27 January 2001
Submitted by eve on Sun, 01/27/2002 - 10:33pm. Funny
"After that, I dreamt I was walking through the mall parking lot, you know, on the top level of the parking structure, near Mervyns? Only it wasn't Mervyn's anymore, it was some kind of western wear shop, but I didn't think that was strange. I was walking there, and this woman asked for help, but I noticed she had hairy arms, and suddenly I just knew -- you know, the way you just absolutely know and it makes sense -- I just knew that she was a man. And she was going to try and steal my car."
--A girl in the women's restroom, very excitedly telling a story to the two other girls she was with
Ah, when dreams and urban legends collide.
Comment viewing options:
Select your preferred way to display the comments and click 'Save settings' to submit your changes.
Browse 1714 comments:
»1« • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • next
There are more than 50 comments in this node. Use these links to navigate through them.
Sympathy for the zombie
Posted by Saint on Thu, 01/11/2007 - 10:29am.
There was a sort of zombie semi-apocalypse. It wasn`t as bad as it could have been, because the zombies went dormant unless they were in close contact with humans. On the other hand, some people with severe injuries to their limbs who didn`t get treated fast enough found their arms and legs going zombie and turning against them, which was amusing to watch but probably not so fun on the receiving end.

Things settled into a sort of normalcy after the initial outbreak, everyone dealing with it differently. Some people hunted dormant zombies, others set up zed vs human gladitorial fights. There were a couple of goth girls who enjoyed sport sex with the zombies (the zombies were apparently big believers in `fuck it, fight it, and eat it`), but one of the zeds broke the ropes holding one of his arms and took the experience a lot further than the goth girl wanted. She spent a long time wondering why she couldn`t move, before one of her friends got close enough to activate her, then she was quite horrified at (but unable to put a stop to) her own ravenous behavior.
 
...It was all just a dream
Posted by Mike on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 11:03am.
What does a zombie leg want, exactly? It`s all so confusing.

I dreamt that I got an explanation about the meaning of dreams. There are a near-infinite number of possible universes, you see, so dreams are what ultimately decide which of those possibilities will actually come about. Only one reality becomes our common reality, while all the rest, no matter how improbable, get shunted into dreams. If you have a nightmare about zombies, what you`re really doing is taking one for the team and sparing the rest of humankind from having to actually live in a hellish revenant-infested timeline.

So thanks, I guess.
 
Cardown
Posted by Saint on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 6:06pm.
Apparently, zombie legs want to kick the ass of the person they are attached to. *shrug* I did say it was amusing to watch.

Last night`s dream was of a dystopian future (my subcon assures me there is no other kind) that revelled in conspicuous consumption. The biggest festival of the future was called Cardown, and it involved finding creative and beautiful ways to destroy vehicles. Most of the ways were pretty pyrotechnic and damn loud.

There was a contest for the best mass destruction, which was something of an audience-participation event because the cars destroyed were the cars in the audience parking lots. One lot was reduced to a crater 50 yards deep and about twice that in diameter by an explosion that looked suspiciously mushroom-cloudy; another had all the cars flattened by a giant, rolling, radio-controlled black sphere.
Don`t knock it
Posted by Mike on Mon, 01/08/2007 - 11:03am.
I had two dreams in sequence that taught me something about the fine line that the subconscious has to walk in making up random crazy stories every night.

The first one had me living at home with my parents again. I was carrying out some petty domestic task when there was a very loud and insistent knock at the door. My subconscious froze up at the knock and couldn`t figure out what to do with me; in the dream I had been in the kitchen, but when the noise started it deposited me in my (childhood) bed. I guess it doesn`t plan these things. Then the knocking got louder and I woke up-- really woke up, in my own bed in my own house, wondering who could be at the door at that time of night. I shuffled out to the front area and peered outside. There was no one there: the knocking was part of the dream. Even in that groggy half-awake mode I was annoyed. Dreams that trick you into waking up are self-defeating.

By the next dream things had straightened out. There was a knock at the door again, but this time it didn`t wake me up. I went to the dream door this time, and got swept up in this random adventure in which my sister was kidnapped and it was up to me to save her but wait! The strange man who was helping me turned out to be her captor in the first place and now we have to duel to the death with bamboo poles etc.

And so my subconscious learned a valuable lesson about realism and boundaries and so forth. At least somebody`s learning from all this.
I guess they really were huge
Posted by Saint on Thu, 01/04/2007 - 2:06pm.
It`s a little-known fact that the Beatles used to grow to Godzilla-size and have outdoor concerts in New York City every year, causing untold property damage on their way to and from the venue.
 
Aimless and hungry
Posted by Mike on Fri, 01/05/2007 - 12:25pm.
Bigger than Jesus, anyway. Now I can`t get that one Rolling Stones video out of my head.

What a stressful few weeks! And stress leads to nightmares! The only one I can remember right now was about being holed up in a mall while zombies ran riot in the outside world. So, horribly derivative nightmares! Yay!

Actually, I think last night was completely zombie-themed. There was one about a secret museum hidden beneath Earth`s crust-- but not so hidden that I couldn`t take a field trip there-- where a cackling old mad scientist proudly displayed his collection of-- well, everything he could lay his hands on. Plants, animals, technology... he was hoarding these things in preparation for the uprising of the undead, so that when the zombie plague was over he could repopulate the world with flora and fauna. The plan didn`t really make much sense to me, but I liked swimming in the whale tank entirely too much to be very critical.

Hey! Have you seen the graphic novel-in-progress about a vampire/zombie war? Of course not: you have a life.
 
Life?
Posted by Saint on Sun, 01/07/2007 - 9:24am.
What is this life you speak of?

No, hadn`t seen it; but I do read Sore Thumbs so I probably would`ve followed the links sooner or later.

Last night I learned that it sucks to be immortal. I wrecked my car in a ravine, and sheared off most of my right foot. So walking out of the ravine was a process of stepping on the stump as briefly as possible, taking another step and dragging the hanging remainders of my foot into position, then stepping on the stump again. Yeouch. I bled until there was nothing left to come out, but I couldn`t die, so I just kept walking.
What friends are for
Posted by Saint on Tue, 01/02/2007 - 10:25am.
There were a group of boys playing around a graveyard that sometimes looked more like standing stones. The youngest boy made some comment that offended the others, and they snuck away and left him there. The boy left alone was scared at first, but then a mongrel dog came and played with him and stayed by his side until dawn, when the friends returned. Somehow I knew (you know, the way you just absolutely know and it makes sense) the mongrel dog was actually one of his friends, sorry for leaving him but unwilling to apologize, and so transformed to give him comfort without giving him the satisfaction of seeing the other boy come back.

Later, the boys grew up, into 80s-movie style special forces guys (you know--special forces guys as played by body builders and wrestlers, tossing off one-liners and grenades with equal abandon) who went in together to form some sort of company after leaving the service. But they had a falling out, and one night the craziest of the crew locked himself in the penthouse of the company building and declared himself king of the mountain. If any of the others wanted anything from the company, they could take it over his dead body.

I`m pretty sure lawyers could have eventually settled the matter, but none of the friends thought of that. Instead, they all dragged out their old military gear and invaded the building, every man for himself--killing each other off in running gun battles through darkened cubicle farms, setting deadly traps for one another in unexpected places (the bear trap in the executive toilet was particularly unlovely), setting fires to generate smoke to confuse the security cameras--until finally only a few were left.

