Post Your Dreams Here

Last night I had to take the SATs, but I had neglected to study so I wasn't expecting to do very well.  I surprised myself by finding a raisin in the first question, which allowed me to make raisin bread, which was an unexpected win.  The next couple of questions were totally opaque to me -- there were like three pages of description of a Greek play and I was supposed to deduce the motives of the lead character.

All the time I was reading this, I was sitting at a picnic table in the break room at work, with my arch nemesis Dean sitting across from me.  He was my supervisor on my very first job, in a warehouse, and he was a sadistic bastard.  He made the job miserable by using the little authority he had to make us miserable.  Incidentally, I returned to that warehouse about ten years later, after I was working an office job and had bought a house, and Dean was still working there!

Anyway, in my dream Dean kept interrupting my reading, asking me dumb questions about it and generally being a dick.  I told him to please shut up, then I told him to fucking shut up, and finally I yelled at him(!) to "GET OUT!"

That last part was out loud.  It woke me up.

Another recurring theme in my dreams, for years, has been "the bathroom break." In my dream I need to pee but cannot find a bathroom.

Or, if I'm in a modern office building (as many of my dreams are) I find a restroom behind an unmarked door but all the porcelain has been removed. No sink, no toilet. Just some bolt holes in the floor. Not even a 3" toilet pipe I could try to hit.

This wakes me up, every time, so I can get up out of a sound sleep and not pee the bed. I'm always relieved to find working facilities in my home.

Funny how the brain works.

This morning I had an odd dream, something I can't recall(?) ever dreaming before: I was training to become a secret agent.

I was at some agency's headquarters, attending lectures and taking tests, in preparation for becoming a spy. I was only a few days into the program. Our class was interrupted by a gruff uniformed sargeant, looking for volunteers to guard a Russian double agent who would be visiting the US.

I immediately became suspicious. They wouldn't send a trainee on such an important job. Unless they were expecting some kind of incident and need cannon fodder.

I did not volunteer.

Instead the sargeant picked me unilaterally, and told me to report to his office at 0700. I panicked.

I went to my supervisor, a power-hungry obsequious prick and told him about this important job he needed to volunteer for. I wheedled and cajoled him into taking the assignment.

I didn't feel a whit of guilt.

A friend and I were waiting in the immigration office, in line to talk to a Mexican official about immigrating to Mexico. When we were finally called into his office, he started to tell us that immigration policies had been tightened, and only certain candidates were even being considered.

I said, "You mean people like us, who have vast friendship networks in the country, who already have a place to live and a job waiting. People like us who are fluent in the language."

The agent nodded and walked out.

I don't know a word of Spanish. I don't know anybody who lives there. What an odd thing to dream about.

After the long 3-day 4oJ holiday, I marched into by boss's office and announced I'd decided to retire.  Or stop coming in on a volunteer basis.  I was tired of working and wanted my life back.

He said, "With all the work we have ahead of us, we were thinking just the opposite."

I pointed at my office, which was half of a room I shared with him.  I said, "If I retired you could take over this whole office.  It'd be fabulously big."

He said, "We are so busy we need every hand on deck."

I said, "I'm old.  My joints hurt.  I can't do the walking (8-10 miles everyday) that is required.  You should hire or promote somebody younger with more energy."

He glared at me.  Then started looking through the reference books in my office (including an 1176-page dictionary of electronic terms [that I really had]), and looking at my windows, and thinking about how he could re-arrange things....

I was at work, and needed to take a shower because I was all hot and sticky. I found the shower, off in one corner of the floor, but realized it didn't have any shampoo or a towel. I checked the pharmacy next to the shower, but all they had was pharmacy stuff: band-aids, deodorant, greeting cards.

So I decided to run out to the nearest store. Found a store down the block, but picking up some shampoo and a towel I realized I had gym shorts on and didn't have my wallet. I'd have to go back to the office to get my wallet so I could pay for everything.

On my way, I felt something move in my hand. The scrub sponge in my hand wasn't a sponge at all, but a tiny baby deer. It'd been too scared to move earlier. It looked at me with big frightened eyes, so I spoke to it soothingly and set it down on the sidewalk, where it ran away. Then I noticed the towel I'd bought was actually a polyester tie, and that wasn't going to absorb ANY water. Boy, what a disastrous shopping trip. When I got back to the office, my boss was standing by the shower, very angry because I'd left it running all this time. It was just spraying onto the carpet, and now there was a huge puddle on the carpet.

