[from a letter to Dani]

I've been trying to think of all the patters of recurrent dreams I have over the years. Here are the ones I come up with, although I'm sure there are some more I can't recall. Also, some of these are no longer recurring.

-Rocky Horror: I probably told you more about this one than any of them. For me, this was a major rite of passage because, the first time I saw it at midnight, I was a senior in high school. Whereas most people can see a movie just a few miles from home, the theater showing Rocky Horror was quite a ways away for us rural kids. The first few times we saw it, we went to a party at another friend's place who lived about 15 miles away, then, around 11pm, we all hopped on the Causeway and went to Metarie (another 30 miles away). Since the movie didn't let out until close to 2am, I didn't get home until as late as 4 in the morning. This was a huge deal because my folks were fairly protective of me. Also, arranging the party and getting everyone ready to go (since we were car pooling first to the party and then to the movie, and then the reverse of all that) was a major undertaking.

As a result of all that, I've had innumerable variations on the typical anxiety dream of seeing the movie. Even though that was 12 years ago (as of this writing), I still occasionally dream that I try to get to the movie but can't make it on time or that I get there and it's the wrong show. Sometimes the movie is completely unrelated to Rocky Horror, sometimes it's a '50s sci-fi and/or horror movie, sometimes it's a Rocky Horror sequel, and so on. Some of these are incredibly interesting dreams in that they produce very involved plots and visuals that my conscious mind would never have tapped into. That's true for a lot of my other dreams, in fact.

-Tunnels: Again, this is a case where I found something in real life that was really amazing and mysterious. It was always an adventure to find new tunnels and to be one of the only people to have been through them while the rest of the world walked obliviously over them. When I was at SLU (not LSU), I started friends exploring the drainage systems under and around the campus. Later, my roommate and I started exploring still other places. Before long we were finding our way into buildings through access points from boiler rooms into basements. We found places where we could access rooftops on a number of buildings. It was a whole secret world.

In my dreams, the tunnels I explore might start out as simple concrete drainage systems, but they almost always end up leading into complete industrial complexes, like secret hide-outs from old James Bond movies. Of course, we (whoever that is in a given dream) are spotted and have to make our way back in a hurry. The feeling is very intense and the imagery is very vivid in all of these. If you could climb inside my head for one of these, you would probably understand my drive to always explore.

-Folsom: I will occasionally dream about being back in Folsom, but it is always very different than the way I remember it. In particular, there is almost always a huge mystery in the woods like the way the "Pet Semetary" was in the movie of the same name. A lot of the time this is something supernatural with very much of a Blair Witch feel to it. The dreams also involve discovering secret, hidden trails that only a few people know about.

Much of this comes from the fact that I moved to Folsom from the suburbs. When you live in a subdivision, pretty much everywhere you go is urbanized. Behind that house over there is another street full of houses, and beyond them, more houses, and so on. There is no mystery about the setting itself. There were woods at the end of the street I grew up on, but you didn't have to go back in them very far before you were on another street. I assumed that was the way the whole world was set up.

However, when I moved to Folsom, the woods were absolutely endless and full of surprises. There were snakes and bee hives, old abandoned shacks rusting and rotting away and overgrown behind acres and acres of woods, all completely forgotten for decades. Streams ran for miles and sometimes opened into what seemed like great gorges to us. We found barns that were practically ancient that we could climb around in, and there were places where the trees grew in such a way that it seemed like there was a cave running straight through the woods. You cannot begin to imagine the effect this had on a 12 year-old's mind after a childhood in the relatively stagnant environs of suburbia.

-The "perfect" woman: I know you're going to take offense at this as though it reflects some conscious desire, but I occasionally dream that I meet a woman who is absolutely perfect and I fall in love with her immediately. Maybe I just have an overdeveloped sense of romanticism. The plot in these dreams is always incidental. I just meet this girl and we are together from then on. It's almost completely about a feeling and that's all. The girl is never the same from one dream to the next, but she has some common features: She is small in a number of ways. She is 2 or 3 years younger that I, and would be described as "petite." She is thin with small breasts and limbs. She isn't muscular or especially athletic. She has an overall "plain" appearance, no make-up, etc. A lot of the time she is wearing small, wire-frame glasses. Shr's usually someone I would actually be attracted to in reality, only a little shorter.

-Hanging out with a celebrity: This is another strange one. I don't particularly idolize celebrities in that I don't hang posters of them everywhere or keep up with their personal lives. However, I probably spend a lot of time thinking about how their talent and style developed as it did. Perhaps as a result of that, I end up dreaming that I am at a particular celebrity's house and just talking with them. This has happened with Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen, Trent Reznor (NIN), John Pertweed (who played the 3rd Dr. Who when I was a kid), Frank Herbert (author of Dune and loads of other books I read growing up), and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. These celebrities are always very accessible in terms of conversation and willingness to go along with whatever I want to do, although generally I just follow them around in their daily lives.

