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!

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.

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.

A Twofer

Well, here it is almost one month since my last post. As I said earlier, in the event of a "dream dearth", I would be posting "best ofs" from previous dreams. Anyways, I think that one month counts as a lapse significant enough to warrant "dearth" status, and thus was ready to post an old favorite after my Holiday break, when lo and behold, I have two memorable dreams in rapid succession! Credit it to all the sugar plums, I guess. Not that they were particularly good dreams, or high quality dreams, but they were memorable, and that's what counts! So, in the order I dreamed them:

1. An Archetype The classic, middle-of-the-Holidays "Oh Shit! I Forgot to Turn in my (insert course here) Paper!" I have this dream a lot, though it mostly happens at the end of the year and involves the final exams in courses I considered signing up for, but didn't. In this case, it was about having forgotten to turn in a French Lit. paper (a course I'm not taking) to Professor Lennox (A professor I DO have, in Canadian Life Writing). Interestingly enough, in my dream the paper was not yet late, but due on Friday, meaning that if I scrambled like mad, I would JUST be able to turn in a sub-par paper, though I would miss Boxing Day with my cousins. In any case, a fairly humdrum dream.

2. U of Hospital A somewhat more interesting dream I had last night. I'm in my high school, but for the purposes of my dream it's also my university. It's populated by a variety of faces from both those locales. Anyways, because of a mysterious illness (which doesn't seem to have any effects), we're all quarantined inside the building. It's nothing serious, but we all have to remain inside, and nurses will be coming with pills for us. Anyways, nurses show up carrying pills on refreshment trays, and the whole thing has a very "dinner party" type atmosphere; there's no instructions for how to take the pills (those gel-coated ones with the tiny medicine spheres in 'em), so the nurses just circulate around handing them out like candy as people in little groups discuss dinner-party topics like the environment, literary criticism, etc. Anyways, I'm having a fine time chatting and swallowing pills, until I overhear one guest talking with a nurse, and the nurse says that, "one of the main effects is that people seem to have difficulty swallowing". As I hear this, I try to pop another pill, but I gag it back up. Fortunately, no one notices this, but I begin to worry about what a faux pas it would be if I were the only one at the party not popping pills. With this in mind, I unscrew the top of my capsule from the bottom and start eating the horrible-tasting little medicine spheres individually. People, ask about it, and I say that it's just the way I eat pills, but the taste is getting pretty awful, enough so that I am forced to bolt out of a conversation mid-way to try to find a drinking fountain to wash the taste out of my mouth. The dream ends with me arriving at the fountain.

Well, there we are. Hope that these'll tide us all over!

Abstract #1

Well, count on my own words to make a liar out of me. Here I am, saying in my last post that "most of my dreams do seem to err on the side of realism and the linear narrative format", and now I'm dreaming in the abstract. I swear, sometimes I think my mind is just trying to make me out as a massive tool. Anyways, my dream last night seemed to consist mostly of a series of images with a snide commentary presented overtop of them, either delivered by or to me (my own subjectivity in this dream was fairly unclear). There did seem to be some kind of overlying structure to the dream, but a fairly vague one. It seemed as though there was an argument or battle of wits taking place in either a library or bookstore. In retrospect, I don't think it matters which one it was, just so long as it serviced as a source of images for debate. Anyways, two indistinct figures or voices (either both me or neither of them me, I was and am unclear) jokingly debated pop-culture back and forth at each other. In essence, I dreamed The Internet, or an episode of "Robot Chicken".

Anyways, the whole thing was pretty strange. Most of the images debated just blended together in my memory, but a couple stand out. In one instance, Voice number one presents Iron Man for debate, to which Voice number two responds: "Iron Man? He's just a cheap Batman with wings!" And indeed, the Iron Man presented did indeed sport a pair of angelic wings (Note to those not up on the comics lore: Iron Man CAN fly, but does not have wings). In the other memorable part of the dream, the two Voices have either presented or transformed themselves into manifestations of "The Chief" from Inspector Gadget, one wearing all black and one wearing all white, which I immediately recognized as being from "Spy vs. Spy". The cavorted around the book depository trying to drop old fashioned "fuse bombs" into the garbage cans they continually popped out of (as they did in the TV show). Clearly this symbolizes something or other, but I can't really say that I care what. This dream was ridiculous. I'm sorry, Internet. Next time I'll try to dream better.

