Weird, Turbulent Dreams I’ve Had: Reloaded

So, with this post I think it might be time to call it quits on the “weird dream” series indefinitely. I feel like this is as good of an opportunity as any to wrap it up for several reasons. One, I’ve run out of new “t-words” and “r-words” for the titles. Two, I just don’t seem to dream as vividly or as often anymore as I used to for whatever reason. In fact, I’ll tell you right now: these entries below are a lot less detailed than what’s come before. Three, each individual compilation in this series contains 16 numbered entries as well as an unlisted “epilogue.” The unnumbered epilogues represent the dreams which were particularly formative from my childhood, to such an extent that I remembered them all these years later without the aid of a written journal. I’ve now officially run out of suitable candidates for these special entries. Four, if we include these aforementioned epilogues in the final tally, that means I’ve reached 136 entries in total–the 16th triangular number (or 17th, counting Zero) which somehow brings it all full circle in my mind.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this unfiltered window into my mind. Perhaps, whether you like my blog or hate it, a peek into the weird, twisted psyche of its creator was helpful in understanding why I see the world as I do.

#113 Hearts on Fire

I had a dream I lived in the Avatar universe and people in the Fire nation would breathe their chi into these little glass boxes when they were near death. They’d say their name into the box, and it would always speak in their voice, burn with a fire ignited by their spirit. Someone’s box was defective and their fire going out. I was apparently a wise but young sage who alone knew how to fix it, but it meant applying some of my chi to the box. From then on, the box spoke in a combination of both our voices, and burned with both our energies. This solution was acceptable to everyone else, but I became obsessed with the results, and the idea that I’d created a perfect Union between two people. I wanted to revolutionize the custom and create new mergers. I wanted to find someone I could fuse with forever. I woke up on the couch from yesterday, and even though I had passed out on a futon and my head felt hallowed out, I was at peace. Somehow, I’d had a dream, and what felt like an important one, even though my brain shouldn’t even be going thru REM sleep right now. …

#114 Conflict & Resolution

I had a dream that was similar to Goodfellas but Tommy/Joe Pesci was the main character and Henry/Ray Liota was a non-mafioso civilian. At some point, Tommy got in a fight with a really big guy at a bar.

Later, one of my teenhood bullies, (not the sexual assaulter, a lesser one with the initials “Demonic Beast”) came to my house along with someone else. The bully was like the plus-one of this other guest (whose identity I don’t recall) and I had not been told he would be coming. I was really nervous to see him. As a way to try to break the ice, I brought over my old VHS copies of Batman the Animated Series, which had blurbs on the back written from the POV of the villains whose episodes were featured in each tape. (I had the ones for Penguin, Riddler, Poison Ivy and Mr Freeze growing up.) Surprisingly it went ok and the guy didn’t seem hostile. He may not have recognized me: he did not offer an apology and I didn’t ask for one.

#115 16-Bit Matrix

I had a dream I was living in some kind of fantastical Alice in Wonderland/Super Mario RPG world, full of imaginative whimsy and childhood innocence. Somehow it was understood that I was in a Super Nintendo game and that by making the right choices in this reality, I would improve my circumstances in the real world. But then, somehow my sister hosting company in the living room was preventing me from accessing the game (even though I was already inside it?) and I had to break into my house to get to the console. Her friends patrolled the outside hallways and I was worried they’d come into the room and stop me from playing, but luckily they never did. The next day, everyone who had been there the night before and I were swimming in a pool. Someone dropped something and they all laughed at the person’s misfortune like a bunch of mean girls.

#116 Hell on Earth

I was living in a Mr. Robot esque thriller where a man had me strapped down to a table and was in the process of piercing my navel with a syringe. I screamed and felt the pain almost like it were real. I looked over at his medicine case, a kind of small brown briefcase full of mysterious drugs. Whatever he injected me with started to work its magic and my vision began flashing red and blue simultaneously. I never got an explanation of who this man was or why he was torturing me.

