Performances - 5/17/13

Here’s the first night of dreams I have had since getting off of school. I have some other dreams from when I was at school scribbled down, I intend to write them up eventually.

———

I was in the dorms at St. John’s College, except they looked like not-as-good dorms at Temple. I recall wandering around and socialising with people, which was not totally remarkable. There was a man in my dorm who I was apparently married to: he was large, middle-aged and of Indian descent, though with an American accent. He had his hair cut short and he had a square face and sort of bulge-y eyes. He wanted to have sex with me and when he was on top of me, I found myself wondering how I had ever found him attractive.

———

I was watching a play at St. John’s. It was student-directed, rather low budget, but everyone thought it would be really good. When the curtains  opened, Ms. H, who was my english teacher in 6th grade and 10th grade came out. She was maybe fifteen feet tall, which did not at all bother me, and she spoke in ancient Greek. The words made sense at the time, though I don’t remember them. She explained every word though. I seem to remember her saying “παῖς, I mean he was the son of…”  We had been talking before the play and it was part of her act to respond to the crowd, so I said a few things and she responded. At one point, I heard the sound of a cat meowing incessantly. I looked across the crowd and out the window and saw a green field with a few cats in it. However, I recognised the meowing as Nina’s, the cat who my hosts have (she is where I was sleeping last night) and I got aggravated at all the noises because it was distracting from the performance. I whispered at her to shut up and Ms. H acted for a moment like she thought it was directed at her. Then I woke up and found that Nina was making noise in real life.

———

I went back to sleep and had a dream that I was young, maybe 12, and my dad had signed me up for a sort of educational small-audience play. I really don’t know what to call it. The ideas was that in a room full of props, there were some guys in costume who would be in character and teach us things. Dad took me there and then left me and I waited for other people to arrive. I noticed that a fair few of them were younger than me, because I had suddenly reverted to my actual age. But then some people my age came too.

We were waiting at the bottom of some stairs leading up to a loft. Everything was done up to look steampunk-ish, with brass and rivets and all that. Then it was time and a friend from college, Reese, came charging out acting like a crazed scientist and yelling all sorts of things and bouncing off the walls. On the wall lining the staircase, he slapped down some magnetic words, “Sweets,” two other things then “Virtue.” He screamed out “VIRTUE!!!” when he put down the last one. I reached up to the one saying “sweets” and he pretended to cut off my pinky finger with something, so I folded it down and acted like I couldn’t use it any more. It was all part of the game.

Reese led us up to the loft, which had all sorts of random machinery and a round table in the centre around which we were supposed to sit after the introduction. He brought out the main actor in this thing, an older man dressed up as a professor and the professor talked about how, in the Industrial Era, everyone feared death and that he thought it would be great to set this performance about science (maybe extending humans’ lifetimes?) in this time. While this happened, there was a little implement that held a black and red spider in a cage and sunk it under water to demonstrate death, then later, it had another spider that wove a web away from the water to escape. I thought this was beautiful and fascinating and I wrote things down and drew in a notebook without ever really looking at it.

Then we were made to sit down at the round table and I don’t know what happened for a while until we were supposed to take a break. Then the actor slipped out of character and we talked about someone who had apparently been kicked out of St. John’s because he had come from a village in Africa where it was found hadn’t achieved a certain degree of education.

Fish - 3/31/13

My mother and I were going from one place to another through this vast expanse of shallow pools. It was quite lovely really: everything was made of this indeterminate pale beige smooth stone and maybe sand. I don’t know because it was as if I never touched the bottom. The water was entirely clear in the shallower places, which were maybe up my knees or thighs, and I was swimming through some of the deeper places. Rounded pinnacles of rock rose up from the water and small, unexplored caves were formed by the sinuous stone. My mother walked, though she seemed to enjoy herself, finding small living things in the water.

I was going along, feeling joyful when I saw some shadow moving through the water. It seemed to be following so, wondering what it was, I went to a shallower spot and sure enough, it burst through: this animal that could have been a tiny whale or a large fish. It was gray, its skin absolutely smooth and soft, like how I imagine dolphin skin would feel. Its face was shaped like that of an orca, but it had flat, low-lying fins like those of the suckerfish you see in aquariums. I took it to be a mammal of some sort and I called to my mother to come see this whale. It had jumped up into my lap and was letting me caress it even though I thought it might be bad idea because you’re not supposed to do that with dolphins and whales because you can get them sick that way.

My mother didn’t come over to look so I swam along with this creature. It moved very fast and energetically followed me around, swirling in spirals with me, brushing against my skin (which made me think that if it touched me rather than me touching it there was nothing to worry about).

