The Dream Donut Device

A few nights ago I had a dream in which I was at a meeting at work and a group of us were gathered around a large conference table. Standing at one end was a former Academic Dean and she had donuts. But how do you distribute the donuts to people sitting around such a large conference table? In Dreamville you just use a device specifically made for just such a dilemma.

It consisted of three parts:

  • a long piece of narrow, rounded wood
  • a tube similar to a Pringles potato chip can, but about twice as big around
  • a fishing rod-style reel to act as a winch
  • and donuts

The donuts were loaded onto the piece of rounded wood. Sadly this meant no Boston Creams or other yummy filled donuts. The loaded donut “stick” would then be inserted into the long tube and at one end of the tube, the donut deliverer would use the reel/winch-like device to slowly push the donut stick out of the tube across the length of the table, allowing people to grab donuts as they slowly went by.

In the dream it was brilliant and everyone found it quite clever. In reality, it would work best if the laws of physics could be suspended, people didn’t care what type of donut they got and everyone was too lazy to just get up to grab a donut from the box (which would at least burn 5 of the 250 calories the donut would ding you).

This is apparently what happens when I go over a month without a donut.

Fly, my pretty

Last night (technically early this morning) I had a type of dream that I haven’t had for many years. No, not getting chased by vampires, mummies, robots or driver-less vehicles (the staples of my childhood and I still have no idea what was up with that), but rather, I dreamed that I was flying.

I would normally associate flying dreams (at least ones where I don’t plummet to the ground) as something positive my subconscious is surfacing and while things have not been going badly for me of late, work has been very busy, I don’t have an idea for NaNoWriMo yet and I have other assorted smaller worries and concerns. There’s a lot on my mind, in other words.

And yet last night I dreamed I was flying over a park (a park was the location of one of my previous flying dreams, too). Sure, the people in the park didn’t seem to notice or care but it was still spiffy. The flying seemed to rely on momentum and inertia, so running and jumping into the air definitely helped. Once airborne, I remained upright and could swoop back and forth, sort of a fast hovering motion rather than using a Superman-style pose.

At one point in the dream a guy started following me. I didn’t know who he was or if he was dangerous but he definitely appeared to be trailing me. I should point out that I was suddenly not flying any more. I was instead scrambling up a steep hill covered in crumbly dirt and rock, the sort of thing that I find difficult to climb in real life. The dream mirrored this aspect accurately. The guy was going to catch up to me but I had to be careful, lest I fall right into his possibly evil clutches. When I made it to the top it seemed I remembered I could fly and so I started flying around again.

I don’t remember anything else after that, but still, it was neat to have a flying dream again.

Kayaks good, little food packets bad

I’ve had a couple of dreams lately where I’ve been able to remember a few details, sometimes even when I’d be better off not remembering.

In one I was kayaking, something I’ve never done because water kind of terrifies me, especially the large oceany type you can drown in. In this dream I was quite comfortable with it as I and two others (I can’t recall who they were, alas) paddled along the coastline. At one point we ended up on a ferry and any dream I have that features a ferry never ends well. In this one we were planning to leave the ferry in our kayaks while the boat was still sailing. One of us then floated (ho ho) the notion that we could leave after the ship docked, so it all ended unusually well.

The other dream was one I woke up from this morning and as befits a Monday morning dream, it was quietly horrible.

In it I was back working as the operator at the concession, the kind of employment I relish the same way a mouse would anticipate an evening with a hungry cat. Various employees were doing various tasks while I took it upon myself to manage the inventory. This seemed to consist primarily of sorting and placing very tiny packets of something edible (looking back on the dream now I haven’t the faintest idea what these might have been) into very long slatted wooden shelving units. The work was fantastically tedious and involved. The whole dream had a terrible dreariness to it and I woke up feeling kind of depressed. Then it was off to actual real work, my mood ashen gray.

I’d next like to have a dream where I win the lottery or something and it’s not one of those ironically nightmarish things like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Brain freezes, Mars facilities and planes a-fallin’

Again I find myself unable to think of anything witty, relevant or interesting to post and the more I try to think of something the greater the blank space where that something would be becomes.

But I’m not going to post another cat image. I’m tempted. Oh, so tempted.