One survivor was the friend who`d been left in the graveyard, and another was the boy who`d come back to comfort him as a dog. Even though they didn`t entirely trust each other, they were closer than the other friends, and didn`t want to shoot each other. So after talking it out from cover at opposite ends of a room, they agreed to work together to get the king of the mountain out of his penthouse, which apparently was filled with an arsenal they couldn`t match. The other surviving friend simply skulked behind them, scheming to shoot them both in the back after they managed to kill the king of the mountain.

As usual, I woke before I got any decent ending.
One small step for kids
Posted by Saint on Wed, 12/27/2006 - 9:43am.
I was a kid with nine siblings, and we had built a rocket in our backyard to go into space.

Come launch time, a couple of the younger kids got scared and decided to hide. One of the older brothers suggested we should just leave without them, but the eldest insisted we all had to go, so Mom and Dad couldn`t play favorites based on who had gone to Mars and who hadn`t. I had the impression that Mom and Dad were, as yet, oblivious to the fact any of us were going to Mars, and hadn`t even noticed the rocket yet.

One of the older sisters took the opportunity of the launch delay to sell the first part of our story to a baking company. It was told through batches of chocolate chip cookies. The cookies sold well, but the sister worried that people didn`t really get it. I had to confess that I didn`t really get it, and wondered why she hadn`t just written a book, but the look she gave me was so withering I just dropped the subject.
Propositioned
Posted by Mike on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 8:19am.
All I remember about last night`s dream is that it involved an infatuated princess and a lot of blushing on my part. I think I actually ran away at several points. This is probably why my dreams never turn porny.
Animal cruelty
Posted by Mike on Sat, 12/16/2006 - 8:56am.
Last night I dreamt that I snapped and went on a rampage because someone left the cats locked out on the front porch until they spontaneously developed rabies, and someone also left the dog chained up in the front yard until his collar and several steel links had worked themselves into his flesh in an inextricable manner. (What cats? What dog? I don`t have any pets.) Anyway, the violence that followed was totally justified, if you ask me.

Then, after I woke up, I saw a pair of collared dogs trotting across a busy street completely unsupervised. They were accompanied by two puppies, maybe eight weeks old, one of whom fell really far behind and hovered on the edge of the busy street, where it surely would have been squashed by traffic, before reluctantly heading back to whatever insanely neglectful home it came from.

So the lesson here is that the real world sucks even harder than my bad dreams. I shoulda stayed in bed.
 
Foaming at the mouth
Posted by Mike on Mon, 12/18/2006 - 11:49am.
Yay for themes! Except for this one. Leave me alone, rabid cats. I don`t care if you`re toothless: stop licking me! Your tongues are too sharp and you still have your claws. One good scratch n`sniff and I`m afeared of water! Lousy dream-felines. Bah.
100 years or light-years, whichever comes first
Posted by Mike on Tue, 12/12/2006 - 9:03am.
Last night I dreamt that a case of copyright infringement destroyed the Earth. Okay, okay, I was the infringer. It wasn`t entirely my fault, though. See, I raided Walt Disney`s mansion and stole an original work or two-- not to copy them or anything, but just to watch. I dunno, maybe I just wanted to see Song of the South without the random Chinese subtitles.

Anyway, I was still in the mansion when Disney`s descendants came home. They were furious about my theft. So furious, in fact, that they decided to release their ultimate anti-piracy weapon. It turns out that said weapon was some sort of dimensional gate that opened up into the heart of a black hole! Boy, was I surprised! So was the Disney family, or so I would guess from their dying screams. I have to admit that it was quite an effective trump card though: the black hole inhaled the whole planet in about a minute.

I survived, though, because it turns out that I`m not really human; I`m just a simulacrum of a human being, sent to Earth on behalf of the forces of entropy and chaos in order to destroy it. Uh, mission accomplished! I turned into pure energy and escaped the planet`s destruction just in time and went off to cause trouble elsewhere. Or degrade into random radiation-- whatever it is free agents of disorder like to do.

Oh, one more thing: there`s this paper I`m supposed to be writing (right now) that I`d been struggling with for a while. When I woke up, my subconscious left me an idea for the entire thing that seems like it will work! Apparently all I have to do to get over idea problems is fall asleep and cause the deaths of billions! If I`d known it was that easy...
Super shark
Posted by Mike on Fri, 12/08/2006 - 2:37pm.
Oops, it`s been a while. I`ve had eleventy billion dreams but only remember one:

Superman and Batman were searching through the abandoned lab of one of their shared nemeses. (Who? The dream didn`t really specify...) Superman was making fun of Batman for not having any real super powers-- ha ha, you`re just a rich psycho and so on and so forth. Suddenly, they stumble across a tank full of salt water. Inside, there swims a shark from Krypton! The bad guy found it... somehow. Anyway, the shark recognized its natural prey on sight, and burst through the glass with the same super-strength that all Kryptonians gain after exposure to our yellow sun. Superman flew off in a panic, just a heartbeat ahead of the shark`s hungry jaws, while Batman smirked-- quite justifiably, I`d say.

Well, this must have been a post-Crisis type dream because the shark couldn`t go without breathing indefinitely. It had to abandon the pursuit and flit back down into the ocean for reoxygenation every few seconds. Still, it gave enough chase to make Superman`s life thoroughly miserable and panic-filled. He finally swallowed his pride and begged Batman to help him. Batman briefly considered standing back and waiting until Supes was just a blob of super-shark poo, but realized that a) losing Superman would be bad for Earth in the long run and b) the shark would probably settle for feasting on ordinary humans sooner or later. So he went home to load up on Kryptonite...

Um, I don`t remember how that dream ended. Dorkily, one would assume.
Long one.
Posted by Saint on Wed, 11/22/2006 - 1:26am.
Every once in a while, I have this dream. So I might have posted it before, and if so I`m sorry, but no way am I going to go looking at 19 pages to check for sure.

Demons take over the earth, and humanity is run underground. The demons want to eat humans, because you see, they feed on evil, and they`re tired of eating each other. There`s a whole big heirarchy to demon society--there`s a demon king at the top, with his spawn on the tier below him, then farther tiers below, until you get down to demon dogs and demon cats that aren`t any brighter (or meaner) then their earth counterparts. Demons can`t harm demons on the tier above their station; to cause lasting harm, a demon has to be on the same tier or higher. It sucks to be the devil-dogs and cats; they subsist on ambient evil in their environment, and are no harm to anybody, but they`re the only thing all of the others can eat (other than humans), so...yeah. The one thing demon dogs and cats can do that`s special is open gates, whether to another location in this dimension or to other dimensions altogether, including elemental planes (if you don`t know what I`m talking about, you were never a gamer geek). Some gates are one-way, some are visual only, some are two-way. With me so far?

Now, the major hold-out of humanity is called Stronghold, and it`s built into a switchback pass in the Colorado mountains, mostly out of old battleship parts. Though there`s a huge, rusting, battleship-armor front door, in only leads out to a large flat empty cave. There`s no entrance from the outside; only a gate can get you in. As for how the humans come and go: one of the leaders of Stronghold is a half-human daughter of the demon king. As a tier-two, she can hurt other demons, and can command demons dogs and cats.

