. It has significantly helped the recall of my early morning parade of dreams, but I can’t remember any of the night-time dreams. Anyway, that’s a start! Just for kicks, here is what my sheet of paper says: work, posters, shredded Chemistry boy in linen closet 5 cats 14 shots my stool pilgrim hockey “colorado” In which I destroy work property, quit my job and almost watch Star Wars… I’m at work and I have a bunch of butcher paper on which is written everything I need to learn to pass my Chemistry exam. I’m in a work room by myself but the fourth wall is a window through which I can see people walking up and down a hall. My husband is in the next room, also working. I pull out a razor blade and start slashing the butcher paper into shapes. I’m going to make a jig-saw puzzle out of all the Chemistry notes. I decide that putting this puzzle back together will be the best way for me to study. As I’m slashing it up, my supervisor comes to the door. I step outside in the hall to talk to her. She asks me how much longer I’ll be using the butcher paper posters because she needs them for a meeting. I realize that I was not supposed to destroy them, so I make an excuse to use them for a little longer and keep her out of the room. After she leaves, I return to the room and stack the pieces up so that people walking around in the hall don’t see that I’ve destroyed the posters. I then go to the room nextdoor where my husband is working to ask him what he thinks I should do. He is in the middle of a presentation and I don’t want to disturb him, so I go back to my own work room. I realize that it is hopeless. There is no way that I can put the posters back together and I will probably lose my job. I decide to leave the workplace forever before I’m identified. I step out into the hall and hear the theme song for Star Wars. I stop and listen for a minute and realize that it is the first one, Episode 4, and that it is being played in a theater. I walk around in the halls until I find a theater and I look through the window in the door to see Darth Vader and the storm troopers boarding the rebel ship, looking for Leah. I’ve never seen Star Wars in the theater before. I go in to watch, but then I see my supervisor in the audience so I decide to leave. In which I find a boy in my linen closet… I’m in my childhood home, walking down the main hall which has bedrooms on the right and left and ends at a linen closet. I open the door to the linen closet and tangled up among the tall pile of folded and stacked blankets is a young boy, maybe six or seven years old. He favors my brother with pale skin and blonde hair, but I know he is a different boy. His head is resting on the top blanket while his arms and legs are folded between the blankets below. He is sleeping peacefully. I glance away, and when I look back, the boy is deformed. His limbs and neck are twisted around the blankets because he has muscular dystrophy and can’t straighten himself out. I realize with some horror that he has been stuffed in the closet to hide him. I reach in to help him out and touch his arm: he is dead. I panic. There is a dead body in my linen closet and I start to worry that the police will blame me for murdering someone. Then in a flash, I fear that I’ve put the boy’s body there. He resembles my brother so much that I start to worry that it is my brother. I force myself to look at his face carefully, and he opens his eyes and grimaces. In which I have five cats that are mostly reincarnations of cats I‘ve had in the past… My husband and I are in our bedroom unpacking our suitcase and five cats jump out. Three are large, fluffy adult cats and two are small adolescents, not quite kittens but not adults either. Our dog immediately tries to chase one of the cats, but we tell her no and make her sit on her bed. Then we explain to her that the cats are “puppies” and that she has to be friends with them. She decides to sit in her bed and observe for a while before trying to play with them. Two of the cats look just like pets from my childhood. One looked like my childhood cat, Dusty, a large Siamese who my parents already had when I was born and who died the year I started high school. I was very close to this cat. The other cat looked like Doofus who was my grandmother’s old blind grey cat. The two similar cats who popped out of my husband’s suitcase were newer versions of the older cats. I explained to my husband that when I was a baby, I had a stuffed Snoopy doll that I loved very much and carried with me everywhere. I couldn’t say “Snoopy” so I called it “Poopy”. By the time I was three years old, it was torn and dirty. My parents bought me a new stuffed Snoopy doll to replace it but I loved the old one so much I wouldn’t let it go. Instead, I started carrying around both the old and the new dolls and loved them both. One was called Poopy and the other was Snoopy. These cats were just like those dolls. They were not Dusty and Doofus but were newer versions of them. Their names are Gusty and