Category: Dreams

I recently had a dream that I heard a kaboom, and when I looked out the window there was a mushroom cloud in the distance. I think I was with Best when I said “Oh no! Quick, before the power goes out – find a web page on surviving the apocalypse and print it out!” Soon I was watching as tsunami washed through the mountains, and three separate armies of demons fought each other. I think I was eaten by a gargantuan triceratops.

Don’t be mad at me for waiting until the Great Old Ones thing blew over before I posted to my blog again.

I finally listened to the Paul F. Tompkins CD that Chris gave me. Funny, funny stuff, as promised.

The show last night was pretty good. Not as good as the official CD release party but still good. Some rock was played, some jokes were made, some shirts were sold, and I was pleased. Friends old and new stopped by and I thank them.

This morning I had two separate dreams that had these turning points based on a single word or phrase spoken by one of the characters. Interesting, no? Wait, let me explain, because I know hearing about other people’s dreams is in your top 3 of Fun Ways To Spend My Time:

Dream 1: a violent mafia dream. These criminals were plotting their next scheme in a house, and suddenly one of them looks out the window and sees a crowd of regular citizens (the mob meets a mob?) marching towards them. The criminals scatter into the streets and into the wilderness behind the house. The citizens cut down a couple of them but this one guy is trapped in this rocky area by about two dozen John Q Publics and is fending their melee weapons with his own martial skills. Meanwhile there is some verbal exchange between them, which offers some of the backstory to the whole dream. Then one guy says that they found out where the mobsters were hiding out by Phil. The last mobster standing goes crazy with this information, like he thought Phil was dead and Phil is the most important person in the world. So the revelation that Phil is still alive completely energizes the mobster and he just starts cutting through the crowd. Grabbing people’s weapons and using it against them, turning the tide completely.

Dream 2: the ex-girlfriend. This is one of those dreams where sometimes the character is his own person and sometimes the character is you. Let’s say for the sake of comprehension that it’s me for the entire thing. So my ex-girlfriend, who is not one of my real ex-girlfriends, but who is a cute little number with short blond hair, works at the grocery store checkout. I have done something really stupid that made her break up with me, but oh my goodness I have learned my lesson and I want her back so bad! So I am standing outside the grocery store and thinking of how to do that. Then I realize, of course, I’ll buy a bunch of stuff and with each item I’ll make a profound statement like “these are raisins. Raisins start with “R” and “R” stands for “regret.” So I fill my basket and work out what all these groceries are going to signify, and when I finally get to her she will have none of it. She is still too mad/intelligent to see through my half-baked ploy. She is off work and she gives me some stern words and walks out. As she’s walking down the street and left there holding the groceries, I become magic man with dream power and I yell out something like “if you won’t listen to me I only have one thing to say – ‘Calkan.’ Now, in the context of the dream, even I have no idea what this means except that I know it will get her to change her mind, and indeed it does. She stops, and reels, absorbing the heavy weight of this meaningful word and at the same time being amazed that I know it. Now in the dream, I think this is basically some kind of magic word and I don’t even know what it means myself. It just gets the job done and she begins to listen to me and reconsider our relationship. Whether or not this is a valid last-ditch effort to get an unreasonable person to acknowledge the truth, or this is just me being a manipulative asshole to get what I want, I will leave it up to you to interpret my dream.
But when I woke up I thought, “you know, from a storytelling perspective, that was really cheap. It would have been better of Calkan referred to some great regret this girl had, like an ex-love that she didn’t give a second chance and lost forever, or else something meaningful for her, emotionally.” In short, something sincere rather than a retarded magic word.

But, them’s dreams for ya!

…or you will end up very fat.

I had a food dream this morning. Some BBQ with both extended family and friends. I was looting other people’s meat caches. I also had a dream that I was a superhero, and there was some sort of Crisis on Infinite Earth thing going on where I had to figure out how I could be in two places at once. I ALSO had a dream that I was in a Lovecraftian play, and it was all going south as people were forgetting their lines and we had to disentangle props. My friend Don Debrandt was in the play, and there was one scene where somebody walked in and told us they had read a certain Cthulhu mythos tome, and we all knew he must have gone mad and was going to try to kill us all.