Instead, I will recall that I had dimly remember two dreams last night. One was being part of a crew setting up some kind of Mars research facility. This was a space station/habitat sort of thing that was going to either be on Mars or in orbit around the red planet. I remember the facility being large, clean and very empty. I don’t remember what I actually did but I like to imagine it was very important. Perhaps I met Matt Damon. I’m pretty sure publicity for The Martian is what prompted the dream.

The other dream involved me watching a passenger jet coming in for a landing at YVR, as passenger jets will do at the airport. I was watching from near 41st Avenue and Cambie and the plane was coming in north to south rather than east to west, which is silly, but that’s dreams for you. I marveled at how close to the ground the planes get when coming in, except this one actually started scraping its tail along Cambie Street. The pilot wisely pulled up, presumably to try again with less scraping. Instead of just looping around he did this strange series of climbs and descents, which I interpreted as him trying to gain momentum or height or something. I don’t know, I’m not an airplanist. The jet moved off to the west, somewhere further down 41st Avenue and did another climb but this time when it came back down it started twirling and then disappeared out of my sight, presumably crashing as out of my sight would be where the ground was. I woke up and was bummed out until I remembered the earlier Mars dream. The airplane crash dream was inspired by me watching a YouTube video of plane crashes that was a “related” video to something I watched that had nothing to do with planes, crashes or plane crashes. Probably a Boston video. Watching it was not one of my better ideas.

Tonight I’m going to watch kitten videos before going to bed. If I dream of being chased and eaten by lions I am going to be very cross with my brain.

A book of dreams

There’s a thread on Broken Forum about dreams titled “Last night I dreamed…” After the inevitable quote from The Smiths the thread has become a storehouse of dreams that range from the banal to the predictably bizarre or disturbing. I thought it might be interesting to adapt one or two into short stories. Dreams lend themselves well to the format as they tend to be fragmentary experiences that are either short on narrative or lacking it entirely.

After requesting submissions from the dozens of dreams posted, I went with the two that were suggested and will be working on them over the next month or so. If the results are promising I’m contemplating an entire short story collection using the same idea of pulling together dreams and adapting them as short fiction. I’m sure someone else has done the same thing already, as any decent idea has been worked and reworked countless times. But what the heck, I’ve never claimed to be original and the idea intrigues me. I may even have a few of my own dreams that could lend themselves to this kind of project.

Eddie Vedder and me

Last night I had a dream. No, not a vision for a better future where all people are truly equal regardless of color or orientation or anything. Just the regular kin of dream you have at night when your subconscious is doing its daily housecleaning. I knew it was a dream because the day was sunny and warm. On this sunny and warm day Pearl Jam was playing a concert in a park somewhere. I have the first three Peal Jam albums, which I rate roughly as Love It (Ten), Like It (Vs) and Listen to Songs From It When They Come Up On My iPod’s 2200+ Song Playlist (Vitalogy). This is to say that I like Pearl Jam so my brain wasn’t actively trying to punish me by having them put on a show for me. I believe this may have been an acoustic show of some kind because I do not recall the wailing of electric guitars. Eddie was a bit soft and flabby. The crowd seemed very sparse, so maybe it was a secret rehearsal or something.

The weirder part is that I was onstage and it was clear that Eddie and I were a couple. I was also a musician of some sort or at least someone had handed me a mike. At one point I made a comment to the crowd as an aside, pointing out how I loved it when Bob Dylan did this certain song. Because Bob Dylan was also there (to the left of Eddie and me). The show was interrupted at one point when a softball came bouncing in near the stage. A couple of apologetic ball players came by and took it away. The concert continued, with Eddie being just a generally nice guy and kind of smitten with me. This was definitely not the lean, growling “Jeremy” era Vedder.

It was a pleasant little dream and I thank my subconscious for not hooking me up with someone dead like Kurt Cobain, which would have been all kinds of creepy.

The ghosts of jobs past -or- Stupid brain!

Recently I recounted how I had dreamed that I was thrust back into working at the Locarno Beach concession, something I last did 12 years ago. My brain or more specifically, the subconscious part of it, has apparently decided to use sleep time to revisit all of my previous jobs in chronological order.

Last night I found my dream-self back at the store I used to work at. At one point I asked about the schedule, to which the assistant manager of the computer department gave a coy, non-commital answer I did not care for. I had visions of barely getting enough hours to make ends meet. And Ramen noodles. I suddenly found myself outside, in a gravel parking lot, looking toward the ocean, except blocking the view was the Locarno Beach concession, with the stand opened up facing toward the road and not the beach as one would expect. It was clear that I was still working there, too. The joy of 11 hour days covered in grease and the happiness of working a low-paying retail job, together at last!

