Post Your Dreams Here

People speak of "spider bites" and "ant bites" too but the mandibles those critters use aren't really jaws/teeth.

I accept that it's common usage. Just seems physiologically wrong.

And attack dogs can and will remove a bite of flesh given the opportunity.

NoCoPilot wrote:

And attack dogs can and will remove a bite of flesh given the opportunity.

Well, yeah they can, they just don't unless trained to, usually. Dogs don't want to eat us, your average dog bite looks like just puncture wounds. (Don't get me wrong that can still be very bad.)

On the ant thing I say "sting." "An ant stung me, get the Benadryl" is a phrase I will utter many times this season.

Which is weird because to me it boils down to you need a "stinger" to sting.

All I can say is that I have encountered four- and five-foot rattlesnakes within ten feet of my front door. I have always been concerned about them biting me, but have never feared being stung by one.

_Howard wrote:

All I can say is that I have encountered four- and five-foot rattlesnakes within ten feet of my front door. I have always been concerned about them biting me, but have never feared being stung by one.

Well that's just silly. It is well known by almost everyone that snakes don't have legs -- much less four or five feet.

We do live near a nuke plant. You should see the three-winged hawks.

I have heard of "right-wing hawks" and "left-wing hawks" but I'm afraid that's a new one on me.

I dreamed last night that I was asleep, having a dream about being in a tropical jungle.  When I woke up from the dream in the dream, I was disappointed that I was not actually in the jungle but glad because I had been running from a black jaguar.  In my dream, when I was awake, I checked the house for large cats and, finding none, went back to what I was doing before I fell alseep.

Then I woke up.

Note to self: must watch Inception again.

Last night I dreamed Obama came to my house to talk to me (Secret Service retinue & everything), part of a "get in touch with ordinary citizens" campaign where my name had been drawn randomly out of a hat.  Instead of a smiling photo op though I spent at least an hour laying our specific policy initiatives he needed to implement to resurrect his popularity and his place in history.  I told him Teddy Roosevelt created the parks system, Eisenhower the highway system, Johnson the Civil Rights legislation and if he wanted to be remembered as not only the first Black president, but as a good president he needed to get going and fast on some bold policy.  I told him the elimination of poverty was within our grasp.  I told him the Third World had leapfrogged us in broadband implementation and we needed to catch up to be competitive.  I told him it was ridiculous to have "fast track" citizenship and green cards for engineers and intellectual property workers from India but not for teachers, engineers and construction workers from Mexico and Central America.  I told him Wall Street needed to be reigned in, outlawing derivatives and leveraged trading and synthetics.  I told him he was letting Congress obstruct him, and should use the power of the presidency, so enhanced and enlarged by the Cheney-Rove administration (he chuckled at that), to go over Congress's heads.  Try a nationwide citizens referendum, I told him.  I said he should put Citizens United to a citizen's vote, and then impeach Alito, Thomas and Scalia. I told him abortion is still legal and states should be forced to make it safe, affordable and available under the ACA.  I told him a couple dozen other such specific proposals -- in my dream they came fast and furious without hesitation.  He was quite taken aback, and said something like, "Maybe YOU should run for President."

I demurred, saying I was just a common citizen with no dreams of power.

Wow.
Talk about working things out in dreams!

I find it odd I haven't been dreaming lately. Not that I can recall. That's unusual for me.

Last night I dreamed I signed up for a music theory class at a local community college. On my first day of class I arrived to find four pre-school-age children sitting in a semi-circle on the floor, with tortillas in front of them.

The "teacher" of my class told me I was to sit down, crosslegged, on the floor and teach these children about rhythm. She dimmed the lights and gave me a microphone (that had a really annoying echo in the sound.)

I looked at her like she was crazy. I said, "Are you joking me? I signed up to TAKE a class in music theory, and the first day you have me teaching music BASICS to pre-schoolers? This isn't what I signed up for."

She said, "Just go ahead and try."

So I asked the class to pick up their tortillas and pretend they are drums. Count to yourself, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. On the count of "one" tap your tortillas. This is 4/4 time, the basis for most Western music. Almost all rock & roll, most classical music, most jazz, most popular music is in 4/4 time. The children were happily tapping their tortillas.

