Dream: The Professor

This one is from three years ago, October of 2018.

I had gone back to college and was taking an Introduction to Art Criticism course. I had been warned the professor was both a tough grader and pretty Out There. Her classroom was decorated like a gallery, filled with her contemporary-style works.

At one point, she looked directly at me and gave me an in-class assignment: “You see a three-eyed woman. What five cameras do you use to photograph her?”

Hey, you want weird? I’ll give ya weird. I started to write out my list. I can’t remember all of them, but they included:

-the camera used to photograph the victims of the Manson murders
-the camera used to photograph the raising of the flag on the Moon
-the last camera that will ever be manufactured

each with an appropriately bizarre justification.

And then she never called on me to present! I tried to get her attention, but, given her mercurial reputation, I didn’t want to press it. She just kept talking until the class ended.

Then the dream shifted.

Dream: Elevator Nightmare

On the top floor of a four-story building, a madman was chasing me. Bellowing, knife held high, he pursued me through the condo.

An elevator ran through the building, opening in the kitchen of each unit. I ducked inside and hit the Down button. The door closed in the face of the madman.

For the moment, I was safe. If I could reach the ground floor and slip out the back, I would be safe entirely.

But I knew the madman was racing the elevator. I could picture him hurrying down, could almost hear his feet pounding in the stairwell.

Would the elevator door open to the sight of him standing there, knife in hand?

The elevator halted.

The door was about to open.

And I awoke.

Dream: I Am Jack Black IN Giant Robot Film

I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie. And that I was the star of the movie.

Specifically, I dreamed I was Jack Black. For the purposes of this dream, I am Jack Black. And the movie was a Pacific Rim style giant robot flick, a family-friendly action-comedy.

Unlike this dream, there was no framing device. I was not watching a movie in the dream, I was just living it (as Jack Black.) Yet I knew it was a movie, and had the expectations of a movie.

The dream started deep in the plot. I was a (rather inept) member of the armed forces who had been selected to become a pilot of a giant robot. My partner was a teenage girl, rather akin to the kids of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

We had both just gotten our butts kicked by the bad guys in their giant robots, and removed from the pilot program for our incompetence. My partner and I were at a church in my town, where our robots had been stored away in cardboard boxes. We had an Emotionally Significant conversation, with one of us saying there was no hope and the other saying there’s always hope. Except I can’t remember which of us was the Depressed One and which was the Encouraging One. Then I remembered I had to mail a letter. So I left my partner and drove to a nearby mailbox.

As I was putting the letter in the box, there was a Empire Strikes Back/Jurassic Park moment of dull thuds in the distance and vibration as Something Massive This Way Comes. The Bad Guy Giant Robots were attacking the town.

Being a member of the armed forces, I, Jack Black, had a sidearm. When the trio of giant robots appeared, looming over the houses, I began plinking uselessly at them.

Since this is a movie, we’re going to cut to the Bad Guy’s POV. On their sensor screens, they can see me. Only they don’t know that I’m their enemy. They never saw my face when we fought in giant robots. So all they know is that I’m some schmuck taking potshots, and the leader of the bad guys decides to have some fun. To step on me.

I see a skyscraper-sized foot lift and descend upon me. Viscerally. In the dream, this all seemed vividly real.

Except I knew it was a movie. I’m the lead in a family-friendly action-comedy. I’m not going to die. So this was not a nightmare. I screamed, but I knew I wasn’t going to die.

Since the giant robot foot is modeled after a human foot, there’s a space on the bottom under the arch, a space in which I now found myself, safe.

Then the Bad Guy Leader, to be a jerk, decided to press the foot in harder.

The tiny space I occupy compressed, and I screamed some more. But I was still OK.

Then the foot rose again. The Bad Guy Robots continued their rampage. I was free to go back to the church, find my partner, and climb into our robots to defeat the Bad Guys, save the day, and end the movie.

I woke. I wonder, if it were real, what the weekend opening box office would be.

A Dream of Atomic Death

Last night I dreamed I returned to my alma mater (although, as is usual with my dreams, the setting looked nothing like the waking life campus). The occasion was both the first week of classes and a film festival. Several other of my college friends were also there, and in a dining hall we were discussing what movies we were interested in seeing.