So Stronghold has water, courtesy of the elemental plane of water, and a sewer and trash system that drains directly into the demons` home plane, and visual gates that let in light to grow plants and generally get an outdoors feel in the complex. Paradise, really, except for the minor problem of the demons in the outside world, which Stronghold wants to reclaim. The people of Stronghold use weapons made with demon parts (if the tier-two leader killed all the demons to supply the parts, she would have had to be very, very busy; but I suppose once you have one effective weapon, the thing sort of snowballs, as you kill more and make more weapons so you can kill more....), so they can go on raids and rescue missions and kill demons. But none of them can kill the demon king.

The tier-two, after wiping out all the other tier-twos, climbs the tall red mesa-looking thing the demon king uses for his throne, and challenges him. He toys with her a while--a backhand, a kick, a couple swipes of the claws--then, just when it seems he`s going to kill her with a claw to the eye, she breaks the claw off and sticks it through his ear. The demon king`s claw, being itself tier-one, kills him. I personally wouldn`t grow my nails out to four-inch length if they could kill me, but apparently the demon king never thought of it. The triumphant tier-two cuts the dead demon`s head off, pitches it down the mesa, and screams, `I am the demon king!` Apparently, a big fan of Nightmare Before Christmas, even though I myself have never seen it. I`m not sure if it`s a happy ending or not--does she go on to get rid of the demons, or does she become tyrant in the old king`s place?

I think the dream is recurrent because my subcon, having gone to all that effort to create a (for a dream) consistant world, doesn`t want to let it go to waste. I tried once to write a story based on the dream, but when you`re awake it just seems a little less...believable. Particularly the elemental planes.
 
Never the same show twice
Posted by Mike on Wed, 11/22/2006 - 12:55pm.
What do you have to do to have recurring dreams, I wonder? Mine are always different, and usually they don`t even bother wrapping up:

Last night I dreamt about a random businessperson who witnessed some sort of greenish explosion on his way to an airport only to realize that there was some bizarre time slippage taking place: every so often, and with increasing frequency, everything around him would freeze as he entered his own little bubble of high-speed time.

He thought it was empowering at first, but after a few episodes he began to realize that if he let it continue he`d live out his entire life and die of old age right there on the concourse. It also didn`t help that his seemingly instaneous teleportation across vast expanses of the terminal had gained the interest/hostility of all of the federal agents and security personnel there. He ended up running and hiding during his time blips, evading officers and desperately trying to figure out how to reverse the effects of whatever caused him to become unstuck in time before it was too late.

...and then the dream changed. How can dreams repeat when my subconscious has ADD?

[edit] Random aside: this may explain why I sometimes wake up tired after dreaming too much. You know, if it`s true and all. Bleh, stage 5 overdose...
Storms! Nudity! Dead mice everywhere!
Posted by Mike on Sat, 11/18/2006 - 12:11pm.
...and yet I still feel stuck in a dream rut. Sigh.

(I didn`t wanna bring up the mice; Google only just recently stopped pitching exterminator ads at me.)
An annoying week.
Posted by Saint on Mon, 11/13/2006 - 9:47am.
Some kids stole my lawn. I lived next to a school, on a house at the top of a steep incline, and I yelled at kids to stay off my lawn because they were killing it by climbing it in their hundreds every day. So a couple of the little brats cut and rolled the grass, then started making off with the dirt and cinder blocks (what good lawn doesn`t have a foundation?) underneath. I caught them, but they wouldn`t give me their mother`s phone number. I had some awareness that I was dreaming, and kept asking myself why I didn`t just slaughter them like sacrificial lambs, but I never did. I think the dream would have left me with a lot less frustrated rage if I`d just made with the violence.

Then I was sitting in a truck, and some big, mean-looking guy was winding up and pitching rocks at my windshield. It made me angry, so I floored the gas, squealing tires and driving directly at him, until...I slammed on the brakes and stopped two inches from his chest, got out of the truck and demanded that he go ahead and hit me as hard as he could. Even in the dream, that didn`t seem likely to resolve things, but I woke up before I could find out.

Then last night, I dreamed I was living in my parents` house, in my old bedroom. Nothing seemed out of place and I was just going through my usual morning routine, when I suddenly noticed while brushing my teeth that I had roommates. Two of them living in my brother`s old room, sneering about my taste in music, and another guy living in my parents` room. The guy in my parents` room was at least familiar (I know him from another forum), but he was moving Whitney Houston in with him, and that just wasn`t going to work. I told AnimeSucks to get rid of her, and I demanded the other two guys tell me why the hell they were in my house, but nobody listened to me.
 
Speak softly, carry a big scimitar
Posted by Mike on Wed, 11/15/2006 - 3:16pm.
Dream violence is definitely the way. Last night I was just wandering by a random battlefield and decided, what the heck, why not join in? Like D`artagnan`s dad said in The Three Musketeers: if you see a fight, jump in!

I don`t think I was on anybody`s side, though-- just picked up a curved sword and started swinging. By the end of the dream I had a real appreciation for the effectiveness of the scimitar: it looks weird and curvy, but it can really slit a throat from a distance! I`m sure all the strangers understood that as they died. By the end it had gone from two warring factions plus me to ragtag group of survivors AGAINST me, and I was still winning! Man, my dream ego is way overinflated.
Bears, bread, bikes, bombs, balloons, breakfast
Posted by Mike on Fri, 11/10/2006 - 3:17pm.
I dreamt that I was visiting the ruins of my old home with two random NFL players. My house was flooded and broken into, but there was very little water damage on the upper floors, so we poked around up there. One of the other guys found a friendly polar bear cub and started playing with it. I very worriedly pointed out that polar bear cubs aren`t typically alone, and sure enough, we heard a loud splashing outside the window and looked to see a very determined (yet disturbingly quiet) mother bear. She pursued us relentlessly through the house until I managed to trap her in the (still fully intact) attic. The damn football players wanted to stay there, until I casually pointed out that the attic slats wouldn`t hold the three-quarter-ton bear for long.

... Um, I don`t think I have time for a full list. That`s what happens when you take too long to post!

[edit] Okay, now I have time but faded memories. I dreamt about being in a bike race with (against?) an autistic woman who got sidetracked frequently by things on the side of the road-- particularly a large hot-air balloon outside of the house we were supposed to stop at because there was a time bomb that needed defusing (I think it was part of the competition-- the bomb, that is, not the annoying balloon-- or maybe we were just a pair of wandering arbitrary do-gooders, occasionally stopping the random act of terrorism? I dunno.), and then I dreamt about having a nice warm breakfast featuring buttery scrambled eggs and freshly baked bread that somehow retained its softness even after I toasted it and made an egg sandwich.

Then I woke up and was hungry for things I didn`t have at hand. I hate that.
...
Posted by Saint on Fri, 11/10/2006 - 11:05am.
In some central European country, handfuls of exchange students kept disappearing. Actually, I don\\\'t know if you could call them \\\'exchange\\\' students, because the central European country didn\\\'t send any students out, they just imported them, so the local vampires would eat them instead of local youths. The head of the vampire resistance and the main vampire were secretly good friends, which might explain why the resistance was pretty ineffective. But the exchange students were all old ER doctors, so nobody cared that much anyway.
Sitter of mutants
Posted by Mike on Thu, 11/02/2006 - 6:54am.
I dreamt about panda babies. Not young pandas, but human babies who looked a lot like pandas. I had to keep them hidden so that hordes of confused would-be zoo patrons wouldn`t crowd around them and turn the whole deal into a carnival-type freakshow. Eventually I discovered a way to turn the children back into normal humans, but it was complicated and slow: I had to convince one of the panda children to ``evolve`` into a higher form-- like a lemur baby or an orangutan-- and then wait a few days for the other children to notice the trend and follow suit. I really shouldn`t have bothered because the panda baby freakshow dealie would have been really profitable.
Four from the past week:
Posted by Mike on Fri, 10/27/2006 - 10:02am.
Dream #1 dropped me out of the sky and onto a platform of random junk and debris floating on an infinite blue ocean. There was no land in sight.