After a while of this, we came near to a narrow space between the rocks. I pushed off the bottom and shot through, but was bewildered to find that the creature wasn’t following me. I went back and was shocked when I found it lying on the bottom, unmoving. At this point it seemed to consist of pieces of broken black ceramic, which I desperately tried to put together. I screamed and wept and my mother stopped by but didn’t say anything, merely indicated that we had to keep going.

So I followed her and somehow we came to a religious place in amongst all these pools. Buddha statues sat under hoods of stone and people congregated where it was dry. I sat in the water and watched as some leader man gave a sermon. The sun was setting and after a while he referenced what had happened to the creature, saying that it was a tragedy. He turned our attention to a particular statue, which was in the lotus position and had the same kind of hair as Buddha statues tend to but had the face of a hawk. He said that it was this gods fault and we must chastise him for his impiety. As he said this, blue flames ran over the surface of this god’s vault in waves and I felt a little better, thinking that this moment was important to me.

———

I was going somewhere else with someone from St. John’s who I’ll call Mr. K. We were in some small town but we were actually in some shady hallway. We had these two iPad like things which were only used for communicating via video chat. They were very mirror-like and when we were trying to get them to work, I would keep seeing my own reflection. We got them to work and he started looking at concert tickets online but found none he liked. As he did this, my mother came along to take me to school, which meant we rode their on our bikes. I went to one of the lockers lining the walls to get some things while my mother did the same and we had an argument while Chris stood around in the background awkwardly.

———

I was in some video game about zombies but as of yet there were no zombies. There was a lot of exposition about the various characters — some slacker boys who decided to buy guns — that I don’t remember. The town had not yet been hit by an outbreak of zombies like the rest of America so people were in denial about the possibility of it happening. I watched as the boys were sitting somewhere, maybe in some sort of clinic. Zombies burst through the doors from somewhere, biting people who would then become zombies themselves within seconds. The two boys sat there stock still, absolutely terrified despite all their normal bravado, then one raised his gun and started shooting.

Then I was in an office, I don’t know if they were there too. The office was full of women and though I was merely observing, I had to keep away from zombies too. So, they had heard of what was happening and said it wasn’t possible, all the while pulling these large plastic shower curtains closed around this area and standing in them. They kept saying “they won’t find us in here” but that was dumb because sure enough, the zombies poured in through the door and ripped aside the curtains. I didn’t have anything to fight them with and considered using an ethernet cable.

Somehow, all of this was related to a very small evil enemy. At first it had something to do with Plankton, which in my mind somehow had nothing to do with Spongebob. In any case, he was far more sinister than that, just some small thing conspiring and controlling the zombies…I don’t know.

I just remember this one thing where I was in someone’s office which had all these stacked fish tanks full of very important fish. One of the fish was brown-gray and looked like it should come from the bottom of some deep, dark lake. That one was my favourite. It was maybe three feet long.

I knew what was going to happen, which was that the Plankton-thing would start breaking the fishtanks, and I knew in which order he would do it so I decided to start moving them around to avoid that. The Plankton became a tiny yellow fish which made small holes in the glass in some sort of sexual frenzy. I don’t really remember, I just know that I saved all the fish.

A Bunch of Assorted Dreams from the Past Three Months in Rough Chronological Order

When there were mice in my dorm I dreamed about them a lot. In one dream, I was lying in bed at night with the lights on when I saw a bunch of mice come streaming out of my closet. They bunched together in the shape of a crab and rushed towards me. I started to pick them up one by one, cursing at them a lot and then throwing back into the closet.

———

Another mouse-related dream was about how I was trying to set up humane mousetraps in my dorm. It was not actually my dorm, just a very messy room. I had posted on Facebook about how I needed peanut butter for the mousetraps, would anyone like to give me someone and this random girl from Australia, Cailin, came along to tell me that she had come all this way to tell me that she didn’t have any peanut butter. She was really sorry about it.

Then I was looking out the window at the campus (again, not much like in real life but rather scenic all the same) thinking about how strange it was that the entire place was underwater. Apparently, it had rained a lot recently so we were about 20 feet underwater which was totally chill I guess. It looked pretty much like normal but I looked towards the right and saw a bunch large orange salmon-type fish swimming out of one of the brick buildings. I smile and thought about how pretty the colour was. It was sort of a pale rosy orange. Then, to my amazement, a gigantic oarfish of the same colour streamed out of the same door. It was probably 30-40 feet long and streamed like a ribbon (which isn’t actually how they swim) through the water. I watched in awe as it went past my window and slid behind a building in front of the building I was in. I waited for it to come out the other side but instead walked out this girl from school, Darlene, wearing an orange flannel. From that I deduced that the fish was, in fact, Darlene.

