Post Your Dreams Here

Last night I sat on the sand, and cried.  I can't recall that ever happening before.

Here's how I got to that point.

I left work with a co-worker (actually she was my ex-next-door neighbor, but let that pass) who was giving me a ride downtown so I could do a service call*.  Once I got downtown I realized it was pretty late in the afternoon, traffic would be bad, and I should just go home after my call.

But I'd left my car keys and coat at work.  Damnit, I needed to get back to work before I could head home for real.

I was in a restaurant along Seattle's waterfront, servicing one of their tape players.  I walked through the large elaborate red dining room overlooking the water, trying to find an exit, and some big party was taking place (politicians and officials) with everyone dressed to the nines (and me in my bluejeans).  I quickly slinked down a hallway toward the bathrooms, and there (finally!) was a door with a green EXIT sign.  I pushed it open and stepped outside.

It put me on the beach.  The door locked behind me.  I walked along the sand around to the side of the restaurant, but there were tall chainlink fences on either side to keep beach walkers from coming up into the restaurant parking lot.  The beach was wet and slippery and I slipped on some seaweed and got my pants all wet and dirty.  As I lay there in the sand I cried.

Then I picked myself up and started walking down the beach.  There must be street access SOMEWHERE from this beach -- even if I had to walk a mile in the sand to find it.  Then I woke up.

Lesson: Always remember your car keys.





* - For reference: One of my earliest jobs was for a company that did background music tape players for restaurants and retail shops. I was the national service manager, not the field service person, but I occasionally went with Bruce to get familiar with our clients. After that job I mostly had desk jobs, doing abstract paperwork, supervising staff of up to 64 people -- until my final job at the hospital, where I intentionally took a low-level service position with no supervisory responsibility. I went around to the various hospital clinics and research facilities, fixing their phones (in addition to doing some abstract paperwork). I was waiting the last couple years (and getting insurance) until I could retire.

Trying to remember one of my long, episodic dreams when I first wake up is like trying to pull a tapeworm out my ass. It keeps breaking off in sections.

The Self-Fulfilling Dream

Last night I had a short dream which, as usual, didn't make much sense. As best I can remember, I was on a cruise ship or something, and attended a lecture in a convention room. The speaker was talking about three things that didn't need to be lectured about: something like ear wax, nose hair and eyebrow shavings. She put up a chart on a tripod stand, which was three orange vertical lines, which ostensibly were created from these three elements, ear wax, nose hair and eyebrow shavings. That's it, that's the whole dream.

In my dream, I said to myself, "This isn't worth a lecture on a cruise ship, I must be having a dream."

Then the dream started over.

And over.

And over.

I must have experienced this dream thirty, forty times in a row. I woke up at midnight to pee, hoping the dream was over. I woke up again at 3:00 to pee & get a drink of water, and REALLY hoped the dream would quit. When I finally got up at 6:00 it was mainly to put a stop to this dream.

Last night I dreamed a dream I've had dozens of times for many many years.  I was in a warehouse full of record albums.  It's not a record store, but somebody's collection (sometimes it's mine).  It's in the basement of some building and the room takes up a whole a city block, 60 feet by 60 feet or so.  One whole wall, floor to ceiling, stacked one-atop-the-other, is Rolling Stones records.  Another wall is Beatles.  Part of the third wall is Moody Blues.  There's a whole section of blues, a whole section of New York punk, a whole section of German bands.  Hundreds of thousands, possibly a million albums.

Every release, in every version, rare and common, all jumbled together and stacked against the walls.  Not in racks -- just piled up on each other.


In my dream I'm fascinated by this collection, but I'm also horrified by the conditions of storage.  None of these records will be playable.  They'll be irreparably warped.

I think, perhaps, this dream was triggered by watching this yesterday:

Two nights ago I was in the forest, clearing underbrush, with my dad and a bunch of other guys (Boy Scout troop?) We tagged one big tree as rotten, then I moved on down the hill. I was off to one side of a small gully, when I suddenly heard cracking noises and the giant rotten tree came crashing down in the gully, narrowly missing me. "Hey," I yelled at my dad, "a little warning would be nice, like 'Timber!'"

