A murder, a mess,…

…and confusion on the stairs.

Wednesday’s dream came in the final, short part of another segmented sleep. Both parts of the sleep were very short and very late. The first was only an hour and a half long, from 16:00 t0 17:30, and the second was two and a half hours long, from 20:00 to 22:30 hours. Even though the total amount of sleep was only four hours long, the second segment was dream-filled and restful, so I’m not going to complain. Much.

In my dream…

…I was part of a two or three man interrogation team. We were debriefing a foreign agent whom we had recently captured.

This was taking place, interestingly enough, in the upstairs apartment of a big, old Italian in which I lived during my stay in Indianapolis, years ago.

There were three of us seated at a long table in what used to be my bedroom. I was sitting next to the prisoner, the leader of our team sat across from us, and we had a third man in another room guarding the door.

No sooner had I made the comment, “This is all going too smoothly,” when a shot from a sniper rifle somewhere outside blasted through a window and blew through our prisoner’s head, killing him instantly.

I dove under the table and heard our team leader say calmly, “Let’s clean up this mess and get the Hell out of here. Right now.”

So I hurried into the front room where our third team member was standing in the middle of the most chaotic clutter possible. And the front door was wide open. And all of our gear (ammo cases and comic books) was scattered in small piles both in the room and out the front door. Stepping through the front door I noticed the women across the hall had small stacks of their stuff mixed with the small stacks of our stuff in our common hallway and on almost all of the steps leading down to the outside door.

When I asked, “WTF?!”. Lucy Liu (yes, in my dream, Lucy Liu was one of the women who lived across the hall from me) explained that they were going to have a yard sale, but it was raining and they decided to stack everything inside rather than out on tables.

On hearing this I shook my head and…

…I woke up.

A Thomas Dolby Soundtrack

My Wednesday dream was most entertaining, but since it involved many of my current neighbors I really can’t write much about it. Y’all do remember my policy in that regard, right?

What I can say is that it had three main scenes:

The first found me attending a party out on the back patio. I don’t know what was being celebrated, but the sun was shining, the patio was much larger than in real life, and there was live music being played by bands floating on barges down on the river below us. There were lots of my neighbors in attendance at the party, and we were all having a great time.

The second part was actually more of a segue between the first and third parts. It found me excusing myself from the party on the patio to take out my trash. I had an item to throw out that was too large for the trash chute so I started carrying it down to the dumpster behind the building.

Before I left the hotel I saw our building’s owner standing in a hallway with his face pressed firmly against a door I’ve never noticed. I said “Hi” to him, and he looked back and said “Hi” to me in reply.

Then the door before him just dissolved and he started running down a strange set of stairs.

The dream’s third part found me following him down, down, down into a sub-basement I didn’t even know existed. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs he was running and I was racing after him.

We entered a huge open room that was painted a pale yellow with one, broad red strip running along the base of all four walls.

“What the Hell is this?” I shouted.

The owner turned back to me and said, “Oh, I’m going to make this into a gymnasium. What do think about that?” And off he ran again.

As I continued to chase him, a soundtrack that had been playing quietly in the background of the dream began building in crescendo. It was Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.”

I woke then, and that song was in my head like an ear-worm for the longest time.

Those singing neighbors

Once again, last night’s sleep was seriously segmented. And once again, it was the second of the two sleeps that provided two dreams. While the second dream was short and woke me, the first dream was longer and more detailed.

In this dream…

I had agreed to serve as guide to a young twenty-something who wanted to explore one of Southern Indiana’s wild caves. This was a cave I knew well, though its existence was kept a a guarded secret from the general public by the caving community.

The guy I was guiding agreed to drive us to the small town where the cave entrance was located in a sink hole near the municipal golf course. Before we left, however, he wanted to stop by his house so he could tell his family exactly where we’d be and how long we expected to be gone. When we arrived at his house, he invited me inside to meet his parents. Yes, he still lived with his Mom and Dad and they were the “protective” sort.

No sooner had introductions begun than we were all shocked by the loudest, most awful sounds coming from outside. Immediately we all hit the floor or hid from the line of sight provided by the house’s windows. Everyone inside seemed terrified.

“What the Hell is that?!” I asked during a short lull in the cacophony.

“Quiet!” someone nearby whispered to me. “It’s those next door neighbors: those singing neighbors!”

Creeping to a window I looked out and saw them out in the yard: three of them, anyway. There was a tall, skinny, twenty-something guy with an electric guitar and a very large girl who appeared to be his sister. They were led by an even larger woman who must have been their mother. All three were in front of microphones.

As I looked, the mother shouted at the other two, “We’ll have to sang one Hell of a lot better’n that if’n we’s gonna make it on the Freedomland Show! C’mon, young’uns!” And the noise started up again, louder and more terrible than before.

This was a dream I’m glad ended.

Fighting off mutants…

…was the major theme of last night’s dream. In physical appearance, these creatures resembled classic zombies. But they weren’t the slow, shuffling, stupid zombies like those in the Night of the Living Dead movie with which we’re all familiar. No. These were fast-moving, evil, totally depraved monsters like those found in the Crossed horror comic book series.

This dream came at the end of my sleep, some of it occurring when I was in that “twilight zone,” trance-like state that sometimes comes before full wakefulness when awareness begins to rise. There was a respectable amount of lucidity in it, especially as I interacted with my house mates.

The setting of this dream was a flat farmland. I was living in a big, old, decrepit farmhouse I shared with three other folks with whom I was loosely associated. We weren’t related to each other in any way, but we were trying to survive in a world which was rapidly being taken over by the mutants.

Our only neighbors were a family of cartoon character types living in another big, old farmhouse about a mile or so down the country road our properties both fronted. For some reason I couldn’t stand the members of this family. And for some strange reason they seemed to be immune to the mutants’ infection. Even when bitten they didn’t turn.

Eventually the three folks with whom I was living became infected and began to change.

It became clear that the only safe place for me was with the neighbors down the road, but I really didn’t want to go there.

I was trying to decide on my course of action and was actually considering joining the mutants when I woke up.

“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.