Post Your Dreams Here

Toving is Norwegian for felting. What the hell is felting?

As long as it's not felching.

Quite often I dream of swimming -- since I swim every morning for exercise -- but in my dreams the pool has a hard surface, I can't dig my hands into it, I'm stuck on the surface.

Well I can't speak for anyone else but that's how I felt.

As a proof of concept I installed six D-cell batteries, in a holder, in my upper thigh, just below the buttocks, right leg. It hurt like hell but it allowed me to use the leg continuously under heavy exertion without tiring. I got aboard a ferry to Canada to have another twenty batteries professionally installed in my left leg by a willing doctor, after which I expected to be able to run or swim for hours without stopping. In fact, I didn't book a return trip back home.

I was back at the hospital where I worked, helping to unload a truck.  A sharp metal edge on one of the containers caught me in the chest, causing a small cut on my sternum.  I grabbed some paper towels to dab the cut, but it insisted on bleeding.  I walked in off the dock to the nearest bathroom -- which happened to be a women's room (I startled a nurse coming out) -- I apologized and grabbed some toilet paper and started looking for a bandaid.  The nurse meanwhile gathered up a half dozen of her colleagues and and on-staff doctor who rushed into the bathroom to attend to me.  I said that's really not necessary, and tried to flush a large handful of bloody toilet paper.  The doctor (a man) pushed through the nurses to come right up to me, pulled my white t-shirt away from my chest, and examined the wound.  He pronounced it nothing to worry about.

Then started reciting poetry.

That woke me up.

I was getting a backstage tour of the zoo from a friend of mine who just started working there. We were walking up a concrete hallway behind the cages, a hallway with about a foot of water in it. Suddenly I was startled to notice a big snake floating past.

Then another.

We rounded a corner and came upon a zookeeper who was standing at the back entrance to one of the cages, reaching in and grabbing snakes and throwing them in the water. "Gotta make room for new smaller animals," he explained. Suddenly I noticed other animals in the water too, from other open cages up the hallway -- fish, a squid that had attached itself to a small mammal...

"Where do they all go?" I asked.

"Down to the elephant pool,"' he replied.

"Huh! Umm... what happens to them? Are any of them still alive down there? Do they form a new ecosystem down there?"

The zookeeper thought a moment. "Nope. The elephants pretty much have a bonanza."

Snakes and elephants. There's an Adult Swim cartoon in the making.

Last night I had a dream which I remember just a bit of. Normally, I don't recall anything.
There was a large cast of characters, including a half dozen now-deceased family members. The rest of the people were just random. All I can recall of the story line is that my brother (who was not a mechanic) was in trouble because he had rebuilt a helicopter engine and it failed.

There was a new fad, having a 2-foot long piece of 1/2” aluminum square extrusion surgically embedded in your throat, just behind the windpipe but in front of your carotid artery. It was a pretty tricky operation, and those walking around with a foot of metal sticking out either side of their neck were pretty vulnerable to having it bumped or intentionally yanked.  Seemed like a really dumb fad to me.

Weird. Whatever it is that you are eating, drinking, or smoking before bedtime -- stop it.

Alas, I can’t claim any external stimulus.

Hmmm. Brain lice? Not trying to imply anything; just a wild guess.

Every once in a while I'll have a dream so awful it wakes me up in a cold sweat. Last night I had one.

Seattle suffered a massive earthquake, there were collapsed buildings all over downtown -- and as I still worked at the hospital, I was roped into being a "first responder."

I don't EVER want to do that.

Last night I attended the taping of Jean Stapleton’s new sitcom.  Sally Struthers was guesting on the show, a rare reunion of the “All In The Family” cast after the untimely death of Carroll O’Connor.  Everyone received a standing ovation.

Just a fragment of a much larger dream, now evaporated:

I was working at the hospital and it was in the process of flooding, like it was on a sinking ship. I had to hurry down a corridor, to help get people out. The corridor was carpeted on the floors, ceiling and walls. As I went farther and farther into the corridor it got narrower and narrower, until I was unable to crawl forward into it any farther.

