learning to dance

Last night’s sleep was very short, and it contained another short, happy dream.

In my dream…

…I was a young boy, probably in my early teens, and I was learning to slow dance. I don’t know who my partner was, but she was a young teenager, too. We were in her house, timidly holding onto each other, and rather clumsily shuffling around while music was coming from her record player.

We weren’t very good at what we were doing, but we were trying, and we were hopeful that we’d get better with practice.

Shopping for soy beans

Never in my real, waking life have I shopped for soy beans, but that’s exactly what I did in last night’s dream. And for once, the contents of my dream had a direct relationship with things that were on my mind as I went to sleep.

A friend on Plurk has sometimes refered to snacking on Edamame. Though I’ve never tried it, I’m tempted to do so. And when I went to bed last night I knew that one of my chores for today was going to be grocery shopping.

In my dream…

…I was indeed grocery shopping in a large store with a well-stocked fresh produce department. It didn’t take long at all for me to locate the baby soybeans I was looking for, happily load a couple of handsful into a little bag, and place that into my cart along with the other items I was buying.

This was a very short dream, but a happy one. I like happy dreams.

Bloodrayne: lucid dreams

After fighting the forces of darkness called up from Hell by an old voodoo priestess on the streets of Toledo in a fight which left that city largely destroyed, Bloodrayne suddendly finds herself in that city which mysteriously shows no sign of the battle. No sign of it at all.

She’s in the street outside a hospital. Walking inside, she finds the old voodoo priestess being pronounced dead.

Text blocks on the story’s last page contain Bloodrayne’s thoughts as she remembers the incident:

No one ever figured out what happened to me, let alone how I wound up in Toledo.

Lord Michaelis said I might have experienced a wake-initiated LUCID DREAM.

He also theorized I may have been part of a very powerful TULPA — a thoughtform of an extremely powerful mind that was manifesting an alternate reality on some metaphysical plane of existence.

Whatever.

He can wax philosophical all he wants, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.

[...]

The page above is found in Bloodrayne: Prime Cuts #3, in the short story titled Princess of Darkness, written by Chad Lambeert and featuring art by Oscar Bazaldua. This comic book carries a March 2009 publication date from Digital Webbing.

A 6th Floor?

Last night’s sleep treated me to a number of short, interesting dreams. One of them was set right here in my hotel.

In my dream…

…I walked into our residential foyer from the sidewalk, and waved at the new, uniformed security officer sitting behind a desk. After exchanging pleasantries with him, I headed over to the elevator.

When I stepped into the elevator I was shocked to see that the push-button controls and the present-floor indicator showed six floors! “WTF?!” I exclaimed, holding the elevator door open. This hotel only has five residential floors. How the heck could there now be six?

The security officer came over and asked me what was wrong. He nodded when I asked about the mysterious sixth floor. “That is something new,” he explained, and added, “Would you like to check it out?”

I stepped back as he punched a numerical code into a keyboard newly installed in the elevator wall. “Just look around from the elevator when the door opens up there,” he told me, “and ride back down to your own floor. No one’s allowed up there without a special invitation.”

When the elevator door opened at the sixth floor there were a number of men waiting to ride back down. As they filed in, I noticed that there seemed to be an upscale meet-and-greet kind of affair in progress. There were waiters serving drinks, there was a piano softly playing, and mostly business-suited men were standing in small clusters talking in hushed tones.

The last man in was more casually dressed, wearing a bright blue Polo shirt, and he nodded at me when he stepped in. I punched my floor number on the control panel as the door closed, and the elevator began its descent.

“Maud’Dib!”

Last night’s first sleep segment brought a short, but interesting dream.

In this dream…

There was much more auditory content than anything else, and there was one visual image that ended it.

Both the sounds and the graphic image came from the SciFi move, Dune. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that film and I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I thought about it… in the waking world.

The sounds I heard very clearly were “Maud’Dib!” shouted by attacking Fremen warriors as they fired their Weirding Modules, and those weapons firing. And the image I saw which ended the dream was the face of Paul’s little sister, Alia, who was born with the full powers of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. With the sounds of battle in the background, I woke from the dream when Alia turned and grinned up at me with her glowing blue eyes.

two kodak moments

Last night (early Thursday morning) brought me two quick dreams that were related only by my thinking during the dreams that, “Wow! This would make a fine picture!”

In the first dream I was walking down the North/South alley of the 100 block of North College Street in Bloomington IN. As I neared the southern end of the alley I saw the two main buildings of a big bank in the next block quickly transform into two huge opposing castle walls. And from these walls big flying monkeys, of the type seen in the old Wizard of Oz movie, were launching themselves from windows and flying about.

This didn’t alarm me at all. My main thought was what a fine picture that would make.

The second dream was also very short. It found me watching a TV program that showed QB Tony Romo at some live celebration in a football stadium. I was under the impression he’d just led his team to some kind of championship, though that wasn’t made explicitly clear. He was wearing the bright blue of the Indianapolis Colts rather than the silver and old blue of the Dallas Cowboys, and he was carrying a smiling down-syndrome baby in his arms. The little baby had such a bright smile and looked so happy. And Tony was beaming and looking so proud. It was such a beautiful scene.

I caught myself thinking as I watched Tony and his baby, much as I did in the earlier dream, “Oh, if only I could be there with a camera!”

Caving, and a darned cellphone

Last night’s dream (well, Wednesday morning’s, actually) combined a few rather common elements, but did so in an unusual way.

There were clearly two distinct parts to this dream, the second part following events of first, and related to them, though involving a different set of concerns.

In my dream…

… I was 1.) living in Bloomington, Indiana, 2.) working as a UPS driver, and 3.) enjoying a favorite sport: exploring the wild caves in that part of the state. All three of these are things I actually did when younger and are things that often appear in my dreams.

