Another UPS-themed nasty

Last night’s sleep (or Wednesday day’s, more properly put) came in two segments; the first was 7 hours long, from 07:30 to 14:30; and the 2nd was a 2-hour nap which came 2 hours later. The dreaming happened in the first segment.

The dream…

…was much more detailed than I can remember now, but two elements are very clear:

1.) I was much younger in the dream and more physically fit than I am now. The first element of the dream found me starting a training run. I was planning to jog from the apartment where I was staying to the UPS Center out of which I worked: a distance of a few miles. However, it started raining when I’d only gone a few blocks, so I headed back home and caught a ride.

2.) My task at work was to train a new employee into how to wash and park the UPS trucks after they’d returned to the building in the evening. This was VERY frustrating as the hose to which the brush we were using was too short, and other guys kept parking their trucks on it. The frustration level wasn’t quite high enough to qualify this dream as a nightmare. Not quite. But it was close.

A Magical Campground?

Last night’s dream was interesting, and also was the method I employed to better remember it.

Something woke me early while I was enjoying a dream. I’m not sure whether it was some noise out in the hallway of the hotel, or my wonky sinuses, but I found myself up earlier than I wanted to be with my mind focused on things other than the dream I wanted to remember.

After deciding that there was no good reason for me to be up, and wanting to reenter the dream, I laid myself back down and resumed the position in which I’d been sleeping when I woke, closed my eyes, and began breathing slowly and deeply. Soon the dream rose back up from my subconsciousness and presented itself, though I wasn’t fully asleep. This gives a pretty high level of lucidity to the experience, as I define it.

In the dream…

I was camping in a magical campground. It seemed that I may have been a manager of that place, though that wasn’t exactly clear. My assistant, partner in magic, and tentmate was a woman I don’t know. Actually, none of the other campers with whom I interacted were recognizable to me as folks I know, have known, nor have known about.

The visuals of this dream were in full-color, it was rich with sounds, and had tactile sense elements. I could hear the voices of other campers and even conversed with some of them. I could hear sounds from the crackling campfires, could feel the pull of the zipper when I opened and closed the tent entrance, and could feel the firmness of grips when I shook hands with other campers, etc.

Two of the more interesting things in this dream were:

1.) the “magical” campfires my assistant and I lit one night to the “oohs” and “aahs” of the other campers. She told me the following night that we couldn’t do that anymore; federal agents had complained about them being environmental hazards: and,

2.) “magical” devices placed in front of each campsite with a big handle that controlled the noises emanating from there. If you had a noisy neighbor, you just walked over to their campsite and pulled down a magic lever that would mute the offending sounds.

killing a vampire, and a broken washing machine

Last night’s was a weird sleep. As this respiratory bug lingers, I’ve sworn off coffee and alcohol to let my system fight it off more efficiently. As a consequence of this, my sleeps have become longer and my dreams more easily remembered.

For more information about my sleeps, refer to my sleep log.

When I woke I had clear memories of the two dreams that occurred just prior to my waking, though I suspect there were others that have faded from my conscious mind.

The first dream:

I was a vampire hunter leading a team of other vampire hunters chasing an infestation of the bloodsuckers in a modern, urban environment. The city in which we were fighting was nondescript. None of the other characters involved were known to me in real life.

The vampires were powerful and in the process of overwhelming us; it was clear to me that I’d have to find and destroy their leader if we were to survive.

I finally found the master vampire. We were fighting each other in the attic of a big house when I forced him out through a weakened section of wall into the direct sunlight through which he fell.

The vampire wasn’t immediately destroyed; rather he transformed into a little gummy-bat maybe an inch long. I grabbed the gummy-bat firmly and carried him into the house’s kitchen. Pinning him to a wooden cutting board with a steak knife, I knew I’d have to put a wooden stack through his tiny heart somehow.

Aha! On a kitchen shelf near me was a container of wooden tooth picks. In a flash I grabbed a tooth pick and pierced the gummy-bat’s heart, killing the master vampire. When a supernatural glowing cloud escaped from the little body and dissipated in the light breeze blowing through the kitchen, I knew we’d won.

The second dream:

This was clearly a lucid dream, as I was more awake than asleep when it happened. It could easily have been described as a hallucination had it occurred under different circumstances.