For example, the Clapton dream stands out because it was so strange. I dreamt that he had a 3 bedroom house in the 'burbs, a wife and 2 or 3 small children. He had a few guitars strewn about the place, and he was walking around in his boxers and a t-shirt. I just came over to have him show me a few guitar licks. He was really sleepy looking and just sat down and played little bits of guitar for me. The reality is that he has 100+ guitars, only just recently had a new baby (I think he has a few older kids), and has at least one mansion in England and (at least until his son's death) a highrise condo.

Some of the dreams are more mundane, but others are pretty wild. The one with Trent Reznor had us living in a great big complex (again, a la James Bond) underneath a graveyard (duh, it's Trent we're talking about). We were "roommates" and this was nothing out of the ordinary for us. For fun, we ran around and did Fight Club style pranks in parts of the city surrounding our secret hideout.

I also dreamt that I helped Roger Waters (formerly of Pink Floyd) organize and play in a huge concert. I think this was after his Berlin concert in 1990, so that would explain this, but this concert was even bigger, if such a thing was possible. The stage itself was larger than most entire concert halls. There were marching bands and things like that, people were in giant carnival costumes like it was Rio or something. It was insane. But no one showed up.

-End of the world/last man on earth scenario: This dream is always different, but it always has a set-up like Stephen King's "The Stand" or the Charlton Heston movie "Omega Man." Most of the population has left the earth and there are only a handful of people left. Where everyone went varies: killed by a virus, wiped out in the war (although nothing is visibly damaged), taken by aliens, whatever; I don't even know most of the time or even bother to question it. Rather than there being a big adventure story, everything is very calm and peaceful. I don't know where this comes from.

-College dorms: I lived in a couple small dorms when I was in college. In general, dorm life can be less than pleasant when you have a large dorm with a lot of anonymity, but a smaller setting means that, even if you meet just a few people, you know a significant portion of the residents. On the occasions when I lived in larger dorms, I never really knew anyone there. However, the smaller ones always felt like a community. A lot of my dreams involve me living in dorms as though they were apartments; the rooms are always much larger and actually have multiple living areas. The architecture is also much more complex. Stairs don't necessarily go up and down or the entire length of a building.

-Movie dreams: Of course, a lot of the dreams I have are influenced by Star Wars and a lot of other movies. I've always been a big movie fan, so this isn't surprising, but the movies are rarely as interesting as the dreams. Often these take very unpredictable courses that aren't what Hollywood would almost certainly do... or what I would have written if you asked my conscious mind to develop a story.

-Architechture: That's a running theme throughout my dreams as well: Everything is bigger and doesn't necessarily follow established design conventions or even the reasoning behind those conventions. I dream that I'm in skyscrapers a lot of the time, especially in futuristic worlds like the one depicted in Blade Runner. All the living spaces I pass through are enormous, like something from Epcot Center.

I’m finally finished with my finals and most of the other end-of-semester projects I’ve been locked into for so long now. For several nights I didn’t get almost any sleep. Those nights I did sleep were little 3 to 5 hour naps. I felt really, really strange while I was awake and couldn’t sleep when I tried. The cool thing was that I had all kinds of neat ideas during that time. The problem was that I can’t remember any of them at all. I have also been having a lot of really wild dreams lately. I wake up convinced they are real, but confused by the fact that they don’t gel with reality.

For instance, I dreamt I went back to the area of Louisiana I lived in about 8 years ago and I witnessed a friend of mine (who is legitimately crazy, btw) go on a shooting rampage then kill himself. I haven’t talked to this guy in all this time nor heard from anyone who would know him, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that he did all that. I’m convinced I am dating a girl I taught a couple semesters ago and that we were extras in a house party scene (a la “American Pie”) in a new teen tv show/movie. I’m not making any of this up.

I dreamt that we were on this forrest planet ruled by some evil overlord. It was the early American pioneers in an Orwellian society. Eventually an old man with wings turned out to be the alien who really was in charge of the planet and he freed everyone. Also, I could walk upside-down on my hands and did so to see midnight movies every night. They were always action movies and I sat in the balcony.

This one girl I dream about every now and again (she works in the lab across the hall from me and we had a class together once) showed up in another dream. In this dream she turned out to be single (maybe she is in reality?) and we started dating. She was a huge Star Wars fan and we were at a film school that was putting together an epic production of a Star Wars movie, but everything they were doing looked really cheap for all the resources they had at their disposal. Anyway, the girl had a bunch of tattoos of Japanese symbols and Star Wars vehicles all over her.

I dreamt that I worked in some futuristic society run by robots. Curiously, I worked and lived in a barn where I had to inspect the robots before they were shipped out. Some of them were life-sized while others were only a little larger than action figures (there was a whole army of them). If they didn't pass the tests, I zapped them with a phaser and they all melted (they were made of plastic because it was cheaper). Later, I dreamt that I moved in with my parents, who built a new house. The only problem was that the only way you could get to my room was by climbing a ladder into the ceiling. It was a nice room, but it was really annoying. I just realized as I was writing this that the layout of the room was the attic of the house we had in Folsom. Dreams are weird.