Later, some of my childhood friends (all male) were aged-down to when I knew them and practicing having sex on each other in a teen sleepover, so they’d be ready when we started dating for real. I was going to join in but started crying about my circumcision and how I’ll never know what a full orgasm feels like because my parents were too careless to do any research before permanently mutilating my body. Eventually I blew my nose and instead of mucus, broccoli came out. Even in the dream I knew this was unusual and I got kind of anxious holding it in the tissue. When I woke up, I cursed the names of Kellogg, Jonathan Hutchinson, Lewis Sayre, Abraham, Mosaic Law, Simon Peter and every stupid insensitive jackass who’s ever downplayed the issue.

#117 The Most Beautiful Woman Who Ever Lived

I had a dream about Catherine Spaak for the very first time the night after she passed away in real life, coincidentally enough. She was on the beach like Francesca in Crazy Desire but somewhat older, and a lot of people were admiring her beauty from afar. I was one of them, and while we were always near each other I don’t think I said anything in the entire time I was there. At some point we were clothes shopping in some kind of swanky upper class store, I remember her trying on a few outfits, not necessarily for my benefit but she came out and showed off each one. Later we were walking through a boardwalk and got something to eat.

Finally we were at a really posh kinky party like that scene in Camille 2000. (Which, incidentally, is not a Spaak film nor a particularly good one at that but I digress.) Catherine was in full-Mimi mode, with the same appearance–her peak physical self, the most outwardly beautiful any woman has ever looked (in my opinion)–and with the same pro-sex mentality as her iconic character. She eagerly engaged with most people there, indulging them in many a wild fantasy just like her most famous onscreen persona would have done. At some point she was behind bars like a prized war captive, a Sabine maiden awaiting the “love” of her Roman raptors, acting out a fearful disposition for the benefit of many a lustful voyeur. It was quite a spectacle I tell you, like an even more risque follow up to The Libertine that sadly can no longer be made. Later that day, I discovered she had passed on in real life and I felt really upset.

#118 Change is Inevitable But Scary

I had a dream my mom was Clare Underwood and had to change aspects of her inner personality and outer appearance to fit in at work. Kinda like season 3 with the election subplot if y’all remember that. I tried to tell her that she ought to do whatever she wanted and screw other people’s fickle opinions, but she wouldn’t listen. Later, in a bizarre dream-logic 180, Nigel Thornberry and his wife were singing a song about all the reasons that they should break up. (I forget specifics about this part.) It was a very heartbreaking moment though, because you could tell they still loved each other very much as people, it just wasn’t working out and they knew that. It was better for them to be honest and part amicably than remain together and let the resentment fester, which in some ways is the most loving gesture there could ever be, like Rick letting Ilsa go in Casablanca. Later, a big mountain goat charged through the house and my mom and I were suddenly in the dream again. Nigel was able to subdue the creature and Marianne looked very impressed with him, but if this changed anything between the two I did not stay asleep long enough to see it…

#119 Drain the Swamp

I had a dream my sister and I lived in a swampy community, where everything was built on stilts and docks above a somewhat beautiful but inhospitable marsh. There was a nice enough community with a few colorful characters and a sense of belonging. It was very much a mixed bag as far as living spaces are concerned, basically. I know much more happened in this dream than I’m able to write, we visited several of our neighbors, but unfortunately I can’t remember those details. All I know is that at some point, my old “friend” Luna was hosting a barbecue and invited us over. There were lots of people there, hundreds it felt like, and my sister and I never got served anything. Luna said that she had run out of food and wasn’t the least bit apologetic about it. I felt as though she didn’t care about us at all, and wondered why we had even been invited except to insult us. My impression of her was as bad as it had been at the end of our “friendship” in real life, where I felt used and discarded.

#120 Alone Among the Crowd

I had a dream where two of my closest friends from childhood were going to move in together without me. I was really upset about being left out so I literally begged–like, on my hands and knees weeping–for them to let me come too. They refused, completely nonchalantly and even seemed amused at the pain they were causing me. I finally realized my efforts were fruitless and walked away with my head down, very disappointed to find out I was the odd one out in what I thought was a three musketeers dynamic. I went to a dock and sat by myself, as I’ve often been in life, looking at the lights across the bay like good ol’ Jay Gatsby.