Laying in bed, in the slow process of waking for the day, I had the clearest vision of looking down at washing machine full of clothes. Its washing cycle was apparently finished, but the tub was still full of water. It looked like the washer had gone through its final spin cycle but none of the water drained away.

Then, as soon as it came, the image of the washing machine vanished. And my eyes began sliding open as I rose from the pillow, waking to face the day.

Joe Biden on a crosscountry bus trip

Last night’s dream was one of the more interesting and enjoyable I’ve had lately. I was disappointed that noises in the hotel woke me from it, and would have tried to sleep my way back into it had not it been so late in a day with daytime chores that needed doing.

The dream…

…had me as a passenger on a large, Greyhound-type crosscountry bus. We were westward bound through a sunny desert of the American Southwest. This was a full-color dream with auditory and tactile senses active, too.

The only person on the bus that stands out in my post-dream memory was VPOTUS-elect Joe Biden. In the early part of the dream, Joe was moving through the bus, trying to talk to the other passengers. When he finally realized that no one wanted to talk to him, he sat by himself at the very back of the bus in a seat right next to the bathroom, pouting, with his leg extended out into the aisle, his foot almost against the bathroom door. No, I don’t know why Joe Biden was doing that. But it was funnier than all get out.

Another very odd element of this dream was that the bus was under attack by three different animals as it rolled down the highway. A tiny water buffalo with huge horns tried to ram it, a baboon was throwing rocks at it, and a bald eagle was swooping down to pick up the rocks the baboon had thrown, then was flying up and dropping those rocks on the bus from high up in the air. During these animal attacks, I was viewing them not from the perspective of a passenger in the bus, but from outside, as if I was flying above and along side the bus myself.

At no time during the dream did I sense myself in any kind of danger or discomfort. Actually, it was pretty entertaining.

A short, UPS-themed dream

Last night’s sleep was segmented into two short uncomfortable sections: a 3-hour section from 06:00 to 09:00, and a 2-hour section from Noon to 14:00 hours. Though there mau have been other dreams last night, I can only remember one from the end of the 2nd sleep period.

This dream was:

Very short. Too short, thankfully, to develop into the nightmare my UPS-themed dreams almost always become.

I was driving my UPS truck near the end of my route, late in the day. The sun had set and I was conscious of how my headlights were shining directly into the rear view mirror of the car in front of me. There wasn’t much I could do about this, it was a function of my headlights being at exactly the same height from the pavement as the car’s mirror.

I was going to pull into the parking lot of an A&W Root Beer stand, park my truck, and go inside to do my end of the day paperwork, my daily checkout routine, before returning to the Center. But I woke up before I pulled into the lot.

Three Christmas Nightmares

Last night’s sleep was uncomfortable, and so were its dreams.

The first nightmare involved private people who are very much alive. For the sake of propriety, I don’t describe any dreams that involve private people who are alive.

The following two dreams were UPS-themed. Such dreams are often frustrating and disturbing. Sometimes they’re down-right terrifying. Almost always they qualify as nightmares of one degree or other.

Last night’s first UPS nightmare involved me trying to work my route, delivering and picking up packages in a goofy golf cart rather than a regular big brown delivery truck. And I was accompanied by a very critical supervisor who happened to be Britt Hume of Fox News.

The second UPS nightmare saw me making a last minute pickup at a small factory. The emplyees at the factory had no clue what was going on, the paperwork that was supposed to travel with the packages was ill-prepared, and the boxes themselves were poorly packed.

After I’d loaded the last of the packages (there was a lot of them) into the back of my truck, the factory manager came out and yelled at me, saying I’d loaded a lot of packages I shouldn’t have. He insisted I unload everything and reconcile the frieght with the paperwork. He was totally oblivious to the fact that his boxes were all crap and his paperwork almost worse than useless. Ass!

Hopefully the Sandman will bring me a better batch of dreams tonight.

Such a short dream, so many elements

Last night’s sleep was a rough one; the wonky sinuses had me sort of awake but still half-asleep through much of it. But there was some dreaming in it, and that’s a good thing.

Though I suspect there were more dreams last night than what I can now remember, the one that was with me as I woke is freshly in mind.

In this dream:

I was much younger than I am now, probably in my thirties, and had just finished a leisure ride on my mountain bike. The “home” I was headed back to was a rented room in a big house that could have been a composite of houses I knew in Peru, Warsaw, or Bloomington IN.

