Time for another dreams thread...

Last night I accidentally got around 11 hours of sleep. And I went to bed with a belly full of chocolate chip cookies and milk. I had around 3 different dreams, but I only remember the last one. It was a sort of James Bond dream.

I may or may not have been Bond. And at times I looked like me while at other times I looked like Daniel Craig. But at all times I had my stainless PPK/S instead of the blued PPK from the movies.

And I'm considerably a bigger pussy than Bond.

It started out in some fairly opulent Chinese restaurant. Something was Going Down so I took cover and moved strategically to where I could ambush the ambushers. That is a fancy way of saying I hid. But that's fine. The Bad Guys had sniper rifles, submachine guns, and body armor (I didn't actually see any Bad Guys, but somehow I knew this). A piddly .380 pistol with 7-8 shots is no match for that.

When the hit didn't go down I eventually snuck out the back, which happened to open into a Chinese-themed nightclub--again, very luxurious and Bondian--where I again hid. (Sidebar: It turns out that, at least in dreams but I suspect IRL too, if you palm a PPK and then ease your hand partway into your pocket, you can have a gun in hand in a crowded room without calling attention to yourself.)

Eventually I found out I/Bond had apparently stole some girl from the Bad Guy at this place a year earlier and he was pissed about it so he was going to shoot the place up as revenge.

That's when The Dog came in and woke me up.

If I have weird dreams, they usually involve a DeLorean DMC12 with something about the car out of whack. First one I can recall, the car had a bicycle seat and I had to drive sitting on that and partially up through a big purpose-built opening in the roof of the car.

Most recent one, I was sitting in the car with the door open -- but it was open the wrong way, it was like a regular car door instead of the gullwing door on a DeLorean. Then water started shooting out of two drinking-straw diameter holes in the rubber seal of the door. When that finally abated, a fully grown black lab emerged from one of the holes. Finally got the dog in the back seat of the car, closed the door and was about to pull out of the parking space when I noticed that all the labels for gears on the gearshift were seriously fucked up.

R, Neutral, Mustache, Explosion, Disco, Pancakes and so on.

I don't even remember the last time I had a memorable dream.

Guess I'll try eating some cheese right before bed tonight.

I know a dude who never, ever remembers his dreams. He could only listen with amazement as I regaled him with my outrageous dream stories.

Fairly mundane last night. I'd taken the motorcycle in to a shop to have them get it running again for me. Then I'd found a different shop that, for some reason I was going to take it to so I went to get it. No one was there so I left a note or something. It started right up so I was a bit disappointed that I'd spent money on something that, apparently (in dream logic), was easy to fix. Then I got it over to the other place and found out that it was missing the carburetor which, for some reason, was now on the front of the engine (or would be if it wasn't missing). Of course in dream logic the reason it ran was because it didn't have a carburetor.

Ironically, today while walking The Dog I wound up talking with the neighbor who has a bike. I'd been meaning to ask him about working on bikes and/or trailering them places but never got a chance. I did finally get to ask his wife, who told me her brother in law had a trailer but that she was pissed at her husband because he'd been in three wrecks this year and she wanted him to get rid of his bike. Well it turned out he'd been cut off on the freeway at rush hour so it was lucky he was up and walking.

The bike went down at around 50mph but since it is a big garbage wagon with slide rails he held onto it and walked away since he was wearing his safety gear. The previous time he'd been hit by a hit and run driver.

But I digress. The thing is, while the wife had seen my bike, he hadn't. But when I said what it was he knew the bike and said that his brother not only had a trailer but knew how to work on my particular bike.

None of that has anything to do with the dream, but such is life. And to the missus' chagrin he said when he got his bike back on the road we'd have to do the Lewis & Clark Scenic Highway, which is a great bike ride. But the last time I went on a ride with a group someone was going to fast and missed a corner, right in front of me, so I'm a bit leery.

Dreamed I was in a traffic jam. Screeched to a halt to avoid hitting the car ahead of me just in time. Then, in the dream, I stared falling asleep at the wheel. I thought to myself, i can't fall asleep at the wheel!! Someone will crash into me and i''l die! I have to wake up! Wake up!

And I really woke up. At 3:30 AM. I looked at the clock, said aw FUCK! and took an hour to get back to sleep.

