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Here is the dream I had a couple days ago, the one I wanted to post about:

I had a really cinematic dream last night, the kind that makes sleeping worthwhile. 

It was all about a young man who was a brilliant actor, but because of a combination of mental illness and epilepsy, he eventually had to be hospitalized.  He either escaped or was released too early, and ended up homeless, living in the subway tunnels, going from one train to another, like he was an animal patrolling its territory.  He had no consciousness of any other existence and was at one with the subway system.  He eventually started protecting a girl that was hiding down there, and got involved in exposing a criminal gang that was involved in assassinations in the subway.  He had witnessed what they were doing, and started communicating with the police, bit by bit, sending them messages.  These messaged enabled cops to strike against the gang in an operation that took place underground in a subway station.  During this, I guess one of the cops saw and recognized the man (who had been living down there for several years by this point, and was now in his 30’s or so).  He was caught, taken to the doctor, given therapy and medication, and then reunited with his family.  At this point, the dream changed a bit, and I was a member of the family, the fourth child out of five, I think, the second youngest girl.  It turns out the young man was from a brilliant family.  His father was a man with white hair and a beard, who might have been a composer, and his mom was a very refined woman.  The oldest sister was a musician, like a cellist, there was the second brother who was brilliant at something – maybe an architect, the third brother, the focus of the story, and then there was me.  There was a big gap in age between us.  He was in his thirties, maybe, and I was about eleven, or maybe thirteen.  I was a genius of some kind, just really smart, although I had not distinguished myself yet.  There was a younger sister too.  I was really excited to have my brother back, and leaned against him, embracing him for a long time on the first day he came back to our house.  Our house was on the beach, a very long, open house from which you could see the waves and shore.  There were big, long windows along the back of the house, just covered with thin white curtains, which waved with the wind.  The wind could blow through freely, people could come and go freely.  That’s the kind of family we were.  It gave our family a kind of transparency, because anyone could look in and see us, and according to the family philosophy, that was just fine.  I did become disturbed, though, because my father started replacing the sheer white curtains with thicker, heavy grayish ones.  I felt like it was because he wanted to enclose us, protect us, and try to prevent my brother from running away again.  (At times, my brother felt the lure of the tunnels, traveling from train to train, and felt an urge to go back again.)  I knew he wanted to protect us, but this “locking in” of our family went against everything we stood for, and would hurt us in the end. 

At that point, I woke up.  I hope when I go to sleep tonight, I can continue with this dream, so I can see what happens.

This came to me in a dream last night, believe it or not.

What happened to the Communist who couldn’t spell?

(Please guess in the comments section.)

Since complaining about my dreams they have actually improved a lot. Here are two recent ones:

1) Caught in a drug bust.

In this dream, I went to a party with my friend Curtis. I didn’t know who would be there, but once I got there, I saw they were all people who were notorious for drug-taking. They started pulling out packets of white substances, which I found shocking. One had cocaine, one had heroin. There was another guy who had little white sticks, like sucker sticks, that were coated with some sort of drug.

We were all sitting around, and this messed-up looking guy came to the door. (We were in a cheap motel room that had a screen door.) I figured he was there to take drugs too, but he turned out to be an undercover policeman. All these other policemen came, and luckily, they started interviewing me first. I say luckily, because I wasn’t high on drugs or anything, and could answer their questions in a coherent way, so they wouldn’t have as much of a reason to take us all in. They kept trying to trick me, but they couldn’t do it.  I felt pretty satisfied with myself.

2)  The “Illusionist”

This was set in Victorian times.  A bunch of people had come to see a performance by a man who claimed he could make things disappear because he was banishing them to another dimension.  The audience believed he was just an illusionist, and came to watch for amusement.   The man demonstrated by setting something up, clapping, which would make the lights go out for a fraction of a second, and then you would see that the thing was gone.  He did this a couple times, and then didn’t set up any object.  He just clapped, and when the lights came back on (in my dream, it was likes some sort of strobe effect), all the chairs in the theater were empty, but you heard all the people scream as they realized the man actually DID have the power banish them to another dimension.  He clapped again, and then all the chairs were empty and the auditorium was silent.