———

I have a somewhat disintegrated memory of a dream about having play battle with a bunch of people from school then deciding I needed to go do my laundry. Doing my laundry apparently entailed going down a long tree-lined path which led to a bird fountain full of dirt. There I started pulling out some strange bulbous plants and tossing them away in search of my clothes, which were apparently in the dirt somewhere. Then this girl from school, Maggie, turned up and said that I had told her in the future to come time travel back to this moment to tell me that she was a time traveller. This seemed very plausible at the time.

———

I was showing someone around St. John’s College. Sometimes it was my mother, sometimes it was Caitlyn, sometimes it was Andrew. It was night time on campus, which of course didn’t look like it does in real life. We went through a building where a bunch of men in a male’s choir were assembled in no particular order singing Sicut Cervus. My mind rendered the song perfectly except in a tone lower because it was all men choir.

When I made note of this dream in my note book, I wrote something about a serial killer but I don’t remember what actually happened in the dream relating to a serial killer except that there were was a building made of glass and I was running through it.

———

I was in my dorm at St. John’s and it was the end of the year. Jack the Ripper was killing members of the dormitory but I wasn’t at all bothered by this. In fact, no one seemed to be too fussed at all. I went down the hall to see that the post-mortem photograph (all black and white and blurry like the photographs of the actual Jack the Ripper victims) of one of the girls who had been killed, Therese (who doesn’t exist), had been taped to the door of the room she used to live in. I went in and a bunch of people were sitting on the floor around a stereo singing along to a Jack the Ripper musical.

Later, the fire alarm went off and I went outside to see a bunch of students in their pyjamas standing around looking groggy. It was the afternoon but they had been sleeping in because it was the end of the year. My friend, Chris, was wearing all red flannel.

———

Andrew had a big performance with an orchestra (he plays flute) so I was trying to get him to the performance. There was so much that happened in this dream but I only remember the part where he had gotten to the place where it was happening and he had to practice with the rest of the orchestra. I had to go somewhere else with a bunch of other people who were going to watch. We had to cross a busy road at night and so we were waiting to do so when Chris ran out into the road. He had gotten to the middle lane when a van came out of nowhere and bore down on him. He sort of bitch-slapped it as it came near him and the van proceeded to plough him down the road about ten feet. I screamed in fear but Chris walked out onto the other side without a scratch on him. This is probably one of the weirdest things that has ever happened in my dreams because at this point I expect everything to be strange and violent and fantastical but I have no idea why my brain decided that Chris should bitch-slap a car.

———

Andrew and I went to bed at 9 PM because we were really tired and during the 2 hours that we slept I had a very strange dream. In it I had a baby girl. She was sort of brown-ish with black hair and a shapeless face as babies tend to do I guess. Her name was like, Mariel, or something. Andrew and I had gotten into an argument so he prepared a bottle to feed her and I didn’t feel angry any more. 

We watched a lot of music videos about trees being cut down. The one I remember was very elaborate — it involved horses pulling very large and intricate machines that chopped down rows and rows of trees. The music was kind of sad and whimsical.

I told Andrew that “maybe I should hang out with the baby some more” so I went to get her and somehow this turned into being on a forested path where trees were getting cut down. I had a big purple monster who carried the baby for me. It was larger than I was and it walked on four legs with lots of webbing between them, like a flying squirrel. Its stomach was white and it had a mouth like the Predator and no eyes. It carried the baby on one of its front legs and when I asked to take her it held her out to me. For a moment, she was small and doll-like, balanced vertically on the monster’s arm. It was kind of disturbing to me.

———

I watched the story of a maybe 12-year-old girl who was fat and had dark hair. She was in love with a skinny, bespectacled boy who was her age and aspired to be a doctor. Apparently, he already had a son (I don’t know how) and he didn’t particularly like her but he led her down a tree-lined street towards his house, which was large and fancy and for some reason had a wooden cupola on the grass in the front yard. The wooden tiles were painted vivid blue, the struts red. To get to his house they had to pass between two school buses parked very close together, which was a scene full of foreboding for me, and as he walked between their bumpers he suddenly sort of glitched out and fell over and scraped up his left side and arm. He was badly wounded, bleeding everywhere, which seemed to be part of the girl’s plan.

I don’t remember it but somehow she stole a car and I saw from a sort of dashboard-cam-type view the car driving the wrong way up a highway, weaving between other cars and somehow miraculously they wound up at the hospital, which had on top of it a bell tower with a cupola exactly like the one in the boy’s front yard. The car drove up a ramp to this bell tower and she brought him into the hospital.