There were other people living on the junkpile who, after a little coaxing, revealed to me that they had gotten there the same way, that a mysterious undertow would occasionally churn the water and suck objects and people beneath the surface never to be seen again, and that they had no contact with any other human beings, seen no fish or animals, and gone through no weather changes-- nothing sun, water, and unexpected random death.

Needless to say they were not the most mentally stable people I`ve ever met. And that was before a young man sitting on a pile of cars was dragged to his watery doom, a fate that his self-proclaimed ``mother`` blamed entirely on my appearance in a quasi-religious way. She rallied the other paranoid kooks to her cause and they started chasing me through the shifting wreckage...

I forget how that dream ended. It was a while ago.

Dream #2 took place at my grandfather`s birthday party. Happy Birthday, Granddad! My mom went into this long explanation of how my grandfather was the last surviving Civil War veteran, which was weird because he couldn`t possibly be that old, and because it was my paternal grandfather-- where the hell was my father? I was about to go looking for him, but everyone hurriedly distracted me by pointing out that there was a bottle of Civil War-era bourbon on the top shelf of my grandfather`s basement laboratory. Oh. Well that explains everything! (At least it did to my dream self.) I began climbing the endlessly tall basement bookcase for the ancient flask of liquor. I was just within reach when someone tipped the bookcase from below. Aargh! It was all a trick to get me out of the picture before I found out where my father had gone! I was fooled by the promise of alcohol!

#3: I was running a daycare for some reason and... look, sometimes children can be so naughty that dousing them with rubbing alcohol and throwing lit matches at them is the only proper punishment, okay? Don\\\'t look at me like that! Seriously, he probably deserved it.

#4: Keyed-up crackheads were screaming at each other in my back yard. I had a board with a nail in it. The plot resolved itself in the usual way. That dream was this morning, and guess what I woke up to?

Just to remind everyone: I\\\'m not a violent lunatic in real life.

(Note: this post is more than a week old, and since then I`ve had quite a few more dreams, most commonly about... uh... stabbing people in the face. Strangers, friends, relatives: you name it, I`ve knifed it.

...

Yeah, well I still stand by my reminder!)
Lincolnstein!
Posted by Mike on Wed, 10/11/2006 - 11:02am.
Last night I dreamt that I was stuck in a boring history class. The teacher was droning on and on about the Civil War until we students revolted! We challenged him to tell us something about the whole deal that we hadn`t heard already. He responded by telling us that Abraham Lincoln was a mad scientist. He spent the war years conducting evil secret experiments on captive southerners: he personally spliced two of them together to form a artificially conjoined twin, for example. And you can only imagine what that sort of operation was like in the 1860s, where amputation was considered an advanced medical technique...

Anyway, the teacher revealed that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln NOT because of a general grudge against the Union, but because did some sort of perverted tinkering with Booth`s dad`s wangery. And suddenly the entire class knew-- you know, the way you just absolutely know and it makes sense -- that it was all true.

So next time you handle a penny or a five-dollar bill, don`t forget to take a moment to curse that God-playing mutilating vivisecting bastard. Hey, better yet, give that money to me! Trust me, you don`t want it.
Unlikely events
Posted by Saint on Wed, 10/11/2006 - 10:40am.
Alcoholic super-heroes playing tag around a city while telepathically arguing the benefits of rehab; being happy in a stable and loving relationship with a beautiful girl; having a hair grow out of my tongue (I still keep rubbing my tongue against the roof of my mouth to make sure I don\\\'t feel a whisker).
Ingrates!
Posted by Mike on Sat, 10/07/2006 - 9:40am.
Last night I had a passel of vampire-related dreams. I can`t remember them precisely anymore, but they mostly involved me taking precautionary measures against vampire attacks. You know, dousing people with holy water, killing suspiciously bloodthirsty animals, stuff like that. Can you believe that people were angry at me for doing those things? Sheesh, judging from their responses you`d think that vampires didn`t exist or something! Be glad for an ounce of prevention, you idiots!
If at first you don`t succeed...
Posted by Saint on Tue, 10/03/2006 - 11:36pm.
I was visiting a friend and an old girlfriend. My friend had a shiny new hot-rod (that was also a minivan), and made the mistake of letting my old gf drive it. Repeatedly. The entire dream consisted of the three of us getting in the car, the gf throwing it in reverse and slamming on the gas, my friend telling her to slow down, and me looking out the back window to see us hitting some kid. Over and over and over, with the sense that, rather than being a single event rewound and replayed, it was instead a daily occurance.

The only thing that really changed was what the kid was doing when we hit him, and how badly we hurt him. His injuries got progressively worse, from simply scaring him to death on a skateboard to actually running over him (thump) on a bike. After the last one, I yelled at the gf that she`d killed the kid, and we all got out to look. The kid was bent in bizarre angles, but he got up anyway and screamed profanity at us. I guess he had the right, but I started to get mad--I mean, come on, how many times can you be hit by the same car before it occurs to you to watch where you`re going?


As a side-note, I took the Tickle Dream Interpretation test in the google ad. The results:

`Chris, the recurrent theme of your dream life is Self-Reliance

`You`re dreaming about situations in which you don`t feel ready to take full advantage of life`s opportunities. This means that in some area of your life, you`re searching for ways to better prepare and protect yourself on your road to success.`

If I wanted to give them $5, they would have told me more of the fascinating secrets they learned with their in-depth 9-page 41-question analysis of my dreams. Alas, I am cheap, and will never know what portion of their asses they pulled this result from. (And if you`re wondering, I use the name Chris when I sign up for junk on the web, so when they send me spam by name, I can identify it right away.)
Struggle for life
Posted by Mike on Fri, 09/29/2006 - 3:05pm.
I dreamt that the world was ending-- which is no big deal, but this time it was super duper ending: there was this worldwide flood, after which the Earth would collide with a planet-sized mini-sun, which would then ka-splode. It was the kind of thing that humankind could see coming, but had no way to fend off.

Anyway, the dream started with the flood. Water was coming from everywhere, and there was no high ground to be found. I was inside my childhood home with my family, resolutely blowing up air mattresses and rubber rafts and even inflatable backyard swimming pools in a last-ditch effort to escape the house and sail the high seas until we found a spare Space Shuttle or something. Somebody walked by-- I think it was my younger sister-- and asked me, in a despairing tone, why I was going though all the trouble: surely it was better to drown than to be roasted alive by the impending starfall?

I angrily replied that yes, dammit, it was worth it... and then I stopped to ask myself if that was true. I mean, we all downplay the reality of death when it`s not looming there before us, but when it seems inevitable doesn`t it make more sense to give in and take the dignified way out? I sat there, in the old house surrounded by rising water, puzzling about the best course of action to take while the house creaked and groaned and buckled under the increasing pressure of the deluge outside.