I’ve been going through a period of stomach problems, and of bad luck with food in general. It all started with the fish and chips at The British Bulldog, which functioned like a dose of Colon Blow, keeping me out of class and near the bathroom all the next day. Since then, it seems that if I’m not careful about what I eat, I get nauseous later on. But not only did I have that bad food experience, the other day I got take-out from a snack place near my house. I got to my office, opened the bag, and found the box had been used before. It was all mashed up, had dirt ground into the raggedy-looking sides, and actually had gray rodent hair inside, by the food. Luckily I hadn’t eaten any of it before I looked closely. Last night I went to a Christmas party (I know it’s early, but a lot of people are going away soon) at Curtis’s office. I don’t THINK I drank too much, but I did have a little bit of a lot of different things — egg nog, pop, beer, white wine, some whiskey and coke, over the five hours or so that I was there. Earlier that day I’d have some coffee, which I usually avoid — oh, and I did go to a Mexican restaurant for lunch. Anyhow, by the time I got home, my stomach was feeling sort of abnormal. I actually ended up throwing up later in the evening. I had mostly very bland food today, and tried not to eat too much, but my stomach is feeling weirdly full and churning anyway. I’m not sure when this will all go away. I could go to the hospital, but then they’d prescribe me some sort of weird medicine that would just make me throw up anyway.

I’ve also been dissatisfied with my dreams because they are just the same old, same old. Just dreams about moving away and not being able to finish moving all my stuff, having to catch a bus but missing it because I can’t get my clothes on soon enough, and stuff like that.  I’ve relied on my dreams for entertainment for a long time, and when I can’t get anything good out of them, it’s a real disappointment.  Maybe this all means my life is in the doldrums.  I’m sure it relates to my anxiety about next year too.

I had my semi-annual waking up screaming episode this morning. As usual, in my dream I was in bed. At that point, someone comes in and they are going to attack me for some reason. Sometimes it’s my dad, who is angry because I’ve been making so much noise. Sometimes it’s my mom, just running amok. This time, some person came in through some big windows in the room next door. The person was wearing this sort of black outfit with a facemask, like prowlers always wear on TV. The person was not too big (maybe my size), and her body/the way she moved made me think she was female. Anyway, she came toward me in this very fast, jerky, and aggressive way. I was really scared and wanted to scream to attract help. Like it usually goes in this kind of dream, the first few times I couldn’t get any sound to come out, so I tried harder and harder, finally got a good scream out, and woke up at the beginning of the second one. I was really spooked by my dream, and got up, turned on the lights, and snooped around my apartment for a while to see if anyone was there. I was also wondering if anyone could come to see what was going on, or call the police, but it didn’t happen. Someone came up the stairs soon after, but it was just the milkman.

that actor Timothy Carey was reduced to a mushy pulp by the same secret society that murdered Pope John Paul I? 

Well, probably not, but that’s what it said in a dream I had this morning. 

I had this dream the other night in which a friend and I (Laura Kersting, in fact) were living outside in these chickenwire cages.  They were only about two feet high and as long as our bodies.  It struck me as we got rained on that when winter came along, we would be really uncomfortable.  It dawned on me that it would be great to make an igloo to keep warm.  I kept thinking, and then I realized there was tons of discarded styrofoam in the area, and that would be really good material because it would insulate from the cold.  As the dream went on, I kept refining the design, like I realized I b/c the foam is not solid, I could drive something like a chopstick down between two parts to connect them, so the structure would be more solid.  Eventually, I even started thinking about making something high I could stand up in.

Actually, styrofoam igloos for the homeless seem like a good idea, for winter, anyway.  They’d be light, waterproof, and the blocks would be reusable. 

I just woke up.  I was having another one of those dreams I mentioned before.  This time I went with Editor B and a couple other people to this conference I didn’t know anything about.  Once I got there, not only couldn’t I find B at all, I couldn’t find any conference schedule, so I ended up wandering around confused and frustrated.  I eventually found out it had something to do with writing, but then I got all anxious and irritated because I realized as much as I like the idea of writing, I don’t want people to know my thoughts.  I’m scared of exposing myself.  I’ve thought about this a lot in real life too.

In other real life news, I’ll have a phone interview for a summer job at Roger Williams University next week.