He came down the hill to yell at me. But by then he was a grizzly bear, growling at me and showing his teeth.

"Hey, cool down," I said. "I was just trying to avoid getting squished." At which point a black & white polar bear came charging up the hill and attacked my dad.

Maybe it was the curry.

Last night aliens took over the Earth, and sped up its rotation. Clouds were streaming across the sky at 10x their normal speed. Days lasted only a few hours.

They also raised the water level, so all the valleys and low-lying areas were flooded. We people were stranded on the islands of the hills and mountains. The water was moving similarly fast as the clouds, so we were unable to leave our holdouts.

Suddenly we noticed, up in the sky, that it was no longer blue. It was gray and mottled, with craters, like we were looking at the surface of the moon. As soon as we noticed that, big graphite spheres started falling from the sky.

As they hit the ground they burst into several smaller spheres. Each of these smaller spheres rolled along until they burst open, revealing a tiny spaceship inside each one.

The spaceships opened up, and tiny furry creatures that looked like hamsters (wearing clothes) came out. They looked around in wonder.

I went up to one of them and tried to make contact. He allowed me to touch him, and then began giggling and rolling around. All of the aliens seems to be extremely happy and friendly, and

And I woke up.

Last night I got to eat and chat with Anthony Bourdain. I'm not sure how it happened. I think it was pure happenstance, both of us travelling and getting stuck somewhere, and choosing to eat together rather than alone. But there I was, and there he was, and we were discussing stuff like we were friends. I don't remember what we were talking about, but I remember he was his usual opinionated self, and I was not always agreeing with him. But even the disagreements were friendly.

I woke up feeling kind of shocked. I don't remember ever meeting a dead celebrity before. And he was a really nice guy.

I went back to work last night, as I've done periodically since I retired.  Sometimes it's on a volunteer basis (because I just can't stay away), sometimes I get paid because they forgot to remove me from payroll.  Last time I went into work they told me not to come back, they didn't need me anymore.

So last night, when I went, after a shower in the locker room before work(?) I found myself at work, dripping wet, wearing nothing but boots.  "Oh shit," I realized, "I'm not supposed to be here."

Much embarrassment trying to get back home without any clothes.

I ran out of melatonin this week, but I’m still having vivid elaborate dreams.

Must not be the melatonin.

I went into work last night, and the place was in an uproar.  Management had installed a new software package on the mainframe, and it caused everything to crash.  Our keyboards are all dynamically-mapped -- nothing displays on them until the keys light up -- and everyone's keyboard had "gone dark."

I started reading up on what the new software was supposed to do.  It was a UI that was supposed to make everything easier & more pleasant.  It played a little song, over and over.  It replaced screen prompts with voice prompts, in a soft feminine voice.  It provided built-in translation between several different machine codes so theoretically many different OSs could run natively.  A bunch of other stuff like that.

I said, "It looks like this software is totally unnecessary.  Why don't we just remove it?"

But no.  When it was installed, it intertwined itself with the OS so fundamentally that in order to remove it, you have to wipe the mainframe.  You have to re-install the OS and all programs.

I said, "Why in the hell did management think we needed this POS software?"

Somebody replied, "To try and fix the OTHER GUI Randy installed last week, which goobered everything up."

Then I woke up.

Thank god I don't work with mainframes anymore.

Why do I keep dreaming about my ex-wife?  And not just friendly dreams, but really sexy ones?  She's been dead eleven years.

Over the past couple of months I've had several more work dreams.  It's always some variation of my dream last night.

I was called into my boss's office.  When I got there the other members of my department were there too.  Boss announces that, as a cost-saving measure, they're outsourcing our department.  We are all terminated, effective immediately.  We can pick up a $50 termination bonus on our way out. 