Now, I said, try counting one-two-three, one-two-three. The children counted 1-2-3, 1-2-3. This is "waltz time" I told them, and sang a little bit of "The Skaters" by Waldteufel and "Blue Danube" by Strauss. Waltz time, I said, is good for dancing because we have two feet and with three beats, we are always in motion to catch that third beat.

Next I tapped out one-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five on my tortilla, and sang a little bit of "Take Five" by Paul Desmond. I said 5/4 time was a little trickier, but it gave a great sense of unevenness to the music which jazz musicians loved.

I described 7/8 and more exotic times like 15/16 and 23/64.

Next I went into where you put the downbeat. We went back to 4/4 and I showed them how to count one-TWO-three-four, one-TWO-three-four. This is "Reggae Time" I said and sang a little example. Many African cultures -- from which Reggae derives -- place the downbeat in the middle of the count.

About this time our tortillas began to fall apart.

I stared at my teacher and said, "Don't ever start a class by asking your students to teach. Don't try to teach music theory without some records to play as examples. And for god's sake, bring in some little drums -- these tortillas are pathetic."

I have a couple of recurring dreams, dreams I've had over and over since I was a kid. One involves needing to get somewhere -- it used to be class, but these days it's mostly to the airport for a flight -- and I find myself in an unfamiliar part of town a long way from the airport and no public transportation. I start walking but keep running into fences, dead-end alleys, scary run-down parts of town, and sometimes underground shopping malls that get deeper and darker and more cave-like until I'm sure I'll never find my way out again.

A different trend has emerged in my dreams the past few years; violence.

I never used to dream about getting attacked or getting in fights, but now I do. I never have in real life, so I don't know where these dreams come from. But my dreams are very vivid, and my fighting skills in them are very deadly. I almost always kill my opponent, often in fairly gruesome and decisive ways. I wake up panicked and sickened by my brutality.

No clue what that means.

Wanted to post while it was fresh....
I was at some gathering, friends were there, Marilynne, Lynn, Victoria, Lisa, others..... It was casual, not a party, not at night.
Someone - can't recall who- brought over a cell phone and a number and said "your dad's number". I looked at them incredulously- my dad died when my son was a toddler. We never really reconciled his abuse with my need for a father figure. Everyone was still laughing and chatting and so I'm half listening and half heartedly dialing wondering wtf is this shit. So the cell crackles and there's some white noise and it's in and out but my dad answers. I knew his voice instantly but it was almost like he was in a tin can- you know like when you have a bad connection sometimes (used to happen more on landlines). I'm like "dad" "seriously" "This is Donnie Morris?" And when he busted out laughing at me I knew for sure it was him, and in the dream I fainted, I felt myself going down and my friends realized and were rushing to me but in real life I was waking from the dream with my father's voice very clearly ringing in my head. Woke me straight up.

I think it's this house. Every now and again I have this thing where it's like a movie scene of something from my childhood and the way the furniture used to be and the way it used to look superimposes over how it is now and it just plays out before my eyes for idk maybe a few seconds. Just a few seconds before I shake my head and it's gone.



@NoCo I have recurring dreams where I can't get somewhere too. I also can't seem to dial a phone for help in them. And I have the fighting dreams. Mine take on a blue tinge and I almost know when a dream has that coloring it's going to be bad and I'm going to wake up tired. I don't usually get mad skills though, just a slightly more powerful upper cut and the same selection of weapons I actually own. In my dream I always remember to punch with my lats, in real life I punch with my arm. (not good)

I have often wondered if those of us with good memories are burdened with more accurate or realistic dreams because our brains have more information to pull from to fill in. Or will the brain fill in the same amount no matter what it has to create?

After a period of really shitty fitful sleep since my dad died, I'm finally settling into some glorious REM sleep again (helped in no small part by my sister's suggestion, melatonin).  I've been having very long very involved dreams of epic scale.  Unfortunately I've also been forgetting them completely.  Sometimes, on first waking, I can just touch the tail end of the dream but it's impossible to reconstruct what led up to that point and as soon as I give up trying the tail quickly fades too.  I know they're very cinematic and epic in scope but that's about as far as I can excavate.

In a couple of them recently my parents were still alive, not as central characters but just people who were always there. Until last year anyway.