I should make a list of my recurring dreams and dream characteristics. One of the strangest ones for me is not a particular presence, but an absence. I almost never dream about real people. Occassionally celebrities will turn up (recall earlier discussion), but more often they are characters from a movie or tv show. Usually, I just make up a new cast every time from archetypes.

After listening to a bunch of Django Reinhardt cds and reading about the guitars he used to play, I ended up having a handful of dreams about them. At one point I dreamt that I found one of them among things at my aunt's house. In the same dream my mom bought me a variation on a Gretch Duo Jet that my brain just invented. It looked more like a cross between an Italia and a D'Armond. Later on in the same dream I found the other Django guitar (he played two different styles). What does it all mean, Doctor?

I have wanted to see Resident Evil since it first came out, but I never have gotten around to it. However, I had a cool dream a while back that probably blows the movie away. It was Milla J. running around some huge alien spaceship killing all sorts of monsters (I don't know if they were supposed to be supernatural or not). Everything was cavernous throughout the ship, and all the lights were just weird and wild. It was very atmospheric. I never cease to be amazed at the things my unconscious mind can come up with to entertain me.

I had a late night and only just got up, but I had a huge bunch of crazy dreams. This included me taking part in some sort of "Temptation Island" show with all these other couples (this is in spite of the fact that I don’t watch “reality” tv at all). I think I was supposed to be in a couple too, but no one really seemed to be paired up with anyone else. It wasn't clear what the "rules" were either. Everyone just flirted with everyone else and there was a lot of flashing and strip teasing going on, but it was all really casual. No one ever saw any action, although one guy got pissed about something and he stormed off. A couple girls went after him to say that nothing was going on between his girlfriend (whichever one she was?) and anyone else, but that was the extent of the drama.

Mostly everyone was sunbathing and trying to look good for one another (and presumably the cameras as well, although I didn't actually dream up the presence of any), but at one point we all went off into the woods (?!) to go swimming in a pond (which some of them did) or to play around in a row boat (which I did with some other guy there; I guess because I was talking about canoeing yesterday). Somehow I ended up finding this fruit tree covered with these little yellow apples in bunches almost like plum-sized grapes. I asked if anyone else had tried one (biblical metaphor?), and no one had. Some of them were rotten and filled with bugs (I think this was prompted by a commercial involving millions of ants that I saw on tv last night at a restaurant; we had no idea what was going on with the sound turned down).

Somehow the fruit indicated something supernatural, and suddenly we're exploring this giant ruined building (yeah, in the middle of the woods) that was based off of an abandoned building full of racquetball court at LSU that we used to sneak into when I was there (You could play guitar in the place and the echo would last forever). This ended up turning into a giant grocery store that only had enough items for sale to fill a 7-11. I saw a lady taking inventory (which probably would have taken all of five minutes), so I asked her what was going on. She said that the place was infested by "fox people" that would come out of the walls at night and steal the food. Apparently these were like American leprechauns, only they were genuinely feral.

In spite of this, the store was kind of a social hang-out as well, and Will Smith and some other guy (no, not Martin Lawrence) were sitting on an empty row of shelves at the front and talking to people as they came in. I talked to them at a couple points in the dream (no one seemed to recognize Will Smith since he had gotten really fat and wasn't wearing any make-up), but the second time the other guy was all mad and looked like he was on the verge of tears. I asked him what was wrong and he said that the store manager pulled him aside and yelled at him for being drunk while he was hanging out there. In this alternate reality, it is okay to loiter so long as you're sober.

The story shifted at that point, and it turned out that one of the guys from the reality show group was a bully who was picking on kids. I magically ended up with a plastic kid's baseball bat, and that was to be my instrument of swift justice. Unfortunately, I never found the guy, and before long I was trying to find my way home. Again, I was wandering through the woods and ended up at the house where I spent my teenage years in rural Louisiana. For some reason I thought my dad lived there (and, no, I don't have abandonment issues; I just talked to him on the phone yesterday about getting my cousin to do my taxes), so I go up to the place and find that some twenty-somethings are living there. They say he's through the woods down a trail (which really existed back when we lived there, but I've been back since then --just last xmas, in fact-- and found that it's overgrown now).

In spite of this fantastical development, I end up at my parents' house and seemed to be there to stay. (Ironically, this is *exactly* the same house as the one in the woods that I visited on the way here.) The only problem is that I'm supposed to still be in college and I find that I'm skipping classes by living at home several hundred miles from school (which, for some reason, never occurred to me up until then). I go into a panic about the fact that I've missed an exam in a math class and I have no idea what's going on in another of my classes, so I'm trying to read tons of material while my folks and my ex wife (who is suddenly living there with me!) keep bugging me to get something to eat.

And then Dani called and woke me up to ask if I could pick up some groceries so we'll have something to feed the friends (and their kids) who are coming over tonight. But tell me, doctor, am I going to die?!