The thing is, I never did make up my mind. Lousy existentialism!
Strawberry frogs, war, and the hassle of winning
Posted by Saint on Fri, 09/29/2006 - 10:17am.
1) Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston somehow ended up in the same pie shop at the same time, and rather than behaving like reasonable adults, they started (well, Pitt started, with both playfulness and malice) a pie fight. This was going amusingly, if messily, for everyone in the shop, until Pitt jumped the counter to get more ammo and discovered the proprieter`s stash of strawberry frogs.

Strawberry frogs are red and have seeded skin--they`re frogs that look (and apparently taste) like strawberries, hence the name. Haven`t you ever heard of them? Okay, me either, but there they were. They were pests around the business, until the proprieter had the brilliant notion to use them in his pies in place of real (expensive) strawberries.

Both celebs, and the other patrons, were quite disgusted by this, since all of them had been eating the famous strawberry pie, but the dream ended before either the puking of the lynch mob could get started.

2) There were little, magical, hobbit-type people just trying to live their lives in their little magical world, when unmagical barbarian types invaded. My brother and I worked with the heroic little hobbit-types, though we were not little magical people--we were actually our normal selves, so I don`t know how we even got there. I don`t remember much really, except the war was not going well. The little guys flooded their home city so the barbarian types couldn`t have it (genocide brings out the pettiness in people), and one of them hid a magic sword in the depths, in hopes of coming back for it later. And barbarians are obnoxious drunks, as you might expect.

3) I went to a fair with a female friend and my parents. I felt like my parents were trying to push my friend and I together, and there just was not anything romantic there, so it was a little uncomfortable. My friend felt weird about it too, and snuck off while we were eating dinner.

While wandering around, vaguely looking for my friend, I found myself admiring a muscle car painted in bright shades of green, with a monster motif. The guy standing beside it gave me a bunch of keys, and told me if I could start it, it was mine. I proceded to open the trunk, without ever trying to start the car. A little later, beside an ice-cream stand, there was the car and the man again, and again, he pushed a bunch of keys into my hand. This time around, I finally said, `Duh, I`m not going to start it by popping the trunk`, and tried the key in the ignition; it started right off. It was fun to drive, but my father persuaded me I should sell it, for financial reasons. I agreed, but I still had to get it home.

Leaving the parking lot of wherever the fair was, I immediately ran into a great deal of construction--I mean, the highway was blocked by a wall of gravel about 15 feet high, with some caution cones in front of it. So my father and I got out of the car, and I tucked it under my arm, and we went to talk to a consignment auto dealer that happened to be handy. He refused to take the car, because the fair wasn`t over and he didn`t believe I`d won the car.

After a lot of arguing, Dad and I moved on, either headed home or looking for another dealer, I`m not sure. And all this time, I was lugging the car under my arm and banging it into things because, as usual, my dream architect provided vertical spaces and narrow staircases. Eventually we stopped and took stock of the damage to the car. The paint was remarkably intact, but a lot of engine bits had shaken loose and I felt like my dad blamed me for that. From the look on his face, I thought it unlikely I would ever be able to either sell it or drive it.
Dreams of death
Posted by Saint on Sat, 09/23/2006 - 9:49am.
The afterlife was like a lucid shared dream with some bureaucracy grafted on top. Every incoming person came with some paperwork and a map that was supposed to be able to lead them to people they knew, and some random celebrities they wished they could meet.

Unfortunately, the constantly shifting nature of the landscape made it all but impossible for new arrivals to find anything. Your map might say your wife lives on Peach Lane, and that`s great, but one day Peach Lane would be a city street, the next it would be a double row of peach trees in an orchard, the day after it might not exist at all.

So there were guides, older dead people who volunteered to lead the young`uns around and help them avoid the pitfalls of the underworld. I was one of these guides, but a terrible one. Yes, if you wanted to meet Bonnie, the forgotten female Beatle, I would take you to her goat ranch in Serenity Valley. I would usually neglect to inform you that Bonnie was a cult of personality--a soul strong enough to gather in other souls as thralls, whether they liked it or not--until I ran into you somewhere else, shilling for Bonnie`s political agenda.

In my defense, I wasn`t intentionally malicious, just absent-minded, and after finding out one of my placements wasn`t working out, I`d do something about it, whether it was prying people loose from personal nightmares or personality cults. But my supervisor was very disappointed, all the same.
...
Posted by Saint on Mon, 09/18/2006 - 9:23am.
I was walking on a back road covered shin-deep in fallen leaves when I came across a teenage boy abusing a dog. I beat him to death. Then, somewhat ashamed of myself and distraught over what my family would think, I went home to kill myself. Home wasn`t really home, but instead was a small squarish house filled with jugs of flammable liquid. I got out a shotgun, stuck the barrel in my mouth and pulled the trigger.

Then I said, `What the fuck?`, spraying buckshot as I spoke. The blast hadn`t penetrated. It had barely tickled. I was invulnerable! I spat the remaining shot into my hand, amazed. Then I set out gleefully gathering up flammables and lighters. Apparently being invulnerable means it`s okay to go on a spree of death and mass destruction without suffering a guilty conscience. Oh, and for some reason, I had the impression I would become Voltron at the end of all this. *shrug*
 
Whole new phobias
Posted by Mike on Wed, 09/20/2006 - 6:33am.
The lion-based Voltron or the vehicle-based Voltron? Yes, it matters very much. Stop asking!

I dreamt that I had-- all of a sudden, and with NO warning-- a small snapping turtle in my mouth. Well, half in my mouth. The tail end was sticking out. The dangerous snappy head part, however, was halfway to my tonsils and flailing about madly trying to connect with something to clamp down on. I was concentrating desperately on keeping my tongue firmly against the back of my throat. How could I get this thing out of my mouth without it taking a chunk of palate or lip or tooth along for the ride? The whole dream was nothing but a blind panic.

What does that symbolize? No, wait, don`t tell me!
 
Identifying with rats
Posted by Saint on Thu, 09/21/2006 - 9:31pm.
Lion-based, I think. It`s been a long, long time since I`ve seen Voltron.

Last night I made love to my wife (not anybody I actually know, just a dream-wife), who immediately fell asleep, leaving me free to sneak across the hall to her sister`s apartment. I had sex with the sister, too, though I was very guilty about it and kept thinking I should go home. But instead of going home, I settled onto the couch and watched cartoons with scraggly wet rats while the sister`s husband and kids prepared for a day trip around me. (To clarify: I sat on the couch with scraggly wet rats, and we all watched cartoons; there was no cartoon featuring scraggly wet rats.)
Nine-minute nightmares
Posted by Mike on Fri, 09/15/2006 - 3:23pm.
My subconscious has adapted marvelously to a snooze-button sleep schedule. Ahh, the wonderful upshot of utter exhaustion tinged with the stress of a new job! I`ve been killing so many people in my dreams that even I find it unusual. Sure, some of them deserved it, like the stadium full of zombies I was unceremoniously dropped into, but I really shouldn`t have whip-cracked those schoolkids onto those jagged rocks. I`m sorry, schoolkids, seriously. My maniacal laughter meant nothing, I swear.

So yeah, quick and dirty death dreams leading directly into work! That can`t possibly end in psychosis! Ah ha ha ha ha ha haaa! (*passes out*)

[edit] Anger management classes? Bite me, Google.
Fragmented Figments
Posted by Somnambulist on Sat, 09/09/2006 - 1:52am.
One recent dream was rather odd; a random male character was explaining his numerous affairs to his wife as an attempt to make the world a better place. Apparently, the world is a largely cold and loveless place, and he was attempting to expend enough energy to effect a change. This led to a rather involved and technical explaination of the nature of the thermodynamics of passion... and stranger yet, the entire scene was set in the Victorian period...