Perhaps because the people I valued so deeply had let me down so much for so long, the rest of the dream saw me hanging out with just a random goat. I took it to a musical theater, carrying the stupid thing across my shoulders like an old fashioned goatherd and even sitting down like that to watch the show. At intermission, I took the goat outside to graze on the grass beside the auditorium. It was dark out and everyone was hustling and bustling in the city around us. It was actually a strangely beautiful scene in spite of its absurdity.

#121 Inter-Generational Trauma

I had a dream I got married to a woman who disliked our ceremony and thought I didn’t get along well enough with her dad so the whole thing was me throwing party after party to impress him. There were shitty people in the neighborhood who threw shade at my prospects, who would take note of whenever I did something weird or couldn’t live up to a male ideal for my wife in some way. I felt very alone and afraid among these people.

At one point I revived Muhammad Ali somehow. I don’t remember if it was to impress my dream father in law or teach me to fight better or scare those other people away. He ended up being a huge nuisance though, constantly picking fights over nothing and talking to himself about nonsense. There was a flashback as if explaining his irritability where he lost a title match despite knocking his opponent down in the first round in some impossible technical decision. His underwear said “Cassius Clay” along the waistband like a company brand. His son was standing behind him at one point while Muhammad bent down to touch his toes. When Ali was done he punched his own son hard in the face. For me to face him was like coming home to a rambunctious toddler. We had made rules about sparring before going to sleep, but he broke them and wouldn’t let me sleep in my own bed. At some point, after an awkward church ceremony (that I was forced to attend in order to keep up appearances,) I gave up my stuffed animal bunny to a woman in the community to keep it safe from Ali, who had taken to destroying my things.

ASIDE: This is a rare example of me sleeping in a dream, and multiple days passing in dream-time.

#122 The Candy Land Flasher

My sister and I were playing Candy Land in a mall food court. The building had an enormous series of tubular ramps and slides on which a series of giant marbles descended one by one, almost like an overgrown toy. (I always loved marble mazes as a kid, in all their various iterations.) I was marveling at this bit of whimsical architecture more than I was paying attention to the game. Then I saw a girl whom I shared a single class with in high school. (We weren’t exactly friends, but she always laughed at my antics and gave me a pet name, so I had enjoyed her company back in the day. That said, I’ve hardly thought of her in years until this dream.) I was drinking a vitamin flavored milkshake but wondering all the time why I’d ordered such a disgusting thing when I could’ve just got a normal flavor like chocolate or something. Finally some creepy old man came up to play Candy Land with us but, as he approached to sit down, he took off all his clothes and I woke up.

#123 Faint as a Whisper

I told my cousin about my then-engagement, and the house we stood within was suddenly swallowed up by a flash flood. Characters from Crazy Desire were there too because why not. Later I remember I was with a small family whose mother had passed away. For whatever reason, accusations of some kind began circulating about me related to her. The daughters accused me of either having an affair with her spouse or having an affair with her. And some of these conversations inexplicably took place on a mountainside cavern for reasons only my subconscious knows. I was trying to do right by this family and set the record straight but they didn’t want to listen. For whatever reason, I insisted we spend the day together and I was gonna show them the town. (Maybe so they’d see I’m not a bad guy.) I remember getting hit on the head by one of them, who used a dainty 19th century woman’s parasol. (There’s a Clue joke in there, somewhere.)