What followed was a scene many years later, after they had fallen in love and been married because she had taken him to the hospital that time all those years ago. He was lying in bed and I was now his wife and we were admiring their children who were all blonde and were visible only as 6 disembodied heads lined up on the bedspread. The fact that they were disembodied heads escaped me at the time, what more intrigued me was that I kept looking away and looking back and their hair colours kept changing. They smiled up at me lovingly. Everything seemed so happy except the mother of some his other children was a vague presence behind me.

Then I was hanging out with his brothers in a nice living room with a big window that looked out on darkness. The lighting was very warm. I thought my children were there but I forgot about them because the two brothers, who were dark haired, were drinking a very pale, clear beer and being loud and obnoxious. I brought up the beer and asked them why it was so clear and they were like “Well of course it’s clear, otherwise it wouldn’t be a winter beer!”

I wanted to bring up the fact that winter beers tend to be dark beers and summer beers are lighter ones but they started debating whether or not to tell me something or whether they should wait until my husband came home like they had promised they would. Then the brother sitting closer to me said, “It doesn’t matter, you won’t be around here for long. The children fucking hate you, your husband fucking hates you. They’re getting rid of you.”

I got angry but at the same time I didn’t feel anything at all. I walloped each of them over the head with my fist and they fell on the ground and laid motionless. Then I sat on the floor with a little Claire’s set of 9 pairs of coloured jewel stud earrings, picking them out one by one and leaving them on the floorboards. My husband came back and he looked sort of stretched out, like an alien, and I don’t remember any of his facial features. He picked me up and hugged me but I knew I had to leave.

Shooting- 12/18/12

I was in a shooting match with some men (at this point I don’t even remember the situation) and I thought about how when I was shooting at them, they were τοῖς ἀνθρώποισ and when they were shooting at me, they were τῶν ἀνθρώπων (basically, two cases of the same noun, the first suggesting that I am doing the action to them, the second indicating that they are the source of the action). I couldn’t stop thinking about this all night, in between dreams and during the dreams, where I reminded myself to remember it when I woke up or else considered it in a rather unrelated event.

Obviously, I had been doing Greek homework before bedtime.

———

Our Language class had been assigned the task of reading out loud a poem in Greek and translating it for the class. I had chosen one in the textbook which was about a large, older dog speaking to a younger dog. The picture that came with it moved, showing a large bulldog with what appeared to be a small bulldog but it was actually a robotic toy. I could see and hear them holding the conversation that was in the poem in singsong voices. Kind of trippy.

In any case, rather than doing that in class we did something else and then Andrew and I were the labyrinthine halls of a hotel. It was some sort of video game but also like real life. We had some strange glow-y weapons, I can’t really recall if they were guns or swords because they seemed to serve both functions at different times. I feel like they were either blue or purple. This was no doubt influenced by watching Caitlyn play Halo before I went to bed.

In any case, as we wandered the halls and the darkened rooms, monsters or other enemies would pop up and we’d have to kill them. It’s too bad I don’t remember what they looked like though. I do remember that we’d come across doors exactly like the ones in Half-Life and I would try to open them without touching them, like in Half-Life and they’d make a certain noise when they refuse to open, just like in Half-Life. As you may have guessed, I was playing Half-Life soon before I headed off to bed.

At one point we came to a pair of elevator doors. They opened for us and we went in to find that the elevator was huge and carpeted, at least as large as the average living room. There were doors in the room. Even as the elevator moved, we went in through one of the doors which led to a bedroom, which looked like it had been recently lived in. I told Andrew to hold onto the door because sometimes, when you looked away from the door, it would spontaneously close. So, I began to root through the dresser there and whenever I glanced up, I would see Andrew struggling with the heavy door as it tried to force itself shut. He was momentarily wearing a dress.

Then some guy came along. He was wearing only a towel he looked like an average lacrosse guy with the shaggy hair. He didn’t talk much but I knew that he was trapped in the hotel, perhaps only in the elevator and had sort of resigned himself to the situation and carried on his life as such, with no contact with anyone.

Somehow we got out of that and then I think we died, and since it was rather like a video game, we respawned outside the hotel. Then we decided to go home. We walked around the side of the hotel and I tried to figure out where the elevator-room was. Each of the hotel rooms had a porch and there was a rooftop restaurant, which was noisy and crowded with people. It was strange to look at this and then at the porches which had no one on them and think that most of this place was infested or haunted with dangerous enemies.

