dreams

I’ve had a lot of dreams the past few nights, and I’ve actually remembered several of them. They are both silly and weird, as all good dreams should be. Given the stress I’ve gone through lately, it almost seems like my subconscious mind is trying to offer a calming balm of sorts. I’m good with that.

Dream #1: The cat and the keyboard

This dream involved one of my internet gaming pals, Circuit. It played out over some kind of webcam he had set up. He was showing off a couple new things: a shiny new black keyboard with a knob (like the one I have). For some reason, the keyboard was on the carpet. I remember the carpet was yellow. And he also had a new black cat, though I never got the name. Circuit mentioned that one issue is the cat seemed to barf a lot and just as he said this the cat barfed on his new keyboard. That’s where the dream ended.

I laughed when I woke up and remembered the dream.

Dream #2: Mom and the duck device

The second dream featured my mom, who is now 88. In the dream, she looked like she was in her late 40s or early 50s, but I couldn’t tell if the dream was in the past or if she was unnaturally young in the present. It started in a booth of what I think was a McDonald’s. I don’t recall seeing anything to positively ID it, but that was the vibe. The scene abruptly changed to outside, near a tree by the road that went past the McDonald’s. I think it may have been the McDonald’s in my hometown of Duncan, so the road would be the island highway, though due to its location, traffic does not go roaring past here. My mom was talking to a man who was down low by the tree, dogging or something. He apparently had something controversial to report, and she was acting like a news reporter, complete with audio recording device. She promised not to use his name and turned the device on to start recording their conversation. The device was disguised as a duck and to turn it on, she had to squeeze the duck, which caused it to open its mouth and quack. She then held the duck to him and started the questions. That’s where the dream ended.

I not only laughed when I woke up and remembered this dream, I laugh every time I think of it. My mom was holding the duck like an Uzi, too.

I had this dream last night:

I was the passenger in a car that felt like a small sedan, somewhat sport, like an Acura or a nice Hyundai or something. The driver was a younger guy who seemed to be a nephew or some kind of relative. In the dream, I did not have a good feeling about his driving.

We were on a mountain highway–you can probably see where this is going (no pun intended)–and it reminded me of the Upper Levels Highway on the way to Horseshoe Bay or maybe the Malahat Drive on the way to Victoria–a windy highway that hugs the face of the mountain, with water hundreds of meters below. As we sped along, I saw ahead of us a bunch of fir tree branches, like you might find on a typical Christmas tree. Why they were laying across the highway I cannot say, but instead of driving around them, my possible nephew drove over them, perhaps thinking them a minor obstacle. As he did, the car got caught on them and started drifting into the oncoming lanes.

I distinctly remember audibly saying in a very calm voice, “No no no no no…” as I knew this would not end well. Surprisingly, my nephew did that “steer into the skid” thing, corrected and got us back on our side of the road without hitting any of the oncoming traffic. “Yay!” my dream-self thought. But only for a moment, because while we were in our own lane, we were not heading down the lane, but rather across it, at full speed. There was no time to correct, nor was there even time for me to chant, “No no no no…” to myself again. I did have sufficient time to absolutely know this would not end well.

I woke up either just before the car hit the concrete barrier at full speed, or just as it hit. I laid there in bed with the dream still fully intact in my mind, my imagination playing through what would have happened next:

• The car smashes into the barrier and the barrier is sufficiently strong enough to prevent it from plowing through, instead causing it to crumple into nothing or possibly explode–then tumble merrily over the edge.
• Or the car does smash through the concrete barrier and goes flying off the mountain at high speed, sailing unimpeded all the way down before striking the water (or rocks) at the bottom at approximately Mach 2.

In both cases, the chance of survival would be pretty much zero, unless right at the end it turned into one of those, “Hey, I can fly!” dreams. That might have been worth staying asleep for. But as mentioned in the title of this post, while my subconscious hates me (by subjecting me to this dream), it still respects me enough to wake me up before the really bad parts happen.

So here’s a half-hearted thank you to my brain. Tonight, if I dream, I want the dream to be pleasant and delightful. It doesn’t have to be enchanting, too, though I wouldn’t object to that. And if any cliffs are involved, I better be able to fly, even if it’s by flapping my arms.

Last night, I dreamed that I returned to work at Starbucks as a barista, a position I last held 24 years ago. Yes, it’s been awhile.