I woke up shortly afterward. If things keep on track my next dream job will take me back to my days of telephone technical support. I can’t wait!*

* yes, in fact, I can wait. More to the point, I would like sexy dreams of daring adventure and not the dregs of my past jobs. Dear Brain, please comply. Thanks.

This is still not the May weather I ordered

I knew something was up when Environment Canada issued its national spring forecast that called for warmer and drier conditions across the entirety of the country this spring. You know how those things go. They forecast sun, it rains. They predict overcast skies, it rains. They predict rain and it rains.

This is the forecast for the remainder of the month:


Allow me to translate:

Friday: rain
Saturday: rain
Sunday: rain
Monday: going out on a limb here — rain!

When I worked at Locarno Beach back in 1996-98 I was understandably obsessed with the weather. Even now I occasionally recall the days of yore when I prayed for sun so I could open the concession and earn a few meager dollars, even as I loathed opening the concession and actually having to be there.

The other night I dreamed I was back at Locarno, arriving rather suddenly, it seemed, and the scene was one of barely-contained chaos. A guy at the counter laughed at me while explaining he was the one who always had some difficult order. It seemed to be whatever it was he wanted — one of those energy bars or something like that — was in one of many boxes in the back. I tried to explain that I didn’t know any of this because I wasn’t there the previous year (or ten). A line-up started to form and I went to the till. An order was rung in for something but I didn’t know what. There was a $20 bill on the counter. I asked the guy if it was his, so I could make change. There was also another separate pile of money on the counter, a bunch of 20s and 10s. Things were cooking. My staff was running about, except they weren’t my staff, they were a bunch of strangers, presumably the staff that had worked there the previous summer. All that was missing was for me to look down and see I was only dressed in my underwear. Just before the dream ended I remember thinking to myself, “At least I’m making some money!”

It was awful. Yech. Dear Brain: No more Locarno dreams. Thanks!

A pair of dream snippets

I am trying to remember my dreams again and have been doing a decent job of recollection when waking up. What I haven’t been doing such a decent job of is writing the dreams down after waking up. 😛

Here are a pair of recent snippets. They’re not very interesting but perhaps putting them down will help me to remember more.

Dream #1 featured Robert Reed, best known as Mr. Brady from The Brady Bunch. The dream seemed to be set back in the 70s and Mr. Reed was being a bit of a jerk (as himself, not Mr. Brady). I have no idea what exactly he was doing, why he was being a jerk and what kind of presence, if any, I had in the dream. I also have no clue why I’d dream about Robert freakin’ Reed. The guy is about as far off my radar as possible. Or so I thought!

Dream #2 took place in a small town and at one point I remember nimbly dodging a set of road construction equipment on my trip to…somewhere. The other part I remember from the same dream was being assembled as part of a group in a large auditorium that was serving as a makeshift movie theater. We were there to watch something I vaguely recall as educational but the stage area had no screen so the film was projected on a small section high up on the back wall of the auditorium, forcing everyone to twist in their seats to look backward in order to watch. No one seemed to mind, though. The one image I remember from the film was of a submersible of some sort. I believe this was triggered by the R.E.M. song “Sing for the Submarine”, which I’ve heard several times recently.

That’s all for my two most recent dreams. More subconscious nonsense to come!

Heath Ledger dies…again

Another dream from last night:

I am on what appears to be a movie set but they are not shooting at the moment. Or perhaps it’s just a ranch because there are horses. And a Spanish galleon. It makes sense, because it’s a dream.

I am on the galleon with someone who is showing off a little swordsmanship. He recites a line from the script that I can’t precisely recall but it was a taunt something along the lines of, “Do you want to brown your pants?” Colorful, as they say. The part was being played by Brian Doyle and while there are a number of Brian Doyles on the Internet Movie Database, I don’t think this guy was any of them. No idea where the name came from.

After the swordfighting demonstration, I then look over to another man, this one holding the reins of a horse. In retrospect I think it was supposed to be Johnny Depp and this was the set for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie but instead it was Heath Ledger, my first dead dream celebrity.