Some of the things our subconscious comes up with defy easy explanation. For example, because I'm such a movie nut, I'll sometimes dream about a movie that I haven't seen yet, and it will totally blow away the actual film. Naturally, I have a bigger budget for special effects and set design in my brain, but even the premise or the plots are sometimes very original... and yet they're completely beyond what I would ever think up on my own while I was awake.

I took a nap earlier and had a really wild dream. Everything that I had experienced in the previous few hours was incorporated into a holistic scheme. I had been talking to Ben about orbs (as well as writing the bit about dealing with them experimentally), then reading things by Robert Anton Wilson about all of the things he is interested in, then looking over the urbex site, and finally reading a comic book about the end of the world foretold by alien beings that said humans would evolve into something cosmic. In my dream I somehow became the next Robert Anton Wilson and my consciousness wandered with the orbs through all sorts of tunnels underneath the moon. It was more involved than that, but I can't reconstruct it all now.

I used to dream that I would meet various "heroes" of mine though. We were always sort of "buddies" in the dream. It was like we were close even though they were still superstars. For example, I dreamt I met Eric Clapton and hung out at his house. He showed me how to play a few licks that I couldn't pick out on my own (e.g., some of the ones he played at the SRV tribute show). Another time I dreamt that I was helping Roger Waters set up this huge concert in a giant arena. It was like we were partners in the whole thing; he wasn't the ego maniac he's famous for being.

I always wanted to keep a dream diary, but I only tried once, back when I was in high school and didn't have a modern computer or word processor. The thing is that writing dreams down is really hard work if you're going to be complete about it or have them make sense. You have to explain why things are happening as they are in this alien universe, since the normal assumptions about cause and effect don't necessarily hold up.

Since we got back from Colorado I have been wanting to write down the dream I had about the "prequel" to "The Perfect Storm," but I've never found the time. I think it would make a funny story, especially given that the premise makes no sense as a prequel. Unfortunately, I've forgotten so much of it that I couldn't reconstruct it.

[Here's what I can remember: George Clooney, Marky Mark, and the rest of the crew were actually some sort of space police like on Star Trek or something. Their fishing boat was a star ship and could also travel underwater (sort of like in the movie, only it came up again afterwards). They teamed up with Milla Jovovitch to fight her evil twin sister (who wore an eye patch and dressed like Elvira) for control of the planet. Somehow this was all a prequel to "The Perfect Storm," although I have no explanation for what happened to all the sci-fi elements. I had the whole thing worked out in my head when I woke up, but we were on the road at the time, so I didn't put it on disk fast enough.]

I had an awesome Star Wars dream last night. Dani and I slept like 12 hours or so, and, for me, prolonged slumber is the best way to get really complex and involved dreams. Couple that with the fact that I don't know much about the next SW film, and you have the makings for something interesting.

In my dream, I was Anakin sometimes and an observer other times, so it was kind of hard to follow, but the gist was that the Empire was continuing to grow to the point where all of Coruscant (sp?) was completely in the thrall of the Dark Side, not just political graft. The planet was like a huge cult of the Emperor's advisor guys you see for about 5 seconds in "Jedi" when he arrives with his guards. In my dream, the Jedi army (more like a commando group, actually) covertly landed in the Emperor's stronghold and we were going to try to cut this cancer out of the galaxy. As Anakin, I went in and tried to slash these evil guys in this courtyard of aliens and Sith-lings, but my saber would only hit them like a roll of cardboard. Apparently the Force was no longer strong enough in this place, so the Jedi army couldn't do anything and had to retreat.

The dream got screwy at this point because Vader was already present as an adult and was somehow a separate character while Anakin was still a teenager. Vader hypnotized Anakin and some Jedi girlfriend of his as well as 3 or 4 other minor characters and turned them into zombies who they could brainwash. However (and the "film" cuts to another scene here), the rest of the good guys had escaped to Tatooine where, as the scene starts C-3PO is reenacting the scene from Empire where Chewie is choking Lando, only 3PO is choking Obi-Wan because they left R2 in the Sith stronghold. It turns out that the good guys planned this from the beginning, and R2 is there to help them rescue Anakin and destroy the Emperor (a la Lando at Jabba's palace?). There were other new characters there as well as Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru (who were now inexplicably at an intermediate age between AotC and ANH), but I woke up before the story proceeded. I usually don't even have involved plot developments, so this was pretty cool to discover.

Last night I had the craziest dreams where Star Wars picked up with Episode VII. The original group was back: Luke, Han, and Leia. Luke was a full Jedi and was running around on a space station trying to save Han. The Rebels (now the guys in power) thought he was a traitor, and only Luke knew better. Bounty hunters were after the two of them.

Later in the dream I jumped to the beginning of the movie where the characters are introduced. Han and Leia lived at my old house in Folsom. They had retired after the Rebellion. I was actually a character in this part, and I was waiting for them to arrive at their home. Han and Leia returned on the Falcon, then their kids showed up, a 14 year-old boy and 8 year-old twins: a boy and girl... which I believe is exactly what they had in the novels and comic books. The kids had cooler vehicles than the Falcon, more like small fighters, highly maneuverable, which they flew around the back yard before they landed. I can't remember much more of the dream than that, although there were many more scenes. I can't get over how much my brain generates subconsciously.