Somebody is already packing up our desks, so we don't need to return to our offices. 

We are cautioned not to speak to anybody on our way out the side door.

Now, this happened to me a half dozen times in my career -- everyone I know in Technical Services and computer maintenance has been through this numerous times, it's the nature of the biz.  Some friends of mine are worried about it happening right now, due to COVID.  Sometime we're hired back on a consultant basis (no benefits).  Sometimes another company snaps us up.  Sometimes we go months on unemployment.

But I'm retired.  I can't be let go anymore.  Wish I'd stop having anxiety dreams about it.....

Such vivid, realistic, nonsensical dreams.  Wow.  Like movies.

I was just starting work (there's work again!) for a large nameless corporation (I think it was Disney, on reflection).  They showed me where my workgroup worked, a big faceless room full of cubicle farms.  Suddenly everyone said "It's Tuesday!" and started filing into a huge auditorium-slash-lecture hall, the size of a movie theater.  We had one of those at Safeco.  On Tuesdays we have a presentation from Microsoft, I was told.

Everyone was getting settled in the auditorium, when a curtain opened on the side of the auditorium.  Everyone had to swivel in their seats to look sideways.  Apparently this was unexpected.

On the screen that filled the wall, a couple Microsoft employees were sitting in what appeared to be a lunchroom or break room.  They looked startled to see us.

"Judy is sick with COVID," one of them said.  "There won't be any presentation today."  Everyone in our auditorium apparently already knew Judy was sick with COVID, in fact she was in Intensive Care and might not survive.  Lots of whispering about how sick she is, and how terrible that she's got COVID.

"Wait a minute," I said, finding my voice.  "You've got a whole auditorium of people, 600 people, waiting for a presentation from Microsoft -- and it's called off without notice because somebody's sick?"

Everyone looked at me like I'd just spoken blasphemy.  "But Judy is REALLY sick, she could die."

"Microsoft is a really big company.  WE are a really big company.  How can the presentation that brings 600 people to an auditorium suddenly grind to a halt because ONE person gets sick?"

"But she's REALLY sick.  Poor Judy."

An employee came up to me in the auditorium, handing me two big 2" binders full of materials and several loose smaller binders.  About a foot of paperwork.  "You're new here, you don't understand, but you're been approved for the Microsoft program so here's a little reading material to get you up to speed."

"No," I replied, standing up.  "This is 2020.  Nobody hands you binders anymore to learn a program.  That was *SO* 1990. And besides, why are you people still using Microsoft?  That's bloatware, that's full of security holes, that's for the rubes and grandmas who don't have a technical skills.  Come on, people!  Look how disorganized they are, they let an entire presentation get canceled because ONE PERSON GOT SICK."

Everyone looked at me, horrified.  Then I woke up.

Who knows where the fuck dreams come from.

Last night I had a pet gorilla.  He was friendly and well behaved, but he showed me a big wooden coin, and indicated he had been using it to wipe his ass.  I noticed it was smeared with gorilla poop.  Then I noticed the sink was covered in gorilla poop too, and the carpet, and the walls.  I started washing up the mess, and rueing my choice of a companion animal.

I need help I think.

Sometimes you have to get up just to pull the plug on a dream. Last night I worked for a company that had figured out a way that oil paintings could move. The scene would change over a couple seconds, on a loop, and you could walk right up to the painting and see brush strokes and everything, but it still moved. It was quite cool.

Unfortunately the brains behind this innovation had left the company. They were forming a new company, or retiring, or something. The remaining executives called a company meeting in the auditorium to announce their strategy for moving forward, marketing this technology they had, even though none of them really knew how it worked.

After a few introductory remarks, the executives started singing and dancing, badly, about the virtues of this technology. It was awful and amateurish. Several of us laughed out loud at how stupid this presentation was. Who wanted to see a bunch of middle aged men and women, who were not singers and dancers, sing and dance about a painting technology. I noticed several employees a few rows in front of me grab their coats and begin leaving. Soon the entire auditorium was jeering and leaving en masse.

