Thread: Asymptote's Dreams

Lucid: blue. Semi-lucid: green.

March 4th, 2008

NOTE: This was one of those rare "epic" dreams that seems to have a great deal of emotional meaning. I always seem to get them when I'm going through profound personal change or growth, although I'm not quite sure what caused this one.

A Journey of a Thousand Light-Years

For some reason, I'm back in high school. I'm at a school I've never been to before, and I don't know anybody. I don't want to bother trying to fit into all the cliques, so I decide to act like I'm mentally retarded, so that nobody will bother me. While I'm bumbling around the campus, I run into a group of
"nerds", who take no notice of me. Then, one of them asks another one a science question, which I answer. Suddenly, I'm part of the group. We sit on the grass for a while, looking at something on a concrete wall [it may have been a projector screen; I can't remember].

We get involved in a project to colonize space. I'm sitting in a classroom on a space shuttle, in orbit around the Earth. I'm sitting next to a girl, who I apparently fancy. We laugh together quite a bit, and I keep resting my head on her shoulder. Then, for no particular reason, our leader (who is more like a high-school teacher) tells us to kiss the person next to us. I do so eagerly. Afterwards, the girl frowns and complains that I kiss like a monkey, and don't use any tongue. My ego deflated, I stare at the floor.

[sudden transition]

There's a dead locust-like insect in a plastic box. It's arranged like a taxidermied bear, in a very frightening "attack" pose. I pick up the box and look at it, and the insect falls over. Somebody is talking to me, but I'm preoccupied trying to get the insect to stand back up.

[sudden transition]

There's a poisonous snake on my coffee table. I hover my finger near it, and pull back when it tries to strike at my fingertip. Then, I pick up a pencil and poke at the snake, which immediately bites the pencil. There are now two holes in its yellow paint, and for some reason, the pencil is starting to swell, as though the venom were having an effect on it. I get confused.

[sudden transition]

I'm in a burned-out house in a stormy wasteland. The house has been abandoned for a long time. The floor is covered with caked-on, dried soot, and there's no roof, revealing a cloudy sky. I go over to a door, and find that a message has been painted on it in red. I read the message. It's from my cousin Jerry. The message says something to the effect that I should call him when I discover the "secret part" in some video game.

[sudden transition]

I'm in space again, on the same spacecraft. The craft arrives somewhere [possibly Alpha Centauri]. An older black woman is walking around the craft, talking to someone else. She starts making a lot of odd jokes about death that don't seem to amuse her interlocutor much. The woman sits down and starts polishing a very imposing suit of leather and steel armor. After a second, she pauses and looks up, eyes wide.

"Jesus!" she says "I just realized, before long, we aren't going to be able to make jokes like that!" In the dream, this is in reference to the fact that we've discovered some kind of nanotechnology that will allow us to repair our bodies and live forever.

The spacecraft arrives somewhere else, and we discover the remnants of an earlier colonization effort. We feel badly for the dead colonists, but we're also quite pleased that we made it and they didn't. As I look at a tiny asteroid with a metal bit sticking out of it, I read something saying "...a [monopole?] magnet buried in a few nanograms of rock."

[transition]

I'm standing on the command deck of the ship. There's an oddly-decorated four-armed robot standing there, working the controls. I'm standing to its right, and a few other people are standing to its left. We're both watching the robot intensely. Somebody [me?] tells it that it can be free, but the others order it to continue its duties. Since it was apparently built to serve us [sounds like the plot to a bad sci-fi movie, doesn't it?] it obeys their orders. Eventually, though, its top set of arms liberates itself (!), and begins fighting the orders. The bottom arms, though, still execute its duties faithfully. The top arms reach down and tear off the bottom-left arm. The other people order it to do something with the controls, which its bottom-right arm does. Then, the robot grabs the arm and pulls it, then goes floating off through the air, before heroically tearing the arm from the socket. There's a great feeling of triumph.

Lucid: blue. Semi-lucid: green.

March 5th, 2008

NOTE: This was yet another "epic" dream (see my last post). It might just be that these dreams aren't really epic, it's just that they have a lot more structure and organization ("plot", if you will) than my previous dreams.

