Saturday, February 23, 2008

Another Dreary Party

Hello, dream blog! I missed you, you know.

Point of fact, I dreamed this maybe two weeks ago. Things then came up, and this is the first real chance I've had to write it out. Also, I forgot it a bunch of times. The dream:

Yet again, this dream starts out at a party. A very ill-defined party at that, too. There's sort of a general "friend's house party" atmosphere in roughly half of the rooms I visit, while the other half have a "high society 1920's party" vibe to them. Also, there is a classical quartet playing strings music somewhere in the building in which the party is being held, but I can't find it. Oh, and the building itself where the party is being hosted is huge. It's a mansion. I think that I subconsciously based it off my friend's ex-girlfriend's house in Richmond Hill (Thorn Hill?) where I attended one New Year's party, then mentally added in a bunch of staircases from an M.C. Escher painting. Bizarre.

Anyways, the party is filled with my friends, some elderly relatives of mine, and the cast of HBO's Rome, in character, except that while they look and act exactly like their characters in the show, they are also the Montagues and the Capulets from Romeo and Juliet. That's not too much of a stretch, really; the Julii and the Junii of the show had the whole "Shakespearean Grudge Match" deal going on anyone, so it's not too much of a stretch to put them in those roles. But I digress.

My own role at the party is less clear. I wear a tuxedo and carry snack foods to people, but I don't feel as though I'm a waiter, as I also drink, talk with other guests, etc. Also, I don't really seem to receive this food from any concrete process; it just appears in my hand and I distribute it to people. Anyways, the main two people I keep coming back to on my food rounds are Rome's Atia of the Julii and Servillia of the Junii (rivals in the show; Montagues/Capulets in my dream), who inform me of their respective plans to poison the food of their respective opposites. I nod politely.

My elderly uncle Larry (actually my great-uncle, but I have never referred to him as "great-uncle Larry") is also there, looking MUCH more frail then in my waking life. In reality, he is a somewhat frail octogenarian with failing eyesight, but is still strong and self-sufficient. In my dream, he looks twice as frail and is confined to a wheelchair which must be pushed by a nurse. I make several attempts at conversation, but his hearing is also apparently failing, and I am unable to make myself understood.

The dream ends as I am in the middle of another interminable conversation with Atia over ways in which she plans to poison Servillia. I turn my head out of boredom and see uncle Larry's nurse is not paying attention to where she is wheeling him (she is engaged in conversation, possibly with Brutus) and is dangerously close to wheeling him down one of the reality-defying staircases in the middle of the room. I try to run and grab the chair, but I am too far away. I have a vantage point (think "internal balcony" or "verandah") where I can see both my uncle's starting point at the top of the stairs and his crash site at the bottom. It is a pretty bad spill, and he begins to cry. However, the sound is not "right". Rather than sounding like an eldery man crying, it sounds like a multitude of babies whaling, perhaps turned up to eleven. It sounded so anguished, so awful, that my last thought in the dream was "won't somebody put him out of his misery?", which is a pretty shitty thing to think about one's great uncle.

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So yeah, the journal's still up and running! No need to panic!

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Concert

OK, this is an odd one. Not really "odd" as in "abstract", but full of enough confusions and vague symbolism to keep me guessing, anyways. I call it "The Concert".