———

The break was over and I was back at St. John’s, which was filled with the air of spring. People walked around on the quad and I saw Tim in a red and white pinstripe or flannel suit carrying a giant suitcase. He talked about the job he had gotten at some place, it was obviously well-paying.

Then I was in my Greek class and people were presenting their poems. I was distressed because it had been a week since I had practiced mine and I looked through my textbook and tried to find it but the pages kept changing (as is to be expected from a dream) and I couldn’t find it. I also realised that I had not done all the Greek work that I had intended to do since, for some reason, the break had only lasted a week. After one of the presentations, Ms. Benson, my Greek tutor, talked to us about how the school had decided to split up the break so that we’d only be gone for a week at a time. We all disapproved. She asked me to do my presentation and I explained that I couldn’t find it in the book though I told her about the subject matter, being the older dog and the younger dog. I said I could do it next time.

———

I was headed toward another one of those hotel dungeon-crawl type things. I was driving on a “car,” which was a black piece of rubber or plastic that sort of hovered above the ground and zoomed along at immense speeds. It wasn’t much longer than I am tall and was very hard to balance on since it kept flipping over though whenever it didn’t, I wasn’t harmed at all, nor did I lose velocity. Sometimes Caitlyn was there, sometimes she wasn’t One of the times when she was there was when we were crossing a bridge, which seemed to me to be the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was very sunny and I had some vague concept of the vastness of the landscape because I saw us from a third person view from far above. Then I was back in my body and I saw that, ahead of us, was a middle-aged man in an old car, which we said was a Thunderbird (which is not far off at all, except that it was red and indigo and kind of weird). He kept driving really fast, then spinning around and driving backwards. We criticised him for showing off and his reckless behaviour and laughed at his mid-life crisis and overcompensation. Somehow we knew he could hear us, even though he was far far away and disproportionately tiny, like a toy (again, I can’t do distances correctly in my dreams). We came to a very large roundabout and he spun around to go through the thing backwards.

Just off the roundabout was my destination, which was some generic open space in front of the hotel. A lot of people were gathered there, waiting for the event to start. Caitlyn had disappeared by now and it felt like Andrew was nearby even though I didn’t see him. I was focused on a man in a suit who had a beaded rainbow tie. I grabbed it and looked at it and saw that it had the word “LOVE” repeated on it. I knew he was gay and I said that I admired him for it. I also noticed that his belt was beaded and rainbow. Then some girl I know from school came up and started removing his clothes piece by piece.

I don’t know what happened next because then Andrew and I were in the halls of the hotel. We tried to follow the same path as before to get to the elevator room but everywhere looked the same, so instead we wound up in a room where a class was going on for participants in this event. It was a huge room, with a dirt floor which was sloped sharply up towards the back end of the room, thus forming a sort of crater of which the front of the room was the centre. People were arranged in a semi-circle in front of a gigantic glowing screen with lots of special effects going on. They were in these vehicles, the kind you see in futuristic and/or sci-fi films where the person is on a seat in the middle of a gigantic wheel. These were probably 6 feet in diamater at best and they glowed blue and were very fancy. Some guy was standing at the front, directing them in how to use these, and every now and then it would appear as if someone was shooting off and going into the screen and disappearing into the distance, but they would still be exactly where they had been before. So basically, it was like a hologram of them went flying off. I knew it was a simulation.

Andrew and I looked at each other. I knew that a lot of the enemies rode these and I think I was also thinking that it was hard to actually get a hold of one. Andrew said what I was thinking: “This is pointless.” So we left and commenced wandering again. So we encountered some of those enemies in the wheel things but I don’t know what they looked like because the blue light from the wheel was so strong that you couldn’t see past it. We shot at the centre of the wheel and the enemy would die and the wheel would roll away and crash into stuff.

Then I started entering cheats into a console that was entirely in my mind and totally not visible. I entered something like “indianacarpet_go” and then we were suddenly at the end of a hallway which had three locked doors and nothing else. I knew we were in a different hotel because the carpet was different: it was red with cream and something else patterns. We started to walk around and then entered into some room. It was kind of bare but for a round table with chairs around it. There were strange contraptions on the table, and then a door to a little room on the side. I knew that it was a lab classroom at St. John’s. We were leaving when I woke up, thinking about Greek.

Forest- 12/17/12

I was a Native American woman with brown skin and long dark hair and a kind face. I was stranded in the wilderness, starving and traumatised by something I can’t remember any more. The wilderness I was in was a forest, which was not too thick really. Then I saw people from my tribe coming to rescue me and I was momentarily annoyed because they were wearing their uniforms which I had always meant to tell them looked like stupid white t-shirts (because they were stupid white t-shirts).

