Post Your Dreams Here

I have certain themes that often recur in my dreams, including working on a house I have built myself, and swimming in the ocean. Last night I took a break from the house and went for a dip, where an orca (killer whale) came swimming up to me and wanted to be scratched like a puppy dog. We cavorted around in the water, his big eye watching me and never missing an opportunity for a forehead rub when he could get it. It was like "swimming with the dolphins" except he was the size of a Prius.

My ex-father-in-law (with my first wife) was the gentlest, kindest, most giving man I'd ever met. I loved him almost more than his daughter.

So it was a dream that woke me up last night when he turned on me, banned me from his home, and said nasty things about me. I can't remember much of the context of this dream anymore, but that one aspect -- so out-of-character for him -- remains to haunt me. No idea what triggered this, nor what it means. I haven't done anything duplicitous recently.

It was the last day of the school year, and a huge storm was coming in. The students were anxious to get going, so we let them out halfway through the day.

A bunch of us teachers started packing up when a janitor popped in the door and reminded us, nothing should be left on the floor or the rats would get into it over the summer. So we started piling everything up high -- books, papers, electronics -- all while acutely aware that a storm was approaching and we needed to hit the road ourselves.

I finished as fast as I could and started packing up to leave. I had two dozen books to carry, and a sheaf of papers, and a winter coat. I needed to set this stuff down to lock the door as I left, but the hallway was already a foot deep in water. There was no place dry to set anything -- so I left without closing the door. I struggled down the hallway which was full of debris -- cabinets, desks, chairs -- and made it to the stairway. I needed to climb two floors of stairs to get up to ground level, to the parking lot, but the stairs were impassable. I had to climb up the railings in the interior of the stairs, while holding my 24 books and rolled up charts and coat. As I climbed the wooden railing, balancing everything I was carrying, the railings got narrower and narrower. I wasn't sure i would fit, and all the stuff I was carrying would fit, in my climb all the way to the first floor.

I’m so glad I’m retired. I dreamed this morning I was working on the loading dock at the hospital, and Jeff (a guy who used to give me some trouble) asked me about a shipment of his from November which he believed was incomplete. I said “November, are you kidding, it’s April! That was six months ago.”

“Besides I was only hired today, and my job is to replace broken windows on the loading dock. I don’t have anything to do with receiving.”

So he pulled a gun on me. I kicked him in the groin, slapped away his gun and pushed him into the dumpster. “Thank god I’m retired,” I said.

Instead of playing NPR to bring me awake in the mornings, I dreamed my alarm clock delivered pancakes. I would let it pump out pancakes in the morning until everybody was full, then turn it off. I could adjust the size of the pancakes so they could be arranged to make a blanket to keep me warm until I got out of bed.

I often dream of the house I grew up in — I think that’s pretty normal — but this morning I dreamed about the neighbor’s house next door. I’d only been in it a few times as a kid, but I know the layout of it and this was definitely it.

I was standing in the doorway, watching a big puddle (small lake) in the vacant lot next door. My dog was swimming underwater in it, with a duck. I told my neighbor that the duck and the dog had become best friends.

Beyond the lake was a hallway, and I could see the conference room at the end of the hallway because the lights were on and people were in there. I wondered if I was expected to attend that meeting, and if so how I would get there without getting all wet.

I just dreamed about a lunar sundial.  Not a sundial that operates from moonlight — they have those — my dream was about a sundial on the moon. To tell time. On the moon.

Which, um, wouldn’t work.

I often dream about things I am doing.  For instance, yesterday I bought a boxed set of seven albums on 4 CDs by Kai Winding (for $6.99!) who was this jazz trombonist (tromboner?)  I was hoping it would have some good solo jazz trombone on it, because I do loves me good jazz trombone (Bobby Brookmeyer, Wayne Henderson, et al.)  But Winding (who was Dutch) most often played with other trombonists; he did a famous series of duet albums with J.J. Johnson.  Come to find out this collection has three albums with JJ ("K + JJ" plus two more) and then four more he did with a whole CHORUS of trombones: three on two, four on another, and eight on one!  The 'bone is a mellow-sounding horn, not as biting as a reed instrument (sax) or double reed instrument (oboe, bassoon).  Therefore when you get a whole bunch of them together they blend into almost an organ-like sound.  Big band arrangers used to like to have a row of trombones up front for playing the smooth main melody lines, through which soloists could occasionally cut.  Real "velvet fog" stuff.

Coincidentally, yesterday I happened to play my Gilbert Artman CDR.  He had a band called "Urban Sax" where he took 30 or 40 saxophonists and did long droning pieces which sounded like they were played on a synthesizer.  Very otherworldly sound.

So last night I dreamed I downloaded a bunch of music files -- been doing a lot of downloading too -- and then had to identify the files.  The descriptions were things like "trombone trombone trombone euphonium mellophone tuba" and "trombone trombone trombone hurdy gurdy zither bass clarinet."  I was cutting the files into songs and using Shazam to identify them.  They were coming up as bands I'd never heard of, like "Eubie Fairbanks and His Twelve Horns" and "Anthony Darkins Big Band."  I was really enjoying hearing these really dense, really musically complex sounds coming out of my speakers.

