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!

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.

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.