The Wasps' Nest

I had something of a more abstract dream last night, though it was still fairly concrete, as dreams go. Most of my dreams do seem to err on the side of realism and the linear narrative format. Also, I'm not sure whether or not people in my life would appreciate being singled out by name in my dreams, so i'm going to try to avoid doing that wherever possible. Anyways, on with the summary:

Anyways, The dream begins with me at my two-shift a week kitchen job, washing dishes. As I go about my tasks, I notice first one, then two, then several wasps flying around my working area. At no point do these wasps ever move so sting me or anyone I'm working with (the people I'm working with are also all acting slightly out of character in this dream, in that they engage in none of their customary banter which usually makes the work day so pleasant). Rather, the wasps merely hover around me and mine, steadily building in number until there's a good 30 or so flying around the kitchen, being studiously ignored by myself and the cook. Anyways, cook finally sends me downstairs to get some sauce. As soon as I open the door to the basement, I walk into an utter swarm of wasps, circling the downstairs area like they were caught in a funnel. I have to walk directly through the swarm to reach the sauce, so that's what I do. As I'm doing this, the swarm moves somewhat aside to give me passage, but it still feels as though I'm walking through a living, fuzzy wall, and I occasionally have to spit just to get wasps out of my mouth. As I'm retrieving the sauce, I'm aware of the possibility of being stung, but not really afraid of it, because I just know that if I stay focused on my work and don't call attention to my own awareness of the wasps, they'll leave me alone. Anyways, I climb back up the stairs through the swarm with the sauce and close the door behind me, except I take some of the wasps with me. They have landed on my hands and arms, but are quite content to watch me work, rather than commence stinging. For the rest of my work shift, I am compelled to do my job in a room full of wasps (the wasps that followed me out of the basement have made the kitchen area fairly crawl with the things) with several attached to my arms and hands. At no point during this dream, however, am I stung.

The Drug Free, No-Smoke Cigarette MC-athon

Okay, this isn't as fresh in my memory as I'd ideally like my very first actual dream post to be, but it happened within the past week, so most of the details remain clear. This is a fairly simple variation on the classic "forget your lines in the school play/big speech" dream, but it has some variations which I think make it worth remembering. Let us begin:

So to start, I'm sitting in the front row of my high school auditorium (for those who went to UFA with me, this is the auditorium in old building on Croatia I'm referring to, not the one way out in Runnymede), watching the "Drug Free, No-Smoke Cigarette MC-athon", a school sponsored rap-battle theme around a "just say no" message. It was not made explicit in the dream, but I knew at the time that whoever won this battle would get to tour Torontonian elementary schools to deliver their rap at school assemblies. That was the prize.

Anyways, The dream opens as I watch The Clean Street Crew perform their set. There's all drawn in the exact same style as they appear in the aforelinkèd comic, but I don't really notice. Anyways, it's all very entertaining, especially the MC Horse bits, and it receives a healthy smattering of applause. In fact, I'm still applauding when the announcer calls out my name.

Now we reach my part of the dream: apparently, I had earlier signed up to perform an anti-cigarette rap and completely forgot about it. I'm shuffled onstage by a few vague administrative figures (they had no discernible "features," as such), handed a mic and told to "go on!" as the red jumpsuited DJ lays a beat down from behind me. Nervously, I walk towards the audience and begin to stutter out some of the lamest anti-drug propaganda ever to be rhymed to a crowd. I'm not entirely sure exactly what I said onstage, but I can clearly remember that it was characterized by long pauses, embarrassingly simple rhyming ("cigarette"/"don't smoke et", etc.), and at best sloppy adherence to the beat. I felt really bad about it, too. Like I was letting everyone down.

Nonetheless, the audience seemed to love it. With every tortured or hackneyed rhyme, they would scream louder and louder for me to go on. I can remember, for instance, rhyming "crack" with "whack" (the most clichéd anti-drug rhyme in the biz) to howls of approval. People were lifting lighters, throwing confetti, raising 40's, it was insane. (The irony of raising a 40 to show approval for an anti-drug song did not strike me at the time of the dream). This all just made me really angry. On the one hand, I felt bad because I was letting everybody down with my lame-ass styles; on the other, were these people were so piss-ignorant, they couldn't even tell how terribly I sucked? I started to think that maybe this was all fake approval, like a massive, audience-wide conspiracy to spare my feelings or something. These people should be disappointed, damn them! What the Hell was wrong with them? Plus, through all this I was still stammering, taking long pauses, etc., so it couldn't have been my technique that impressed them. Was I just a William Hung to these people?

Anyway, I ran out of material, so I had to stop. Or maybe I just wanted to. After the applause died down, they didn't even let the other acts go on; they just gave me the prize. I forget who was hosting, but they pinned a blue ribbon to my lapel. I had never felt so undeserving in my life, like I was being rewarded for something I should have by all rights been punished for. I believe the dream closed with me, from the stage, looking out on the dejected Clean Street Crew, who wanted this prize more than anything in the world. Then I awoke.

So there it is, my first dream post. I didn't mention it before, but you Internauts reading this should feel free to analyze and/or review these dreams. My subconscious just loves critical analysis. So do I, in fact. It's the only way I'll learn. Also, I've filed this under "nightmare" because it invokes unpleasant feelings of guilt, not because it was terrifying. I have few real "terrifying" dreams. I haven't concretely figure out all the "labels" I want for this blog yet.