Goofus. When I petted Gusty, she curled up in my lap, dignified, and wanted to be petted over the top of the head and under the neck just like Dusty. Goofus wanted to explore the room by herself and be left alone. The third adult cat was a really fluffy fat long-haired cat that looked like a Persian. He was a lover, and I told my husband that he had the same personality as McKenzie, the cat I got in high school and had through college when I met my husband. The new cat looked nothing like McKenzie except that he was just as fat, but he acted just like him. He playfully batted at our hands and rubbed his body against our legs and arms. I named him Lover Boy. The two younger cats confused me. They ran around together as a pair playing and bouncing off one another and were not very interested in us. I told my husband that one of them must be a reincarnation of KittyCat who was McKenzie’s companion and lived until very old age. But neither of the kittens looked or acted like KittyCat. And I had no idea who the second young cat was. We wondered at this for a while and then decided to name them Kip and Kiddo. I played with the cats for a while and woke up. In which I still have five cats and a crazy lady tries to give me 13 injections… Even though I woke up for a while, I fell right back into the cat dream. The five cats now had a really bad case of fleas that was affecting our dog too. We figured it was because they’d been in the suitcase for a while and hadn’t had any flea treatment. But we didn’t want to double dose them with Frontline if they’d already had flea treatment as too much Ivermectin can cause problems in some animals. We called a veterinary nurse practitioner who makes house calls. A fat brown haired woman in a purple sweater arrives at our house. She smells of dogs and cigarettes. She looks at the cats and says she will have to take them in for testing. We help her round them up with a butterfly net. Only Goofus seems distressed. I’m worried about the cats while they are away and make the woman promise that she will not give them any treatment until she consults me first. She comes back the next day with two large duffle bags. She unzips the first bag, and dozens of cats jump out. There are cats of all shapes, sizes and colors running around the house. I tell the lady that we’ve become cat women. I’m happy to have all the cats running around, but the lady speaks to me accusingly. She says that these are all the kittens of my five cats. She said that I’ve been an irresponsible owner and didn’t neuter and spay them. I argue with her because this is untrue. Gusty, Goofus and Lover Boy have all been neutered and spayed, and Kip and Kiddo are too young to have babies. The veterinary nurse practitioner admits that I’m correct and explains that she had me confused with someone else. We then run around looking for my five cats to separate from the others which she will have to take back to someone else’s house. Lover Boy is easy to find because he comes when I call him. Goofus is anti-social but wise. She has already figured out what is going on and she is waiting by the bedroom door. We put them both in the bedroom and herd the other cats into the living room. Gusty then rubs herself on my legs. I tell her that she can stay out in the living room but that she has to stay close to me so that she doesn’t get lost in the crowd of cats. The fat lady and I are left searching for Kip and Kiddo. They are lost in the mass of cats. She pulls out her butterfly net again and starts gathering up cats, inspecting each scoop for Kip and Kiddo, and then dropping the other cats into her bag. Finally, we find my two adolescent cats and put them in the bedroom with Lover Boy and Goofus. The fat veterinary nurse and I sit down at my kitchen table. My dog Lucy sits under the table at my feet and Gusty sits on the table near my hand. The lady opens her second bag and pulls out a bunch of syringes. She drops one on the floor and my dog picks it up with her mouth. I take it from her and notice that it is a giant needle - the sort that doctors use for spinal taps. I hand it to her and notice how chaotic and unhygienic her practice is. The lady explains that fleas are a super organism like ants or bees. The live in colonies and share a large consciousness. She says that the fleas that have inhabited the cats are the same as the ones who live in the carpet and on my dog and even on my own skin. She says that we can kill any of them and this will eventually kill them all because they all must stay alive for the super organism to function. The tests she ran on my five cats reveal that they’ve already had a recent dose of Ivermectin so she doesn’t want to give it to them again. Instead, she wants to inject me and my dog with some flea treatments, and it will eventually spread to the cats. First I protest because I’ve never seen flea medication given as an injection. Usually it is topical or in a pill form. She says that we have a serious infestation and this would not