Heath was going to show off something or other but the horse’s reins got tangled up and it began freaking out and thrashing violently. Heath was standing beside it and could not extricate himself from the reins. By the time he was freed he was laying prone on the ground and making unpleasant facial expressions, a waving hand indicated possible back injuries. When next I looked he was propped up against a nearby fence with two girls looking over him. One was about ten, the other in her teens.

I distinctly recall one of them saying to him, “Please don’t bleed like that” at which point blood started oozing from his nose and mouth. This, understandably, upset the girls and they began wailing as Heath Ledger expired. Again.

Acrophobia on an alternate world Davie Street

I’ve been remembering a lot of my dreams lately for whatever reason, enough so that I may actually do some research to retain them even more than I do now.

Last night I was in a typical alternate world dreamscape, this time at a huge outdoor theater improbably constructed near the intersection of Denman and Davie Street. The theater was open but did have a roof to provide shelter from the elements. The featured show was a bunch of old men singing in front of an artificial waterfall. Where this bit came from I have no idea. At the end of the performance — which actually felt more like a rehearsal, I moved out of my seat and headed down toward the stage. The seats were a weird kind of jumble that only makes sense in dreams and I found myself inadvertantly blocking the way. This woman standing opposite me seemed to offer a solution, for lo! We were both actually standing on a lift that she could operate.

She did so and we rose up and above the crowd. I was perhaps inclined to offer my thanks when she continued to raise the lift higher than necessary. I am not especially keen on high places so I noted this fact to her in the hope that she would stop. She did not. I then raised my voice to a level one might call “screaming”. My words to her were as such: “Lady, I’m afraid of heights! Let me down!” I continued this plaintive request at maximum volume but she gave no reaction, as if she was utterly deaf or cruelly indifferent.

I should further illustrate the scene by noting the platform that I was on was barely big enough to contain me and it lacked anything to hold onto save for a railing along the front which I flung my arms over, hoping to not plunge onto a singing old man some hundred feet below. When the lift finally reached its maximum height — and that height was impressive indeed — the woman’s hearing seemed to suddenly return to normal and she brought the lift back down.

I was not amused.

The dream broke apart at this point, the crisis ended. The loss of control is a typical theme in dreams. Perhaps I can conquer this one by standing on my tippy-toes at the edge of the Grand Canyon one day.

My dream (directed by Roland Emmerich)

There have been two recurring themes in dreams I’ve had since I was a wee one. The first was being chased by something — mummies, vampires, mean robots but most often vehicles and in true Killdozer style, the vehicles would always be driver-free. Two I recall vividly were a muscle car from the late 60s/early 70s that chased me down a neighbor’s driveway (I escaped by leaping onto the branch of a tree that hung over the end of the driveway), the other a giant-sized dump truck with the front bumper missing, which made it much scarier.

The chase dreams pretty much ended as an adult.

The other theme has been ferry disasters, which I’ve talked about before. Last night I had one of these dreams and as with most of them, it wasn’t really scary, just weird. I don’t recall who I was with but we were on the ferry and as usual, something goes wrong. This time it seemed like some kind of stability issue, which we noticed when the ferry began lurching to the side so severely as to nearly touch water to the passenger deck. Then, while still motoring along, the ship does not one but two complete barrel rolls. Yes, it capsizes twice. But it manages to right itself and we were apparently wearing our capsizing boots and were none the worse for the spinning. But now it was clear the ferry had to get to the terminal and dock ASAP.

The ferry starts racing along through the water and is kind of wobbly, pitching a bit from side to side. At some point I move to the front lounge for a better view ahead and we are entering a winding river-like area that doesn’t actually exist. Perhaps because of the ferry’s excessive speed, instead of attempting to navigate the serpentine path, the captain has the crew shovel more coal into the boiler and guns it toward a giant pile of smoothly-shaped rocks. Maybe it was a hill covered with rocks. Whatever it was, it was clear we were going to jump it.

The ferry hits the hill and scoots up it and out of the water, then flies off the top and soars like a wingless bird. For a few moments as the ship flies through the air we ponder what the landing will be like. But not to worry — the ferry lands upright and everyone’s okay. But not! Because the terminal is dead ahead and the ship is going way too fast! The engines are put into full reverse and the water churns furiously as we speed toward the dock. The ship slows, slows some more and then finally eases into the dock as if this was the end of a perfectly normal trip. Roll credits.