The Girl

I walk into my laundry room. In addition to my four washing machines (?), there are two more that look entirely different. Where mine are sort of a beige color, the new ones are shiny and silver and pretty. There are also a lot of really huge laundry bags stacked along the back wall. A few of them have notes pinned to them. One of the bags' notes reads "For Sitting." Another reads something to the effect of "Don't go through my stuff :-)". I move on to the washing machines, and see that one of them also has a note written on it from "Julia." I realize that I don't know who Julia is, and I'm racking my brain trying to figure it out when she comes down the stairs. She looks like a girl I knew from high school. We talk for a bit, then she goes off to do something. Apparently, she was responsible for bringing the extra bags and washing machines.

Later, I go upstairs to hang out with her, and discover that her father has arrived. I'm anxious to be rid of him, but he won't go away. I keep trying to drop hints that I don't want him there, but he ignores them. He starts talking about various features of my apartment. Eventually, he opens the oven and reveals that he's baked a single cookie in the shape of Marge from "The Simpsons." I frown at him, and tell him that my oven is a piece of junk and has very bad temperature control. As I say this, I realize that the cookie is badly burnt and is giving off foul-smelling smoke.

I go into the kitchen, and find that Julia's father is still hanging about. I keep trying to think of ways to get rid of him. While I'm doing that, he fiddles around with my sink, and the drain backs up. Water floods across my kitchen counter. I get very upset with him, because my autographed copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick is sitting on the counter.

"Sorry," he says.

"That's okay," I reply, grumbling, "It's only a limited-edition autographed copy." Eventually, though, I realize that the book was getting wet was some completely different book, and my copy of Slapstick was sitting somewhere else. Still, I want the man gone. Eventually, I get rid of him.

[there's a bit missing here]

I decide to clean the pool [odd, considering that I don't have one]. I dive in and discover a huge clump of algae-covered hair floating at the bottom. Before I can remove the disgusting mass, more of the stuff gets thrown in. Eventually, I manage to collect all of it, and I throw it out of the pool.

[Another bit missing]

I think Julia is flirting with me. We're hanging out together a lot, at least.

[I really wish I'd written this next bit down, but by that point, I could barely keep my eyes open, and I wanted to catch up a bit on my sleep. The result is that I'm working from a very foggy memory.]

It's in the fairly distant future, and human beings are no longer constrained to totally "normal" human bodies. There are all sorts of odd-shaped people about. Personally, I consist of a hollow sphere with a long handle sticking off.

My new body looks something like this:



When I want to interact with the world, the sphere and the handle split in half and swing open on a hinge, and reveal three eyes on the inside surface of the handle. Someone compliments me on having three eyes.

Somehow, something bad happens to me.

There's a city street sloping up, with sterile, white, hypermodern buildings on either side.

I'm either trying to get somewhere or trying to get away from somewhere.

Julia is still there in some capacity.

Something significant happens involving future technology.

One or two of my eyes gets injured.

A toilet backs up and overflows.

Lucid: blue. Semi-lucid: green.

March 9th, 2008

NOTE: I didn't write this dream down, so the memory's very fragmented.

Adoption

I'm in some sort of peculiar pet shop trying to adopt a cat. There's somebody there who makes me nervous. I keep trying to adopt the cat, but the person stops me. Somehow, they keep me from leaving, and threaten me with something, possibly a gun.

Suddenly, the place is not a pet shop, but a child-adoption agency. Some depressed people come down to adopt a child.

[something happens, I forget]

I wander down to the beach [?] and there I find one of the adopted children laying dead facedown in the sand. The people who'd come to adopt him are very upset, and start saying something about a hurricane.

The whole dream has a very disturbing feel to it.

Lucid: blue. Semi-lucid: green.

March 13th, 2008

NOTE: This one, like the last, is transcribed from memory, so it's a lot more fragmented than usual.

The Electric Car

It's raining. I'm standing on a sidewalk next to a winding road in the hills. My father appears around a bend in the road, driving an electric car. In order to demonstrate the car's acceleration, he stops and then speeds up. The car is very fast. I get in, and he starts driving. My father tells me that the car is a Dodge.

After a few minutes, we're heading back uphill, and I'm getting annoyed at my father because he knows how badly I want to drive the car, but he won't let me. Suddenly, he stops and gets out of the car. I follow him as he crosses the road.

He goes into a little thatched-roof mud hut with beaded curtains over the doors. Inside is a Mexican man, and my father starts speaking Spanish to him. I can't understand Spanish, and that annoys me, and I keep thinking that my father is talking about me with the man. I become aware that the man is some sort of Mayan or Aztec (the dream didn't really specify which) spiritualist.