Forbins traffic dream reminded me of our initial convoy into Iraq 2003.
I had been driving for over 30 hours with no sleep. I was so spaced out, for a few seconds at a time I didn't know when I was awake and when I was dreaming. My head would jerk up, and for a few seconds I didn't know if I just woke up and was actually still driving or or if I was actually asleep and dreaming about driving. It was one trippy feeling!

Fairly classical dream last night--all the archetypical elements.

I'm out on the water--or I'm on a dock, I'm not sure. There must be some kind of event going because there are boats everywhere--in spite of really stormy weather and big waves. And my Dad needs to tell me something, so he paddles over in his canoe. I want to say that it is calm and sunny around my Dad, but this may just be because my brain was using clips from a canoe trip from...a long, long time ago--30 years or so? I think someone else was in the boat with him and I think they were familiar to me but I don't remember who it was.

Anyway he comes over and makes some joke with the butt of the joke this guy that I'm supposed to be working for in the Marine Reserves. So I ask my Dad about how he knows the guy and his advice and my Dad tells me some of the subconscious feelings I have about my upcoming arrangement.

That's pretty much it.

In defense of the aforementioned guy, my reticence is as much on my side as it is about working for him. I don't know that I'll be able to honor my commitments. I need to get time off from work a couple times in the next few months. And I need to line up a dog-sitter each time. On top of all that I still need to get back to Wisconsin for at least a long weekend. So I have some real doubts about whether I'm going to be able to do what I've agreed to do.

I had a very realistic (and terrifying) dream earlier in the week. My father-in-law had died, and of course my wife was devastated.

Now every time my mother-in-law calls I get freaked out thinking this might be the day.

I won't dare tell my wife that I had this dream, because if he dies in the near future, my daughter and wife will blame me because I "jinxed it."

A couple good ones:

Earlier this week was Failure Dream Night, trifecta of fairly basic failure dreams:
#1: I'm in some college class where we're studying some old Irish play or something. I have to read a part aloud--something I'm actually pretty good at--but the text isn't the right text. It is about the story, but it isn't the actual story. It is also formatted artistically with varying type sizes and orientations, all crammed into a geometric shape that is supposed to have something to do with the story. The professor is getting more and more angry at me for delaying the class and I'm getting more and more frustrated because the text is useless. I've done the homework so out of frustration I just start paraphrasing what I'm supposed to be reading.

#2: The most boring, shortest, and least well developed of the dreams. I'm at some formal dinner, wearing my Dress Blues, and I realize I forgot to shave--but I can't leave.

#3: This was the main event. I have a group of friends and in the dream one of them is in the hospital. The girl I rented a room from wants me to give him a speech(!) to cheer him up and entertain the rest of his guests.

I get in the room and I'm the only one there. The girl who conned me into this has left me some kind of tiny antique black & white TV in lieu of an LCD projector and a tangle of cabling. (In retrospect since it was just me and the guy and my laptop display is far better than the "monitor" provided, I should've just done the slides on the laptop, but I digress.) So I'm trying to be entertaining and make small talk while fighting with the equipment and cursing the girl who put me up to this and then left.

Which brings us to last night's dream...

Had one the other night. First one I remember in quite some time. I was flying through a city, Superman style, and came to a large office tower. I landed, went in, and was walking through the various offices and hallways. I found my wife sitting on a square hassock-type thing. Naturally I was very, very happy to see her but even in the dream was somewhat confused by her being there. I hugged her and that's where it ended.

I don't know where last night's dream came from or what it was trying to say. It was one of these weird hybrid dreams I have that are part movie that I'm a character in and part real life. This one was some kind of post-Apocalyptic movie. There had been a biological or radiological event and the remaining survivors were holed up in bunkers. You had to wear your hazmat gear even in the bunkers because...I don't know, it made perfect sense at the time. Something about how you couldn't be sure something hadn't been infected in the bunker or that you'd get something in your suit if you took it off.

There's me and a couple main characters and we're trying to "get the band together" to resolve the movie problem--defeat the infection, stop the radiation, I don't know. There's some college professor-type that may or may not have been played by Morgan Freeman. Then there's some convict that he did a paper on who is friends with one of the other "heroes" and I'm trying to steer everyone together so they can solve the problem.

And I know I'm in a story in that I know how these people know each other and why they need to be together--like when you're reading a novel and you have pieces of information from different plotlines that the characters don't have yet. But I was also IN the story. And the story was "real"--US cities were really in ruins, the population was decimated, and there was some pollution that required clean suits.