Last night I had this dream in which I saw a new kind of mousetrap — or really, because of the size, it would be a trap for rats and small animals.  It consisted of a nest made out of ramen noodles.  The animal would be attracted by the noodles, and when they got to the middle where there was a relaxing-looking nesty area, that part would have some sort of battery-powered shocking device.  They’d lay down for a rest, and then ZAP!  No more rat. 

I wrote this a while back, but never posted it.

That stuff on my hands:

In another part of last night’s dream, I looked at my hands and saw that little green things like small peas were growing all over them. I tried smoothing them down or scraping them off. Eventually I went to a doctor, who said the condition was serious, and scolded me for not seeking medical help sooner. I tried to defend myself by saying it was because I was in graudate school, and didn’t have time to do stuff like that.

Actually, it’s pretty common for me to have dreams where stuff is growing on or in my body. I have a lot of dreams where I pick at something on myself, and some sort of worm comes out. If you go to my Nov. 27, 2005 entry, you’ll see a really strange one

Lately I’ve been having my typical vivid dreams, and they’re falling into several of my typical dream categories.

Dream theme one: The disappointing outing.

I dreamt I went to some sort of conference. It started with a fun walk through a park area, where I got to play with a monkey. Then we went in to begin the conference. As usual in these dreams, it seemed I was the only one who didn’t know what the schedule was. I was with Rachel and Benn, so I just went to the same forum as they did. It was about responsible urban planning, and was led by an angry older black man who looked like he had been some sort of sixties radical. His message was incoherent, on one hand talking about “Christian love,” and on the other hand threatening to physically attack anyone who wouldn’t go along with his plans. We were at a long table and I could barely hear him, though. I was all pissed off, stood up, exclaimed, “I don’t even know what this guy’s talking about!” and started storming off. I realized I had acted really uncouth and made people think I was a nut. I came back and tried to apologize to the other participants, saying my ignorance had made me act that way, but I could see they were still disgusted with me. Soon, bored and confused, I wish I had just left. I wondered if I was supposed to have signed up for these forums, or could know which ones would be on interesting subjects. I felt I should know about that. Later I left the table. Afterward I found out there were all these fun activities that were going on that I didn’t know about or was missing.

I have a lot of dreams like that — I go on some sort of outing, and I have no fun at all. I get left out of stuff, nobody likes me, the directors seem to look down on me, everyone knows what’s going on but me (I used to feel like that a lot), or I need to go change clothes, but by the time I finish the bus to the activity has left without me, stranding me, and I can’t get to the activity until it’s practically over.

I’ve been having very interesting, technicolor dreams lately. They’re so interesting they surpass anything in my real life, and even anything I watch in actual movies. That makes it hard to motivate myself to get up, since I know I won’t be seeing anything as interesting while I’m awake.

Here’s the content of one of the latest ones:

I often have dreams that have to do with a movie that suddenly becomes incredibly violent at the last minute. Often the number thirteen is involved. (For instance, in the past I’ve had a reoccurring dream about a movie by Peter Greenaway that is cut into fourteen sections, with the thirteenth and fourteenth being horrifically bloody and brutal.) This dream had to do with a movie called BEAR, which came from a book (it has a yellow cover, with a picture of a bear and the type in black) that I saw in last night’s dream too. It’s a science fiction story, and suddenly the last thirteen frames of the movie become incredibly violent, with a female character (played by Renee Zellwiger) being transformed into a bear, and using her long, razor-sharp claws (kind of like you see on Gloomy Bears) to slice a man to ribbons.

Of course, thirteen frames of a movie would take less than a second to see, but when the dream began, I was thinking about them and how I would be scared to see them. They had actually been printed out large — maybe people in the theater could only see them subliminally, were terrified, and wanted to see what they were really like — but I tried to avoid looking at them too.