OMG what an epic dream.

It started -- or the first piece I remember -- with a stage presentation on a cruise ship.  The entertainment director had designed these ball gowns that changed color, depending on the movements of the dancers.  He had about twenty white haired old ladies who danced around in unison, in synchronized dances, so their fluffy ball gowns were constantly changing colors, like a bouquet of color-changing flowers.  It looked like a scene out of "Fantasia."

Then the action shifted to a story about a sailor.  There was some kind of projected image trickery where actors appeared outside on the deck, then "crashed" through the windows and were live on stage.  It was quite well done.  There was an elaborate storyline but I forget what it was.

The part that woke me up was the third part: a tribute to me.  One of the dancers turned out to be my ex-wife, and she started talking to me.  It was amazing seeing her alive again.  The stage actors re-enacted some scenes from our lives together, things we'd done together.  It was amazing the level of detail on their re-enactments.  Then they brought in actors playing our parents -- her parents looked EXACTLY like they did in real life.  I could tell by the way they moved though that they weren't really them.  The woman they brought in to play my mother wasn't realistic at all; don't know what they used for reference material, but she never looked that haggard and old.  They brought in dogs to represent dogs we'd had in our lives: the dog I grew up with, the mutt we'd first gotten, the cocker spaniel we loved so much.  They were each very close analogs, and the cocker was cute, but she had bits of black in her coloration instead of white & brown (only) like Sophie.

As this "This is Your Life" pageant was playing out in the ship's ballroom, I slowly realized my ex-wife was being played by an actress.  She was SO GOOD I was totally convinced it was her.  I had to leave the auditorium when I realized this, and go take a shower(?)  When I came back, the audience was still sitting in the movie theater seats(?) waiting for the show to resume.  I peeked through the curtains and told the stage director I was THIS CLOSE to walking out there, still nude and dripping wet.

We agreed that wouldn't be a good idea, but somehow they convinced me to tell the REAL story of my mother, why the actress hadn't been convincing.  I sat down on stage in a towel and began describing her vibrancy, her ready laugh, her zeal for exercise.  And how, from a first stumble on one of her daily 2-mile walks, through EIGHT LONG GRUELING years, she gradually lost the use of all of her voluntary muscles. After about four years of imperceptible decline she had to start using a walker to get around.  A year after that she was in a wheelchair.  A year after that she couldn't get herself around at all, and could no longer reliably feed herself.  We moved her into assisted living, because my dad could no longer get her to the bathroom -- although she weighed only 120 pounds, it wasn't safe for an 85-year old man to be carrying her around.  In assisted living, none of the caregivers had time to read to her -- she'd always read 2-3 books per week -- so I started renting books-on-CD for her.  She went through them voraciously (4-10 per week), and was eager to discuss them in detail with me when I visited her every day or so.  A lengthy biography of Abraham Lincoln, books about cutting edge science, historical novels, even a couple romance novels (when I couldn't find anything else at the library).  She must've read fifty books in the assisted living home, and could remember every single one of them.  There was one romance novel that, she said, had some "spicy bits."  She said she liked that!

Gradually, after another year and a half of 24-hour care, she could no longer communicate.  The muscles controlling her tongue and voice box were no longer following her direction, and all she could manage was make strangled moans.  She still followed every conversation in the room, and followed us with her eyes.  We could ask her questions, but she had trouble making her answers understood.

A couple months later, she couldn't even sit up in a chair anymore.  They moved her to a hospital bed, which they brought into her room.  She had to be turned every couple of hours to avoid bedsores, and was catheterized.  One day when I was visiting her, she croaked out -- repeating it several times until I understood -- "I.  Want.  To.  Die."

I told her, "I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do."  There was no machine keeping her alive that we could unplug.  With a pet it's considered merciful to have them "put down" when their quality of life suffers, but with humans that would be illegal.

Finally, after about 6 long weeks of laying there motionless, the whole family came together to visit her, and afterward trooped down the hill to a Thai restaurant.  As our food arrived, I got a phone call from the facility letting me know that she'd passed away.  We had our food boxed up to go, and went back to the care center.  My dad kissed her cold lips.

I always suspected -- but couldn't prove (and wouldn't want to) -- that one of her caregivers aided her transition while we were out of the room.  If so, it was a mercy.

There wasn't a dry eye in the theater as I finished my story -- and then I woke up.