[it sort of trails off here]

Killer Clown

I'm walking across a parking lot at night. There's a clown standing in the parking lot holding a sign. The clown's out there to get people to go into some store, but he makes me very nervous. After I leave the parking lot, I keep looking over my shoulder to see if the clown is following me.

Eventually, I get back to my apartment. For some reason, my mother is there. I confess to her my paranoia about the clown. I laugh, convinced that I was just being paranoid, but just to check, I push open the venetian blinds just a crack. There's nobody outside the door. Then, I shift my head a little bit, and suddenly, I see the silhouette of the clown's head framed by moonlight. I start screaming, then wake up.

Government Investigation

For some reason, people in my apartment complex are being observed and investigated by the government. I'm worried.

One of the government agents goes into my apartment and gathers some information, then walks up to me and informs me that I'm violating some law or other.

"You'll have to break every CD and DVD in this apartment," she tells me.

Dejectedly, I obey, and I start collecting the disks and snapping them in half. I start to get angry, since I have a lot of CDs that will be hard to find again, and I'm not exactly rolling in cash, so re-buying them will be expensive.

PCP Donuts

I go to my local grocery store, and as I'm passing by the bread section, discover that they're selling boxes of little donut holes dusted with the drug PCP instead of powdered sugar. I buy them and take them home, but as I'm heading home, I start to get worried. It doesn't make sense for a supermarket to sell an illegal drug like that, and I start thinking that it must be some kind of government sting operation. Still, I eat one of the donut holes, and start to have some psychedelic effects. I get home, and my mother arrives suddenly, and I'm very concerned that she'll notice my odd behavior.

The Loan

I'm at my college, and a very big guy comes up to me and says,

"Hey, can I borrow twenty cents?"

"Sure," I say, and reach into my pocket, but as I'm handing him the money, he says,

"Can I just borrow like, forty cents?" I frown at him and get out some more money. "I only wanna borrow sixty cents," he says, and I start to get very angry with him. I think he thinks he's somehow tricking me into giving him more money, and I get upset and walk away.

Later, I hear him talking to someone else (or I hear someone else talking about him), and he says that he's going to kill someone (it was a specific person, but I can't remember who). The planned murder has something to do with the money I loaned him, but I don't think I'm the target. I hear some professors talking about the murder, and one of them tells me to go find the target, whose name is Andrew. I walk into the first classroom I can find, and ask for anybody named Andrew to stand up. A few people stand, and I go to each of them, asking "Do you know a big black guy?" (the killer). One of them says he does, and I warn him that the man wants to kill him, and he runs away. As I leave the classroom and start up the stairs, I see a young guy dressed in black with black-dyed hair. He looks very shifty. Somehow, I know that he's responsible for this whole murder-plot thing, and that he was actually the intended target. Apparently, he's smuggling something in his mouth, because there's a plastic baggie or a piece of bubble wrap between his lip and his bottom teeth.

The Song

I've written a song about something rather silly, and it becomes a big hit on the Internet. I go into my Anthropology class, and my professor starts playing it and telling everybody that I wrote it. I get quite embarrassed. I don't want this much attention.

May 9th, 2008

The White Room

My friend Charlie and I are walking on a white catwalk hanging from a high-ceilinged white room. For one reason or another, Charlie says something about men.

"Men aren't pretty," I say. "They're hairy, they're sweaty, they're smelly, they're rough. Not to mention their behavior. Don't even go there, sister." I say the last sentence like somebody doing a cruel impression of a gay man.

Somehow, I get myself trapped on a very high-seeming windowsill near the catwalk. The ledge isn't very big, so I have to hold on to some boards that are apparently mounted near the ceiling. The boards aren't very strong, and I know that they'll break soon. I yell for Charlie to come and help me. The catwalk turns sharply right near the window ledge, and Charlie comes over to the corner to try to help me across. As he's reaching in my direction, the catwalk collapses, and he falls what looks like about ten feet onto a little square table. He says "I'm slidin'!" as he falls. I ask him if he's all right, and he says he's fine.

One of the boards I'm holding snaps, and I nearly fall of the sill. I tell Charlie to get me a ladder or something to get me down. He's about to leave, but before he does, I tell him to put something soft below me, in case I fall while he's gone. He piles up some blankets below me, but I tell him to move them closer, which he does. Just as he's about to leave to get the ladder, I realize that I'm not really all that high up (maybe a few feet), and I jump down with my face scrunched up in fear and anticipation. Charlie looks at me like I'm a wimp.