The one I went to was about nuclear war. Immediately I was both watching the movie and living it (as, again, is typical in my dreams). The world was on the brink of thermonuclear exchange. I was residing in the Pacific Northwest, and had gone to a nearby army base for refuge. The commanding officer informed me missiles were flying.

From a distorted view, I could see all down the coast, and one by one I watched the death lilies rise above city after city. It occurred to me that the base to which I had come for safety was, in fact, a target.

Above my head and to the left, there was a flicker of bright light. it had begun.

The dream atomic explosion owed little to real life. The heat came in waves. My skin grew hot, there was a burst of light and I thought “Is this it?” Then it would fade some. But on the third wave, the heat did not fade, it reached a crescendo as I was consumed in temperatures greater than the sun, my dream-vision overwhelmed with brilliant yellow light.

Yet through all this I did not fear, for I knew it was just a movie.

That was the end of the film. I rejoined my friends in the cafeteria. They asked me how it was.

“Interesting,” I replied.

Dream: A New Iteration of The Library You See In Dreams

Last night I visited another Library You See In Dreams.

This must have been an academic library, because it was the haunt of grad students. Many grad students. Who lived there. On a vast subbasement level, innumerable grad students had carved out living spaces for themselves, forming library furniture–shelves, book carrels, whiteboards and the like–into rough territory-defining areas around cots. Their personal items were stashed about like a refugee’s household goods.

I was visiting. I was looking at the books. But naturally, I didn’t want to disturb anybody’s stuff. There was a shelf piled with folio-sized red hardbound volumes, worn at the corners. They held maps from World War II. I really wanted to take one down, but the shelf was currently forming a wall around one of the grad students’s cots. The student in question wasn’t there. Feeling like I was intruding, I tiptoed around their stuff, and got down the book.

Having my treasure, I tried to move out of the area, but knocked into an enormous duffel bag propped on the cot. The duffel bag hit a book carrel, which hit a floor lamp, which collapsed onto a whiteboard, which rolled across the tile. I tried to start picking things up, but the book carrel moved further and hit something else. In the quiet of the library, the clatter seemed deafening. People were looking at me. I knew that that untold numbers of grad students were ticked off at whoever that fool was making all the noise. At any moment the person whose stuff this was might appear.

Then the dream shifted.

Dream: Mr Wallee At the Front

I was a Marine on some island during World War II. We were preparing for a Japanese attack. Apparently we knew the enemy thought we were in a certain position atop a ridge, so we had shifted to a different position, some ways to the west, and dug in.

Each of us had been issued their own individual small mortar. I crouched beside mine, holding a shell. At that moment, I saw the enemy artillery open up in preparation for the assault—but they were uselessly bombarding our old position. We braced for the infantry charge to follow.

Just then Mr. Wallee wandered into our lines.

He was a portly Japanese gentleman in an elegant suit and a Van Dyke beard. He greeted us kindly, chatted with us, gave us a ribald Japanese comic book. Apparently he was not with the enemy forces. He claimed to be a traveler, enjoying this Pacific isle.

All the guys liked Mr. Wallee immediately, but we still had to assume he was a spy. The enemy might have sent him to detect our new location. It seemed ridiculous that they would try such an unusual ruse, but maybe that sheer ridiculousness was part of the idea.

I was detailed to take Mr. Wallee back to the battalion command post, where he would be transferred to the prisoner of war system. He was offended that anyone would assume he could ever work against his Marine friends, protested his innocence, but came with me anyway. As we proceeded to the rear, I wondered if there was some classification kinder than P.O.W. that he could be given. Mr. Wallee seemed too civilized a man for such a vicious war.

Dream Journal: Those Surprising Cannibals!

Was reminded this morning of a dream I had in the spring of 2009:

I, along with a party of dreamfolk, had been kidnapped by a group of cannibals. But these cannibals were not so banal as to simply murder and eat us. Instead they forced to run an elaborate and deadly obstacle course. We weren’t supposed to get through it. They intended for us to succumb to one of the lethal hurdles within, so they could fall upon our corpses Sawney-Bean style.

But somehow, miraculously, we made it to the end. The cannibals were waiting for us at the finish line. We assumed they would be furious at being thwarted and braced for an assault.

