dreams

As sung by Tom Petty (RIP).

Last night I dreamed that I was jogging along this lovely mountain trail. The sky was clear, but it wasn’t hot out. I had views that were nice, but not vertigo-inducing, of a bluff above, of alpine forest and a wide, flat valley below, where a lush savannah lay. Above the trail were a series of boulders that seemed to be shaped, possibly human-made. I remember clambering up to see what it was all about and recall water, so maybe some kind of reservoir? The dream was being a tease on this part.

In the savannah, I saw a hippo. Why a hippo, only my brain can say, and it ain’t talking. The hippo was the size of a house. There was also a house-sized chicken, though its proximity to the giant hippo was unclear. There might have been more chickens.

The bluff above made me think of the one in The Lion King, arching up to the sky, except instead of anthropomorphic lions capering about, there was a herd of giraffe gathering. I could see several of them hunkering down in a way that suggested they were getting ready to leap off the bluff, not like lemmings to their doom, but because they could fly. Of course.

This was a dream about my recovery from surgery.

Two recent dreams:

Frogs

I am in the hallway of some kind of school, possibly a college or university. For some reason the floor is carpeted. There are several people with me that I know in the dream, but I can’t recall if they were actual or dream people. Doors to nearby classrooms are open. There is a lot of water on the carpet, leaving it quite saturated in some spots. There are some green frogs scattered about, one a fairly big size (for a frog), the others small.

I am wearing blue jeans. I look down at one of my legs and see the jeans are wet. It is not because I failed to get to the loo in time, it’s just water. But from that water emerges a tiny frog, as if manifesting from the frog dimension and onto my leg. It hops onto the floor and joins the other frogs. I see more frogs appear out of the saturated carpet.

Before the frogs can take over the world, which was undoubtedly their plan, I awaken.

The Delivery Van

Or possibly a moving van, but I’m pretty sure it was a delivery van. I am riding shotgun and the driver is a nervous young guy, maybe 18 or 19. We are returning the van to the lot from which it was rented/borrowed. I am aware the van is semi-autonomous, but the kid is driving and in full control.

We get to the lot and there is another similar van there, which becomes relevant shortly.

From a room with large glass windows, almost like a control tower at an airport, a supervisor of some sort guides us in. He tells the kid over the radio to line the van up with some kind of docking mechanism. The important part is, just as the van connects, the kid has to push a comically large button on the dashboard. The kid muffs on the timing and the van fails to dock. This causes it to wheel off back into the lot and somehow it becomes more autonomous and sort of out of control, but very slowly out of control. Think of the steamroller in the first Austin Powers move, like that.

The supervisor from the control room somehow manages to climb into the driver’s side to take over. The kid has either disappeared or got out real quiet-like, making me wonder why I couldn’t have done the same. The other delivery van is kind of looping around us and while it’s not explicitly stated, I understand this is a bad thing.

The supervisor gives me a big key and produces another identical to it. He says we both need to insert our keys into slots on the dashboard at the same time and turn them. “Like firing nukes,” I say, “except we’re the nukes?” He laughs, but in a nervous way.

Sadly, I wake up before finding out what happened next. It’s too bad, because I really wanted to know!

Last night, two dreams in which I was running.

Dream #1, The Good Dream:

I am standing on a quiet street on a pleasant day. There is no traffic, so this may be a residential area. Sitting on the curb are three people I know, though I can’t recall now if they were real people or dream people. I decided I would play a guessing game with them in which I would run before them as a famous person or fictional character and they’d have to guess who. The three I chose were:

1. Terry Fox
2. Steve Austin (The Six Million Dollar Man)
3. Tina Belcher, from Bob’s Burgers

The dream ended shortly after I’d presented my Terry Fox run.

Dream #2, The Bad Dream:

I am outside and it is dusk. I am near the side of a large building, there are two doors on the wall– men’s and women’s washrooms. I try the door on each, both are locked. I nod, because it is getting late and it is not surprising they are closed now. I realize it is later than I thought, as it is getting dark and there are no nearby lights. I start to head back to the front of this large building, which now seems to be the Moose Lodge in Duncan (it has been known for many years as the Duncan Lodge, I am recalling the version from my younger days). Across the parking lot I see a young woman walking slowly toward me. There is enough light to make the person look like someone from The Ring and I become alarmed and start to sprint toward the front entrance. I move in that syrupy slow way of bad dreams, but make it inside and instead of fumbling with the round door lock like a slasher movie victim, I manage to smoothly switch it over into the locked position.

