October 2012
1 post
A meandering piano score; someone picking at the keys. A cluttered house. Objects stacked and draped on every surface. My mother sits in one corner doing something, focused on something. Knitting, perhaps; the camera never focuses on her to investigate. I know my mom is the age she is now, but my brother sits amongst the stacks of paper on the couch, and he is only five or six years old here. He...
November 2011
1 post
The next movie in the Saw franchise came out: it was the far future and the work of Jigsaw was now being some by nanobots, which lived in the bloodstreams of victims and formed small cutting instruments at preprogrammed times.
The ultimate goal of the nanobots was to create some kind of hybridized person. I don’t know the philosophy behind it. I do know that it resulted in dozens of people...
August 2011
1 post
It was the end of the world. The only ways we knew this were scattered earthquakes, the moon growing larger in the night sky, and increasingly, areas of the ground glowed red, which meant that soon at least one long- and dark-haired Japanese horror child would be birthed from it. They were good ways of knowing.
In a below-ground parking lot, my friends and I had managed to group together,...
common concepts in my nightmares: living dead; dolls; things behind glass on display; orthogonal intelligence; paralysis while conscious; impossibly fast or slow movement of incorrectly-scaled objects; reduction of behaviors to pointless ritual; compulsion to do wrong by outside force; final-but-meaningless conscious thoughts immediately before death
March 2011
1 post
I was a soldier participating in a relatively new psychological warfare test that was rapidly becoming some kind of field standard. I stood on the bottom floor of what looked like an indoor three- or four-story pink-painted mall. There were escalators and shop fronts, walkways with glass and metal railings. I could not tell if it was day or night.
I wasn’t alone here; a handful of other...
November 2010
1 post
I was traveling with Kurt in some snowy Eastern European country. Kurt was driving, and the roads were jammed. Men in black hunting caps with rifles walked down every street. At one point Kurt missed a hidden off-ramp and we found ourselves driving down railroad tracks. There was road access further down the tracks, meaning at some point you were actually supposed to drive where a train might hit...
August 2010
4 posts
I had a very fun, cohesive dream about zombies that I just woke up from. It was identical to a movie. It had a lot of moments where I thought to myself, “oh, that’s clever” during the dream, as if I was watching a film. Early on Tony Stark didn’t show up, but since he did come in later, I want to say this was Iron Man vs. The Zombies.
It started with a father and son...
I am watching a Lost-like show — perhaps Lost? — in which some penultimate reveal threatens to blow the doors off the show. A woman is pressing some entity for answers as to why a disadvantaged neighbor kid wanted to find out about triangular beings of light that lived at the bottom of a nearby body of water. They kept referring to the aliens as “the napers.” The napers...
A remote orbital station above some forbidding planet. Cut to an interior: a huge, empty, hangar-like room, like a cargo area. Huge picture windows looking down at the planet. A single turbolift door in one part of the room.
Familiar blue chyron titles in one corner of the view: “Cause of Death.”
An ensign, unsure, hesitantly exits the turbolift. He looks around the well-lit, empty space....
I dreamt we made love on an ironing board. It was noon.
I dreamt someone invented a recursive flyswatter — the further away from its starting point you moved it, the exponentially larger and further away a projected duplicate of itself grew. It wasn’t an illusion; the duplicate was solid and had its own mass, and mimicked your movements of the original. It was designed so that you...
June 2010
4 posts
February 6, 2008
I had a very long, very elaborate dream last night, and sadly I’ve forgotten most of it, but the important parts have stayed with me and colored my day.
The dream was formatted like a movie. It was a story of two people, a young guy and slightly-older married woman, attending a very liberal art school together (very liberal as evidenced by the kind of student work permitted). She had come...
The dream started in medias res, possibly too far into in medias res to even be in medias res at that point. It was like the end of the movie. Luke Wilson played a college dean in a gray suit. He was racing around the campus of his university while total pandemonium raged around him. Crowds fleeing, screaming, mass confusion, the ground shaking, brickwork shifting and coming loose.
Ornate metal...
I had interesting dreams this morning that I forgot all but two parts of:
Scott had brought this gadget or curiosity from an online store. It may have been partly alive, and it resembled a tiny translucent jellyfish skin. You placed it on top of a small object you value and “activate” it by leaving it alone. The membrane grew in size over it making a second thin skin — in this...
I was a woman for the first time in any dream I’ve ever had, and I actually believed I wasn’t male anymore. The dream had the feel of a supernatural WB show like Charmed. (Or Supernatural.) I was a young, suburban witch.