Dreams where you're trying to get somewhere and having difficulty are usually just typical "anxiety" dreams, meaning there's a change happening in your life and your subconscious is worried whether you'll be able to cope, or you've got something very important to do and aren't sure you can do it. As leaving home to go to college approached (like, a week away) I had a dream like that two or three nights in a row (a recurring nightmare, I suppose, but I wasn't scared by it, so not really). I forget where I got the dream interpretation from, but it was clearly correct. As soon as I understood the dream, I stopped having it.

When I was small, we lived next door to my maternal grandparents in a pair of row houses. My parents both worked, and during the day, granny would be the child-care. (Not a bad arrangement. My mother was working as a school secretary nearby, and was even able to walk home for lunch.) At some point, perhaps when I was 10 or 11 (I'm really bad at dates), granny had a bad stroke, and lost the power of speech as well as a lot of mobility. By that time, of course, I was off at school myself during the day, so lack of child-care wasn't an issue. Granny survived for a few years, but eventually passed while I was a teenager.

A couple of days after she passed, I was in bed one night, perhaps it was midnight or 1:00am, when the bedroom door swung open and granny walked in. She looked at me in the bed, with me looking back at her, frozen in place. She was smiling, and looked pretty good, more or less the same as she had looked a few years previous (just before the stroke), but she didn't say anything. She just stood and looked at me for a few seconds, and then turned and walked out. I became "unfrozen", and tried to speak, but I was choked up, and started to weep instead. I knew I wouldn't see her again. After a while, I went back to sleep.

I've never told anyone about this before, although it was more than 40 years ago. It's either a dream or a ghost story, depending on your preconceptions.

You never had the chance to say goodbye, if she had a stroke while you were at school.  I'm sure subconsciously this was your brain's way of rectifying that.

Thank Gary* I was able to send off both my parents, and my sister too (though she was not ready to go) with my expressions of love and thanks for sharing their lives with me.

If such a thing as ghosts were to exist it would have to be people who had died before they were ready, before they'd resigned to it and settled their affairs.  There's something terribly tragic about lives cut short in the middle of doing something.


* - Gary is the black custodian in the sky.

The past few nights I've been having one long episodic continuing dream. Something about doing bodywork on cars while at the same time doing some coding for selection of data in a huge spreadsheet (it didn't make sense in the dream either).

The latter comes from work. The former from a TV show I watched recently, where rusted up junkyard wrecks are pulled out, bondoed, painted, put back together & sold for big money.

I guess the symbolism of covering up and painting over major flaws hits my subconscious a little too hard.

"I love you!  I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

Those were the words I spoke to my wife and sister as death approached in my dream last night.  I was certain we were gonna die.

A couple days earlier we'd been swimming in the sea when all of a sudden a tidal wave -- composed mainly of ice and snow -- had swept over us.  Luckily we were swimming holding onto big kitchen appliances, like refrigerators and stoves(!), which we used to deflect the huge pieces of ice coming at us at 60 mph.  We rode out the wave undamaged.

However, when we got to shore we found that something like 1/3 of the population of the US had been wiped out by the wave, apparently caused by a meteor strike.  The world was strangely quiet and uninhabited.  We went out in the country and took up residence in a lovely country cottage.

Later (same day?  Next day?) we were standing in the living room chatting.  I'd just put some canned stew on the stove to heat up.  Suddenly I noticed that the front window was half underwater and the water level was rising fast.  As soon as I could say the above, the water crested the top of the house and we could hear it breaking like a wave over the top of the roof.  However, the walls held, no water leaked in, nothing happened to us -- so I went to check my stew.

NoCoPilot wrote:

If such a thing as ghosts were to exist it would have to be people who had died before they were ready, before they'd resigned to it and settled their affairs.

Spare me.
If such a thing as ghosts exist, why would it have to be because they died before they were ready?
Just so they could stare at Richard?   I'll bet even the 2 or 3 people that have managed to successfully 'settle their affairs' weren't one hundred percent resigned to thinking this was a good day to die.  

All matter is electric.  Electricity is energy.  Love is a tangible vibrational energy.

I think Richard got a gift of love.
We should all be so lucky.
I'll remember your story for a long time.
Thank you.