In any case, I got back home and there was a man who was in love with me. His hair was shoulder length but I don’t know what his face looked like. At one point, I remembered thinking that, in this dream, I really had to try to imagine his face better if I wanted it to be realistic. Mostly I would somehow just not see his face, even if I was looking straight at him. At first I was unsure. I wandered in the village, which had 5 or 6 longhouses amongst the tall conifers. There was one space where I knew a longhouse was supposed to be and I knew that when the guy who loved me married me, he’d build the house for us.

I had a 3/4ths full bottle of Jack Daniels’ that I had somehow acquired while being stranded. I knew I couldn’t let anyone know about it because such things were forbidden, so I wrapped it in leaves and took it to the empty plot where the longhouse would go. I hid it amongst some bushes, at that moment feeling very emotional because I knew that the man who loved me would understand me and would not judge me for this happening. I didn’t want the bottle anyways. I just needed it when I was stranded so I could deal with the trauma.

Later I sat in front of the longhouse across from the empty plot and watched as the man and some other person walked around and surveyed the area in preparation for the building of the longhouse. I was afraid they’d find the bottle but they didn’t and the man came to me and I told him about it and he understood. We moved to some place in front of a really random door that was yellow and plastic-ish and had a number on it. We started to kiss each other and I was content in knowing that I’d marry him. I felt sure of this future, despite the fact that we’d only really known each other for a week, and it was nice to be sure of the future like that.

Suddenly (Old Dream)

This is an old dream that I just remembered. It’s worth writing down, I think, because it’s wonderfully fucked up.

———

I was partying with a bunch of St. John’s people. By a bunch, I mean like, fifty. It was nightttime, and sometime late into the party, people decided en masse that we should go somewhere. We wound up going to this store that looked like my old middle school, but people were disgruntled to find that it was closed. We decided to break in by going in through a back door, so we walked around the side of the building and I distinctly remember walking past the window looking into the boiler room that I used to look into when I went for walks around the school years and years ago…

We came to the back door and got in and the building turned out to be like, a Best Buy crossed with a buffet. People started to steal things but then sales representatives appeared out of nowhere and started selling to thing to people. I looked around at the buffet tables with sandwiches on them and decided that I didn’t want anything.

Then the building exploded. The next thing I knew, I was either dismembered or paralysed and lying in the parking lot, slowly dying. Right in front of me was my friend Chris, covered in blood, missing his glasses and staring me in the eyes. For some reason, no one could come rescue us so we all died slowly over the course of a week or two, even though it felt like it only took a few days.

Lightning- 12/16/12

(This dream came about under the influence of a melatonin pill, that’s why it was so vivid.)

I was walking around the State Circle in Annapolis with some people at night. I assume Andrew was there because he almost always is in my dreams, but other than that I think there were four of us. We were talking and I was looking into the sky, which was dark and starless. I saw the shapes of trees edging the sky and, even as I looked at them, a bolt of lightning shot from the darkness and hit the tree. The noise was tremendous and the tree caught fire and toppled over.

I called out to the others: “Whoa, did you see that?” We looked at where the tree had fallen, but then another light in the sky caught our eyes. It was purple, growing into an amorphous ring in the sky, rather like a nebula. It rumbled as it grew ever-larger, and then suddenly it exploded into thousands of tiny sparks of white light, like a firework. The force threw us onto the pavement and we laid there and watched the sparks fall from the sky, exclaiming our wonder and delight and fear. I held up my hand to catch the sparks, wondering if they were hot, but I felt nothing.

Finally, the sparks dissipated and we picked ourselves up, only to see, in the electric light from the top of the Maryland State House, that the fronts of our bodies were spattered with blood. We looked at each other and I asked how this could happen? How could the world work in such a way that a thunderbolt should spray us with blood? Someone said that there were many mysteries in the world, and that this was one of them. So we got up and went our way.

Thumbtacks- 12/11/12

I was on some sort of mission with some friends to assassinate a person. We were in a series of rooms that largely looked like they should be in a middle-class suburban home. At first we were in a large room in which there was some sort of stall that was constructed like bathroom stall. I was with some male person in this stall and we were poking around the stuff in there. I knew, from past experience (as it felt like I had lived through this dream before), that there was a box here with a female-looking robot in it who was apparently a widow. I knew that she engaged in pretty suggestive conversation and my male friend was excited. I said I didn’t blame him.