Good times!

I just woke up from a dream about being at school. College actually. School dreams are like nightmares to me. I’ll take a dream about being chased by monsters over a school dream any day of the week. In this particular dream I spent most of my time wandering around the school looking for my locker. It was the last day of class and I was going to clean it out. I finally found it and when I did, of course, I didn’t have the combination so I ripped the door off with my tremendous strength (there was also a bit of levitation, Holmes, in this dream). I hadn’t opened the locker in months, and there was strata of sweet treats gone bad on the top shelf. The best part of the dream was that the school security guard caught me with my broken locker and he started scolding me not as a regular conversation, but as a heavy metal musical. As with many rock songs, I couldn’t make out most of the words, so I started quizzically repeating back the mondegreens that I heard.

After the apocalypse, some assorted people and I will be living in a huge, towering complex with many mysterious sealed off sections. I’ll be at a computer console and while I’m screwing around I’ll accidentally break one of the seals, and zombies will be released into the living sections. Flee!
…according to the dream I had the other night.

Yesterday at 8:33pm I sold the very first “The Shadow Out of Tim” to Robert Crosby of South Carolina via the interweb. For reals!

I have a habit of keeping my dictaphone near my bed so that I can record my crazy dreams when I wake up in the middle of the night. Usually when I listen back to it, it sounds like this:

Mrfle muf…uhhhh…annnd…uh..some kind of brfusmet…

But the other night I had a pretty good one, and here is the dictation not quite verbatim, but close:

The Alliance of Wizardry is made up of a bunch of wacky characters who find this magical tree and decide to hide stuff around it so that genuinely clever boys and girls can find interesting things and make their lives seem more interesting and wonderful. One of them is a gnome, another is a brownie, another is a clockwork baby changeling or something. Very Terry Pratchet/Neil Gaiman. One guy is a living period – the punctuation – and he gets the idea to get a hat so that he can
look like a question mark. Another guy urinates lightning. Thor?

I seem to go through cycles of remembering dreams for a couple weeks and then not remembering them. Here’s a few recent ones:

I was at a Japanese restaurant trying out my Japanese with the Japanese… and Steve Martin and Linda Ronstadt walked in. I introduced myself and since there were no empty tables I offered that they sit at mine since I was alone. Then we started talking about acting and my favourite Steve Martin films. I pretty much ignored Ronstadt.

I was walking along the beach and I found the carcass of a giant squid. It seemed petrified and mostly buried so I spent a lot of time trying to dig it out. It was missing it’s two tentacles (not to be confused with its eight arms). It was pretty cool!

After ten years in Vancouver I finally broke down and bought a rain poncho (at Camouflage). So watch out for that!

I had a dream last night that I organized a Slackademics class on sex, which was basically going to be a big orgy, and for some reason it was happening in a hotel, so it got mixed in with one of my recurring dreams which is raiding a hotel buffet or banquet. I was both intrigued and extremely nervous about the Slackademics workshop – needless to say it was the most attended class. The dream ended before anyone got their clothes off though.

I’ve watched five films in probably as many days. Cocoon was great. Children of Men was great, Letters from Iwo Jima was really good, Anchorman was good and funny, My Super Ex-Girlfriend was entertaining but mostly bad – fun to watch Eddie Izzard as the villainous mastermind, though.

Speaking of movies I got the game “Director’s Cut II,” a movie trivia game. I bought it at Salvation Army for 7 bucks, still in the wrapper. Every week or so Joyce and I have been going to Stephane & Sheri’s place and watching something with David Attenborough (I got my Life in the Undergrowth DVDs recently) and then playing games – usually Wii. I think next time we may have to play some Director’s Cut. Usually Joyce kicks my ass at games but we played Boggle last night and the tables were turned. TURNED I tell you! I spelled ‘peyote’ which was gratifying.