There was one wild cave of which I was particularly fond, which had an entrance located only a few miles out in the county from where I was living. Of its many interesting features was a horrendously long, tight crawlway through which one had to pass in order to reach the larger rooms and more complicated passageways deeper in the cave. I came to love that cave and its long crawl, and often visited it alone. (I don’t endorse solo-caving, by the way. It’s an extremely dangerous activity.)

At any rate, in my dream I’d adopted the habit of driving to the cave and doing its long crawl as an early morning exercise: showering afterwards and then reporting for work. And in this dream a couple of my fellow UPS drivers wanted to do the “early morning crawl” with me. I had extra gear (helmets and carbide lamps) and decided to let them tag along.

This was the first part of my dream, and it didn’t go too well. The guys were able to follow me through the crawl all the way to where it opened up into the first big room. Of course, I moved at a slower pace than was my norm. After resting for a few minutes I told them we’d have to move faster on the way out if we wanted to make it to work on time. Now, being late is an unforgivable sin for a UPS man, so these guys said, “Okay, lead the way.”

And I moved quite a bit faster, falling quickly into my familiar rhythm. When I arrived at the front end of the crawl I was alone. I’d expected the other two to be well behind me, so I waited for them to come out. They never did.

Not wanting to be late, I ascended the rope and climbed out of the small pit that formed this particular entrance to the cave system. And still there was no sign of my two buddies. So I waited some more.

The second part of this dream found me still waiting above ground near our parked cars when start time at UPS got near and I had to call the Center to let them know I was going to be late. Only… I’d forgotten how to work my damned cellphone. I was holding it in my hand, but I did not know how to make the phone call.

And I stared at the phone in confusion for the longest time, not having the slightest clue what to do. Then it started ringing. And I knew it was a UPS driver supervisor trying to reach me, but I didn’t know how to answer the damned phone.

And still there was no sign of the two guys I’d taken into the cave. And there I was with a ringing cellphone I didn’t know how to work, late for work, not knowing whether or not my two friends had had an accident back in that crawlway, and…

… I woke up.

Whew! I was SO glad to see by my bedside clock that I’d had a good, long sleep. It was safe for me to start waking up. I did NOT want to return to that dream!

Lost, in traffic

Last night’s dream (this morning’s, actually) was one that I have, with some variation, rather frequently.

In my dream…

I was trying to drive a former female friend of mine back to her home from some daytime event we’d attended together. Unfortunately, I was lost.

The streets down which I was traveling kept changing from those that I almost recognized as belonging in one city or town I used to live in to those of another. And landmarks kept cropping up that were clearly out of place.

My passenger was less concerned than I about the strange drive we were on. She kept pointing out places she thought she recognized and laughing at the weirdness of it all. And she frequently wanted to stop and explore some of the more interesting things we were seeing.

Me: I just wanted to know where the heck we were and how to get where we wanted to go. And the volume of traffic was so heavy that I was unable to pull off and ask directions or look for a map.

A Lucid Dream Storm

For the second time in less than two weeks I was hit by a major lucid dream storm. Just as was the first one that hit me on the weekend before this past, today’s storm was 4 hours long. It lasted from 10:00 AM until 2:00 PM when I answered a knock at my front door.

My “true” sleep segment this morning was also four hours long, from 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM. I believe it was my allergy-wracked sinuses that woke me from the sleep. I don’t recall any unusual, significant noises in the hotel at that time.

Rising from my pillow, I was intending to walk across the room and dose myself with allergy meds, but before I even left the bed I was hit by a powerful lucid dream. Yes, my eyes were sort of open, I was aware of where I was, what time it was, etc. but I was gripped by an intense dream. It was so so strong that I didn’t even try to put my feet to the floor. Instead I slid back between the sheets and let the process develop.

The first lucid dream was followed by another, which segued into another, and that into another, etc. At no time during the “storm” was I really asleep, but the dreams were so intense that getting up and moving around was totally out of the question.

Four hours later I heard some loud knocks at the front door. A member of the hotel’s staff was bringing me a package that the mailman had delivered earlier in the day. Luckily, I was able to rise and stumble to the door, though my head wasn’t fully engaged in what my body was doing.

This four-hour “storm” of lucid dreams was incapacitating. Thank God I live alone and had no outside responsibilities today. Being able to crawl under the covers and let the thing run its course is the only way to handle such a thing.

No, I don’t know what brought it on, but I suspect it was related to the allergy situation I’ve been dealing with lately. Last night I was tempted to double-dose the allergy meds before going to bed, but I went with a single dose instead. Tonight I’m double-dosing for sure. And we’ll see what happens.

Time Travel?

Finally the weeks of sleep deprivation and dream cessation have come to an end. Thank God for that!

Last night’s sleep was fragmented, as my sleeps often are in normal times. And my dreaming took place in the night’s (day’s: it was 4-hours long, from 09:30 to 13:30) second segment, as is usually the case.

In my dream…

I was waiting at a nondescript bus stop in San Antonio, just casually watching the traffic flow and passing the time. My attention was drawn to two delightfully restored old, very old antique cars that were moving along the street with the more modern cars and trucks. And I thought to myself in the dream, “I wonder what this all looked like when those old cars were new?”

In a flash, the scene I was looking at changed dramatically! All the modern buildings, sidewalks, and trappings of San Antonio today disappeared. I was standing by the side of a hard-packed dirt road, with a few small trees dotting the otherwise flat, dusty landscape. And on that dirt road, chugging confidently along, were the two old cars that I’d been watching while waiting at the bus stop.

Blinking my eyes to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing I found that I was actually looking over at the wall next to my bed. I was waking up.