Satori, dreams — Stephen on December 7, 2009 @ 9:26 am — 1 comment
I had a doozy of a weird dream last night, but can only remember small bits of it, so here they are:
Some boyfriend and I had strange super powers that we were sharing, somehow activated by an ipod mini-looking device that would put both of us at the same time into the same robot. It was like I was both of us, but I was in control of the robot and was fending off all kinds of attacks, and it was fun even while it was dangerous.
Later it seemed that Madonna was my girlfriend, and we both had very similar powers, mechanical in nature. We were being chased by crowds and villains, and we were still fighting off attacks as she was coming to visit me at my place. Because she is Madonna and so famous, all my friends and people all around wanted to meet her, and I was sort of basking in and enjoying the reflected glow of her celebrity, but we never got to meet anyone because we were fighting off all these military style attacks all around us. Madonna told me that she was really born in another country and her name was not Louise, and her voice sounded like it was being run through a synthesizer.
Somehow a bit later in the dream I was having dinner with a middle aged woman who was talking about a couple that are friends with my parents. She made a big deal out of telling me that the husband in the couple was not monogamous, even though the wife was, and that this was their agreement. She said it in such a way that I could tell she didn’t approve at all, but still with a resignation about it.
I was on an island with two sides and parties on either side. There were people everywhere and a festive mood. Everyone spoke different languages but we were communicating well. At one point I needed to get from one part of the island to another, and I had to walk through a forrest to get to the other side. There was no real path marked, but I found my way to the other side and the cabins there. Somehow right at the end of the path I had to choose right or left to get to the village cabins and I chose right, but unfortunately this led to a very very steep incline. When I realized this was wrong, I turned to go up the hill in a shortcut , and found myself under a strange mesh, more like a parachute type material and below me was all sand. I somehow managed to climb up in between the mesh and the sand at this very steep incline to get to the flattening out at the top of this hill, but it was very uncomfortable and hard to breathe. Finally I came to the edge of the mesh and came out to enter one of the main cabins. As I was walking inside, a bunch of people were leaving to go to the other side of the island from where I had just come. I went in to the cabin and sat on a large bed with two guys that lived there and we sat talking for a bit about the party. Although they were mostly ignoring me. Then two other guys came in with a dog, who scampered onto the bed and peed on it. The guy with the dog was apologetic but only made a half assed attempt to clean up the stain the dog had left. At this point I decided to go back to the other side of the island where all the fun was really happening, but it was getting dark out and I didn’t think I would be able to find my way back. Nevertheless I headed out in that direction, and I kept passing happy groups coming back form the other side, asking them how to get there. They kept telling me to just keep following the path, although there was no path. I headed in the direction of the woods and suddenly a house was in front of me and I knew I had to open the door and walk through it to get to the path on the other side. I opened the back door and started walking down a hallway, when an old woman doing laundry spotted me. I started to apologize and explain that I had to walk through to get back to the other side and she didn’t say a word and so I continued through the house, and out a yard when I noticed that much of my laundry was there and hanging, waiting to dry. I realized I could not go back to the other side of the island without my clothes, and so I would have to spend the night on this side of the island, even though I had no cabin. As I headed out the house, back the way I had come in, the screen door slammed behind me and I woke up.
I had a bit of a nightmare last night, which is pretty rare for me.
I was deep in an underground school or camp or prison of some sort, hanging out with a rag tag group. We were sort of like a group of homeless people, rummaging around the debris of these subway tunnels and basements for junk we could use. The people running the place were thuggish, brutish types that were quite menacing. Two other guys and me were about to be punished for breaking some rule, some minor infraction perhaps having to do with some contraband. They had decided that we had to have our eyes put out. We were terrified, but going about preparing ourselves. I was very upset that this was happening, and I complained to someone who told me that for some ethnic reason, this rule didn’t apply to us. I spoke to one of the people in charge who gave me a note excusing me from the punishment, although the small gang meting out the punishment seemed unlikely to heed it. I kept avoiding the place where the torture was happening because I was worried that even though I had been excused and had my note, they would still grab me and try to do the same. I was with a small group, half hiding and yet still wandering close to the place where the guys eyes were to be put out, a group preparing their bed and station and moving things around. The scene was like a wartime, dirty makeshift hospital ward. We heard their screams coming from the other room and I was horrified and also relieved that it was not happening to me. I was filled with some shame for my special privilege, and anger at their stupid rules. We left after that to go out to a safer place while they recuperated. A group of “friends” grabbed me and let me to another part of the underground maze. It seemed that there was a real kind of cultural divide, and that I needed to go with them or I wouldn’t be safe. As we wandered from room to room, I noticed a bunch of malformed and sickly children that were coming and going, moving around everywhere or arriving by elevator down to the depths with us. Then the entire place seemed to tip sideways and we all fell to the ground, and then I woke up.