#124 I Never Even Liked That Show

I had a dream I was helping to clean a big house because Raymundo’s new wife Noelani was moving in. (You know, from Rocket Power.) In the dream, I thought the dad/son relationship with him and Otto was special somehow. I found many rings in the couch and put them in a cupboard, then mopped the floor. My friend kept bugging me about something when i was trying to answer phone notification messages and things got heated between us. I confronted Kayla about what happened, first in a zoom call then in a visit to her house (which morphed into a party). She was sort of kind of sympathetic but also not fully taking it seriously and walked away without actually saying “sorry.” I stormed thru the house and drank. I went outside and this-guy-I-used-to-know was drinking and whining about how there was no perfect girl for him and I yelled that he was married. (Which he is in real life.) I broke glass and threw some on the yard, an older guy told me to stop because children play there. He said to drink some water because I was being “a south pole,” aka a negative influence/belligerent drunk. I desperately explained why, but he sort of half tuned me out. I started smashing jewel cases of plastic and said half jokingly “yeah fuck these things.”

#125 Remember When He Seemed Cool?

I had a dream that Will Smith was driving on the turnpike and some random woman in a giant big wheel trike was passing him in the nude. She sat spread-eagled on the seat, letting the wind sweep through her nether-regions as though she were getting fucked by Uranus. In Will’s distraction, somehow Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air got killed in a car crash. I’m not sure if he had been in the same car as Will or not, and if so why Will himself apparently made it out ok. Regardless, Will cried over the horribly burned wreckage until a random lanky old man with a gray beard stepped out and proclaimed himself to be Carlton. He looked nothing like his shorter, muscular, mustachioed namesake but Will didn’t seem to notice. (Or maybe he was just so grateful at the thought that he clung to false hope. Dream logic!) Still, the new-Carlton apparently felt the need to prove himself regardless and took Will back to their in-character house at Uncle Phil’s. After all that, the old man took a few steps outside the set, revealing that even in my dream this was all a TV show, and still Will believed him to be his in-character cousin reborn. The janky old bird mimicked Carlton’s trademark dance to “It’s Not Unusual,” and Will smiled with reverence.

#126 Fear and Loathing in the 3rd Dimension

I was in a basement, in fact it looked similar to the AVGN’s setup from the Crazy Castle time of production. And I was standing up, fiddling with a GameCube that was displaying an error message. (They always freaked me out as a kid; I hate whenever technology did something sudden and unexpected.) I looked exactly like Barbarella, probably because I’ve read some of the graphic novel recently. (The plotlines are as nonsensical and episodic as in the film adaptation but without the gorgeous set design, attempts at world-building and Jane Fonda to make up for it. So I was somewhat disappointed in the comics–just saying for the record.)

For some reason, a car was driving around on a very narrow series of metal grating that was arranged in two parallel lanes with several perpendicular lanes between them. The car was zig-zagging between the two in such a way that it seemed bound to fall, yet the driver kept his getaway somehow firmly on the tracks. Eventually a man came into frame who was chasing after the car–he rode a bouncing merry go ’round horse like in that scene from Mary Poppins. (By the way, Bert is the real hero of that story; he’s the one who actually made the children and their father understand each other. Just throwing that out there for the record.)

There was some kind of giant shopping mall all on one floor with a layout such that smaller vendors populated the outside perimeter of the building while the inner space was comprised of larger shops and restaurants. The two were separated by a winding figure eight footpath with a wooden floor and a glass ceiling. The whole structure locked its doors at 8 PM. My husband and I decided to use its denizens to make a TV show and ended up assembling the exact cast of that godawful Sense8. I knew already that we’d just copied a terrible show but my husband seemed oblivious until I pointed it out. I was deciding which of the cast we could cut when they all fled outside the mall and I had to have an employee unlock the door to let them back in. I kept thinking about how awful that show is and its grating theme song played in the dream. (That stupid “what’s going on” song I refuse to link.)

#127 A Puritanical “Heaven”

I once had a dream that a saintly teacher of mine (modeled after my elementary school orchestra instructor) had the divine power to transfer me and my then-classmates to Heaven in such a way that we would not have to experience the trauma of dying first. All our parents were eager to have us partake in this ritual, they didn’t even seem concerned that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to actually enjoy our lives first. Nevertheless, they did take us out for a big party the night before, letting us eat, drink and taste the carnal delights of adulthood before we’d be deprived of them in Heaven. I remember the next day they cut my dick off, telling me it was an “unnecessary attachment” and that God had no place for such activities in his domain. Still, I was upset by that and kept trying to reattach it to no avail. Finally I got beamed to Heaven, which ended up being a pure white room “completely free of distractions,” with the idea being that now I was free to contemplate God 24/7. I was terrified at the prospect and tried looking for a way out, but there was none. Even Heaven, it turns out, was a disappointment to me.