I sat down by one of the walls of this stall and this woman who was sitting at a desk on that side saw me under the gap. She spoke in a patronising way — “Now now, who are you? I can see the logos on your pants.” I don’t know if my pants had logos on them. She came around to the door to see what was going on and my friend and I jumped on her and knocked her out or killed her. We were contemplating what to do with the body when two children came along. One of them was a blonde-haired girl in a dress, the other was a black kid. They seemed to be about 5. We didn’t think of them as a threat but then they wandered down the hall and told some people in another room what was going on.

That was when the target of our assassination appeared, ordering men in uniform with guns to line up against the wall in the room at the other end of the hall. They started shooting at us and there was chaos but I thought they were bad shots because neither of us got hit. The man we were supposed to be assassinating was then in the room with us so I tackled him and kept him on the ground. He was oldish, with his hair shaved down and a sardonic way of speaking. I stabbed him in the face with a thumbtack, creating bloodless holes in his skin. I knew he’d die when the redness in his ears faded.

The experience was really frightening for me, stabbing all these tiny holes in this man. At one point I got one that was especially deep and he was like “Ow” and I realised that he was my dad (not at all like my real dad). I nearly stopped but then I thought of a picture I’d seen of him fucking a girl doggystyle where the girl had thumbtacks stabbed into her buttocks. I stabbed with renewed vigor and after a while more, relented, and allowed myself to be capture.

I was taken as a hostage and a ransom was demanded for me. We sat on a couch which turned into a raft floating on water. The sky was dark but for a ray of light and illuminated a boat that was headed towards us, bobbing on the gentle tide.

Strange - 11/29/12

I was talking to this guy from my lab class, who I will call Mr. M (I refer to him by this formal term because that’s what St. John’s people call each other in class). In real life I don’t really talk to him much. He’s rather quiet and has black hair in a long ponytail. In the dream, we were talking in my room and I have no idea what the original conversation was, just that I wound up mentioning something about Christmas. Whereas he’d been completely composed before, he suddenly started crying and said, “I’m not going to my grandmother’s for Christmas.” What was especially disturbing about this was that his eyes got about three times larger and round, tearing up like a cartoon or anime character. I tried to figure out why he was so sad about not going to his grandmother’s, then I don’t remember what happened next.

———

There was a fight going on for St. John’s College and some people and I had to fight for it. There were about ten of us, all using swords, led by CJ. I can’t really remember who was there, just that we were supposed to fight on this concrete bridge thing that we kept referring to as “The Phallic Place” because it was vaguely penis shaped. Basically, it was a choke point or something. Needless to say, this doesn’t exist in real life.

We never got to the battle, of course, and a lot of time was spent planning and my brain doesn’t like doing epic stuff in my sleep. At one point, I needed to go to the bathroom and I went to some weird stall in a hallway. It didn’t have a door, just a clothesline stretched at about eye level in front of the toilet. Hanging on the clothesline were “underwear” but they were grungy-looking ill-formed shapes of cloth. Some friends (Frederick and Chris I think) were hovering around outside, peering in as I sat down. I figured that the clothesline had been sufficient covering for everyone else who had used this toilet so it would work for me too.

Assorted Dreams

Thanks to college, I don’t really have time for this dream shit, so here’s the interesting ones I remember in no particular order.

——-

I was in the Randall common room with my boyfriend, Andrew and our friend Robert (who is a blond libertarian) and some other guy. We were about to go to seminar so Andrew was in a suit complete with a silver cummerbund and Robert was in street clothes (because he can never be bothered to get dressed up for seminar). The other guy was kind of creepy, sitting in the corner wearing a mud-coloured hoodie and keeping to himself. All of a sudden, he jumped up and shot Andrew in the stomach, then pulled out a knife and slashed Robert in an “x” shape across his lower torso. As he ran away, I saw the flower of blood blossoming on Andrew’s white shirt while Robert didn’t bleed at all, just laid there, motionless.

Andrew got up, not at all hindered by his wound, and insisted that we had to go to seminar. I told him that we had to get him to the hospital. Administrators began to arrive on the scene and I told them to call an ambulance and I think they did, but Andrew continued to say that he was going to seminar. He walked off and I tried to stop him, at which point I woke up. I was sleeping with Andrew, so I grabbed onto him and held on — the dream had been so real, visceral and frightening.

——-

This is a common theme in my dreams in the past few months. I’ll be there with Andrew and dream the awful things that would never happen and wake up and hold on. He never remembers this — he wakes up and falls right back to sleep and doesn’t recall it in the morning.

The last time this happened was maybe a week ago. We were walking down West St. in Annapolis and we went into the restaurant called 49 West. The weather was insane — when we were walking, a twister tore through the street, though we managed to leap out of the way in time. We hung out in the restaurant and his mom picked us up and took us to a stone and metal and grayness kind of building. The rooms were expansive and there was a gigantic bathroom, with maybe 50 stalls in it.