Last night, for the second night in a row, I met with a bunch of people I went to school with, people I haven't thought about in fifty years. We meet up at a bar or a restaurant or something, and talk about old times and what we've been doing in the meantime -- even though they don't look age-progressed, they look like I remember them.

Then suddenly I realize we're all sitting together, these strangers who haven't seen each other in 50 years, and none of us are wearing masks! Suddenly I get very scared and realize the situation is entirely unsafe... then I wake up.

I guess this mask mandate is finally starting to become internalized.

I'm back at work, they call an executive meeting and (for some reason) I'm expected to be there.  The CEO announces he's been notified there will be a group of protestors coming to our building to cause a ruckus and get on the news.  We're to quietly let people go home and avoid the messiness.

I go back to my floor and tell everyone, and they quickly shut down computers, pull on their coats and head for the stairs and elevators.  As the first bunch of us reach the lobby, there are hundreds of people milling about, and I realize I don't know if they're all employees or if they're some protestors mixed in.  Suddenly a guy in a black t-shirt and a black pith helmet comes up to me and says, "I'm Jeremy Campbell, you can say today you met me.  I'll be the guy that takes down the corporate infrastructure and gives society back to the people."

I nod and smile, and say to myself, yeah right.  Good luck with that bucko.

Suddenly a robot appears on the floor, a big boxy thing with angled sides.  Looks like an oversized Battle Bots robot.  It scoots around the floor, scaring people out of its path, until is finally targets a coin-changing machine in the lobby.  It rams the machine, knocking it over, and then kind of rips it open.  Coins fly everywhere.

I think to myself, this isn't the main event: this is a distraction.  There must be something big happening elsewhere.

Then I think to myself: what do I care?  I'm retired.  Why don't I just slip out and go home.  I can watch events unfold on the TV from the safety of my house.

Then I woke up.

Last night I finally retired.  Or more accurately, in my dream I finished my assignment.

I worked for some kind of spy organization.  My final assignment was to break a vicious cycle that had risen up, where employees had to shoot some paper targets in order to advance, but like Scientology, as you got close to finishing the levels they laid in front of you they told you that you had to start over because the course had changed.  Apparently dozens of our employees were stuck in this "advancement hell" where it was impossible to graduate.

I discovered that the required high point total was arbitrary, it didn't matter how many points you had because that was not really the criterium for graduation.  I discovered that you could challenge the system with a question, and if you got the question right they had to graduate you.  Shades of the Kobayashi Maru!

Anyway, I challenged the system and won, and thus beat the system.  Despite a mountain of work left undone on my desk, I was told I was done and had retired.

I went looking for my wife to tell her.  I found her lounging on the beach (this was some exotic beach on the Mediterrarean).  She said, "So what're you going to do next?"

I realized I hadn't really thought about being retired.  I could travel the world -- but no, I hated traveling.  I could sit down and write my memoirs -- but no, I had nothing to say.  I could start a consulting business -- but no, I was tired of the workday grind.  What WAS I going to do?

It occurred to me that I had some ideas about retiring, just reading and listening to music and enjoying myself.... and then I woke up.

I wonder if it was possible to record and replay your dreams, whether anybody would want to?

Last night I took a couple Exedrin PM, to make sure I slept soundly (arthritis has been waking me up, and I'm not swimming this morning).  I went to bed at about 7:30pm and woke up about 6:00am, having peed only once at 11:00pm.  That was an EPIC sleep for me, who usually gets by on 5 or 6 hours per night, sometimes 3 or 4.

And I think the whole 10½ hours was devoted to one dream.

It was a monumental dream, lots of stuff happening.  It's slipping away from me, chapter by chapter, as the drug leaves my system, but I remember a gay nightclub with a bunch of flamboyant folk singers, I remember waiting for a friend of mine to show up but he never did, I remember making a new friend who had very nice breasts (she showed me), I remember looking for my car down at the waterfront when I couldn't remember where I parked (it was my old car without remote unlock), I remember taking a ferry ride, I remember swimming in the ocean (again), I remember being back at school.