As the dream went on, I was put into the actual movie, as sort of an observer/minor character. It was set in a society that was sort of futuristic and medieval at the same time. It was set in sort of a police state where animals were only kept as pets and not trained to do anything, and the government used sets of strings (like dividers made of string) to block some sort of magic or power. What they really didn’t want people to find out was that some people, under the right circumstances, could transform themselves into animals. They also didn’t want people to know that animals were trainable, and could be taught to do things. If they thought you were involved in training animals, or had some sort of knowledge of the possibility of people to transform, government agents would kill you. There were also people who had some sort of ability to steal people’s souls through their mouths — they weren’t part of the government, though — they had some power or authority, but I’m not sure who it came from. Eventually it became clear that the bear transformation at the end of the movie involved a woman who was totally ignorant of this possibility of transformation, and she just turned to a bear unexpectedly, perhaps under the threat of rape by the man, and once transforming, tore the man to shreds.

I wonder what I’ll dream about tonight.

Part of the dream I had last night was that two things came in the window into my house and scared me.�� I figured out pretty fast that one of them was just a chipmonk, but the other one was much more bizarre: it was a severed deer head.�� I figured out in the dream that it had been blown off with a shotgun, and because of the ears, it was still able to flap around.�� I guess the ears were propelled by the wind, and were blown around in some sort of way that made them effective “wings.”�� I can’t explain it in a way that makes sense.�� Even though the deer was dead and had no mind of its own, its head kept swooping at me scarily and I kept having to hit it with an umbrella to keep it away from me.

I feel this is really interesting, but on the other hand I feel like it’s mean to talk about this, like it’s something I should keep quiet about. The other day I asked my embroidery teacher what her surname was. She told me, and wanted to write it down, but told me she didn’t know how to read and write! In fact, the only thing she could write was her name, because her brother had taught her, but she had real trouble with even that. She told me that her parents wouldn’t send her to school and told her to study embroidery instead, because if she didn’t know how to do embroidery nobody would want her. Her older brother and younger brother got to go to school. Of course, refusing to send girls to school isn’t allowed, but she lived in a little village in the countryside, and people didn’t come around checking very often. Imagine if you couldn’t read and write at all! I feel a little bad mentioning this here since I posted her picture and all, but it’s so interesting. She’s my age or a little younger. She’s married now, and told me her husband and daughter live in Shanghai, and that her daughter goes to primary school here.

I met this nice Chinese-American guy at the Democrats’ meeing.�� I gave him my card, and a couple days later he called me and invited me to this banquet thing he and his friends were having.�� I wasn’t sure if it was a date or not, but I dressed up really well.�� It turned out that there were only other women there, two of whom I even got into an argument about Mao with.�� I was thinking it hadn’t been a date when he called me yesterday and asked me to go to this head-hunting/networkign thing.�� It turned out it was on a Thursday so��I couldn’t go, but I told him I would have gone if it weren’t for the time conflict.�� He called me today to invite me to a wine-tasting thing, which also turned out to be on Thursday, and then called back one minute later to suggest we go to a “retro seventies rollerskating party.”�� In the spirit of trying new things, I said yes, despite thinking that rollerskating is something that would probably be embarrassing to me, if not dangerous.�� I might well break my foot or something again.�� It sounds mortifying in general.�� Maybe I’ll call the guy back and suggest we do something else.�� Maybe I’ll talk to Curtis about it, and we can arrange something less potentially humiliating.�� Even go-karting would be preferable, and I know there is actually a go-karting place near my school, although I’ve never been.��

On another, freaky note, I had this dream that I went on a date on this guy, and we started having oral sex.�� I noticed there was some sort of elastic brace, like some sort of sport brace for an injured ankle, around his penis, and asked him about it.�� He was all embarrassed and upset.�� He confessed that this brace was to make his erection stand up, and that he had some sort of sexual problem.�� I was really sorry I had made him unhappy.��

I keep having these dreams where I have a nice apartment, but I keep finding out that there is one door that will not lock. A lot of the time either people are trying to get in, or I get home and find that someone has been in my house. One funny variation of this is one where I found this room in the apartment I didn’t know about, and the next time I went in there, I found all these Japanese businesemen playing cards. I got upset and yelled at them, and they apologized and said they thought they were in a hotel.

It’s a little�� after six, and I’m up and feeling headachey.