Andrew was wearing his suit. In one of the rooms, which was some sort of bedroom (which was hardly accommodating since everything was polished gray stone and black tile and shit), there was a kitten in a box. It was actually encased in the thing, with legs sticking out the bottom and face stuck through a hole in the front. Apparently it was supposed to grow to full maturity in this thing and I wondered how that would work. When I was contemplating this, Andrew became suddenly ill and ran off and threw up in one of the toilets in the massive bathroom.

I was afraid. He kept getting sick, vomiting every few minutes while I stood in the bedroom and cried. My fear of vomit conflicted with my desire to take care of him. I felt trapped, knowing I couldn’t get out of here because of the storm raging outside but I felt bad for even wishing to leave him. His mom tried to calm me down as I had a panic attack and then, once more, I woke up and grabbed onto him until I was calm enough to sleep again.

——-

During Hurricane Sandy, I dreamed that Mitt Romney and Harry Potter were in love. I started off being Harry. We were having sex in a room resembling one in Mellon Hall, on a couch. When this act was done, I became Mitt and after Harry left, I thought obsessively about my shame at being gay and thought that I needed to get the locks on the doors to this room fixed so that I felt more secure, knowing that no one would walk in on us.

The fun part of this dream was that, with the encouragement and plotting of a friend, I’ve been writing a Harry Potter x Mitt Romney fanfic and yes, it is awful. Atrocious. Hilarious.

——-

I was about to leave school for some sort of holiday but everyone else was studying for some sort of test which was a seminar that lasted four hours. I had never heard of this and was very confused. I asked people about it but I was merely told that it didn’t exist. They all ate strawberry-flavoured candies which I knew were very tangy and strong even though I never at one in the dream. So I wandered through various rooms in connected treehouses, asking people about this assessment and receiving that same answer: it’s not actually happening, you can go now.

I was dreadfully confused but after a while, Andrew came along and we shrugged it off and decided to go. So, I went to this cave where I had been keeping my main mode of locomotion: a giant red lobster which I rode like a horse across the land. It hardly seemed alive; it didn’t really move or walk per se, merely glided across the land like it was hovering. I mounted it, sitting on a saddle, and rode it out of the cave and into an expansive desert landscape, thinking that I’d have to keep it in Andrew’s family’s garage during the break. Andrew and Caitlyn showed up on their own steeds, which I think were lizards that probably moved in a similar way to the lobster. I thought about how I could adopt one of the small lizards that scuttled about in the sand and nourish it until it became an adult steed. We played a game of pretending to hunt each other in preparation for more real, more dangerous events in time.

I wound up keeping my lobster in that garage but it was getting bigger and bigger by the day, until I could hardly fit it’s giant, shiny claws into the room, amongst bicycles and boxes of old stuff. I went to bring it somewhere else and began the process of “starting it up” by cutting open the top of its head and removing the covering like it was a panel. I could see the translucent, wet flesh underneath, pulsing with life. I tried to fit the piece back in place but couldn’t manage it.

——-

Everyone in St. John’s College went to see a movie. I don’t remember what the movie was thought I feel like it had something to do with Will Smith as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air or something similar. I only remember the trip back. We were in a city full of tall, austere buildings and gridded streets. Everyone walked in a single file line that wound beneath the shadows of these skyscrapers. I looked at them and thought “so this is what all of the Johnnies look like when they’re going somewhere.”

At some point, the press came along and began to video tape us like it was a reality tv show. I was near a stand of fruit and vegetables. Maybe people began to throw them at each other…I don’t remember.

At one point the line dissolved and we walked through a vast room that was so tall I couldn’t even perceive the ceiling and so wide that I wasn’t sure what was on the other side. In the centre of the room was a giant pit that must have been a hundred feet deep, likely more. One of my classmates, CJ, jumped on some other guy and pushed him down into the pit. The guy fell and fell and hit the bottom and wouldn’t move. I tried to tell CJ off but he laughed it off and said he’d be okay. I looked at the pit again and it was full of clear water. I could see all the way to the bottom where the tiny shape of the guy still laid motionless.

(Note: CJ is actually a really nice guy, he’d never do this. xD)

——-

I was in my old house, though I didn’t think of it as home and didn’t recognise it as any place I’d ever lived. It simply didn’t cross my mind. There was a rainstorm raging outside but I had somewhere to go, some sort of appointment to make so I had to walk home really fast. I went outside and there was snow everywhere. I had to walk barefoot and I dreaded the pain of the endeavour.