If I could watch that 10-hour movie again, I think it would blow my mind.

Last night my dad was showing me the system he designed for Tesla, it allowed a constant flow of fuel so the car could maintain speed without the driver having to press the gas pedal.

It wasn't until I woke up that I realized:

1. Teslas don't use gas; they're electric
   
2. Cruise control is standard on all cars, including Teslas
   
3. My dad died before ever riding in a Tesla
   

Last night I went into work to write my letter of retirement. I'd been working from home for a few years so everybody I met was surprised I still worked there. I looked all over the floor for my cubical, finally found one off in the corner with my nameplate on it but it was full of equipment. There was no desk or phone (?) from which to write my letter. I went looking for a phone. Actually I went looking for a phone CABLE as the first step to plugging in a phone, but all I could find was short little 3" cables or the 4-conductor wires that went between the handset and the phone, not the 6-conductor wires needed to plug a phone it. I looked everywhere and nowhere was there a damn phone cable. How the hell was I going to write my letter of resignation without a phone cable?

Last night I was at work when a young woman marched into the room and announced she had planted a bomb.  She was carrying a tiny pistol, looked like a cap gun.  I surreptitiously crept to the back of the room and hid under a desk, not wanting to be in any line of fire.  The woman marched right back to me, and started following the circuit on a giant circuit board I was laying on, trying to determine, I dunno, how to cut the alarm system or something.  I lay very still and didn't make eye contact, not wanting to engage with her.

Shortly an armed guard entered the room, and the woman surrendered without resistance and was led away.

I told the guard, as he was leaving, "Don't forget about the bomb she planted."  He left with her.

I told the people in the room, "She said there's a bomb."  Nobody seemed concerned.

I left the room and started walking down the hall, which had turned into a mall walkway (with storefronts).  Suddenly there was this huge explosion, and giant balls of flame came out of the room/storefront I'd just left.  I thought to myself, all my co-workers just died.  I TOLD them there was a bomb!

Quote :

Too much melatonin can have the opposite effect of its intended purpose. It can make it harder to sleep because your normal circadian rhythms will be disrupted.

An overdose can also leave you feeling groggy and sleepy during the day and give you nightmares or extremely vivid dreams at night.

OMG yes.  I started taking two 3mg melatonins at bedtime about a year ago, to help me fall asleep (arthritis). 

Quote :

Medications that lower blood pressure, such as calcium channel blockers and beta-blockers, may reduce your body’s natural production of melatonin.

It worked -- but the dreams have been EPIC.  Not in a bad way -- I kinda enjoy the 6-hour movies, even if I forget them within 5 minutes of awakening.

I finally ran out of melatonins last night, and bought some more today.  I took two without looking at them...  The new bottle is 10mg pills!  So I took more than 3x my normal dose.

We'll see what the cinema holds tonight.  Tomorrow I drop back to a singe pill.

If I wake up.  (Website says more than 30 "may be dangerous" but test subjects had the same symptoms as on placebos, so...)

20mg of melatonin had no noticeable deleterious effect. Still, I'm taking single pills from now on.

Couple of nights ago, Wednesday morning, I was having a dream that my sister was sitting on me. I tried to get up, to throw her off me, and found I could not rouse my body to move. I made Herculean efforts to sit up, and finally managed to break the paralysis and in the process woke up. Sleep paralysis. Weird sensation.

But that was before the melatonin overdose.

I've been taking melatonin almost every night for longer than I can remember, but I don't think it affects my dreams. I used to take 10mg pills, but the last time I went to the drug store I bought 5mg, and one of those seems t put me away with no trouble.

I do think I remember my dreams more often these days, but I think that's the meditation, not the drugs. Not that the dreams are bad, I just remember them more often when I wake up. I used to go for months or even years without remembering a dream. Now I'm remembering one every few days.