I know why I dreamed this.  I kept thinking that she would have LOVED to meet my grandson today, and the whole time I was holding him I was sorry she never got the chance.

I got a new penis last night. It was longer, and browner, and slightly more pointed than my old one.

I couldn't wait to try it out.

I was at work, doing something in the realm of testing/quality assurance for an aeroplane. (I have never done anything like that, but the details of what I was doing were a bit fuzzy). It was really urgent to do this, because the plane was going to fly tomorrow, and we suspected there was something wrong. Anyway, at pretty much the last minute, we discovered for sure that if the plane did take off, at some point later, the wings would fall off in mid-air. So we were able to stop the test flight and nobody got hurt. Then there was a meeting with senior management, and they were very upset about the whole thing. But we could barely speak to them, because we were so happy, laughing and high-fiving and such, because we had managed to stop the flight.

I have no idea what that was all about.

Last night my ex-wife and I were goofing around, watching a movie or something. We got to wrestling, and one thing led to another....

I woke up just as my penis was entering her. Damn!

My ex was difficult to live with and I'm glad I divorced her, but she WAS a lot of fun in bed, I have to admit. I once estimated we'd made love 10,000 times in the 14 years we were together.

If you do the math, that's a lot.

Last night I was compiling an English - Chinese translation dictionary, and had almost all of the entries ready, printed on little pillows the shape of pills, about eight inches long. The 3-4 character Chinese ideograms were in red stitching against the brown pillows.

As I neither spoke nor wrote Chinese, I had a native speaker assisting me.

He startled me by asking what I was going to do about formal Chinese. Apparently everything I'd collected was conversational Chinese, 2-3 characters per English word. There was another more formal Chinese, used in official documents and solemn writing, which would be 6-10 characters per word. It was much more contextual and indirect.

The prospect of needing another several thousand brown pillows woke me up.

Dreams are the brain's screen-saver.

Dreams clean out the brain by firing it in random patterns, preventing memories made during the day from "burning in" too deeply and damaging previous memories.

"Bolo"

Last night a black hole flew past our Sun at approximately 32% the speed of light.  The black hole, a comparatively small one which has been nicknamed “Bolo,” was five times as massive as our Sun and about the size of a bowling ball.  Because it came from beneath the elliptic of our solar system, no planets were affected by its trajectory.

However, the black hole’s path took it very close to our Sun, inside the orbit of Venus.  Although it flew past the Sun in less than two minutes, its gravitational wake slightly disrupted our Sun’s orbit.  Scientists estimate the Sun was pulled 1.8º out of its previous orbit.

Although small, this perturbation will have long-ranging affects for our solar system.

Planet dynamicists are still calculating the exact timing, and the exact effects of this change, but preliminary indications are that it will be catastrophic.  In approximately 5600 years, our Sun’s closest planet, Mercury, will crash into the Sun.  In approximately 2.3 million years, Venus will be catapulted out of the solar system altogether.

The third most-distant planet, us, has entered an elliptical orbit that is several times the eccentricity of our previous orbit.  Over time—scientists estimate several thousand years—this will lead to exaggerated seasons, with six months of the year being 2-3 times warmer than now, and six months being colder.  Scientists are still calculating out their future predictions, but so far it does not appear that the Earth’s orbit will become unstable like Mercury’s or that of Venus.

However, the long-term affects of such variable climate warming-and-cooling cycles, which climatologists say could reach 100º extremes, have yet to be determined.

I think your unconscious underestimates the damage such an event would cause.

I was attending a big week-long technical conference, somewhere in the Northeast, for work. Most of the conference, attended my many of my co-workers, was way over my head and not related to my job so I'd kinda drifted in and out of the seminars. It was Friday, the last day of the conference, so when I woke up I figured I'd better get my ass in gear and put in an appearance.

I went downstairs from my hotel room, and hailed one of the shuttle cabs that took us to the conference center. I figured I'd hit the breakfast bar and get the lay of the land, meet up with my co-workers and decide which seminars I'd attend that day.

Once the driver dropped me off however, I realized I was still in shorts and a t-shirt from sleeping. Oh well, I'll sneak into the cafeteria and then back home to change.