In another dream, I woke up on my oldest younger brother`s couch holding my irises in the palm of my hand. As I was calmly admiring them, it occured to me that it was rather fortuitus that I could see them so well, seeing as how I no longer had any way to control the aperture of my pupils. I idly wondered how I had taken my irises out, and suddenly had a memory of removing them like a pair of contacts. That shocked me awake; I`m rather squeemish about touching my eyes... even if I had bad eyesight, I`d never be able to use contacts, and as for corrective surgery... *shudders*

I also had a strange demidream in which I wrote a short story about a secret society of 24 members, one per time zone, who were responcible for keeping the sun chugging along in a westerly way. They were all in telepathic rapport, and each one was primarally in charge of `catching` the sun for the first half hour of the day (sunrise), and `pushing` it for the last half hour of the day(sunset) while it was in their timezone. There was a bit of a crisis when people started to believe in a heliocentric, rather than geocentric, system, but the society cleverly resolved this issue by... humming `The World`s Address`, or more specifically, the line that goes, ``Tell them Albert Einstein and Copernicus were wrong.`` (?)

That`s all I`ve got for now... and more than enough, I`m sure.
Plague and Celebrity Duets
Posted by Saint on Sun, 09/03/2006 - 10:22am.
The world ended in plague. Not this world, but a world we colonized. It looked like Utah. For a while, everybody I personally knew was fine, but then suddenly everybody was gone. The only other person alive looked and sounded a lot like Drrrnt from the Strangerhood. We were wandering around stunned in the ruins of the colony, and in a science lab I found a huge amount of plastic flatware. From this, I somehow deduced that the scientists had started the plague that killed everybody I knew. I started ranting and raving (Why? Why? Why would they do this to us?), then Drrrnt distracted me by pointing out that the box we were loading supplies into had a fold-out mini-Zepplin built in.

My ex and I (why is she so much in my dreams lately, anyway?) were in the audience of the Tonight Show. Lucy Lawless and Chris Jericho were promoting the Celebrity Duets show (which I feel compelled to say at this point that I do not watch), so they sang. It wasn`t a stage performance, so much, more like a very odd music video, with cartoon characters and weird backdrops coming and going. Throughout the performance, Jericho carried a box of cookies and Lawless had a sixpack of bottled beer. At the end of the performance, Jericho passed out cookies to the audience, at the same time making comments strongly implying that they were drugged. I decided to pass on the cookies, and instead tried to finagle a beer from Lawless. She was cool to the attempt, to say the least, and when I shrugged and gave up, she went backstage to complain about me. Pretty soon security came, letting me know in no uncertain terms that Lawless was not gay and highly offended by my hitting on her. Huh? Then they escorted me from the building. So unfair. I don`t even like beer that much.
Ninjas, zombies...the usual.
Posted by Saint on Wed, 08/30/2006 - 9:59am.
1) I was a ninja named Myra. I hated my name, and would kill anyone who used it, but I kept introducing myself to everyone anyway, just inviting them to make me cut them down.

I lived in a third-floor walk-up in a converted factory, but I never used the stairs; instead, I came and went through the window. My wall-climbing skills greatly impressed the girl who lived on the fifth floor, and she invited me up. Naturally, I climbed up from my window to hers (hey, you stick with what works), which led directly into her bedroom.

This seemed to be working out okay, until the damn doorbell started ringing every minute or so; everybody this girl knew in the entire world apparently felt the need to stop by just then. And damned if she didn`t answer the door every single time. Finally I got so frustrated I went home, fetched my sword, and started killing everybody in the hallway, whether they were going to see the girl or not. I must have slaughtered a dozen of them before the rest fled in terror.

Weirdly, the girl was untroubled by the gore, or the fact I`d killed people she knew; if anything, she was impressed. Ninja groupie, I guess. Anyway, we were able to pick up where we left off before the doorbell started ringing. I kept the sword by the bed, though, just in case.

[edit] While I was out at my parent`s place for dinner, their cat came in covered with cobwebs--complete with a spider. Which reminded me of a piece of the ninja dream I`d forgotten, the part where spiders with bodies as long as my thumb started crawling out of the potted plants by the girl`s bed and I had to crush them bare-handed. Ninja or not, I am just as arachnophobic in my dreams as I am in real life, and although I did squish the damnable things, I`m pretty sure I did not look cool doing it. *sigh* I could have done without remembering that.

2) The city was slowly being taken over by zombies. So, of course, there was nothing for it but for the remaining survivors to hole up in a luxury hotel and have an end of the world party.

It was a rockin party, too, until some drunk idiot drowned in the huge rooftop swimming pool. He seemed to be too stupid to get out of the pool, and too slow in the water to catch anybody, so he couldn`t do any harm to anyone. But just having a dead guy in the pool ruined the swimming completely. It did give the kids at the party something to do--baiting the zombie by dangling their feet in the water, or throwing stuff at him--while the rest of us got drunk and screwed.

After a few more guys died (presumably from alcohol poisoning), though, the party was well and truly over and all that was left was the blood and the screaming and the running. Oh, and the Lear jet full of models.
 
Poor family planning
Posted by Mike on Fri, 09/01/2006 - 7:32am.
Oh, and the Lear jet full of models.

Alive or dead? Yes, it matters very much.
(Google Ads: Panic Attacks and Oprah Has Spoken. Huh?)

Last night I dreamt that I was at a buffet-style restaurant in a mall. I was with some guy whom the dream identified as my stepdad. We were loading up on roast beef and garlic bread-- mmm, greasy garlicky roast beef sandwiches-- and had a small supermarket shopping cart brought in to simplify our dining experience. Yay for being pigs!

As we wheeled our fare through the seating area a nearby couple commented on the prodigality of our appetites. They had three children: a young boy, a younger girl, and a baby of indeterminate gender sitting in a high chair. My stepdad and I pointed out that, once puberty and growth spurts hit those three, the couple would become well acquainted with this sort of gluttony. We all laughed mildly-- ha ha ha-- and the couple then facetiously offered to give us a child or two if that was the case. Then we adults laughed some more-- until the parents insinuated that they weren`t kidding.

They really were trying to give their kids away! To strangers! At the mall! It must not have been the first time, either, because the boy and girl had grown strangely somber just before their parents made their little proposition, as if they had known from long experience where the conversation was headed. They just looked sad and defeated, the way you`d expect children to look when their parents tried to pawn them off on strangers.

The whole incident was so sad that we stood there stunned until I woke up. Then I was mad because I never got to eat anything. All that dream food gone to waste...
 
Love lowers IQ
Posted by Saint on Fri, 09/01/2006 - 8:47am.
The models were live. The flight crew...not so much.

In last night`s dream, I finally gave my ex a piece of my mind--literally. I just carved out a chunk of my brain and handed it to her. I think I thought it would make her love me again, but she just pocketed it and didn`t seem very interested. Meh.
Samurai showdown
Posted by Mike on Sun, 08/27/2006 - 2:32pm.
Wow, I had this horrible dream where I bumped into a samurai on horseback who immediately decided to kill me. I ran into a nearby tunnel that was filled with cobwebs and old dead leaves. Using special ninja techniques (or dream magic, I dunno), I attached myself to the low roof of the tunnel and connected a thin wire to a web in the shadows near the floor; when the horse came galloping into the tunnel, I shook the web, whose leaves let out a loud distinct rattle which sounded enough like a snake to send the horse into a panic. The samurai was upended and I had him cut wide open, palate to pubes, before he even hit the ground.