"See what I mean about men?" I say, turning off the fan before I leave.

May 10th, 2008

A Game

I'm playing a game very similar to "Counter-Strike," except in this game, when you shoot people, they disappear rather than becoming corpses, and you get points.

Time is running out on the current game, and my team has to kill all of the other team in order to win. I've cornered the last few enemies in a large warehouse. I shoot a woman and her companion, and they disappear.

Time is almost up, but the last enemy appears out of nowhere. I shoot him, but my gun is on non-automatic mode, so I switch it and start shooting rapidly. But, just as he's about to die, he throws a smoke grenade at me which explodes in a gray flash, and I wake up.

12 May 2008

Disaster Strikes[NOTE: This was another of those "epic" dreams I have from time to time. This has to be one of the most coherent plots I've had in a long time.]

I'm at my college, which suddenly resembles my high school. Some sort of disaster has taken place, so the school has been shut down. Students are no longer allowed to enter a large part of the school, but that just happens to be the part where my bag and a lot of my stuff are, and I don't want to lose any of it. So, I sit around. The professors start to act a little odd, and some of them flee the school, seemingly in fear. There are a lot of military or ROTC students hanging about. I wander around for a while, hanging out with various people I've known. The disaster has made some of them start acting odd, too.

I see someone I knew in high school. He drives into the parking lot and circles around the McDonald's (?) before parking and getting out his electric wheelchair. He's got a very nice car, but it has some odd bumper stickers on the back. One of them is a stylized picture of him, with pink lines drawn on his face for some reason. He gets out and rolls around in the wheelchair for a while, then gets up and walks with me. I get very confused, because, apparently, he only uses the wheelchair to get from place to place, and he walks around once he gets there.

I end up near the soldiers again. Since they seem to be blocking me from getting into the locked-down part of the school, I go over to a female soldier and copy her appearance, like one might do in a computer game, just by clicking. I then climb up to a ledge above the doors that lead into the sealed-off area, planning to expose my copied breasts to distract the soldiers. But, for some reason, I pick up a boomerang before I reach the top, and by the time I get up there, one of the soldiers has spotted me, and is looking suspicious. He asks what I'm doing. I don't have an answer, but I start to get nervous, because the field I'm looking out over is apparently the field where they do target shooting with shotguns, and they use the boomerangs as moving targets.

I'm hanging around with my cousin Jacob. He's watching some sort of Japanese anime movie where a little boy gets kidnapped and is forced to make large withdrawals from the kidnapper's bank account. The first scene shows him running down a dark hallway with sweat all over his face, with a long row of ATMs to his left. Then, for some reason, Jacob and I decide to watch the movie's trailer first, which just consists of a very odd sequence of chopped-up, sped-up scenes, almost like a video on fast-forward.

Part of the movie is like a video game, where the viewer has to enter the proper password to access the ATM. It's complicated. There is a password box, a bunch of other little boxes, and then a box to "confirm" the password. Jacob enters something like 3956SQ in the first box, which confuses me because it seems like it ought to be only numbers, not letters. Then, he enters all the other information, and in the last box, he enters a completely different number. He gets annoyed when the ATM won't accept it. I try to tell him (but only through vague, indirect hints, for some reason) why it's not working.

While he plays the movie/game, I go over to the window and look out to see a beautiful blue sky filled with puffy clouds. We seem to be at the same altitude as the clouds, almost as though we're in an airplane or something. It starts to look a lot more like that when I realize I can't see the ground. I tell Jacob about them, but he only looks at them for a moment before going back to his game. Later, I tell him to look again. There's a cloud that looks just like the prow of a ship cutting a wake through rough seas. Then, the cloud suddenly looks sort of rectangular, like a really odd-shaped fire engine. Jacob looks at it, and says a line from some Schwarzenegger film where he says "Fire engine!" in a really amusing way.

[sudden transition]

Back at UNCC, I find one of my English teachers from high school walking across the parking lot. Even though a feeling of impending doom is still hanging over us from the disaster, she's in good spirits, smiling all the time. I tell her that I'm afraid to die. She says that she believes in life after death, but she seems to say it in an odd kind of roundabout way. I tell her that I've tried to believe in the afterlife, but I can't. She says something about how I've got the wrong idea about the afterlife, but it seems to me that her idea about it doesn't make it much of an afterlife at all.