But I couldn't find any breakfast. All the seminar rooms seemed to be full, people in suits listening to presentations -- and nobody I knew. Suddenly, I realized I didn't know where my group was meeting. I wasn't dressed to attend. I should get back to the hotel, but I didn't even know how to call the shuttle service (nor did I see any kind of concierge). Because I was in my sleeping togs, I didn't have my wallet with me to hire a cab, and besides, I suddenly remembered, the hotel was on the US side of the border and the conference center is in Canada. If you're riding the hotel shuttle cabs they made an exception for customs getting back-and-forth across the border, but if I took a cab, I'd have to try to go through customs. In my underpants. With no wallet.

I started going from room to room in the conference center, scanning the rooms for any face I might recognize, to ask if I could borrow $100 to get back to the hotel... Every time I opened the door, in my shirt and shorts, I got a lot of gasps and stern looks. I must've looked homeless. One room was all Japanese people listening to a Japanese presenter. Another had a film playing and it was too dark to see anybody. I started to lay down to try to think about a way out of my predicament, when the seminar leader instead guided me out of the room in no uncertain terms. I realized my underpants had come off, so I started to go back in to look for them.

Then I woke up.

Last night we were floating in a tank, a kind of clear glass aquarium floating in the ocean.  There were a lot of fish who came up to the glass to look at us, curious about these people floating in their midst.

My instructor was pointing out the fish, telling us what they were.  Several of the fish were juvenile sharks.

Suddenly I had one of them nuzzling my arm.  It had apparently jumped the aquarium wall to get inside with us, and wanted to be petted.  Sharks are intensely curious animals, and will "come up for a pet" in the wild.  I tossed this little guy back over the glass into the wild.

At which point my instructor reminded me that the smell of blood in the water triggers a feeding instinct in sharks, no matter how friendly they seem.  He mentioned seeing some open sores on my arm, and reminded me to be careful.  I looked behind him to see several more juvenile sharks in the cage with us, and a couple full grown adults.  How did THEY get in?

I suddenly needed to get up and pee.

Last night I had a long involved dream about polydactylism.  I even remembered the word in my dreams.

While waiting for the bus downtown, I noticed five people with severe polydactylism laying on a sheet on the sidewalk.  Their polydactylism wasn't just extra fingers: they had huge growths all over their bodies that looked like root vegetables.  I guess what they had was polymelia, though I'd never heard this term until I looked it up this morning. These people were sorta like Frank Lentini (look him up) but worse.

They were quietly talking among themselves, and their conversation sounded pretty intelligent and interesting, so I beckoned to the nearest guy and asked him about his disorder.  He was surprised I talked to him, but more than happy to engage in conversation.  We had a long talk about it.  At one point he shifted his position to show me a puppy he was harboring, a puppy with poly.  I was surprised, and told him I'd never heard of dogs having poly.  He said they were usually euthanized at birth.

Somehow I volunteered to drive with this guy way down south to pick up something, so the last half of this dream was me driving a couple hundred miles.  My passenger's affliction never came up during the long boring drive.

And then I woke up.

Last night I was working for some weird guy, kind of an Elon Musk type. He had me figuring out how to exclude fish from the English Channel. The plan was , once all the fish were out of the way, to fill in the Channel, so that England and France would be joined. (As they once were, I believe, long before England and France, the countries, existed.)

I've been awake for a while now, and I still can't fathom what that was all about,

Last night I was compiling a report on a fellow employee. It was in the form of a picket fence.

The reports for 2015 and 2016 were all done, and had been painted white. I could make no more changes to these reports without gaps in the paint showing. However I was still working on 2014, and only one side had been painted. I was looking for one or two more slats to attach before I could paint the back side.

So I'm in the Raleigh airport. waiting for my flight, but I don't know what time it leaves. I'm wandering around the shops in the airport, just killing time, when it occurs to me I should check the departure time. The ticket desk is way out a long corridor, out by the gates, so I leave my jacket and suitcase in the main part of the airport and begin the hike out to the ticket agent. When I finally get there I realize my ticket is in my suitcase, so I can't tell the agent what flight number I'm on. And frankly I don't even remember where my next destination is -- I'm on a long multi-city, multi-week tour for Cisco training. So I trudge the long corridor back to the main airport to retrieve my stuff. When I get there everything's gone. It's apparently been loaded onto the airplane. So I jog back out to the ticket agent, but at the last part of the corridor there's a locked door because they're departing.

I realize I've missed my flight, with all my stuff on it.

I check my pocket. Yep, I still have my wallet. I can re-book another flight, I can find a hotel, I can rent a car. I'm okay.

