Grocery shopping with a werehousefly

One thing I’ve noticed about my recent dreaming patterns is that the dreams have been coming in clusters. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but cluster-blogging is clearly a problem.

It’s been my observation that proper personal blogging, such as that which I hope to do here, is best done on a regular basis. Therefore, I’ve taken up the habit of recording notes about my dreams on paper. A phrase or two is all that’s usually needed to evoke the clear memory of a recent dream. And I’m consulting those notes as I write my dream journal posts. Hopefully this will keep the posts coming at a steady pace of one every other day or so.

This comes from Monday’s sleep. Even though it’s a few days old I remember it well. It deals with another strange grocery shopping trip.

In my dream…

…I’d somehow fallen into a living arrangement with a colony of werehouseflies. Yep, werehouseflies. Like werewolves, these were creatures that could appear as ordinary humans. But at certain times they would transform into big housefly creatures. I was an ordinary human, myself, and I had no idea why I was living with these strange beings, nor why they accepted me so well. But that’s how it was in my dream.

We were living in a large old house I remember well from Bloomington, IN. In architecture it resembled The Adams Family house from the TV series both in its size and general air of spookiness. When I lived in Bloomington, a family lived upstairs in the house and ran an antique business downstairs.

There was a large grocery store located across the street from this spooky old house both in real life and in my dream. That grocery store was the setting in which I found myself during the course of this short dream.

I was shopping at the big grocery store with a teenage girl from the werehousefly house. She was in ordinary human mode, but we were shopping for the house and we knew well what everyone wanted. She was filling our shopping cart with glazed, gooey pastries, but I was though we ought to bring back a more well-balanced, nutritious load of food. So I was loading the cart up with watermelons.

As we were adjusting the load in our cart so that my watermelons weren’t squashing her pastries, the girl was happily laughing her funny, buzzy little laugh. We were having a good time and our appetites were rising.

Before we made it to a checkout lane… I woke up.

Strange Grocery Shopping

Sunday’s second dream featured a very realistic (full colors, sound, tactile senses) grocery shopping excursion with a mysterious woman and her very strange daughter. This dream took place in two different settings: a large grocery store that seemed to be a composite of several that I patronized years ago, and the apartment of the woman and daughter.

In my dream…

I’d just entered the store and was beginning to move through the first aisle of groceries. There were only a few items I wanted, two or three small things, so I opted not to use a grocery cart nor a convenience basket; I figured I could just carry what I intended to pick up in my arms.

“Well, Hi there!” I heard a woman’s voice behind me. “Fancy running into you here!” Turning around I saw a woman who remained unidentified in the dream but was obviously someone with whom I had a very friendly relationship.

And, “Hi, hi, hi! Hee, hee, hee!” piped up the woman’s young daughter, who happened to bear a striking resemblance both in appearance and behavior to Radical Edward, the 13-year-old computer hacker from the Cowboy Bebop anime series.

It only seemed natural that the woman and I should do our shopping together. She and I chatted as we moved through the store and I placed my few items in her cart, planning to remove them and pay for them separately when we reached the checkout lanes. When we’d finished shopping she asked me to collect her daughter who had wandered away from us but whom we could hear laughing in another part of the store.

However, after I started looking for the girl her laughter faded away, and I was unable to find her. When I returned to the front of the store, expecting to find the mother and daughter together, I instead found them gone. And so were their groceries, And so were my groceries!

Scratching my head in momentary confusion, I saw the head cashier motion for me to come over to her. She laughed and explained that the woman had paid for my groceries with hers, and had left word that I should head over to her apartment.

The woman’s apartment provided the dream’s second setting.

When I arrived, she had my items setting on a table waiting for me. She also had a drink ready for me and said, “I hope you’re not in a hurry to leave.”

I stayed, and we got… friendlier. Then I woke up.

A flood in the laundry room

It is with a great sense of relief that I note the return of dreaming to my sleep segments. For approximately the past week I’ve been rather under the weather: not terribly sick, not enough to keep me from functioning, but certainly visiting enough unpleasant symptoms on me to restrict my activities. That nastiness appears to have passed, thank God, and things seem to be returning to normal.

During the week of illness my sleeps were nearly devoid of dreams, they were certainly empty of any dreams I can mention here. But now I’m feeling better, generally, and I have dreams to post. Today’s second sleep segment brought me a pair of interesting and unrelated dreams.

In my first dream…

… there was an episode of flooding here in the hotel where I live.

Noticing the unusual sound of running water outside in the hallway, I opened my door and saw a big water stain on the carpet in front of the laundry room. The laundry room, by the way, was situated next door to my apartment just as it is in real life. The stain was growing larger by the second, fed by a mini-waterfall cascading from the slightly elevated floor of the laundry room, which is one step higher than the level of the hallway.

Very curious about this situation, I looked into the laundry room (which, in this dream, was much deeper than in real life) and saw a plumber working feverishly with a big wrench at some pipes in the back of the room. “Looks like we have a bit of a flood here,” I shouted back to the plumber.

He turned to me and yelled back, as he continued to work, “And it’s a cold flood, too! I’m about to freeze! Hopefully I’ll be able to get it stopped pretty soon!”

Looking at the mess I shook my head and… woke briefly.

“One of Death’s Dreams”

To place this conversation in context, Walter is a former butler to the Hellsings. He has voluntarily allowed himself to be turned into a vampire, and has become a traitor to the Hellsing forces, fighting now for their destruction. In this scene he’s confronting Alucard, master vampire, and loyal servant to Integra Hellsing. Alucard and Walter used to be friends, now they’re mortal enemies.

When looking at these panels, keep in mind that though the dialog is shown in English it’s presented in the original Japanese format, it’s intended to be read from right to left.

Alucard: Look how ugly you are now.

Mind and body…

You’ve become DEATH.

Walter: I have!!

In the end, this world is just one night’s carnage-filled dream.

One sleep! One intoxication!

I am the ruins of one of Death’s dreams.

At the moment of this dawn, I’ve at last become the Angel of Death.

These panels come from the manga, Hellsing vol. 9, written and drawn by Kohta Hirano, and carrying an American publication date of October 2008 from Dark Horse.

Cold Storage, and Moving Furniture

My sleep was pretty evenly segmented today with one 4-hour segment from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM, and another 4-hour segment from 11:30 AM to 3:30 PM. And as is usually the case, it was the second segment that brought me dreams.

I woke from the sleep with clear memory of two different, short dreams.

Cold Storage:

The setting of the first dream was in the suite of rooms in which I now live in real life in this hotel on the Riverwalk.

As is usually the case in real life, in my dream I was using several different computers at home, some for this purpose, others for that. Unlike real life, however, in this dream I had several little netbooks. And for some strange reason, I was storing the netbook computers in my refrigerator when they weren’t being used.

The only action sequence of this dream had me walking to the refrigerator and sliding out the particular netbook I wanted to use from the stack of three or four that were resting on top of each other on one of the refrigerator shelves.

Moving Furniture:

The second short dream took place in some non-descript apartment in which I was living. Due to the fact that I had a roommate either moving in or moving out, it was necessary for me to move some of my furniture and “stuff” from one room to another.

I found myself rather sidetracked while moving some dresser and desk drawers by sorting through some of the knick-knacks I’d stored and had been saving. It struck me that I really didn’t need to be holding onto all the “stuff” that I’d been storing. And I was in the process of deciding what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to throw out when I woke.