Coincidentally, I heard a great segment on This American Life in which this guy talked about how he was re-writing the screenplay to The Phantom Menace. He did a lot of things that I would have done as well, but he explains it in a funny way. IF you get a chance to listen to it (it's only 10 minutes long), skip to about 50 minutes into this episode: http://thislife.org/ra/232.ram

I had this one dream where I was in the airport and saw a 5 or 6 year old kid pull out a bag of vintage Star Wars figures. I went over and was looking through them for any "finds" (e.g., the BLUE Snaggletooth). Somehow I ended up hanging out with this super-rich 10-year old kid who had so many Star Wars toys that he had a room three times the size of my living room and with a 15 foot ceiling. He had Star Wars toys that would *never* have been produced for their cost, like a playset of the Endor base that the shield generator is on (you only see it in a few shots; that's where Luke surrenders to Vader and they take the shuttle to the Death Star II to meet the Emperor) and another playset of the original Death Star that was at least 7 levels high and probably four feet wide and at least 2 feet thick. It was amazing!

I had some crazy dreams last night. I dreamt that someone stole my car, but I couldn’t remember where I was when I left it: In Texas as your house or in Florida. So I ended up stranded in Florida and hitched a ride on a plane. Then, when I got back to Dani's house, her neighbor tried to say I had been cheating on her, but everyone knew better because I had been in Florida. Then a girl I knew from my first couple years in college moved into Dani's old place and we hung out together. Somehow I ended up traveling around with some rich, older lady and hanging out at her place, but then the apocalypse started. We tried to eat everything before the zombies came around. After that we drove endlessly looking for safety from the hungry people and zombies. We drove through the woods and the lamb we were trying to save and raise for meat jumped out of the jeep and was immediately devoured by hungry snakes and a griffin. We all shrugged and went back to reading. One guy was reading a medical manual proffered to him by the 8-month-pregnant girl who wasn’t sure who was going to be able to deliver her baby.

I had some really terrific dreams a couple nights ago. Earlier that day I had read a Star Wars comic book I ran across at the library. It's this interesting series called "Infinities" where they explore parallel universes where the stories of the Star Wars saga were twisted around and ended up completely different. In this one, the first movie ends where Luke's torpedo doesn't blow up the Death Star. They have to retreat, and Yavin is blown up. Han and Luke think that Leia was killed, but she managed to get off the planet, only to be captured by Vader (something she's really, really good at, of course).

Luke goes to Dagobah to train with Yoda while Han and Chewie continue on as smugglers. Leia is brought before the Emperor. She hates him, but Vader tempts her with the same plan as he put to Luke: that they would take over the Empire from Palpatine. She trains under him for the next few years while Luke continues with his training, each thinking the other was killed.

Five years pass, and Han finally returns to Dagobah to pick up Luke. Han has seen video footage of Leia being elevated to one of the top positions in the Empire. He freaks and tells Luke about it. Yoda reveals the relationship between Luke and Leia and Vader before the heroes head for Coruscant. They fly the Millennium Falcon into the Death Star (now christened the Justice Star and in orbit of Coruscant), and Yoda uses his mind tricks to take control of the Death/Justice Star while the Falcon continues on to Coruscant below where Chewie drops off Han and Luke.

The two heroes confront Leia, Vader, and the Emperor. Leia is goaded into fighting Luke, but Luke reveals the relationships. Vader is shocked to learn the Emperor had kept this information from him (which was why he had pursued Leia earlier in the story), and he fights off the Emperor. The "family" escape just as Yoda crashes the entire Death Star into the Emperor's palace, killing both of them (and probably thousands more in addition to the thousands Yoda killed earlier using the Death Star to destroy the Imperial fleet). The end is pretty much the same though where Vader is too weakened from his fight, so he takes off his helmet before he dies.

---

Anyway, long story, but I thought it was an interesting twist (especially given my disappointment with RotJ). The night after I read it, I dreamt that I was Luke and that Vader and I were storming the Emperor's palace to rescue Leia. In my version, Vader had turned to good again earlier somehow, and Leia was still good. The Emperor was the only bad guy left, but the Empire was fairly strong. Vader and I went in with just a couple light sabers and just started fighting bad guys like crazy.

There wasn't much substance to the dream, but it was exceptional for me in a number of ways. For one thing, I rarely have "name brands" in my dreams. Things are usually jumbled around from a variety of influences. I almost never see fully-formed characters in their original incarnations. I also got the lightsaber to work. Things rarely work properly in my dreams. Either they never work or they do things that are unexpected. It was a really weird dream in that it actually made a cohesive piece of short fiction.