Then I woke up.

Last night I was back at my first job, in a Formica warehouse, calculating out how many square feet of D-33 Sierra Matte the customer had ordered, and how many 5 x 12s had to be ripped in half lengthwise to make the 30 x 144s he wanted.

I told a couple of girls that worked there to be ready to build about 15 pallets for the order.

This was RIGHT out of my life in 1975 -- except it was ME building the pallets... and there were no female employees in the warehouse.

Weird.  Why am I reliving events from 43 years ago?

Melatonin gives me such detailed, vivid, weird dreams. I feel like my brain gets a workout -- even if I don't remember them the next day.

I take melatonin sometimes, and haven't noticed any effect on my dreams (which I very rarely remember, with or without drugs).

I was in a railroad yard -- dirty, greasy, smelly -- some employees alongside the track were choosing lumber from a railcar full of long cedar pieces. They had a grooved notch at one end, and a bevel at the other. These boards were handed forward, as the car moved along, to a woodshop at the front of the track where a carpenter was assembling wall display units for a new restaurant. These big shelf units were then transported to the restaurant on the rail tracks. The foreman was about 6'7" and very meticulous. His cabinets looked wonderful and smelled like cedar. I told him he did wonderful work but he didn't seem to notice me.

I rarely have sex dreams. I may have sexy dreams, dreams where I'm on a date or in a club. But actual sex is rare. I had a dream of being in bed with the prettiest guy I've ever seen. Pretty boys aren't usually my thing. I'm more likely to bed the rough and scruffy type. Even as I get older. This guy was downright soft. I remember looking at his hands in the dream. I could see his face too, which is rare for me- usually the harder I try to focus the more the person fades out. He had a lip piercing, a small silver hoop. It was weird.

Here lately mine are on the active side. And a lot of having to take the wheel of a moving vehicle.

I just had a nightmare so vivid it woke me up. I was visiting an acquaintance of mine and he was showing me his record collection. He had SEVERAL pieces I’d never seen before.

I determined, then and there, that I needed to start a database to capture the basic information off these unknown discs: artist, title, COO (country of origin), DOO (date), COR (country of release), DOR, label, catalog number.

I started thinking about expanding this database to everything in his collection... and everything in my collection... and everything else out there...

It woke me up. I mean theoretically the list of released records is finite, but it’s so near infinite that it scares me. I'm sure this dream was triggered by running across, yesterday, files for download of an obscure LP I used to have and had completely forgotten about. It was the second picture disc ever released, Saturnalia's "Magical Love." It's not a very good record -- and a CD-R of it doesn't capture its one claim-to-fame -- but I STILL had to download it and burn a copy.

Just had a vision of what the post-Global Warming world looks like.  Every nation had dikes around it, every state had dikes around it in case the national dikes failed, every city had sea walls, each neighborhood had high walls the neighbors were expected to maintain.

Seattle is a very hilly city.  Houses at high elevations were suddenly the high-priced real estate, while homes, even expensive homes in valleys and riverbeds were dirt cheap because they flooded regularly with dike failures.  Getting around town involved a boat more often than not.

In my dream, I was telling an acquaintance about my decades of having a LP collection in my basement, and he was incredulous.

I must have awakened five times to my alarm this morning.

Friday I got up and went swimming, for the first time after two weeks of pool closures due to the snow. In order to do this I had to set my alarm Thursday night, but I accidentally set Alexa to go off with her built-in alarm bells rather than waking me to NPR. I decided I liked this better. Donald Trump first thing in the morning is not a pleasant sensation.

So I lay in bed this morning for at least two hours, half-asleep and half-awake, waiting for those alarm tones. At least four or five times I dreamt they went off, only to wake up a little more and realize that, no, they hadn't.

So disappointing

My nightmare last night was an odd one.  Not sure I can explain it, because it doesn't really make any sense now that I'm awake.

I remember being in a big room, or a big container, and somebody was loading in a bunch of goods around me.  They started putting in some glass sculptures -- looked like Emmy awards or something -- when they first touched me they were cool to the touch like glass, but quickly warmed up and became uncomfortably hot.  As more and more of these things were piled around me I was in danger of getting burned, and began pushing them away as fast as I could.

I took off the blankets on my side of the bed.

I threw all my pillows on the floor.

These things were not soft fluffy & warm anymore but had become searing hot glass burning into my skin.  When I finally lay there uncovered for a few minutes, I began to cool down, and awakened enough to escape the dream, and said to myself, "That was weird."

As I lay there adjusting, Mrs NoCo started mewling in sleep terrors next to me, shouting and crying in her sleep.  When she went on and on I laid a hand on her hand (which was all balled up into a fist) and gently brought her out of her nightmare.  I was convinced she was being burned by glass sculptures too.

I had a dream Tuesday night that wasn't exactly a nightmare, because what woke me up was the usual need to go to the bathroom. But because I woke up while in the dream, I could remember it, or parts of it. And I'm pretty sure I've dreamt it before.