Success! I raced from the tunnel with the samurai`s swords as my prize and proof of my feat. I even stopped to tell a passing gunslinger/cop. (I dunno, maybe there was a bounty on his head or something.) But when I got home, I found that my wife and young children (?!), fearing me dead, were in the middle of loading up their possessions and fleeing for their lives.

Once they saw I was okay they started moving everything back into the house, but not before they had left the family treasure exposed for all the world to see: somehow we had acquired a large pile of gold and doubloons-- seriously, this dream was very sloppy with the pirate/ninja/cowboy nomenclature-- and I had to make sure that no one had seen it. I casually sauntered into the back yard... where I found a little kid, a child of the next door neighbors or a friend of my kids or something. He died first. There was much blood and screaming, and I remember feeling guilty but following through on the boy`s evisceration with a grim purpose and sense of duty to my family. His screams flushed another child from her hiding place and... yep. Weird, I usually don`t feel guilty about decapitating people in my dreams, but this one really really sucked. I think there were maybe two more bloody murders before I woke up. Gold and glory doesn`t seem to be worth all the trouble.
Reverse dungeon
Posted by Saint on Sun, 08/13/2006 - 10:05am.
A big rock crashed to earth. It had an entrance, which was usually closed and which occasionally bit the curious, and a gaping hole in the side, which nobody ever paid attention to. Inside, there were levels filled with monsters and traps, and for every level a person advanced towards the top, the person would get a million dollars. I\\\'m not sure who was giving out the prize, but I guess it didn\\\'t matter, because nobody ever survived to collect.

There was, however, one guy who\\\'d been a kid when the rock landed, who\\\'d always dreamed of running the gauntlet and getting the prize. Apparently, his other dream was to be covered in plain blue tattoos of tools, and his left arm already had quite a collection of hammers. After getting one of those \\\"It\\\'s okay that you\\\'re a loser, I love you anyway\\\" speeches from his girlfriend, he decided to give it a try. To start with, he didn\\\'t use the entrance, but instead scaled the outside of the rock and entered through the gaping hole at the tenth level.

While he was working his way up further levels, cut to the local sheriff, chatting with a pissed-off shape-changing telekinetic alien. The alien clearly held the sheriff responsible for the tool-guy\\\'s surprising and annoying success, and was mentally throwing things at the hapless man, starting with paperweights and ending with a screwdriver.

When the sheriff was dead, the alien headed for the rock, I guess intending to take out the tool-guy personally, but sadly I woke up before I could get closure.
Soil searching
Posted by Mike on Fri, 08/11/2006 - 8:59am.
Over the past few days I`ve had dreams about gardening. The first one was about how a bunch of dump trucks pulled up outside my window and slathered asphalt all over the ground, ruining weeks of planting; the second one, in which I got in trouble for tracking thick red mud across the living room carpet, was last night. I think that`s enough gardening for a while.

The third dream was more exciting: it was about pirates! I was in a race with a crew of marauding buccaneers, see, who were out to find the same treasure stash as I was. It was hidden in a trap-filled cave on a tropical island, and I got to it while they were still looking for a port in which to weigh anchor.

Knowing I only had a headstart of a few minutes, I launched myself into the hunt. Hmm, the map said that the treasure was hidden in one of eight tunnels, while the other seven contain deadly pitfalls. I squeezed into the main entrance, a narrow hole leading to eight narrower holes, and pointed a lantern into each of the passages in turn. There was a strange glint in the fifth tunnel.

I could hear the pirates approaching the hole behind me, so I took a deep breath, suppressed my fears and doubts, and set forth into the fifth hole. It was cramped and stale-smelling, but there were no immediate fatal attacks, so I was thinking that I chose the right one. The tunnel was a bit narrow, though. I pulled out a spade and set about widening it...

...and then thought to myself, hey, you`re playing in the dirt again... which was enough to break the illusion of the dream and snap me awake.

So no pirate battles or dream treasure for me. :^(
Little match girl
Posted by Mike on Wed, 08/09/2006 - 2:41pm.
Last night`s dream was an empty pointless tragedy about a poor little orphan girl who was homeless and starving to death in a small village. As she wandered through the town on a cold gray morning she hallucinated that she was at a luxurious banquet/ball, that she was being cared for by the townspeople, and finally that she was offered a magnificent brass bed with warm down pillows to sleep in.

The dream would show me what the girl was imagining to be true, and then gradually that would fade and be replaced by the cold hard reality: she was sorting through trash for rotting leftovers; she was being chased off by scornful inkeepers and mocking schoolchildren; she fell asleep in a gutter and froze to death.

Then I woke up in the real world, where nothing like that could ever happen.
Shielding
Posted by Mike on Mon, 08/07/2006 - 1:04pm.
Last night I had a couple of dreams about protecting people. The first one had me dragging a boatload of soldiers through a subterranean cave filled with deep water. It was dark and gloomy and they wanted to leave, but I warned them that there was a critical mass of fissile material at the bottom of the cave, and the water was the only thing protecting us from a fatal dose of explosive radiation. Sure enough, there was a bright green light and an explosive bubbly blurp! sound soon after, and I deemed it safe enough to row us out.

The next dream was about a father and his son lost in an open-air concrete labyrinth. It was starting to rain and the son got tired and began crying to be picked up. I offered to lead the pair out of the maze by walking along the top of the walls and leading them to the exit. Taking it a step further, I also decided to keep them dry by holding a mattress over their heads as we walked. I spent the rest of the dream dragging the soggy thing around while we searched for a way out. Helping people sucks.

Er, now that I think about it, there was a third dream about a guy who programmed a computer game about a goofy-looking cartoon devil. I was telling him how stupid the game looked when the devil burst out of the computer screen and started running amok and killing people citywide. That doesn`t have much to do with the other two, does it?
A week`s worth
Posted by Saint on Mon, 08/07/2006 - 9:39am.
1) Some kind of alien virus caused people to grow foot-long porcupine-style quills out the skin on their backs. It was very painful, and victims of third-stage infection were forever bent over, between the pain and the weight of the quills. For some reason, there was a social stigma attached to the infection, so third-stagers had to move around through tunnels under the city to avoid being beaten or killed.

A strangely friendly Predator discovered that the virus was being spread deliberately, and found the source--some guy in powered battle armor. There was an epic battle, and the friendly Predator was cut nearly in half even as he ran the infector-dude through with his spear. Conveniently enough, the guy`s death killed the virus, so people began to go back to normal. The third-stagers loudly proclaimed the Predator a hero, and practically nobody disagreed.

I say practically, because apparently Yakko Warner has a great deal of anti-Predator prejudice, and he vowed to find where the third-stagers had stashed their wounded hero and finish killing him. Yakko also has a hidden talent of running very fast on all fours, but that`s neither here nor there.

2) I joined an intergalactic army, which was a good deal less exciting than it sounded. Basically there was a whole lot of training and a whole lot of waiting, and not much of anything else. Eventually I was sent out on a salvage operation, recovering what I could from a planet that humans had tried but failed to inhabit.