Or back up. I was stuck.

But I still had miles and miles of corridors to notify. Panic sets in. I wake up.

Last night my dead ex-wife made an appearance in a dream. We were opening mail, and each envelope contained a graduation announcement about the children of friends we knew. Each announcement touted the accomplishments of these recent graduates: This one won a full-ride scholarship to Yale, that one got a Presidential Commendation, this one started a business in her spare time and was now a multi-millionaire.

You know, that sort of thing.

My ex was VERY competitive. I never felt like I lived up to her expectations. Of course she didn't either.

Woke up feeling kinda depressed....

In my dreams I am often nude, I walk through malls or on the streets and nobody notices. It's just one of those things.

Last night I was walking through the office of one of my old employers, and ran across a hidden room with about seven analysts working in it. They noticed I was there, and noticed I was nude, and commented on it.

This has never happened before.

I started talking to this group and discovered they were a secret division whose job was to find solutions to problems nobody else could solve, or to think up imaginative new ways to market the company. Everyone in the room had a super high IQ and that's why they were kept apart, in a secret room with no windows.

I wondered if they'd let me join.

I got up at six this morning to feed the cat -- she kinda insists on it -- then fell back into bed and had a long intense, very complicated dream. I can only remember bits and pieces of it. I was sent to a factory to resolve some problem they were having, and my solution involved assembling thousands of tiny cubes into these translucent walls to keep stuff separate. I had to be careful not to bump the walls I was building because they liked to come tumbling down.

Somewhere along the line I always was called upon to resolve a family dispute in the Zappa family. I got Ahmet and Dweezil into a conference room, without any lawyers, and they quickly agreed to put aside their differences and be one big happy family again. I was SO GLAD they decided to work together again.

As we were doing this, we kept getting interrupted by workers from the factory, who all seemed to be Hispanic with limited English skills. They wanted greater autonomy and more time off and health care, which I was in the position to grant them for some reason. I let the leader know (the guy who was translating for us) that the workers could have whatever they wanted, because we wanted them to be happy. He conveyed this to his workers and they conversed for a while, and then he came back to me and said, "Everybody has decided to leave and go back to Mexico, to be with their families." I was devastated that I'd managed to destroy the factory's workforce.

I seem to be dreaming a lot about reductionism lately. This morning I was assembling highlight reels of my best dreams, and I'd gotten the essence of each dream down to about 15 seconds. I organized my "dream essences" by subject matter, so I could play eight or ten dreams all at once and they all seemed to relate to each other.

I worried that some of the dreams felt a bit "out there" and didn't fit in perfectly with the others in the set.

Wondered if I should make a set specifically of "out there" dreams.

I spent last night building a 3-dimensional filing system, consisting of a hot air balloon-shaped list of linked names. Once completed and inflated, one could stand up inside the database and see all of the connections between each name and all the others.

It was very delicate -- the threads kept snapping -- and very difficult to lay out in 2D on a computer screen. But eventually I got it working, and with a font and resolution size that make it usable.

Last night I worked in a hospital or a morgue or something, we received a coffin containing a person who had been incorrectly declared dead. Our job was to revive him.

But when we opened the coffin, there wasn't a whole body in there, just some pieces of brain, a tangle of neurons, and one eye. We said, "This can't possibly be right" but the public relations person said "Oh yes, he's alive" and looked at the eye and said, "Mr. Pederson, if you can hear me move your eye."

The eye darted back and forth.

I said, "Shit, what do we do now? How to we revive a tangle of neurons?"

For the last three mornings I have dreamt that my alarm went off, I hit the snooze and went back to sleep -- and then it went off for real.

It's like déja vu all over again, man.

Last night I met a new employee at the company I worked for, a very attractive 20-something blonde.  We chatted and did some work projects together and she was very friendly.  I started walking with her to lunch and she kinda snuggled up under my arm, surprising me.

Then she said something about "father figure."  Fuck!  She's right, she was younger than my daughter.  Instant boner killer.