Anyways, the dream begins with me and my dad going into an arena to see a concert. My dad, a big Bob Dylan fan, is convinced that that is we're going to see, but I have no idea who it will be, trhough I'm fairly certain that it isn't going to be Bob Dylan, a thought which I keep to myself. Anyways, once we get inside, the darkness of the arena coupled with the coloured lightshow on the ceiling immediately scream "power metal" to me (not literally "scream", but strongly suggest), and surely enough, the band Dream Theatre (an appropriate band to feature in a dream if ever there was one) comes onstage to much crowd approval. My dad, seeing that this is not the Dylan that he expected, quickly disappears into the crowd with a curt, "see you later", presumably to go home.
I find a table next to some of my friends (there are tables in arenas, apparently) and settle in to watch the show. Dream Thetre immediately launches into a rendition of "their" hit, Kingdom for a Heart (in reality, a song by Sonata Arctica) and the perspective of the dream switches from my first person view to that of a typical "filmed concert" music video, with various close ups on guitar licks, drum breaks, etc., and cuts from the concert to pre-filmed images of the band playing in outer space, standing on a rainbow and performing on dragon back. Anways, the song ends, and I turn to my friends (to those in the know: Leo, Neil, Box, Matt and Ben) to see what they thought. Their reaction is uniformly negative, with Leo flat out telling me that it sucked, and Neil more diplomatically saying the same thing. In response (and this is the thing I remember most vividly), I pick up a hot dog on the table in front of me (it's been there all along, of course) which, rather than being composed of bread and meat, is made of a gummi candy weiner with a marshmallow bun. I then pick up a ketchup packet of gummi-style translucent red icing sugar disguised as real ketchup, begin to apply the icing to my "hot dog" and say, both defiantly and wryly, "Yeah well, different strokes for different folks!", before taking a hugebite out of my footlong gummi-dog, to the outrage and disgust of all. If any of my friends had been wearing monocles, that's about when they would have fallen off.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Duck Shoot

Happy new year! Hey everybody, I hope we can start 2008 off with a bang and a dream. So here's the dream.

Now, before I start this one, I will say that I have been watching a lot of The Sopranos on TVD lately, so I'm pretty sure that that is where a lot of the imagery and plot of this dream comes from. The premise? In the dream's prehistory, I have asked by certain higher ups in the Mafia to shoot ducks for them. This is IMPORTANT. The mob NEEDS me kill ducks, and I need to kill ducks if I'm ever gonna get "made". So as the dream itself begins, I am resolved to go out and shoot some ducks. I decide to take my shotgun (which I have always had, in this dream) and go out hunting around the neighborhood, see if I can flush out any game. I'm not two feet out my back door when I see that there is a flock of ducks sitting in the middle of my driveway. Plump, fat, prizewinning ducks. I start to take aim with my gun at one of them, when I see another guy with a shotgun taking aim on the other side of my driveway. Now I don't know if he's aiming at the ducks or at me (I am on deadly Mafia business), but I suddenly panic, veer up my gun and shoot him. He makes a little "uuh" noise, but otherwise just drops into the snow. Now, in the commotion, this has panicked the ducks, who are now flying en masse straight for me. And I now notice that it wasn't a group of ducks in the driveway, it was a group of loons. In any case, I still raise my shotgun up to take a shot at one of the loons, which shreds it out of the sky. And I do mean shreds. Apparently, using a shotgun to hunt birds is a bad idea (according to my subconscious, anyways), because the one loon that I hit has just been reduced to a tangled mess of blood, feathers, flesh and beak. I try to pick it up, to maybe try and pass off as a duck to the Mafia heads, but it's just too shredded and gross. I decide I need a plastic bag tgo pick it up, so I head over to the corner store to buy some "kitchen catchers". On my way out of the driveway, I prod the guy who I shot with my boot, but he doesn't get up.

Anyways, so next I arrive at the store, where I decide to buy an RC Cola as well as some plastic bags. At the store, there is a Korean woman looking distressed. I ask her what 's wrong, and she tells me that she keeps on trying to phone her husband's cell (terror-ring her husband on the P-Hone, to use some of 2008's future slang in advance) but she isn't getting an answer. And suddenly I realize that I've seen this woman around the neighborhood before, and what's more, I've seen her husband, and I'm almost positive that he's the guy I just shot in my driveway. Anyways, the woman is getting ridiculously frantic, and I'm feeling overwhelmingly guilty, so I just bolt out of the store to get home. On my run back home, I begin to think that I just left this dead guy lying in my driveway and maybe that wasn't the best thing to do. What if the neighbors have seen? What if that woman called the cops to find her husband and they found him dead in my driveway? Wouldn't I totally deserve it if the cops DID catch me? I'm a monster! Anyways, I can't say for sure what happened after that, because that's when I awoke. Looks like dreams for 2008 are gonna be some kinda interesting.