#128 The Road Not Taken

I had a dream I put on some of Zuckerberg’s magic metaverse googles of bullshit and was transferred to a beautiful boardwalk setting. Someone said they were waiting for me to finally realize that Venus (a true old friend from college) was in love with me already and I was somewhat taken aback. I asked a crowd of people “who else thinks me and Venus should get together?” and a bunch of them, AIs no doubt, raised their hands in unison. I gave some dismissive answer about how I’d “think about it” and then walked along. I was very flattered by what I heard, and in this dream my husband seemingly did not exist. I distracted myself by going into a bunch of shops, watching them materialize around me due to the metaverse’s pitiful bandwidth, and messing with the simulations I saw.

Eventually, the actual Venus and her real-life husband approached me looking somewhat downcast. I asked what was the matter but they did not want to talk about it. I was curious but did not press the issue. I then saw two of my old childhood friends (same from Dream #120 above) having a picnic together and squeezed myself between them as if asserting my right to belong. I hugged one and asked what he was doing. He answered “China” and while I assumed he meant he was conducting business there, I decided to be facetious about his lame one-word reply. “Oh you’re gonna do China huh?” I said with a wink and nudge indicating the ol’ in out in out. Then I left to join my dad in a hotel. We got in an elevator that was the size of an entire room. I asked a bunch of teens if any of them read my blog, and when I pulled it up to show them I was shocked to find about 25% of my posts missing due to “hate speech.” Some teen punk drew on my neck with a red colored pencil so I beat him up and took it from him, which was surprisingly easy to do.

Even though she was only in the dream for a minute, my most overriding thought upon waking up was the possibility of me with Venus as that computer-generated kid had suggested. While we had always been close friends at the time, and she admitted to having a crush on me years later, I and Venus were never romantically inclined in real life. I like where I’ve ended up and considering my unconventional lifestyle I think my husband is a better fit for me than she would’ve been. Plus, of course, she seems happier with her husband than she probably would’ve been with a more “out there” person like me. But all the same, for a solid twenty minutes that morning I thought about my time with Venus and what might’ve been. I regretted not seeing the signs in my youth, I hated my bullies and sexual assaulters all the more for destroying my confidence in those years so that I never believed anyone could like me. (I’ll never forgive them for costing me these opportunities.) I missed Venus a good deal, and felt a pang of sadness before it wore off and I appreciated what I have now despite it all. Life is messy and bittersweet and unfair sometimes.

Random Dreams That Always Stuck With Me For No Particular Reason

Admittedly we’re kind of scrapping the bottom of the barrel here, but for completion’s sake these are the final two dreams I can remember from before I started formally documenting them. They both occurred when I was a young child, long before the idea of keeping a journal ever occurred to me. I’m not sure why these in particular made such an impact for me to recall them 20 years later, but if this series has proven anything it’s that our subconscious mind is a very strange thing indeed.

I recall one dream ending with a very memorable sequence where I looked out my bedroom window and saw a horse. It was a realistic looking animal except for the human-like expression of shock and devastation on its face. I inadvertently made a noise of fright and it saw me. On a dime, its anguish turned to anger and it began chasing me. I do not know if I have ever known such acute, pervasive fear in a dream as I did in that moment. (Dread, grief, hate, shame, revulsion and just about every other negative emotion yes, but not fear.) My house was the same in the dream as it was in real life and I tried to make it to my parents’ room. I woke up when the horse overtook me.

The shortest, least eventful dream I’ve ever had: I was wearing normal clothes, I was alone in a plain grassy field with no distinguishing features, I took exactly four steps before I tripped and fell on my face. Immediately thereafter, I woke up and jolted into a sitting position on my bed. Even at the time, this one was notable for how short and bland it was.