I was one of the engineers involved in designing one of the largest battleships ever built. It was up in dry dock, but was getting ready to be let out to sea. We had to lower the ship from chains, which had to manually be unjacked (jacked down?) from (only!) four points. The sea was getting rough, so we were trying to get it released quickly, but the mechanism kept getting jammed.

I decided to get everyone motivated. I told them that I just heard on the news that there was an alien invasion on its way across the ocean (why they wouldn't attack from behind the moon instead like any normal alien invasion, I don't know). Everyone started scrambling around like crazy at that point, and they finally got the ship into the water... presumably after an enemy who wasn't there.

After that, I left the giant hanger where the ship was constructed, and I walked down the street where I was picked up by George Bush. He looked really old, but he was actually pretty funny (obviously this was a dream because he was making jokes that would go over his head in reality). "You're a really likable guy, but I don't agree with you on anything in your policy," I told him. He didn't seem terribly bothered by that (much like the real guy, come to think of it), and I got out a few blocks later.

We had been driving through a crowded region downtown somewhere, like maybe San Francisco (only much flatter), and there was some sort of street festival going on. There as an exhibition by real(?!) ghosts who looked like something out of Disney World's "Haunted House" ride. They were doing some sort of a dance where they would disappear into the pavement and come up again. They weren't really trying to be scary though, and were in fact coordinating their various monochrome color schemes (e.g., pale yellow, light orange, or faded light green) to make the dance more symmetrical.

I went a little further down the street, and there was a section where you could meet movie and tv celebs who were just assigned a spot along the wall in this one area. Oddly enough, they were hardly swamped with visitors and admirers, so they were competing for attention. Bill Murray was trying to get me to listen to a routine while Jon Stewart was narrating the scene as though for a news story. The genuinely funny celebrities were taking advantage of the situation and were doing improv sketch comedy while the no-talent actors who didn't have a script to tell them what to say just stayed back away from everyone. Julia Roberts, for example, sat around like a bump on a log.

In the next building over, there was another arrangement of celebs like before, only in this one they were selling things. For instance, J.Lo was selling used books. She was all really serious though (I think she was my take on a friend of mine's girlfriend who resents it when she tries to tell a story seriously and we all have to jump in and flesh out the humorous elements in it that she's completely glossing over). J.Lo. tried to give me this book on nudity in film. I was like, "Uh, no thanks. I'm an expert on that," and reminded her I saw her naked in "Desperado." (Yes, I know that was actually Salma Hayek, but my sleeping brain doesn't distinguish among members of my mental file of "Latin Women Who Annoy Me.") She tried to push another couple books on me, and I moved on.

Back outside I ended up at some kind of assortment of S&M/drama groups who had set up booths in which barely-dressed people were whipping other barely-dressed people. It was like the Rubber Ball meets a Renaissance fair. Understandably, it was a bit noisy in this part of the street with all these little groups performing their sketches (and there was a bit of screaming since the props were real). Maybe that's what woke me up.

Christopher (the guy with the nose) from "The Sopranos" is ambushed and caught in his own home by some heroine dealers and forced to negotiate with them to let them deal on the Soprano's turf. He resists them, so they shoot him full of heroine. This has the opposite effect as intended, however, as Christopher is actually a junky and needed a fix. Now Christopher is suddenly a wheeler dealer. He begins speaking so articulately about complex economic principles that the heroine ring have to follow what he says to do or he'll use his John Nash-like math abilities to drive them out of business with just the power of his Nobel Prize-worthy mind.

The heroine dealers turn him loose, but they stay in his house, locking themselves inside. They may have lost this round, but they're going to squat on the property until they can gain the upper hand again. This leads Christopher to bring Tony Soprano in on the situation. Tony sends out a bulletin on MySpace to call over there via his calling card (he posts the number) and to annoy the hell out of these guys. I give them a call because apparently Tony's on my friends list(?!?), and I bug them until they hang up and block my number.

Next, one of Tony's cousins is brought in. She's a mutant who is part wolverine (Yeah, I wonder where I got that idea from), and she sneaks along the side of the house looking for an entrance. Meanwhile, another one of the family's allies comes in, a girl who has the ability to make ghosts appear (whether by conjuring spirits or just causing hallucinations, I'm not sure; I didn't look up her profile). The "ghosts" inside the house scare the heroine gang, so they run out the front door of the house without even checking if it's safe. As it turns out that's where Tony and the boys have been waiting, and they finally bust them.

The End.

I had this crazy Star Wars dream that juxtaposed elements from several different episodes in ways that didn't make any sense and then some! Specifically, there were two groups of characters running around in some industrial type complex, basically like an abandoned building like I am wont to explore from time to time. One group consisted of bad guys such as the Emperor, Jango Fett, and some other villains, while the good guys included (believe it or not) Chancellor Palpatine (aka the Emperor), Boba Fett (from Empire Stikes Back; yes, I know he's a bad guy too), and several others. The obvious guys like Luke or Vader weren't among either group.