14 May 2008

Stoves and Exams

I'm in my apartment, but it looks more like a hybrid of my current apartment and the house I lived in when I was very little. It's quite dark inside, and rainy outside, altogether depressing. I'm awake early, and getting ready to go off to my classes. Apparently, I've got some exams.

Just as I'm about to leave, I look at my stove and see that the oven is turned on. I look at the dial, which is set on 10,000 degrees. I can see the heating coil in the oven, which is white hot and giving off a lot of smoke. Then, sparks spray everywhere and the oven shorts out, setting the stove on fire. I hurry to find the fire extinguisher that I keep on my counter, and I try to put the fire out. However, the extinguisher only works when I squeeze the lever a little bit, and if I squeeze it too much, water shoots out.

Once the fire is mostly extinguished, I unplug the stove and get ready to go off to my exams. When I get to the college, I have a lot of trouble finding my way around, and it's very rainy and dreary.

I spend the whole day worrying that there was some sort of project I was supposed to do for my exams that I forgot to do, and by the time I get home, I'm in a very bad mood. Once there, I see that someone has plugged my stove back in, and it ends up catching fire again. I put it out.

19 May 2008

My House

I'm riding around a neighborhood that doesn't look familiar. I go into a house. Something makes me think it's a vacation house, and it's not mine. I hang about for a while, then start flipping through my anthropology textbook. I come upon a line drawing, demonstrating how two people have sex. I get turned on, but my mother and my friend Charlie arrive. We hang out for a while, then I go to try to look up the drawing again. I can't find it. I look in a different textbook for the same class, but still can't find it. I begin to get suspicious. None of this makes sense, so I start to suspect that I may have been dreaming when I saw the drawing.

I start to hear the sound of a party and loud music playing outside. Charlie leads me to a stadium where some sort of enormous rap festival is going on. There are people running around everywhere, partying, fighting, and dancing. I keep trying to break-dance as I walk, but I get worried that I might break my neck falling down the stairs.

I'm back at the house. It's raining very heavily. The windows aren't closed, and the wind is blowing the blinds around. A lot of rain is blowing in. I get worried about my mother, who's still standing on the deck, watching the storm. I call to her, but she doesn't hear me. A bolt of lightning flashes across the sky, and there's a very loud thunderclap. I call to her again, but when she tries to come inside, I realize that there are three locks on the door, and I've lost the key to one of them. The lock whose key I lost is only attached to the door by a board, so I just tear the board off. My mother comes in, but now the door won't shut properly, and I realize how stupid it was to pull the lock off. We try to figure out how to fix it. I decide that I'll just take the screws out then nail the board and the lock back to the door. When I go to unscrew them, though, the tip of my screwdriver gets all bent. I know it will never work again, and I complain about this. I continue taking out the screws anyway. When I finally get one of the screws out, it looks very odd, like this:

The Launch

I'm in a garage. Charlie is playing some kind of video game. We're in the game world somehow. A rocket is going to launch soon. Charlie goes to a supply closet and picks up a few weapon power-ups. Some of them are meant to be mounted on the player's airplane, but he uses them by hand anyway. He fires the plane's cannon, and knocks down some sort of platform that was mounted on the side of the rocket's launch tower. It collapses into the empty silo.

"You shouldn't do that," I tell him.

"Yeah, I think you have to use those platforms later in the game." I see an image of how they would have been used: there was a computer terminal on each platform that the player had to press. On one of the tower cameras, the place where the platform had been flashes red. Charlie gets confused, and he doesn't understand what went wrong. At the bottom of the flashing screen, "Point of No-Fly" appears.

People are wandering around the launch garage, messing with things. Mr. Burns (from "The Simpsons") takes some documents out of boxes that look like coffins. He tells me to put them in order, but the numbers are bizarre, and the "documents" are just things written on loose-leaf notebook paper. I try to put them in order, but there aren't enough documents for it to be worth the trouble. The only ones I have are #1, #3, #7, and #4,387,354 (or some such number). I start talking about the A.I. computer Mr. Burns had installed is evil, but he says that that's how he ordered it.