The world is ending. I am with my cousin Josh and another friend, and we are trying to find a good place to go and music to listen to as the world explodes. Chaos is everywhere and we are a little scared, but resolute and accepting nonetheless. We are looking for a place to be when it ends and steeling ourselves for what it will feel like for the planet and everything around us to crumble under our feet and for us to suddenly be in the vacuum of space. We wonder what it will feel like in the miliseconds before we cease to exist. Running everywhere, from place to place to prepare, but the event isn’t coming though we know it will very very soon. People are screaming and crying all around and millling about. It seems important for us to find good music we enjoyed to be listening to while we die. Various songs keep playing and then changing, and the music is coming from everywhere around us and is good. I really have to go take a piss and wonder if I will expire at the urinal. I am looking and looking for the bathroom but the first one is so crowded and disgusting I go looking for the one in another wing, but alas it is locked. After talking to a woman in charge who is dressed like a nurse, she finally finds the keys and opens it. I go inside to piss and wake up to realize I really do have to piss and so go to the bathroom.
I was walking in the woods with my grandmother….there were other people there as well, and then I was left all alone for a while. It was very green all around, and I noticed the pleasant smell of some of the plants. One in particular had a vague peppery scent that pleased me, and I tore off a leaf to smell it, but it was different than the scent in the air. When my grandmother finally came back, we were walking through the woods alone before getting on the bus with a bunch of other people to go back. The bus started back towards the community, and we were talking about her selling her apartment, and it was the apartment that I knew her having lived in when I was a small child. She was saying that she didn’t want to leave it, it was (grandpa) Joe’s apartment, and she couldn’t bring herself to. I was pointing out that it was too big and she needed to move on, and she started to cry a little, telling me that she had spent 2/3rds of her life there, how could she leave it. She said she had plenty of money and didn’t need to sell, she still had a couple million in an account somewhere. Then the bus we were in stopped in the community and Grandma got out and started hugging people with a great sense of fear that she would have to leave them. This Grandma in my dream was at about the age I knew her to be when I was a child, perhaps only 55 years old. Strangely in the dream, I was somewhat immaterial, as if I was the ghost haunting her instead of the other way around. She was talking to me and confiding in me her feelings of dread about leaving her apartment, but I was somehow of a different materiality than the group of people that she was worried to be leaving. At that point I woke up.
I was talking to my friend Troy about the next trip he was taking. He kept mentioning some obscure place that was in Antarctica and I was asking him if there were any people or civilization there of any kind and he said no. So I asked him what he would be doing there (and how he thought he could even get there) if there was no infrastructure of any kind but he didn’t answer. Later I was flying over the area with something like Google Earth, looking at the terrain, when suddenly I overshot and ended up on a cruise ship off the coast of Argentina. Friends and colleagues (none of whom I recognized) from some vast elected body like the senate were arriving and discussion the situation with the boat. Most of us hadn’t seen each other in years. The boat was apparently floating out to sea and we had to make some decision soon about whether to save or abandon it. A few of us were at a poker table, with the previous captain who was suddenly back. We kept mentioning that some who were elected as representatives to the boat (some friends of mine) even though elected, hadn’t been to the meetings in years. The old captain was recommending abandoning the ship and putting everyone in the transporter which was a big raft. We were waiting at the poker table for the other captain to get there to make a decision when I woke up.
I can only surmise that this dream is the result of too many people talking about Star Trek (which I haven’t seen) and of me talking about my upcoming travel to Europe with friends.
Satori, dreams — Stephen on April 11, 2009 @ 8:20 am — 1 comment
Time for another installment of “Stephen’s Dreams”.