be enough. Next I argue that I’m not sure if it is safe for people. She makes me feel guilty for putting something on an animal that I’m not willing to put on myself. I agree to take a shot. I look at the syringes strewn out across the table and ask her which one she is going to use. I’m really worried about that giant spinal tap syringe. She explains that she is going to use all of them. I count them and see that there are 14. I tell her that this doesn’t make any sense and that I must be dreaming. She argues that I can’t be dreaming because in a dream, I don’t know how to count. I accept that this is true and then get really worried about what to do. She says she is going to put seven shots in one arm and six in the other. I tell her that this is only 13 and she says that the 14th, the spinal tap syringe, will go to my dog. I’m about to submit, to accept that this woman is a professional and that I should trust her when I remember that I do have free will and that I don’t need to be bullied. I tell her that I’m uncomfortable with her explanations and that I can’t trust her with something so potentially dangerous as injecting substances into my body and my dog’s body. She tries to make me feel guilty and says I just won’t do it because I’m afraid of all the shots. I admit that I am afraid of the shots too, but that I’m more afraid of getting a staph infection or brain damage. I tell her to leave and help her gather up her syringes. She doesn’t even remove the needles from them and she pokes herself once. In which I rediscover a childhood possession and wake up crying… I wake up (in my dream) thinking about the little stool that my great grandmother made me when I was a little girl. It was a multi-colored embroidered round seat standing about a foot and a half off the ground on four little wooden legs. She gave it to me when I was only six or seven years old, and by the time I was in high school it was so wobbly that I couldn’t use it to sit or stand on anymore but kept as a sentimental item. I know that I held on to it through college, but I’m not sure what happened to it after that. I lay in bed thinking about it for a long time and then remembered that I planted it in my garden. I realized suddenly that this was foolish since it the exposure to the elements would destroy it, so I ran outside in my robe and started searching my garden for it. My garden was a multi-layered biosphere. Up above my head was a tree canopy with tall flowers sticking out. At eye level were the tops of rose bushes and tropical plants. Below this were shrubs, holly and nandina. Ground level was ivy and daffodils. Frogs jumped about the garden and I followed them because my great-grandmother loved frogs and I knew they would lead me to her stool. I found the stool beneath an umbrella of iron plant leaves. I’d planted the wooden legs in the ground and had to dig it up. I carried it inside and got back in bed with it. My husband and I examined it from our bed. The embroidery on the top had faded completely and the cloth had a small tear from which some of the stool top’s stuffing was visible. I touched this stuffing and was surprised how soft the material was. My husband stuck his hand inside it too, and it expanded. Beneath the embroidered surface cloth were dozens of pieces of fabric including fine silk saris and down quilts. We pulled the fabric out until we were buried in our bed under a mountain of colorful cloth. My stool appeared to be destroyed. I picked it up by the four legs and set it on the ground, now deflated and without a stool surface. But then I saw that the bottom of the stool was hardwood and that it contained a leaf inside like a dining room table that can be expanded. I pulled it open and my stool became a beautiful hardwood table, about four feet by two feet. Folded down over the table was a delicate metal music stand made of a fine pattern of intertwined roses. I flipped it up and sat in front of it, smiling. “Look,” I told my husband, “now I can sit on the floor and play my guitar in front of this!” In which the houses on our street turn into pilgrims and play hockey… I step outside on my front porch. I look at the houses across the street. They all turn into giant cartoon pilgrims. They have top hats, beards, buckle toe shoes and farmers clothes. They are a long row of identical pilgrims. All at once, they pull out hockey sticks and start playing street hockey. In which my safety word is “Colorado”… I was engaged in a relatively tame sex game with two men I didn’t know very well. I don’t think the details are appropriate to explain here! But what I thought was really interesting is that I told the guys that my safety word (which is the word you say to end the sex game) was “Colorado”. Once I woke up, I realized that this is also my name here on this website so I must’ve been thinking about dreaming at some level. I don’t live in Colorado or anything like that so I don’t think it could mean anything else.
Updated 12-17-2010 at 04:39 PM by 38879