23 May 2008

Evolving Plants

My friend Charlie is living in a very nice house. I walk around it for a while, and eventually come upon a fairly exotic-looking jungle plant of some kind in a pot hanging from the ceiling (it's in a greenhouse of some sort). I look at it for a while, and discover that it's growing so fast that I can see it grow. As it grows faster and faster I start to get worried. Apparently, I think it's going to eat me or something like that. I ask Charlie to come help me, but he's off in some other room and doesn't come, so I'm on my own. I sit down at this touch-screen computer terminal and start trying to find some way to design a plant that will be able to kill the fast-growing plant. I decide to use the genetic algorithm approach, that is, create a very simple plant and let it evolve to be able to kill the original plant. But, as I fiddle with Charlie's computer, I start to realize that I don't have the programming skills to design the kind of plant I'm thinking about. Instead, I just get as far away from it as possible.

26 May 2008

Virus

I'm in a small office building. A warning is going around about some sort of computer virus that's just been released into the building's network. I see someone's computer get infected while they're using it. The keyboard turns blue and sort of vaporizes, and then, to my horror, so does the person who was using it. When I see someone else's computer doing something similar, I pull them away.

Now, we're on the run from somebody. We're driving down a highway with another car in hot pursuit. Since we can't shake them, and we know that they'll kill us if they catch us, we decide to take extreme measures, and we start driving on the wrong side of the road. We weave between very close-packed cars, and the cars start to dodge around us, some of them losing control and spinning into the other lane. This produces a massive traffic jam which blocks the people chasing us for a while.

We end up driving down some sort of deserted service road, and we crash into a wall. We know that the people chasing us are still close behind, so, even though the front end of the car is all smashed up, we just keep driving. The car limps along, and we end up back in traffic with our pursuers close behind us.

14 June 2008

Terrorism

I'm walking around an arid and gravel-filled landscape. I seem to be at the top of a cliff or a ridge. I'm walking with a few other people. Suddenly, a man appears below, holding a rocket-propelled grenade. We all freeze in our tracks and watch as he tries to launch the grenade. He doesn't have a launcher, so he just lights one end of it with a match or a lighter, and it makes a popping sound like a firecracker going off. It doesn't actually launch, so we get a chance to get away, which we do.

We're now staying in some kind of Japanese-style house. I'm really regretting my decision to visit this country (I think it was supposed to be Iraq or Afghanistan), because now, all the terrorists in the country want us dead. I try to stay in the corner of the living room of the house, as far from the windows as possible. I begin to wonder how I'm going to get home, or if I'm simply going to be killed. Eventually, we all go to sleep.

I wake up before everyone else, and it's still dark outside. I wander through the house, trying discreetly to wake people up so that we can all leave. It's very cold in the house, because the air conditioner is turned up very high. It takes a while, but everybody wakes up. I start getting really worried that the airport is also terrorist-controlled.

NOTE: I seem to remember that each of the people I was traveling with in the dream had a very distinct personality, but I can't remember any of them now.

ANOTHER NOTE: I can't recall ever having dreamed about terrorists before...I suppose that'll teach me to watch the BBC right before I go to sleep.

6 July, 2008

Whoops, Sorry

I'm in my upstairs bathroom. Some sort of sentient liquid-metal entity is in there, too (think of the T-1000 from Terminator 2). Since it is apparently my goal to kill it, I try to defeat the thing, and end up liquefying it, but I don't have anywhere to dispose of it. So, I decide to flush it down the toilet. When I do, it causes a clog, and a puff of yellow sulfurous stuff rolls up through the toilet water. I flush it again, and the toilet overflows. I get quite annoyed.

A little while later, I discover that the yellow sulfur compound is absurdly toxic, and that it will kill the entire biosphere, all life on earth. My first thought is how I'm going to build a spacecraft to get off the Earth before that happens.

11 July 2008

Break-In

I'm driving home from somewhere. It's dark and possibly rainy outside. I stop at a traffic light near my apartment complex, and as I look down the road, I see that the complex is covered in that yellow crime scene tape. Somehow, I discover that, while I was away, someone broke into my apartment. I get very upset and back my car up, accidentally slamming into something behind me. Then, I shift into forward gear and drive the rest of the way, but my car's making a funny noise and the brake lights don't work properly.

I go into my apartment feeling very nervous. I check all the rooms. The burglar is nowhere to be found, and, strangely enough, nothing's missing. Still, I feel very unsafe in the apartment. I tell my father this, but he just brushes it off. I get angry with him, and then tell him about the car.

[The memory sort of breaks up at this point.]

Wow. A feeling of invasion, maybe. Lots of interesting symbols there. I imagine it must mean something to you.