Anyway, that's about where it ended. Adn the dog is getting antsy, I need to make a Blue Room post, and I desperately DESPERATELY need some sleep.

All dreams would be improved with a Morgan Freeman narration, that's for sure.

Had one the other night where my cats got out of the house and I was frantically trying to catch them before something bad happened. Strangely tho, it wasn't my house, but my parents' place. Clancy I got hold of right away but Tennyson ran off.

Needless to say, when I woke up the first thing I did was check on the cats.

Sounds like a typical anxiety dream. You're juggling too much in your personal life and you're anxious that things are getting away from you.

I had one the other night about an upcoming trip to L.A. in June. We're going out for my niece's graduation from UCLA, and then I'll get to show my wife (who's from Jersey) where I grew up.

In the dream we went back to see the house where I grew up. It was abandoned, but the people who owned it last updated it and removed all the windows. When I went to check out the back yard they had piled mounds of dirt 100 feet high on all three sides to totally block everything out. My wife irritated me because I wanted to look around and reminisce, but she was in a hurry to go somewhere.

Sort of odd lately. I've been dreaming. But just little dream snippets. And most oddly, I don't think I've been "me" in them. The only one I remember, I was a Chinese woman who was buried alive in a building that collapsed.

This morning I got back to more normal dreams. In one I dreamed I was talking to a friend, whose mom helped out when my Mom was sick, about the difficulties of having a life half a country away. I was talking to someone else in a later dream, but I don't remember that one, possibly my brother about needing to close out the estate and let things go. That's what it was! My Mom was arranging to ship all my stuff from the farm out to me and I was telling her I didn't want any of it and they should have a garage sale or give it away or something and she was telling me "too bad, I'm shipping it to you."

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what either of those dreams were about.

Had a weird one the other night where Bettie Page used something on me that was like the Neuralyzer from MIB, only it didn't wipe my memory, it just made it so I couldn't open my eyes or move at all. Then she started swabbing the side of my neck with rubbing alcohol and I knew she was going to inject me with something, so I woke up.

Wow. Interesting, interesting dreams last night. Don't know if that was because of the events of the day or what.

We started the night with RetroTV: We had an episode of "Bewitched" where Darren's boss is interviewing someone for a job and Samantha has some kind of compulsion that is making everything in the interview happen. So we see the office behind the interview filling up with new cars and such before, we get a kind of "Its a Wonderful Life" segment on how things would be different if Darren's boss had never been born.

Then we get "I Dream of Jeanie," where Tony and Maj Healey decide to rob a neighboring government installation, using a meeting with Dr. Bellows as their alibi. Oddly enough, Jeanie isn't in this story.

Then what? A mundane college networking event, where I'm catching up with some of the faculty and my classmates.

And...crap. There was something equally bizarro this morning. I think it was also a TV show--a documentary or something. Why was I dreaming TV shows?

I had a TV dream once - Gilligan's Island!
The Professor was giving some kind of class to the rest of the folks. A big snakes was climbing all over him. Gilligan went up to touch the snake and the prof yelled "Gilligan! That's an incendiary snake! You can't touch them...." about that time the snake burst into flames, the prof screaming and getting burned alive.

Another TV dream was The Flintstones! I was car-pooling with Fred and Barney. They picked me up for work, and whoever was driving (cant remember for sure) drove us into a big open seemingly bottomless pit. As we were falling falling to our deaths, Fred + Barney were getting all emotional "we had some good times buddy! I'm going to miss you. I love you man" and so forth. I didn't know them that well so didn't say anything, just got ready to die.

I've had various dreams of my celebrity crush and I as either good friends joined at the hip or in a relationship together or wanting to be in a relationship. those were nice.
I had an odd dream two nights ago: I dreamt about Star Trek for the first time in many years. It was Spocks bday and Dr. McCoy and gotten Spock a really cool present: some rocket like rollerblades! For some reason I played a part in the dream..think I was a Yoeman or something. Kirk was also in on the present but didn't actually appear until a while later. Spock's reaction was priceless. He was like: hmmm, fascinating! They are what appear to be rollerscating rockets. He basically thanked the good doctor and I just admired his reaction to the present. Thought it was interesting.