Oddly enough, a little later in the dream I was somehow aboard the Millennium Falcon with several of the "good guys" (a different group this time), and I also somehow knew this was a movie... and apparently yet another part of the saga. The weirdest thing was that this time Chewbacca wasn't talking in wookie language; he was actually speaking. And the worst part of it was that he talked like Dan Ackroid or John Belluci. He was narrating what he was doing and acting all cocky. In other words, he was an obnoxious version of Han Solo (who, in fact, was nowhere to be found). I remember thinking to myself, "I can't believe they made this change to the series. The fans are going to be pissed!"

I'm better at most people at figuring out where things came from in my dreams. I will usually remember things that happened the day before and see how it triggered something. Of course, I'm only seeing how particular elements originated. I'm always fascinated at the ability of my unconscious mind to generate things that are so much more detailed and original than I could come up with consciously, especially since my dreams weave everything together all at once.

A lot of the really cool dreams I've had even in my childhood had things wrong with them. For example, I had one when I was in elementary school where I had my own lightsaber. It was real, but it didn't work very well. It would keep cutting out and didn't always turn on. In the dream I was just showing it to friends (not fighting Darth Vader), so it was kind of embarrassing.

Similarly, I dreamt once (also when I was in elementary school) that I and a couple of my friends had angel wings. We were trying to fly with them, but all we could do was to get a running start and glide for a short stretch at a time, maybe 2 or 3 hundred feet and only about 50 feet up. Still, it was really cool.

When I was a kid, there were several dreams I had in which I was going to die. I never actually did in any of them, however. The one I remember was me wandering around and trying to get funeral services arranged. I was maybe 8 or so, so I had no idea what this involved. As a result, the dream didn't make a lot of sense to describe. For example, at one point I bought yams from a guy selling them from a bucket as he walked the streets around my elementary school. Apparently, this was required for the funeral. See, I told you it wouldn't make any sense.

Last night I dreamt that I was in a live-action version of the original Robotech series with some (inevitable) elements of Star Wars thrown in. It didn't make a lot of sense, but I had a fancy bow and set of special arrows that I used to fight aliens that were landing in our city on the SFD-1 spaceship. I was friends with Han Solo's son also (he even wore the black vest) and we were fighting aliens at an arcade. It was just nuts.

I've had a number of anxiety dreams. For example, last night I dreamt that I had a job at Circuit City (the electronics store). I had only been there for one day of training (much like I had in real life with school), but then I couldn't remember which store I worked at or how I got there (which sort of made sense because I just made up that particular store in my head). Then, when I was trying to get dressed to go to work, I found that my dress shirt was too small and it ripped right up the back. Anxiety!

You ever wake up from a dream, and you're really affected by it? I get those every once in a while, and it almost doesn't matter what the subject of the dream is whether it affects me or not. The one last night was really weird. Dani and I were trying to get pregnant, only we were going to use a surrogate for some reason, but Dani didn't even want to use one of her eggs, so technically the surrogate was going to be the mom. Dani didn't look like herself, but somehow that was who she was supposed to be (This happens a lot in my dreams). Since she was being a bitch about things, I ended up in a relationship with the surrogate, even though this meant (by the logic of the dream) that we were going to lose the kid to evil Dani. (No, that makes absolutely no sense considering we were the biological parents.) I have no idea what to read into any of that since it doesn't even remotely parallel anything in my current triangle.

Ever since I woke up, I've had this really, really weird feeling like something's missing. I miss the surrogate who I fell in love with. It's just bizarre because I don't even know anyone like her, and I barely even remember what she looked like in the dream. This is seriously weird.

Somehow that dream shifted into another one in which I was at a music store that seemed to double as a live music place. They had a stage that they were setting up with equipment (and even fog machines) for a band that was going to come on later that night. I was messing around with guitars there, but I was also supposed to be with my students. They were supposed to be college students, but they looked and acted a lot younger. Somewhere along the way I ended up with a guitar that had maybe 36 frets (a typical one usually has between 21 and 24), but the higher ones triggered all sorts of electronics such as arpeggiators. For example, you might play a chord, but then you would run your hand over those high frets, and the guitar would break the chord apart into individual notes and play them really fast and in random patterns. It was very, very cool.

I always have intense dreams when I go to bed really early and get a full night's sleep without waking up (which is what usually happens). I hurried up and wrote them down before I even checked my email.

I dreamt that my dogs and the cat that lives here (that I never call *my* cat) managed to not only get out of the back door, but also made their way into the neighbor's back yard behind us. In reality, there's an elementary school directly behind us, but in the dream there wasn't even a fence, just a continuous yard. The neighbor had a fox for a pet, and I worried that the dog(s) would fight with it, so I chased after the animals into the neighbor's house.

Once I was in the house, I was sitting on the floor in a hallway trying to call the animals back to me from opposite directions. It turned out there was a small party going on there which was populated by (mostly) people from a party I went to a few weeks ago. A lady turned up in a perpendicular part of the hallway and asked me what I was doing. She was a cross between a professor I had in grad school and a lady I used to work with. I didn't want to seem like I was being anti-social at the party, so I got up and started mingling.