I was trying to arrange a trip home, trying to decide on which plane to fly, exactly what day to go, etc. For some reason I couldn't decide what was right, and there were other things that I knew I had to do, like organise a cat-sitter, and so on, and I knew I hadn't done any of that stuff either. And nothing was exactly wrong, but I was getting frustrated at not being able to make progress. And it occurred to me that Montez was the good organizer who took care of a lot of this stuff for us, and it was a shame she wasn't there.

At which point I woke up, and realized immediately that the trip "home" was back to England, which makes no sense because that house was sold years ago, after my parents passed away. But then I also realized that "home" was where Montez is, and I wanted to make the trip because she's not here, and I really want to be with her.

I've been fucked up ever since.

I quit my job last night.

I had been struggling mightily to get all my work done -- we're severely understaffed -- and as a result some of the paperwork was lagging, and general cleanliness was suffering.  To be fair, EVERYBODY in the company was feeling the budget pinch (half of the toilets were missing, and the rest were clogged).  But I was doing my best to keep our customers from feeling our problems, and thought I was doing a good job under the circumstances.

So when Jonathan, the obsequious little prick co-worker, called me into a conference room "to discuss my performance" I told him I quit.  I told him I had enough money to retire, I was only working for something to fill the day, and if he wasn't happy with my performance he could start over -- he could try to find someone willing to work as hard as I was working, for the insulting pay I was making, under the depressing conditions I was enduring.  It felt good to tell him to 'take this job and shove it.'

I started composing my resignation letter in my head, realizing I'd need to notify my higher-ups about the whys and wherefores of my leaving.  I pondered how much detail, how much vitriol to include.

Then I woke up.

Thank god I went through all this 4 years ago, almost to the day.

I was showing my dad around the campus where I work, and ran across Jerry Van Corbach who'd just spent the night reprogramming one of the switches to try to implement some new feature. It didn't work, and he was exhausted from working all night. I looked up and my dad was gone. I walked back to where the car had been parked and it was gone too.

"Damn," I said to myself, "I don't want this to turn into a dream, where everything goes wrong." I thought maybe if I worked hard to impose some normalcy in the story I was in, it wouldn't turn into another dream, so I walked back across campus and sat down at one of the picnic tables to listen to the musician. But he was a TERRIBLE singer, and by the time I was approached by a dog with a giraffe's head, I knew I'd failed. Yup, this has turned into a dream.

I went up to the 5th floor to collect my dog and take her home -- the office was full of people's dogs -- but was told that Hannah had turned vicious and destroyed some furniture so she's been put down. I was upset they'd done it without telling me first.

I went to leave, but found the car lot across the street had rented out my car to somebody. They'd been expected back at 2:00, but it was after 5:00 and they weren't back yet. I asked the attendant if I still had to pay for parking if they rent out your car without your permission.

Yep, I have some epic and interesting dreams on Melatonen.

I picked up a used science-fiction novel at a yard sale, called "Neverus." It wasn't even the whole book -- the back cover and god-knows-how-many-back-pages were torn off. Started reading it. It was about a race of aliens that was invading the Earth, surrepticiously, blending in, so the average person didn't even know aliens were among us.

Then things got weird. Turns out there was a "Neverus" video game, played on arcade machines or on your computer, and somebody monitored who did really well fighting the aliens in the game and recruited them to fight the aliens for real. There was a whole underground of fighters playing the Neverus thing for real, and aliens walking around in disguise, and simply by picking up this book I became a player in this global game of cat and mouse.

I was demonstrating how telekinesis works for a friend of mine.  It still followed simple physical laws.

Moving small objects was relatively easy, especially if they were slippery.  Turning a bar of soap 90º for instance, or making a scrap of paper or an ice cube on a table move.  It was much harder to move a medium-sized rock, and it simply wasn't possible, for instance, to stop a car in its tracks.

People could be influenced, but it had to be within their own logical free will.  I showed how I could make a little boy stop walking and just stand there.  I could make a man at the bus stop check his watch.  I could NOT make somebody scream and wave their hands and take off running.

There were also physical limitations of course.  I couldn't make an anvil fall out of the sky.  I couldn't make a hole suddenly open up in the sidewalk in front of us.

It wasn't magic, afterall.

Sometimes my Melatonin dreams result in images rather than stories.

Last night I was working on building a picnic table set, table and two benches, out of red diamond plate.  The design of the benches was sorta like this (without the hand rails):


Picture it made out of red diamond plate, with a black strip along the top that's maybe 4" tall.

The table looked a little like this. except red diamond plate with black bands on the end:


Incidentally, red diamond plate looks like this:


It was -- even in my awake state -- a remarkably attractive design if I say so myself.  Maybe not too practical though, as an outdoor set since I suspect water would gather on the seats and tabletop.

Last night I dreamed I couldn't fall asleep. I tossed and turned for hours.

I realized, after I got up, that it MUST be a dream because I was on a cruise ship somewhere in the Middle East, and our cabin was in the hallway next to a shopping bazaar.