Coffins on a train dream! Okay, I'm walking near a lot of fast moving vehicle traffic. I think I have to run an errand or something. I could be trying to get home. I'm not in a downtown city, I'm surrounded by freeway ramps for some reason. Every time I manage to get a break in the traffic and sprint across the road, I get further from home. Also the traffic gets worse and worse, forcing me to cross unfamiliar roads.
Soon I see a passenger train coming by, but it's all flatcars only. People are just sitting or hanging on kind of like Indians on a crowded train, but there is no inside seating.
So I jump on the train and try to explain to some people my trouble, but they don't seem concerned or helpful.
I see a good place that I recognize and could get me back - but the train is going too fast to jump off! The situation is getting worse and worse.
Finally the train stops, and people are getting off. There are subway trains at this station, and a group of people is coming up a ramp. One man is pushing a wheelchair - with a skeleton in it!
Apparently these people are aware of my situation without even talking to them. Now the wheelchair is gone, but there's a coffin next to the people - which includes a kid of about 10 or so, and the distinguished gentleman who was originally pushing the wheelchair.
The man says he has the ability to get me home, but there is only one spot available - in the coffin!
It's not airtight - it has ventilation holes kind of like a pet carrier. Then the man says "it's quite comfortable. And it still smells like the banquet we just attended." As I'm mulling over the choice of getting in the coffin provided by these strangers or not getting home, I woke up. WTF?

Strangest dream progression in a long time. The recurring message was fairly easy--not fitting in and such.

The best, most clear example was where I had some quasi role with a company. I was trying to get a job with them or consulting work or something and they weren't convinced. Then I wasn't convinced either because the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't know how to do half the things they might want me to do. So I was holed up researching and trying to figure out what I could provide (including buying a WWII video game on a 5 1/4" floppy to play on an Apple ][ computer). Meanwhile, they're hiring this whole team of people (the office was just starting business).

Some time passed and I was checking up with my contact to see how things were going. I found they had 6 people to maintain 6 cubical walls--1 for each 17-24" panel on, like, a 6' wall. They used to have 7 but they had to let one go so the couple that was managing one of them together got split to each getting their own wall. That was their whole full time job. At this point I took the guy aside and explained that I'd maintain all 6 panels myself for 1/3 of what he was paying them together. When he started dragging his feet I said that if the price was right, I'd manage the whole thing for the same amount they were paying one person. "It isn't that simple," he demurred, "like so much of this thing, if we'd done more planning up front..."

Earlier, the dream had a sort of "Quantum Leap" feel, where I was slipping through time and space, occasionally meeting other people doing the same: "Hi, how long have you been doing this?" "??? " "What year is it?" "2004." "I first met you in 2011." Once we sorted that out, I was somehow mistaken for a dentist, so we figured out how long we could operate a dental office without an actual dentist--we'd hire a hygienist to do cleanings and I'd just come in to sign off on the work, etc. Later my friend thought she saw someone in my office/lecture hall (I'm omitting a lot of boring detail here) so she sent the campus police to investigate but they were too stupid to figure out her directions.

The dream ended as a full orchestra-style choir was singing "The Tie that Binds" while some women were chatting about the play "Our Town" and me asking them if they'd seen the adaptation of "Private Lives" playing across town (IRL I'd been meaning to, but didn't go).

Standing outside my high school with a cute girl, I think plot stuff happened with other people that I don't remember, then we started walking home through, basically, downtown Columbia. I should point out that my high school and elementary were neither downtown nor in Columbia. An open-air car full of people drives by, with Chewbacca sitting sideways on top of the seat backs waving hello to us. Then we're on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and several of the buildings we pass are the elementary schools from when I was young, except downtown store-styled, you know, not very wide. Except one was Zeus Elementary which is not remotely the name of any elementaries in my district, and they all had these little dark blue signs out front giving their name and I don't think blue is really associated with my high school or elementary. (Obviously this represents my buried angst at the terrible change made to my elementary mascot. Yup, that must be it.) Anyway, we go up a flight of cement (concrete? whichever) stairs, and at the top are a couple of tables, one to either side, at which some guy is apparently selling pamphlets or DVDs or I guess both in which he rages about how Spiderman 6 or something is a total rip-off because whoever made it just spliced scenes from some other movie into a Spiderman movie. I'm not even clear if this movie he's talking about is supposed to be professional or fan-made, but the girl I've been following buys a pamphlet for a quarter and promptly expresses disappointment and I'm like, yeah, did you need this guy to tell you this? You could just glance at the movie and figure it out for yourself.