But no. They merely congratulated us. They seemed impressed. Then one of their number, a dwarf, raced among all the survivors, dabbing our hands with a pastry brush dipped in skin-soluble LSD.

Was this a new trap? Would they expose us to horrible things so we would tear out our own eyes in the depths of the worst of bad trips?

Nope! Again, much to our surprise, the cannibals showed us hospitality. They brought out colorful toys and children’s books. We all had a happy psychedelic time.

Nothing bad happened. Once we came down, the cannibals, apparently considering us prime talent, invited us to join them. They offered us brochures and VHS videos on how to kill and eat human beings.

I declined, though politely. I still didn’t want to risk angering these homicidal manics.

Then I woke.

Dream: The Man in the Higher Castle

I found myself in an Japanese-occupied 1940s American city. It was a setting akin to Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle, although in this dream the war was still ongoing.

I left our apartment to run errands. There was steel foundry nearby. I could see the showers of sparks as battleship armor was forged. Then in my hand I found my grandfather’s copy of Battle Stations, a book that, in our timeline, the U.S. Navy published to commemorate their victory.

What was I thinking? Why had I brought this outside? If anyone noticed I had such piece of American propaganda, it would mean arrest and execution for myself and my entire family. I tried not to panic and immediately turned toward home, praying no one would notice the title.

Our apartment was located in an immense skyscraper–so immense that there was time, during the elevator ride up, to show propaganda cartoons. The car I was in was filled with people, including several Japanese soldiers. Everyone was laughing at the cartoon, laughing at the ridiculous Yankees being defeated by the Emperor’s troops. One of the soldier was standing right next to my hand holding the book. Would he happen to look down? Would he notice this criminal piece of subversive literature?

I held my breath and counted the floors until I could get out…

Dream: The Armenian Woman

Last night I dreamed of an Armenian-American woman of the early 20th century. She was in her early Thirties. She was angry. She was angry because her ex-husband had just died and left her millions of dollars.

An odd reason to be angry? But you must understand: she had left her ex-husband, who was a nationalist leader in the American and global Armenian diasporic communities, because he was controlling, abusive, and philandering. At some point she grasped he had groomed her from a young age to be both a leader in the cause and his wife, and became disillusioned with both his cause and him.

Now he had bequeathed all the millions he had raised from Armenians worldwide to her personally. Not as an institution–as an individual. She could either take the money as her personal fortune and use it selfishly, or she could use it for the intended purposes. She could not bring herself to do the former and she knew he knew she couldn’t. From the grave he dragged her back to the Armenian cause and chained her to it. She was furious.

And she took it out on her new lover, Harrison Ford. Or an early-20th-century Armenian-American man who looked like Harrison Ford, let’s say.

Then the dream skipped to her late ex-husband’s battles in World War I. He had raised an Armenian-American unit and led it against the Turks. The scenes were anachronistic–the Turks were using arrows. But then the dream shifted to a World-War-I-era film style, sepia and flickering, showing the unit’s victory parade into Paris. Except they showed up in their gas masks, to the horror and confusion of those lining the streets–until they whipped off their masks to reveal it was the brave Armenians all along! Then everyone laughed and cheered.

(That was all. Dreams don’t usually provide coherent narratives. There was no end. I like to think The Angry Woman took up the mantle of Armenian leadership, but in ways her late ex-husband did not foresee and would have strongly disapproved.)

Dream: The River

Had a dream. Little hard to describe since the dream had not a plot, but a place: The River.

From the air, I could see the River, curving fat and slow across a great plain, the sun glinting off the turbid water. At every curve you found a town, centers of the surrounding farmland. In between the towns swam the boats choogly.

Choog-choog-choog.

I saw the steamboats, not like sidepaddlers of our own history. I saw a line of them: barges with boilers on them, looked like furnaces, with great bronze screws, choog-choog-choog, half-in and half-out of the water. Which makes for massive cavitation and poor performance (hence the choogly sound), but that was not a problem. They were slow, but they connected the towns. No one was in a hurry.

Between the towns the steam-boats carried goods and passengers, choog-choog-choog, and the boat-men got a little change in their pockets, singing in the sun.

On the river ran the boats, town to town, and I saw the River, the people of the River. They were happy. It was a lovely dream, because they all were happy.