Yeah, it seems all of my dreams lately have been very symbolic, although the range of possible meanings is still pretty broad. Come to think of it, I've been having weirdly symbolic dreams like this, on and off, since I moved out of my parents' house.

29 July 2008

Russian Roulette

My friend Charlie and I are in a building. It looks normal, except for the fact that the walls are made of dark gray stone and the place appears to be lighted by medieval torches. A masked man (he looks to me like "V" from "V for Vendetta", which is odd, since I've never seen that movie) puts us through a series of "trials" (I can't remember what they were exactly), and then, we reach our final test.

We're standing in front of a wooden table. "V" is wrapping things in aluminum foil. There are a number of foil-wrapped packets already on the table, maybe ten of them, each of them containing a slab of cooked steak (?). "V" tells us that we each have to take a packet, and if the packet contains a gun, we have to shoot ourselves. I look over the packets and become terrified as I realize that my death may be imminent. There's a feeling of horror; this is the closest I've ever come to death, in the waking world or in my dreams. I notice that there are faint revolver-shaped bulges in some of the packets, and I pick one that doesn't have such a bulge. I unwrap it. Inside is a plastic box with the title of that new Indiana Jones movie written on it (odd, since that's another movie I haven't seen). I open the box, and experience a moment of horror as I see gleaming metal and a white handle. For a second, I think that "V" was being cunning and trying to trick one of us into picking a gun. But, I realize (and I think there's a possibility that I willed it to happen this way) that it's not a revolver, but instead, a club that looks like a revolver. It has the same kind of handle, but where the barrel should be, it's just pointed metal. I feel greatly relieved.

I look in the box again, and find a smaller box, this one cardboard. It has no top, and when I look inside, I see a Post-It note, on which "V" has written something complimentary about how I'm the most logical, intelligent person he's ever met (or something to that effect). Smiling, I show it to Charlie, who seems angry at me. I think he's disappointed, since he didn't get anything interesting in his packet (at least he didn't get a gun, though). Then, like a schoolboy, I go show the note to my mother, irritating Charlie even more. I go over to talk to him, and he complains about what he got in his packet, and suddenly, there's a spider sitting on my club, and I throw it away.

17 August 2008

If...

I'm apparently some sort of teacher. I'm in a house at night with a fellow teacher. She's got black hair and one of those "bob" haircuts. We're talking about school, and she starts caressing my neck. I start doing it back, then pull away, but I suddenly remember that I'm married.

"I'm sorry, but I can't..." I say. She's married, too, and also pulls back. "But...if..."

"If?" she asks as I walk down the stairs, leaving her leaning on the banister.

"If."

---

I'm walking with some people down the long driveway of my old house. I'm feeling pretty good about life in general. On the road ahead, I see a venomous-looking snake appear on the road and rear up like it's about to strike. I stop and tell everybody to back away. The snake starts to slide back into the grass, which pleases me tremendously. Then, though, it starts to come after us. It's not moving very fast, but everybody gets scared and we all start running backwards.

24 August 2008

Bugs in the Microwave

I'm in my kitchen, and I look over and see that there are a lot of bugs in my microwave. Most of them are normal-sized, but some of them are very big, maybe the size of a small mouse. I try to kill them by turning on the microwave, but when it finishes, only the big ones are dead. The little ones (they look like pillbugs) are still roaming happily around. The microwave keeps emitting a hissing, sizzling sound. It's annoying and gross, and some sort of liquid is leaking out the bottom of the microwave and boiling. Then, I realize that the stove is still on underneath the microwave (?), and when I turn it off, the sizzling stops.

11 November 2008

Techno Putty

I'm listening to a techno song about some sort of "living putty." I have some of the putty on a lab bench, and when the song plays, the putty dances and crawls around. There's an air of creepiness about it.

Someone's talking about the song. It's called "1294" (or some similar number). Apparently, it was composed algorithmically. I look at a sound spectrum from the song, and the sound patterns form a bunch of circles and arcs that come together in some contrived way to form the numbers of the song's title.

2 December 2008

Bathroom Test

I'm in a bathroom, standing near the bathtub taking some sort of test. There are books all along the far wall. The shower-head is spraying water into the room instead of into the bathtub for some reason.

The Plane!

There are weird planes flying overhead. They look like Quonset huts with wings and propellers. As I go out to watch one of them pass, I see Scratcher [a mean cat my family had when I was a kid]. She attacks a rabbit, but it doesn't die. My father comes out to put it out of its misery, but it burrows underground and gets away.