When I was about a block away from the house, a mysterious woman appeared on the sidewalk next to me. She was wearing a flowered t-shirt and black lycra running shorts and seemed to be headed to my house, too.

As I approached the front porch and shouldered my bike to carry it up the steps, the mysterious woman bounced up to the porch and let herself in the front door ahead of me.

The scene then flashed, and I was standing in the house’s big common living room. Another blond woman, whom I only know in a very tangential way over the Internet, looked up at me from a couch, smiled and said, “Surprise! Bet you didn’t think I could come right into your dream like this, did you?”

And then I woke. Sort of. It was a sinus thing that made me sit upright for a few minutes, but I never came fully awake.

When I laid myself back down, I focused on the last image remembered from the dream just mentioned, and I smoothly transitioned back into it. The woman on the couch was still smiling up at me. This time she said, “Hey, let’s use Latin, okay?” And she started speaking to me in Latin. And she laughed. Then I woke for real.

“Over 5,000 pieces!”

Last night’s sleep was rough: the GD sinuses kept waking me. But they never kept me up for long. One good thing about the sleep was that it was dream-filled. Though there were others during the night, the only dream I can remember in detail is the last one: the one that ended as I finally woke for good.

This dream was set in the Morris Hotel, where I live. Many of the folks I saw and with whom I talked in this dream are familiar to me, they’re my neighbors or staff who work here.

As it opened, the dream found me waking to construction noises coming from somewhere in the hotel. This is a common occurrence in real life, by the way. Ongoing renovation of this hotel, sometimes on a pretty large scale, is a fact of life which those of us living here have come to accept.

Rising from bed, I noticed that there was a lot of commotion out on the back patio. After bathing quickly and throwing on some clothes, I went out there to investigate. What I found was rows upon rows of framed paintings: paintings of all sizes and types. And there were several long tables loaded with boxes and stacks of books, most of them art books.

“You’re going to love this, Roscoe,” one of my neighbors standing out there told me. “There are over 5,000 pieces here!”

Looking up, I saw that more objects were being lowered by boom from one of the upper-story windows.

“How the blazes was he able to fit all this in his apartment in the first place?” I asked.

The guy I was talking to just shrugged his shoulders. “Well,” he said, “he did have a pretty big suite of rooms up there.”

I never did learn, in the dream, whether the art collector upstairs was moving out, and this was just a staging area for his stuff; or if he’d died, and his collection was being prepared for storage elsewhere; or if he was just in a “sharing mood” and had decided to give all this away. To us, his neighbors. I wanted to find out, but I woke up before I could ask about that.

I was an “Occult Investigator”?

Yep, that’s what I was in last night’s dream(s).

My sleeps last night were segmented, and so might have been my dreams. I slept a dream-filled four hours from 04:00 to 08:00, then was awake for two hours, then slept for another three, from 10:00 to 13:00 hours. All my dreaming was done in the first sleep segment. When I woke from that I couldn’t tell if I’d had three dreams with common elements or one dream that was divided into three distinct parts.

In this dreaming I was an independent investigator of occult events. And so was Mr. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. He and I weren’t partners, but we weren’t adverseries either. And we were both working the same bizarre case. We were investigating a strange cult in Bloomington, IN, that centered around a naked witch who lived in a small cave directly beneath a huge tree that was growing in Dunn Meadow on the IU Campus.

The three parts of the cave involved 1.) my investigation, 2.) Bill’s investigation, and 3.) our interviews. It wasn’t clear in the third part whether I was interviewing him, or he was interviewing me, or if we were both being interviewed by a third party. But the first two parts were vividly clear, and involved visual, auditory, and tactile senses.

No, I wouldn’t call this a nightmare: at no time did I consider myself in danger. But it was one of the strangest dream experiences I’ve had recently.

Password revealed, and the Lone Ranger

Last night’s sleep was tortured and shallow. It was also full of dreams now mostly forgotten. I can remember the themes of one (or was it two?) of them.

I was 1.) very worried about a computer password (not sure if it was a password needed to start a computer, or to open a piece of software, or to gain access to an online program) being lost, stolen, or made public; but I was 2.) very releaved to know that the Lone Ranger was on the case and that he would make things right.