As always, there is a lot missing, but here is what I could piece together after waking up. I was heading back to an old apartment that I hadn’t been to in years. It was in a very backwoods area, but not so much “rustic” as “redneck”, with dirt roads and screen doors and junk sitting out in front of people’s houses. My old “apartment” was actually a kind of freestanding two story building, and going inside it was like a hurricane had hit. Everything was a mess under piles of junk that hadn’t been looked at in years. I had headed back there with a group of people I had recently met. As they were rooting about in all the mess and asking questions about it, I found some old machine or something that allowed me to make two cars materialize in the street in front of the house. It wasn’t actually a machine, per se, but more like some technique I had invented (that required me to be back in this apartment) to make these cars come into being out of thin air. I had done this before, in the past (and to be honest, I am not entirely sure I haven’t had this dream before) and I was telling my new friends about it as we went on a series of rides to various places, always somehow leaving the car in some faraway place when we made it back to the apartment. This would of course necessitate making a new car for another trip or errand we had to run. One of the odd features of this ability to make cars out of nothing is that I had no way to get rid of them, so they were littered all around town and the police were on to me (since somehow the cars were registered to me). There were all kinds of tickets issued, but they couldn’t catch me. Another odd feature is that there was only one key to the cars that I kept in the apartment, and at one point I lost it and had to find it under a mountain of crap in the apartment. It turned out the way I was able to keep this apartment for so many years without being there is that the owner had died while I was living there, and no one ever came by to check on the place. But the neighbors were getting suspicious, as they had several times seen these cars materialize in the road, and they wanted a stop put to it. They called a cop in to investigate, and as we were leaving on one of our errands, he followed in hot pursuit. And then I woke up.
Satori, dreams — Stephen on March 28, 2009 @ 8:04 am — 1 comment
I had another interesting dream(aren’t they all?) last night. I wish I could remember it more fully, but all I remember is bits and pieces, like accidentally purchasing 30 discounted tickets to a George Michael concert and trying to sell them. Some of the people purchasing them were people I hadn’t seen in many years and didn’t even know well. There was also a life size replica model building of the Starship Enterprise that people were taking tours of. I was directing some retirees up the winding staircases of this building and helping to prep some performance for them by other retirees. And there was also a moment when I was lounging under a table on the grass with four other people. The three on my right were friends (but I am not sure who) and the one to my left was some really handsome guy I was into. One of my friends said something to him, implying he was straight at which point he smirked and kissed me. And then I woke up, alas.
Satori, dreams — Stephen on January 23, 2009 @ 9:18 am — 6 comments
I had an odd dream (aren’t they all?) last night.
A woman who looked a lot like Rachel Maddow was our new teacher in some kind of class. She spent a long time giving an orientation, then set up some kind of couch-like thing and had all the students line up to jump over it, one by one. This took a very long time, almost the entire night. When it was just about my turn to go, Rachel called an end to this and told everyone to follow her to the next room for some other thing to do. I stayed behind with my friend and we were complaining that it was almost morning and we never got our turn to jump. And we were complaining that jumping over a couch seemed like a stupid thing to do anyway, and why did we have to stay up all night to do it? Then we commented on how our teacher really looked a lot like Rachel Maddow and wasn’t that strange. Since I was still awake, I decided to complete some work for Rachel’s class, a task that involved installing some game console into my computer (even though I never play games on a computer). As I was doing that, my mom called and told me she was running for president and that she needed some help with something.
“Really?”, I said, “President of the United States?”
“No, of course not. Of the organization I am in.”
That made a lot more sense to me. I said goodbye and continued to install the hardware when I realized I had to open up my computer and put in some extra memory chip thing that came with the console. It was giving me a little trouble, and so I busted out an impression from Mommie Dearest and said to the chip,
“Why can’t you give me the respect that I’m entitled to?…”
Wouldn’t you know it, right at that minute Rachel Maddow walks back in and starts laughing good-naturedly at the sight, and then I woke up.
I had a strange dream last night. Somebody famous (I can’t remember who, but some sort of aging, annoying, rocker type with scraggly blond hair) and a friend of mine and I were organizing a house move, packing up all our stuff and loading it into a small plane. The rocker guy was getting increasingly impatient with our progress. As we finally got everything loaded and seated ourselves (with a few other people) in the small plane, we noticed that there was a thunderstorm appearing in the direction we were about to take off into. The rocker guy (who was also the pilot) barked a few orders at everyone and taxied to the runway for takeoff. As we started down the runway, we noticed a huge semi truck in front of us, which accelerated very quickly and took off into the sky in front of us. Then we took off and were flying behind it, and the storm seemed to be dissipating a bit. Then the bells of a nearby church rang (in reality, here in Cusco) and I woke up. Any dream interpreters out there care to take a stab at the meaning of this?