But, it strikes me, I don't know where I'm supposed to go. Should I just go home?

I am, afterall, retired I realize.


By the way, this exact scenario happened to me--minus that last part--when I actually WAS traveling for Cisco.

Quite often I wake up after a stress dream and can't get back to sleep.  They're usually work-related and silly, upon awakening.

Wednesday morning was an exception.  We were visiting New Orleans on vacation, and asked to drop in on a former co-worker who we knew lived there.  He graciously invited us over for dinner at his house.

When we got there he introduced us to his husband.  I didn't even know he was gay!  They showed us around their beautiful N.O. home, with a gorgeous brick patio, all festooned with lights.  The table was set for four, with fancy napkins and wine.  His husband was charming, and funny, and made us feel very welcomed.

It was such a "feel good" dream that when I woke up, I didn't WANT to go back to sleep!

Last night, I was scratching an itchy leg and noticed it made a funny crackling sound when I did this. I pulled back the covers to see why, and discovered it made sparks when I scratched my left calf with my left ring finger fingernail.

No other part of my body sparked. No other finger triggered my left calf. But that one combination created a lot of sparking, like my leg was made of flint.

I called out to my wife, who had gotten up and was sitting at a desk, to "Hey, look at this!" I sparked my leg a few times to make sure it still worked, and it did. But when she turned around to look, I could no longer make it spark.

And then I woke up.

Are dreams continuous?

Isak Dinesen wrote:

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. It is the freedom of the true artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of. It is true that if remembered in the daytime they will fade and lose their sense, because they belong to a different plane, but as soon as the one who dreams lies down at night, the current is again closed and he remembers their excellency.

Is this true though? Can one re-enter a dream after waking from it? I know Aboriginals claim there is a whole separate "dream world" that runs in parallel to the waking world, which one could theoretically dip in and out of at will. On occasion I have awakened from a dream to pee, then snuggled right back into the dream on laying down again.

But dreams from one night are never revisited another night.  Themes recur—working, running, being unable to find a door—but each night is a separate play, with different characters and scenery.  For me, at least, there is no one "plane" of the dreamworld.

Well, in answer to the query above, last night I had three different dreams--pee break in between--all part of the same overarching story.

In the first dream, I found myself in Raleigh NC on a Friday, on the last day of a week-long Cisco class (that part's based on reality). I had spent the week sightseeing in Raleigh instead of attending class, and now I was going to have to try to bluff my way through the final exam (not real). It didn't worry me however because I am retired and have no need to know all this Cisco shit (real).

Dream #2 was about returning to my motel room with my fellow students, and discovering the course materials included a huge 800-page manual, and four 2" three-ring notebooks. Everyone was cramming furiously. I'd never even seen these materials before.

Dream #3 had me getting to the exam room, which mysteriously migrated to my old tower office building in Seattle. The elevators in the building were confusing because not every elevator went to every floor. We took one to get from the lobby to the fifth floor, another to get from 5 to 8. The second elevator was not a passenger elevator, but some kind of freight elevator where we had to stand behind a bunch of equipment. Finally we arrived at the examination room, and it was full of equipment: computers, big black boxes, some amplifiers and a turntable(!). There were bins and bins of accessories -- patch cables, electronic components, adapters. We were going to have to BUILD something with what we were supposed to have learned in class (this part's also real). I knew I'd be totally lost, but I wasn't worried because I was retired.

This reminded me of a class I was sent to, which was all about this French telephone system Alcatel. All the TLAs (three letter acronyms) were in French. The Cisco world loves TLAs; some paragraphs in their manuals are nothing but TLAs! Well, the manuals for Alcatel were all in French (of course) and their hundreds of TLAs made zero sense to me. After three days of auditing the course I called my supervisor and asked to bail. It was an impossible situation.

Anyway, I woke up from the three dreams feeling like I was about to fail in something big and important. Despite being retired.....

I usually don't remember my dreams, apart from the odd fragment. But lately, the fragments have had similarities. Basically, I seem to be taking a lot of road trips lately.

Last night's was especially weird. There were four or five of us in the car, one being Charles Nurse, a bridge-playing friend who passed away earlier this year. While it was nice to chat with Charlie, the odd part was that the driver was Whoopi Goldberg. Not the young Whoopi (that I found oddly attractive), but the older, heavy Whoopi, who doesn't appeal to me at all.

Where were we going? Where were we coming from? I have no clue.