It turned out to be something like a high school graduation party, but eventually I found you there. People were excitedly running around and talking to one another like it was the last time they were going to see one another. I managed to steer you to one of the back rooms in the house so I could talk to you, though it meant fending off people so we could have some privacy. I had to seriously ask you if you had seen my dogs. Now why this required privacy, I have no idea, but you were disappointed because you thought I was going to ask you to make out. I realized that, hey, that wouldn't be such a bad idea, so we kissed for a second, then the dream shifted to where we were leaving for a trip somewhere. I was loading up my car to head across what was apparently a barren area. My uncle was there offering me fish he had in his freezer, but I explained to him that they wouldn't keep on the trip across the desert in just an ice chest (and how would I cook them?).

Somehow I found myself at a cd store with maybe twenty people. It was sort of a party there as well, though I really didn't know anyone. These armored aliens showed up and were about 10 feet tall. They rounded us up and said they were going to experiment on us. They killed a couple people right away when they struggled.

Somehow it jumped ahead 500 years, and we were all still trapped in the store. The aliens had allowed most of us that they originally captured in the music shop to live forever, but had killed off everyone else in the world. Outside the store, you could see there was nothing but desert because their destruction had been so thorough, but there were maybe a dozen of us left and we all had super powers somehow.

Yeah, it was completely nuts.

I had some pretty wild dreams last night too.  I dreamt [my then-girlfriend] and I were on a train traveling thru Germany and we were going to visit her folks [who weren't from Germany, I should mention].  I had dyed some of my hair a bright pink color (in reality, a bunch of people I know recently decided to put highlights in all together, so that's probably where that came from) and it was supposed to wash out the next day, only it took out my hair across the part I had put it (right across the front of the top of my head going toward the back).  I wasn't too concerned so I told myself that I would just shave the rest off b4 we got off the train.  However, while I was looking in the mirror at my hair I noticed that there were little, wire-like hairs growing out of my face.  They didn't look very much like hair and they all pointed exactly in the direction I was looking: the mirror.  What was even weirder was they all had little rubber animal faces on them about the size of pencil erasers.  I also noticed that I had a great big mushroom growing out of my face.  It was like the kind that grows out of the side of a tree, only it was sideways.  I thought to myself that I should go to a doctor, but I was scared to b/c I knew it would have to hurt to have all that removed.  It scared me.

I used to fall asleep in class fairly often when I was taking organic chem, and one day the professor was talking about spectroscopy and doing the NMR stuff so he started talking about the effects of e-negative atoms on the H's of the molecule.  I think there must have been an arrangement in the molecule in his example with 2 Cl's and an O because I dreamt that the O atom was Dracula and that his brides were twin sisters named Chlorine and they were trying to lay on opposing sides of him as he closed the coffin lid, but he couldn't because there wasn't enough room.  That is probably the 2nd weirdest dream I've had in organic chem, the 1st being the one I had last fall where I realized that molecules are reacting all the time (especially in the examples in class) so there must be an alternate universe where they can go to take a break from reacting.

Last night I dreamt that I was at my mom and dad's wedding in 1972.  My mom wasn't wearing a wedding dress though.  It was fashionable, but it looked more like she was hosting a party than getting married.  I didn't see my dad there, but I saw my aunt and one of my cousins, only she was the same age as I am (which didn't make sense because she's my age right now in 1995 as I'm writing this).  I was cleaning up after the reception (I think it might have still been going on, but I'm not sure).  I was trying to get all of the rainwater out of the beef stew.  Analyze that one why don't you.

[written in college sometime around when the "Interview with the Vampire" movie came out.]

I woke up feeling absolutely horrible this morning.  I couldn't really figure out why (aside from the fact that I only had about as much sleep as you and knew I wouldn't be able to get a nap before supper).  While I was brushing my teeth I remembered.  This fucking scared the shit out of me even in my sleep.  I dreamt that I was responsible for killing a woman.  I was in with this group of about five or six other people (one of whom was Elena [a sort of Goth girl I was friends with a year or two earlier]).  Some how the group of us got together and took this 40ish woman from her house just before dawn, out in the middle of some sugar cane fields and tied her to a pile of the canes themselves and burned her.  I think she must have already been dead when we got her there because she didn't move or anything at the time, but I watched her body after they had been burning it for a while and the entire thing looked basically like the place on a cigarette where the ash meets the unburned part.  The scary thing about it all was that I was somehow tied up into all of this and I didn't want to do any of it, but there was no way I could get out without them killing me as well.  A little later in the dream Elena (who was infinitely more frightening than she could ever even attempt to pretend to be in real life) came over to me bragging in the most sickening gloating way about the latest killing she and the group had made.  She was only doing it because she knew I didn't like the killing and knew that I would be held responsible for it (even though I had nothing to do with it) if any of them were ever caught.  The whole thing looked just like a movie, but it scared me more than any dream I've had in a long time.

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