There was a long, very steep, slope (almost a cliff) studded with boulders, and I had to hop and skid my way down to get to the last salvage. The entire slope was littered with alien artifacts--stone carvings, weird machinery, what have you--but that wasn`t what I wanted. No, my goal was the empty plastic bottle of cherry brandy and the half-empty bottle of cherry cough syrup at the bottom of the slope.

There was also, surprisingly, a girl at the bottom, so, sick of jumping and climbing on boulders, I grabbed the girl and the bottles and phased so as to walk up a more gentle incline, inside the mountain. Why I didn`t do that before, I couldn`t tell you.

3) My ex`s parents were having me feed their dog while they were gone, and for some reason, pretty much everybody I ever met (except for my actual friends) decided to come visit me at their place and start partying. I never knew my co-slackers and old schoolmates were such jackasses.

It was already pretty stressful trying to usher them out, but then a cop showed up and started questioning me about the death of a high school teacher. I didn`t remember the teacher at all, but the cop claimed to have multiple statements from multiple sources about how much I`d hated the man. I found that pretty unlikely, but whether I had hated the guy over ten years ago or not, I didn`t even remember him now, and certainly hadn`t killed him. The cop didn`t buy it, though.
 
Remnants of a week`s worth
Posted by Mike on Wed, 08/16/2006 - 11:17am.
Bah, I forgot most of them already:

There was one about living in a world where seven-eighths of the human population had been done in by various natural and non-natural disasters (the dream was very specific about that percentage) and there was a tour guide available to explain about the form of apocalypse particular to each region. According to her I was in a place that had been destroyed by Godzilla. He was getting increasingly pissed and destructive as he realized that civilization was over and there would be no more buildings to destroy, and was off in the distance flinging his blue-glow radiation breath off into the atmosphere in impotent fury.

The remaining people in this sector had all taken to swallowing seeds that grew through them, forcing them to hunch over painfully (sound familiar?) and sometimes rooting them to a single spot, but it kept Godzilla from recognizing them as human beings and so spared their lives.

Then there was this dream about a computer that was set up as an experiment in artificial intelligence. It suddenly became not only self-aware, but godlike in its understanding of the meaning of life the universe and everything, and since I was the one having the dream, I acquired that knowledge too! I was really excited when I woke up. It lasted maybe four seconds. Better luck next time I guess.

Um... and then there was one this morning where I was shoe shopping with my dad and he took my foot measurement procedure (12 1/2) as an opportunity to go into the whole you-know-what-they-say routine for the entire mall and at an incredible volume while I went into the Mortified Fetal Position and wished him into the cornfield. I woke up sort of curled up that way.
 
Turtles all the way down
Posted by Mike on Thu, 08/17/2006 - 11:29am.
Huh. I would`ve sworn that my browser crashed before I got that last one posted.

Last night I dreamt that I was at some sort of bed-and-breakfast motel where the feature attraction was the free-roaming turtle that wandered the building. As I sat and watched television and talked with the other boarders, the turtle began walking across my arms over and over. The other people were jealous that it was paying me so much attention, but I was really quite uncomfortable as the thing was impossibly cold and kept nestling in to steal the very heat from my body. Warm your own blood, you lousy turtle! But flinging it across the room would have been rude or something, so I didn`t do it.

When I woke up my arms were freezing. Dreams like that are annoying. Why can`t your body just wake you up to adjust the covers?
Surprises
Posted by Mike on Fri, 08/04/2006 - 10:09am.
Last night I dreamt that someone in my family was having a surprise birthday party. I showed up only to realize that it was me! My birthday was six months ago, so the surprise part was certainly accurate. As a present my family produced a childhood friend of mine, someone I haven`t seen since the fourth grade or so. Wow, was that out of the blue! Then we went to an empty theme park and rode on all the roller coasters. There were no lines and everything was up and running.

It was turning into the best day ever as we raided the concession stands and loaded up on cotton candy, pizza, soda and ice cream. Things got a little suspicious during the meal, though, when everbody suddenly insisted that I kiss my former best friend. On the lips. Um... wha? That`s when they explained to me that I had better get it over with, as today was the end of the world and I wouldn`t get another chance. Okay, what the hell made you all think that my most fervent desire was to make out with... wait. WAIT. The end of WHAT?

The world, they explained patiently, as if I was being silly. Why, I knew as well as the rest of them that the planet was scheduled to be detonated by aliens within the hour. It had been broadcast for months, and everyone who could had already abandoned the planet. We couldn`t find offworld passage, so make with the making out already, they said.

I had kind of an overload moment there-- the world`s ending, my whole family`s gonna die, and for no discernible reason they think I`m totally gay. Prioritizing quickly, I figured that rescuing us all should come before the other problems. In inexplicable dream fashion, I suddenly realized that I knew where an alien spaceship was hidden nearby, so I herded everybody out of the park and drive frantically to the location.

The sky had gone a shifty red color, and there was a large flickering point of orange light near the center of it where the aliens were warming up their atomic death ka-splosion ray, I guess. The casual we`re-all-doomed-so-let`s-party attitude that my family had at the park was dissipating as they realized I was serious; turns out that they weren`t as fatalistic as they`d been letting on. There was a deep low hum coming from... well, everywhere. The spaceship looked like a giant toaster oven. We all scrambled into it as the humming grew louder. Would we make it in time?

I dunno. That`s when I woke up. My subconscious is all about the setup.
Distracted
Posted by Mike on Tue, 08/01/2006 - 11:56am.
I`ve been waking up every day thinking about gardening, and tend to lose track of the dreams from the night before-- everything except for the usual man-was-that-one-weird feeling that fades the second I step outside and mosquitoes try to eat me.

I dunno: something about a barefoot marathon, and a Kenyan who found someone else`s name so funny that he started laughing and couldn`t stop, and another short dream in which a rich and very distinguished-looking businessman decided to give me some valuable financial advice that consisted of three important words that I have now completely forgotten-- vapor [something] [something]-- and then sent me forth to conquer the world. Urgh, there goes my shot at joining the Fortune 500 this year.

But hey, links work just fine without quote marks! Let`s have a link to tide us over for a while, and maybe it`ll help a bit.
XomDonald`s
Posted by Saint on Fri, 07/28/2006 - 8:15am.
A bunch of people at some sort of conference for the deeply depressed decided to tour a XomDonald`s facility. Other people--an endless line of them--were forced to trudge up an incredibly long, steep, free-standing staircase to get started, but the conference tour was given a sort of mine car to ride in to get to the top. They also got big white square packets taped over their chests.

At the top, there was a huge tin funnel, and people from the staircase jumped off the stairs into the funnel; the mine cart was upended into it, saving the tour the effort of standing up and getting out. The funnel was large enough, and packed with enough people, that most people probably died of suffocation or crushing before reaching the meat grinder at the bottom.

After going through the meat grinder, the resulting chunky red mush sprayed down through sixty feet of free-fall before hitting another funnel, this one smaller, copper-colored, and attached to progressively-smaller metal tubing with blocks of filtering machinery here or there to remove excess blood, large bits of clothing and bone, that sort of thing.

At the end of the tubing, the final hamburger product was squeezed out onto a belt on an assembly line for seasoning, frying, and slapping onto a bun before being shipped out to XomDonald`s restaurants and the frozen sections of supermarkets.
Control panel
Comment viewing options:
Select your preferred way to display the comments and click 'Save settings' to submit your changes.
Browse 1714 comments:
»1« • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • next
There are more than 50 comments in this node. Use these links to navigate through them.