I am safe. It seems now that the Moose Lodge interior has been replaced with the home I grew up in, so I am standing in our downstairs hallway. There is still very little light, so I head toward the next room, the kitchen. As I get close to the doorway, I can see someone standing in the centre of the kitchen, unmoving. Light coming in from the window over the kitchen sink hits the figure from behind, giving it outline and form. The head is bowed, the figure is not moving at all. Instead of panicking, I inch forward and snap on the light.

When the light comes on, there is no one standing there, if there had ever been. I make some kind of audible sound–a moan of relief, a cry, something. I then realize I am awake and making the same sound. I feel a bit silly and stop.

I mull over what prompted each dream, but can’t make any connections. I fall back asleep and spend the rest of the night dreamless.

My REM sleep was rated Good by my Garmin Forerunner last night, and I think it may have accurately captured things, because I had dreams a-plenty. Here is what I remember of them, using four keywords when I woke up during the night to help:

• gay
• Musk
• Mom
• Tim

Gay: This seemed to be a dream about olden times, like in the 1800s, and was focused on a man who wondered if he really was a man (i.e. straight), musing aloud about the alternative possibility: “It could not be so”. I think he was sighing heavily on a couch or something. The best I can figure is this keyed off images I’ve seen on a social media account called Old Book Illustrations.

Musk: I was with a group of people outside. There was a hill and a lake or some sort of body of water and it had this weird undulating effect that didn’t seem physically possible. Even in the dream it seemed weird. This part is directly related to seeing a gull bobbing on waves on the Fraser River yesterday afternoon, which undulated in the same way.

And yes, Elon Musk was there. At one point, a bunch of helicopters (?) flew in, dropping off a bunch of random vehicles. They were all the vehicles he had owned, which was supposed to be interesting, somehow. Musk babbled on about all of this and someone by he commented on what a showman he was. I replied that he was a con man and a huckster. Even dream me ain’t impressed. This dream had a strange and somewhat poignant turn at the end, as my mom showed up and upon seeing me, she immediately turned her head in a way to get a welcoming kiss, which signalled to me that she clearly recognized me (she did not quite recognize me in April 2023 when we met in person for the last time). But then I asked her, “How are you?” and she couldn’t answer, like the question had no meaning to her. It was odd and a little sad.

Tim: But just in time to save me from the melancholy, I found myself at my old place on East 19th Avenue, where I last lived in 2011. I was apparently on top of a broken staircase outside and trying to figure out how to get down. The son of Tim, my friend and landlord, appeared at the base of the stairs and I noted how much bigger he was from the last time I’d seen him, apparently going from a toddler to maybe 8 years old? Also, the kid looked nothing like Tim’s actual son, but more like one of my brother’s kids, who is obviously now a full-grown adult. The kid seemed to acknowledge my predicament. Then Tim and Sue arrived and I feel others were with them, but I can’t recall who. Tim was completely naked, but it was OK, because they had been attending some event/ritual where being naked was part of the hippie fun. In the dream I could remember what the event was, but not now, alas. No one seemed fussed about Tim’s nakedness. I managed to climb down the back side of the stairs to get back safely to the ground.

There may have been more, but that’s what I remember. My brain is weird.

When I was a wee lad, I semi-regularly had two types of bad dreams:

• Ferry disasters (possibly because I didn’t swim well and any rocking on a ferry kind of terrified me. Because I grew up on Vancouver Island, almost all of our holiday trips required taking the ferry.)
• Getting chased down by various things and entities, including but not restricted to:
  • Vehicles of all types. They typically were missing the front bumper, because this made them more terrifying to me.
  • Vampires
  • Robots
  • Mummies
  • Assorted monsters

The chase dreams would usually end just as the thing was catching up to me, or in the case of a vehicle, just as I was about to be run down. I’d wake up, all frazzled, then eventually fall back asleep. Good times all around.

As an adult I very rarely have bad dreams and when I do, I typically wake up, think, “That was weird” and promptly doze off again.