I just had this dream in which I went into this truckstop bathroom, somewhere in China.�� I knew it would be disgusting, but thought I had better take advantage of it anyway.�� I went in, and trying to find a stall that didn’t have one sleeping in it or something, I entered one that seemed to be empty.�� I looked down and saw there was a dead baby submerged in the toilet.�� It had obviously drowned.�� I could see from its features it had Down’s Syndrome.�� I thought about taking the baby out, or calling for help, but since it was so obviously dead I realized there was no point.�� I decided not to tell the people I was traveling with, since it would just upset them.

Oftentimes, I dream about movies.�� Last night I dreamed I was watching a new sequel to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.�� The cops were chasing Hannibal Lecter in a staircase.�� After aiming a hail of gunfire at him, they caught him.�� Then, as they took him away, the chief of police, played by Harvey Keitel, realized that the REAL Lecter was still in the stairwell.�� He’d been there the whole time, and the cops had been shooting at the wrong man.�� Then the real Lecter slipped away as Harvey Keitel’s character stood there, helpless.��

In this dream, I was supposed to be preparing for my final exam in Chinese class, and I criticized myself for watching the movie rather than studying.�� I couldn’t take my eyes off of it though, because it looked so good and flowed so well.��

In the next scene introduced us to another protagonist, a policeman who for some reason was driving an 18-wheeler.�� Perhaps he was undercover.�� Anyway, he was played by a black actor, and his hair and beard had been dyed white to make him look older.�� They hadn’t done a very good job of it, I thought.�� It didn’t look realistic.�� In this scene, the man was calling his teenage son, who he didn’t get to see very much, on the phone as he drove.

Then the doorbell rang and woke me up!�� It was some woman who wanted to check the gas meter!�� She was like the meter-reader of Poorlock.�� I’m sure this has happened before, and I’ve written about this same thing happening in my blog a while back.

I had a strange dream the other night. At some point in it, I looked down and found there were these strange granules the color of raw sugar growing out of my finger tips. I pinched them to see if they would come out, but the skin just got irritated, so I stopped. Later I was with a bunch of people looking around a house when I got a strange feeling in my stomach and realized I was going to be sick. I asked if there was a bathroom around, and another guy said he was interested in going too. He made a move to use it first. I was desperate, and tried to say something to stop him, because I felt all this turmoil going on in my gut. I had the sudden realization that rather than the diarrhea I had feared, I was so full of poop that I was going to vomit feces out of my mouth. I put my hand up to my mouth to catch it, and found out it came out in all these dry-ish, stuck-together little lumps that were covered with the same weird yellowish grains that were growing out of my hand. I felt helpless and didn’t know what to do. A woman with the group asked me what was wrong. I explained and showed her the poop vomit. She was surprisingly sympathetic and didn’t seem disgusted. I vomited a few more times. The woman thought we should put some of it in a bag and take it to the doctor with us. I picked up some of it and we found it had become all ropy and the granules had spouted into thousands of white spore-like things. The woman also insisted on taking a swab of the inside of my anus with a Q-tip so we could take it to the doctor to analyze. I didn’t think it was necessary, because I started to feel a lot better after I got all of that poop out of my system, but she was adamant. It was VERY painful. I never did get to find out what was wrong with me — the dream either ended or veered off in another direction before I could go to the doctor and get a diagnosis.

In retrospect, I wonder if this dream has to do with the party I had been at earlier that night, and my wondering about people’s reactions as I was talking. I was worried I seemed inarticulate or like I wasn’t reasoning properly, but people seemed to be taking what I was saying nicely. I was worried, I guess, that “crap” was coming out of my mouth.

This is from an interesting dream I had last night:

I dreamt that in this society, every year they had some sort of combat exercise. I was totally perplexed to find out that I had to participate in it, because I had never heard about it before. In the exercise, half of the people had to dress up in orange, with jack o’lantern heads. They would attack the other half of the people, who were defending the city. Defenders would wear their normal clothes but be issued long jumropes, which they could use to set up barriers, or to catch and tie up attackers. Apparently, people put in bids for which side they’d like to be on (most of the jack o’lanterns were men), but if people didn’t choose, they were assigned. I only found out about this when I saw all these people running really fast and carrying jumpropes. Then I was told to visit a particular place, where I was given all the paperwork and my own jumprope, and was told to go join the melee. I ran down the stair really fast to catch up with everybody. (Running down stairs really fast figures in a lot of my dreams.)