Here are the details as I recall them:

• The store was either very big or in a very big space. The ceilings were vast, like the kind you would find in a convention hall. The store had two bars arranged opposite each other in a square, but there was something in the square between the bars, so to go from one to the other you had to walk all the way around, which seemed like a vast distance in the dream.
• I was wearing a black long-sleeved shirt and had the sleeves rolled partway up. I think it may have been a turtleneck.
• We were either post-pandemic or in a dream version of the world where COVID-19 never happened, as no one was wearing masks. This was the only nice part of the dream.
• It was very busy. Orders were coming in fast, and I was clearly out of my depth. Everything I knew I’d long since forgotten. A customer asked for a triple, and I looked at the menu board, trying to figure out what a triple might be. He wanted three shots of espresso, of course, something any noob barista would know.
• I don’t remember if this happened, but it seemed like at least one customer remarked about how they knew more about my job than I did–which was accurate.
• I don’t remember how the dream ended, but I do remember waking up and feeling kind of crappy about it. On the other hand, the idea of working retail anywhere again gives me the willies, so perhaps the dream was just my mind’s way of reminding me, should I seek out some additional income from part-time work on the side.

In conclusion, I would like a nice dream about fluffy nice things tonight. Or winning the lottery and not having it turn out to be an ironic horror or something.

Last night I had an odd dream that I actually remember fairly well.

I was in downtown Vancouver, within view of Burrard Inlet. The sky was a bright, clear blue and the way people were dressed suggested it was summer.

To my left was one of the historical buildings that one finds along the harbour–think the Waterfront Station building–though in this case the building more closely resembled the Hudson’s Bay building which is not, in fact, located on the harbour. It was a dream building, then, but close enough to reality to serve its purpose.

Directly ahead of me, in the inlet, was what appeared to be a giant oil derrick, except it had been modified or created with a different purpose. Atop it was a fully articulated arm, the end of which was tipped with a very large spike. For scale, I’d say the spike itself was probably 20 feet long. Not the kind of spike you’d want to be caught under. This spike was almost casually reaching over and chipping away at the historic building reminiscent of the Hudson’s Bay store. From where I stood I couldn’t see the actual damage the spike might be doing, but somehow I knew that it shouldn’t have been doing this, but also couldn’t be stopped, because the platform was an alien construction and we puny humans had no control over it.

After some time passed there was a tremendous heaving sound from the building and I looked over in time to see an impressively large chunk of it–multiple stories–come loose, and topple into the inlet. Moments after, the spike managed to needle its way into a more modern structure and what appeared to be an entire skyscraper suddenly appeared in the sky, somehow pulled loose from its foundation, and which was now making its way directly down toward the people gathered.

I began to run to the east to avoid being squashed, but my mom–who was apparently there the entire time–had a better read on the building’s trajectory and told me to stop. I stopped and the building crashed into the harbour. We then conferred briefly and I suggested we walk to my place to see what the fallout of all this might be. Most people were similarly clearing out of the area, not in a panic, but in a “better safe than sorry” kind of way. The direction we headed suggested I was still living on East 19th Avenue, which would put the timeframe of the dream somewhere between 2001 and 2011, but it felt earlier than that, like I was still in my late 20s or maybe early 30s.

The dream ended there, so I’m not sure what our building-mashing alien overlords had in mind next, but the thing that lingered with me later was how strangely banal the whole thing was. An alien construct appeared or arrived in Burrard Inlet, it started poking away at nearby buildings, and all we could do was shrug and wait to see what happened. So we did.

Which is quite possibly the way something like this might actually unfold, if we were clearly powerless to stop it.

Well, not another. But one is probably enough.

Last night I dreamed of being in a small, cluttered bedroom or spare room in some place or other. The bed was covered in sheets, blankets and bric-a-brac. I pulled aside one of the blankets or sheets and revealed a very large, circle-shaped spider sitting on the bed. Size-wise, imagine tripling the average tarantula and you have it about right. The spider was startled and skittered in its spidery way to the edge of the bed–where another spider waited. The second spider was similar in size but was differently-colored, light to the other spider’s dark. When the fleeing spider made contact with the second spider a fight broke out.

Lesson: do not disturb a spider, especially a large, circle-shaped one.

The part that made the dream stand out, though, was not the weird shape or large size of the spiders, but rather, the sound they made when they began to fight.

They screamed.

It was a high-pitched screeching. It didn’t stop. As they grappled the screaming went on, the two voices overlapping each other and sometimes blending into one super-creepy tone, on until I awoke and wondered what I ate to prompt such a dream.

I had other dreams last night, but the screaming spiders are the ones that stayed with me. I’m good without having a repeat, really. It wasn’t scary or anything, but those screams. Spiders should not make those sounds.