Last night I dreamed I was either at the UBC campus or one that was subbing for it. It was vast and sprawling, and I must have been attending classes there, because I remember marvelling over how I was enjoying the science classes more than the arts, which was the opposite of my dream self (my awake self is the same, but not as strongly as the dream version of me). As I made my way across campus, it became time for me to leave. I was walking along one of those quiet campus roads that you see an occasional service vehicle trundling down, and as I approached the edge of the campus this road widened out into the start of a (I believe four-lane) highway. This was almost certainly my subconscious drawing in the Southwest Marine Drive entrance to UBC, which is indeed very highway-like.

Because this was where the highway started (or ended), it was very quiet. I needed to cross, and rather than going back to the quiet campus road, I opted to cross the highway.

You can see where this is heading.

I began to cross and almost at the same moment noticed a car approaching from the campus side, heading toward me. It was a low, dusty gold colour. It made me think of a 70s Dodge Charger. I looked it up and if this isn’t the car I saw in the dream, it is extremely close to it:

In the dream, I did a quick mental calculation and realized that the speed of the car meant I wouldn’t have time to get out of the way. Would the driver swerve around me? Plow into me? Was there even a driver at all? (The childhood versions of these dreams almost always featured driverless vehicles).

With no other options left, I did the only thing I could think of: I jumped straight into the air as the car approached. And it zipped harmlessly under me.

I woke up shortly after that.

Maybe the takeaway is that as an adult I have more control over things that frighten me, or make me uneasy. Or maybe my subconscious finally realized that three dimensions exist in dreams, too.

I think my allergies have been bonking me over the head the past few days, and this lead me to having a dream (I think it was a dream, I was in bed and all) about a new anti-allergy medicine called AllerJAZZ! The packaging had the compelling slogan: “Takes care of your allergies…and all that jazz!” Apparently, my subconscious mind is big on exclamation points. Also, jazz hands were a prominent part of the logo.

I can kind of see the packaging for this. Maybe I’ll mock up something later. That seems like a good use of my time.

I remember at least part of a dream I had last night. It went like this (insert dreamy music and transition effects):

I was in a large house, possibly a mansion, and had a sniper rifle. But wait, it’s not what it sounds like! It was a pew-pew laser rifle, like you use in laser tag. In the dream I apparently had a reputation of being a good shot (this is definitely not taken from any actual skills at video games and/or real life) and so even though we were in some kind of timed game that was ostensibly a free-for-all, it was really Everyone vs. Me.

I would emerge from a room and take a shot. I didn’t have time to use the scope, so I’d just quickly eyeball using the sight, and down an opponent would go. After a while, when they probably started thinking about how I was never not going to use my laser rifle, I switched it up and began using a grenade launcher. No, I don’t know how you could possibly simulate a grenade launcher in a game of laser tag, but in my dream, it not only worked, it worked very well.

I woke up just as the timer was running down, and I was declared victor, going undefeated. Basically, in this dream, I was a complete badass. Why I had this dream, I can’t say. Maybe my subconscious felt I needed a little ego boost for the end of the year, and delivered it in a way I could understand. I’m pretty sure the grenade launcher was due to recently rewatching Aliens. I had better luck than they did.

Last night I dreamed I was back living in my basement suite at Tim’s old place (I last lived there in 2011), but as is the case in dream versions, the layout was different and it had a hallway where one did not exist before. Apparently we were having water issues. More specifically, something broke or sprung a leak because I was walking through water (rather unperturbed, too. I think I was barefoot and enjoying it in a way).

Rather than have a plumber fixing the issue, we appeared to have an entire crew working on whatever the problem was. One especially cheerful member of the crew stopped to explain to me how the problem was fixed and confirming it was fixed, and they were leaving. Even in the dream, I was curious why the whole place was still flooded. I approached another worker who was moving the fridge (back?) but then it turned out to be a mattress. It may have actually morphed when my sleep-brain decided a mattress suddenly made more sense, somehow.

But the best part was when about half a dozen pigeons flew into the hallway (which was not flooded) and started milling about as pigeons do. This was treated as essentially a normal thing in the dream and I bent down to one pigeon and moved an index finger under its belly, toward its feet, the way you would do to a budgie to get it to hop on your finger. The pigeon hopped onto my finger. I then carried the pigeon around on my finger for most of the rest of the dream.

Then I woke up. It is dry and pigeon-free as I type this, so my dream does not appear to be prophecy–so far.