“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.

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.

The charging samurai

The dream that woke me from my second sleep on Monday didn’t strike me as being particularly nightmarish. Though, if it had lasted any longer, even a split-second longer, my opinion of it might be otherwise.

In this dream…

I was being attacked by a samuria warrior dressed in full armor of Japan’s early Edo Period. He was charging directly at me, running fast, screaming, his heavy battle-sword gripped tightly. Just as he came within striking distance…

…I opened my eyes and woke up.

Whew! That was close!

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.

A signal from beyond?

Last night’s sleep was long and deep, the kind of sleep for which I’m very thankful. It was slightly segmented by one of two lucid dreams.

The second dream of the night dealt with issues of a personal nature, so I’ll not go into it at any length here. It wasn’t disturbing or nightmarish at all, nor did it include anything immoral or illegal; but it dealt with institutions to which some folks have a strong personal attachment and against which others hold strong prejudice. It was very interesting and had some beautiful elements, and was one I wouldn’t be surprised to revisit in the future.

The first dream of the night was the more lucid of the two, though both were more lucid than my average, “run of the mill” dream.

In this dream…

…I was a (the?) lead scientist of a team of scientists investigating an alien artifact.

The origin of the material we were studying was unknown, and its exact nature wasn’t made clear in the dream. But we had come to conclude that it represented an active attempt by some alien entity to contact us, and I had decided on the most appropriate response.

Seated at a computer work station in our large, shared laboratory space, I typed my message to the alien and checked the monitor in front of me to verify that it was what I intended while the rest of the team watched the big, wall-sized flat panel display that mirrored my monitor. I hit the Enter key, sat back, and let out a sigh of relief.

Someone in the room asked, “What happens now?”

“Now,” I replied, “we wait for anything, a signal of some kind.”

Then I woke to the sound of what I interpreted as three sharp knocks at my front door. These weren’t “real” knocks; there was no one at my door. But it woke me to the extent that I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. Realizing that they were “dream” knocks, I applied head to pillow and reentered the dream.

What I saw when I returned to the dream was the big, wall-sized monitor display in the research lab. It showed two text fields: the top field contained the message I’d sent to the alien, and the bottom field was filling up with a stream of new symbols from the alien. Communication was under way.