The reason why I said it was a dream or a ghost story is that I know I was at some point asleep, and I know at some point I was awake and weeping. But did I wake before seeing her, or after? I did not know at the time, and I still don't have any clear recollection of waking up. Logically, I must have dreamt and then woken up, but it didn't seem like that was what happened at the time. I've not had such an experience before or since.

I dreamed I had a big pile of cardboard boxes, I would take one down and open it up which would build a corral about 10' by 10' inside which I could sleep for a half hour. Every half hour I'd have to open a new box of sleep.

I knew at the end of 7-1/2 hours I'd have to get up because I'd be out of boxes of sleep.

It's Saturday, I drove into town to take a test. It's a long test, like a SAT, they give you a FREAKIN' BOOK of questions and you answer as many of them as you can in the allotted time, which is an hour. Just as I sat down with the thing, filled out the first lines (name & address) on the answer sheet, I begin rubbing my eyes. My eyes are blurry, my contacts won't sit right, I'm blinking and dabbing my eyes but I can't get them to focus. This is very much like the pain I was in twice last year after swimming and getting some irritant under my contacts -- the eye doctor called it "corneal dermatitis" where the actual surface of my corneas became pitted and my eyes became so sensitive to light that I had to be in TOTAL darkness (wearing sunglasses!) for four days. Anyway, I stumbled forward in the testing center, which was housed in a fallow community college building, and tossed my test on the instructor's desk. "I can't finish this" I wheezed, but she'd already left the room. I tried to find the door to the room, but I could not hold my eyes open. I got down on my knees and began crawling the perimeter of the room, looking for the door.

Why I'm not sure. There's no way I could drive home.

I find the door, and begin crawling down the hall, eyes closed, howling in pain.

I feel strong arms grab me, pulling me into a medical clinic set up in the old school. I see glimpses of nurses fussing over me, laying me on a cot with a blanket. Something is put in my eyes, some drops. I begin to feel very warm, and call out for a wet washcloth. One is laid over my feverish forehead, my temperature is taken, it's 104. I tell the nurses it was probably 106 when I was crawling down the hall, howling like a rabid dog.

After a little while I'm starting to feel coherent again, but I'm sweating like a pig. I get up off the cot and begin lurching around the tiny medical clinic. I decide I must get fresh air, I must cool down outdoors. I find a door and let myself out, I throw off the blanket I'm carrying.

I throw off the blanket.

I throw off the blanket I'm under and blink my eyes open. I've fallen asleep on the bed, under an electric blanket, and my cat is sleeping on top of me. I'm overheated. I've been napping for nearly four hours! My eyes are fine. I can see!!!!

I get up and come downstairs and record my dream for UD.

Three images from a series of nonsensical dreams.

A giraffe with black and white spots like a Dalmatian.

Me in a gay bathhouse, trying to avoid eye contact.

A woman who eats fish whole, like goldfish but much larger.

Mrs. NoCoPilot's dream last night, as related to me.

She was in a room and noticed a tiny black woman, only 6" tall. She appeared to be pregnant. Suddenly a chest of drawers fell over, landing on the tiny woman. My wife grabbed the bureau and lifted it off her, but the woman wasn't breathing. My wife panicked, and grabbed a ziplock plastic bag. She carefully placed the injured woman in the bag and rushed her to the hospital.

When she got there, the doctor took one look at the plastic bag and said, "What have you done? She can't breathe inside a plastic bag!" He fished her out and started applying CPR to the tiny figure.

My wife wept for her error. "My god, I've killed her!" she cried. "What was I THINKING???"

And now a scene (the only one I remember) from a long dream of my own last night.

I'm with some friends standing in line for a movie, discussing the movie we're about to see and making many salient points (of course). The woman in line in front of me turns around, and it's Zooey Deschanel. She says she agrees with me, and we start a heated discussion on the sorry state of arts & culture. I'm finding ourselves in complete agreement about all the topics we touch on, and Zooey is animated and funny and we're enjoying the discussion so much we decide to forego the movie and have dinner instead. After another hour of discussion Zooey coyly excuses herself and slips under the table. I feel her fumbling with my zipper. I bring her up, and explain to her that I'm a happily married man, and as much as I'm enjoying her company and think she's lovely (which I do) I wouldn't do anything to jeopardize my 26-year marriage.

Yeah, like THAT could happen...