I don’t remember the majority of the dream, but I was being tasked by a middle-aged Hispanic man, who was actually a demon or other entity in human form. He...
May 2010
1 post
Scott’s brother Brian and I walk down a hallway of an old lecture hall at a college. Brian says, “come on, check this out, Kris.” We come down a stucco hallway and approach an old wooden door. Brian calls out, “hey, Grin?” At first I thought he had said “Gram” like a nickname for a grandma, but there was a red thread that had been stitched into one of the...
April 2010
1 post
I dreamt that Scott was leaving a panel and was accosted by three or four guys with recording equipment. They went “whoa, whoa! You just rolled a 1 and critically fumbled your saving throw to avoid being on our podcast! This is ‘It’s A Trap,’ the 60-minute ultimate geekcast!!!”
Scott goes, “… No, no, I don’t have time for a podcast. I’m going...
November 2009
1 post
I dreamt my brother and I were in some sandbox-like video game, like Grand Theft Auto — or at least we were in a world that behaved that way. We entered an abandoned building via some odd roof entrance and looked around. The walls had been whitewashed years ago but the place was still a mess.
One section of wall behind an old vending machine hadn’t been fully painted, and I saw some...
October 2009
1 post
My brother had finally overworked himself to the point that he was losing his mind. We had gone out to eat when he started to do some incredibly childish things, like releasing the parking brake when we were both sitting in the backseat of the car eating (I had to steer us into a wall to avoid other parked cars) and quoting Soupy Sales sketches to cashiers and others who had no idea what he was...
September 2009
1 post
Last night I had a dream inspired by Halo 3: ODST and probably a little of Penny Arcade’s Automata. It was a future in which holographic interfaces were so prevalent that they were more or less accepted as other people, and stories about people falling in love with holographic AIs were not terribly fringe anymore. Those people had to overcome similar prejudices as gays or minorities.
My...
August 2009
1 post
It was the end of the world. Most of Earth seemed deserted; maybe everyone else was dead, but I didn’t see many other people at all. I remember cars parked in — or wrecks littering? — a football stadium. The silence was sporadically pierced by looters, either alone or in small groups. Scott was with me and I was furious that this was all that was left of humanity. One man tried...
July 2009
2 posts
This weekend I was introduced to the idea that what I’m experiencing aren’t nightmares, but night terrors. Last night, just as I hit the edge of unconsciousness, I heard someone in my pitch-black room loudly brushing their teeth. Brushing isn’t scary in and of itself, but I knew it was in the room, and that it wasn’t real, and that I couldn’t move to dispel it. I...
Leonard, an unnamed girl and I were all friends living in New Zealand. There had been a series of zombie attacks in our metropolis, but rather than evacuate or take military action, the overwhelming response from the population was to demonstrate against the zombies with picket signs and rallies. The zombie infection wasn’t as catching as it is in movies, where whole cities can turn in a...
June 2009
4 posts
I dreamt I went back to LA and re-befriended everyone I left behind there because of arguments in the past. I cried. My other ex was there too, and her response to me coming back was a fist-pound.
Kurt was sitting there with all of them at a picnic table, at a Starbucks.
Last night I had a lot of anxiety for some reason. There is a muscle that contracts in the ear — I’m doing it right now — that makes a sound of blood rushing. For whatever reason you have to have your eyes closed to flex it. That blood rushing sound was keeping me awake last night. Whenever it happened, it was just so loud. And it seemed to happen right as I was losing...
My brother and I were in New Orleans, in a plantation mansion adjacent to a bog. We were joking around in one of the bathrooms: the toilet was a large metal bowl set into the floor in the doorway. Above, in the door frame, was an inverted metal bowl with holes — a shower head. There was nowhere to sit, you just stood in the floor bowl and let it fly.
A commotion outside interrupted our fun....
Last night I put my powered nightmare armor to the test. If I’m lucid dreaming and I start to have a nightmare, I envision myself encased in an eight-foot-tall mecha-style suit. I could not sleep last night at all — there’s a dream state where I’m semi-controlling the dream, but it always goes in directions I don’t want it to go, and that’s where I was last...
May 2009
1 post
A news show had a story about a firefighter being praised as a hero in a small town. In the video there was really no town to speak of, just redwoods everywhere — if there was one, it was an Ewok village. There were people gathered around, wearing early-1800s colonist dress.
A child was in distress, and the firefighter had the presence of mind to perform, quote, an “emergency...
