I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.
From my friend:
The British Library let me run off a bunch of flyers on their Gutenberg printing press.
I don’t think they have a Gutenberg press.
And whatever I playing with wasn’t a Gutenberg.
but.
Yes, I dream in moveable type.
I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.
From my friend:
Last night’s dream: I was an astronaut and was in Japan (which looked like a futuristic Glendale Mall). I bought a training manual and a sandwich, but hadn’t learned yen-to-dollars yet, so I paid $60 USD for the two. I still had my big poof of hair and had concerns about fitting it under my helmet. There was also something about a bear, and, towards the end, a conversation with a friend in New Orleans about his newborn. I can’t even begin to analyze that mess.
In the past week, I’ve had three different friends tell me they’ve had dreams about me. That’s very odd, to say the least, but entertaining. Our friend David said in his dream, he took me to the prom, and I was crowned queen. That’s so likely! I can picture it now. Oh, wait, no, that’s a scene from Carrie. But now I have a new goal – instead of trying to control my own dreams, I’m going to try to star more in the dreams of other people. Step one of this project involves feeding people around me lots of cheese and beans. I haven’t worked out step two, but step three is definitely “Success!” I’ll let you know how it works out.
We attended three parties on Saturday; I feel so popular. Here are photos. See, I do have friends. And somewhere along the line I caught a nasty cold and spent all of yesterday sleeping and reading. Not at the same time, of course.
I had two health appointments last night and this morning: my follow-up sleep study to see how well I’m doing on my CPAP machine, and my follow-up cardiologist appointment to see how I’m doing after my surgery.
I didn’t manage to get all the glue washed out of my hair from the electrodes that were glued there for my sleep study last night. I had 16 of them attached to my head and face and other body parts. This time, though, I had fewer things to deal with; I had only one microphone glued to my neck rather than 2, and no breathing tubes, because I had the machine.
One of the things they mentioned, that I noticed, too; I have dreams again. I’m actually sleeping long enough to fall into REM sleep and have dreams, which I wasn’t doing before; their study showed I wasn’t getting any REM sleep at all. This had probably been going on for years actually, which you can tell if you look at the dreams section of my journal, where there’s a gap of about three years between dreams that I remember enough to write down. So the return of dreaming is a really Good Thing, as Martha would say.
The cardiologist’s appointment was really short and not much happened. I expected to have a electrocardiogram, but they didn’t do one. And Dr. Yee didn’t even realize I had the heart valve surgery; he had to take notes. He listened to my heart and said everything sounded good. I should be walking a mile a day, or biking, etc. I also should be able to lift whatever I normally lifted before surgery. I’m supposed to see him again in on October 17th at 9:00 am and they’ll do an electrocardiogram then, and then again once a year for the next several years to monitor how my heart is doing.
While I was in the waiting room, I was watching the health channel they have on TV — same one that I wrote about before, with the dog trained to detect a woman’s epileptic seizures before she had them, to warn her so she could prepare. Turns out the channel I was watching is Accent Health. Here’s a news article on the subject.
I made notes this time because the program today was on healthy eating; they said studies show that lycopene in tomatoes can reduce women’s risk of heart disease by 30% if you eat 1/4 cup of tomato sauce a day. I wonder how that translates to V-8 juice.
The first dream I had was about a house that I owned with my brothers. We were renting it out to a friend of mine, and I found out that he had a dog, which was okay, but he was keeping it in the crawlspace beneath the house, which was not okay. So the whole dream was about going to rescue the dog and explain why it’s not good to keep it in a crawlspace. For some reason I was being really polite to this friend, instead of being pissy and indignant, like I would be in real life.
The second dream I had was about a video copying place. I went with one of my co-workers to get a home-made video copied onto DVD, and while we were wandering around in the store, we discovered that they also printed books, too — our books, it turned out. They were making pirate copies of books from the company I work at. We started to snoop around a little more, and we stumbled across an executive from our company in a back room; he was startled to see us as much as we were to see him, and it became obvious that he was running this company. So we tried to sneak out the back door, and the mafia showed up in cadillacs. Then I woke up. Writing about it now, this dream makes no sense for a variety of different reasons, but it seemed to while I was dreaming it.
In the third dream I had, Stephanie and I drove up to Valparaiso to meet a friend of hers that I had never met before. I don’t remember of the name of the woman in the dream, and it certainly isn’t an actual friend of Stephanie’s. Anyway, the woman was older and had three or four kids and drove around in a mini-van. Stephanie left me alone with the woman and the kids (which I thought was highly weird) and we ended up going to her house to work on a craft project with all the kids, involving making a full-sized grandfather clock out of clay. (I honestly don’t know why that would be in my head). Suddenly, the woman started hitting on me, in front of the kids. I was really freaked out, and she ended up telling me that Stephanie had encouraged her to do so because Stephanie didn’t like me anymore, and wanted to set me up with someone else so I wouldn’t be heartbroken when she dumped me. And I got really upset and woke up. 🙂
I had a dream last night that I was babysitting for people I didn’t know, and I accidentally left the baby out in the rain. Then the parents came home, and said, hey, where’s the baby? And I went out and found it in the backyard. It was soaking wet, but in good shape. Although it was one gigantic fat baby. Not a toddler at all, but a big big kid. I was horrified that I’d forgotten him, until I started to wake up and realized that, thank god, it was only a dream. Now I’m worried that if I have a kid, I’ll leave it in the yard. Is that like throwing the baby out with the bathwater? I wonder.
I speculated the other day that I would, now that I’m working in XML directly in the tags, start having XML dreams like I used to about HTML. But no.
The dream I had last night was about the new A-team. The team was me and a bunch of carny workers, driving around in a weird, beatup delivery truck, solving crimes. And the details that were upon later reflection truly bizarre: This wasn’t a TV show, but a real happening, and I mentally referenced the original A-Team as though it wasn’t a TV show either. Also, I had a “flashback” to “high school” (not my real high school, BTW) where I had attended class with much younger versions of the SAME carny workers, who were all friends back then, too, but not friends of mine.
“In 2001 a group of carny workers was kick out of town for being too bizarre. These people promptly escaped from the midwest to the Los Angeles underground. Today ignored by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem. If no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire: THE A-TEAM.”
And my trajectory towards burnout on XML corrections is reaching critical mass right now.
Okay, I’ve had three more dreams recently about Sarah Michelle Gellar. In the past, I’ve had reoccurring dreams and sex dreams, but never a reoccurring sex dream. This is very cool, and I hope it lasts.
Actually, only one of these three new dreams — the first — was really a sex dream per se, and was very similar to the one I had earlier, except that I remembered (!) to shut up and not ask questions. (I actually remembered the other dream *in* this one. Weird.)
The second dream I had was one in which I made spinach lasagna for Sarah, and she ate it at my apartment. (This is the second time I’ve dreamed about my apartment where it actually *looked* like my real apartment.) She loved it, and wrapped up the rest to take home with her. We didn’t do anything but kiss, but the whole thing seemed erotically charged. Especially the part where she liked the lasagna.
The third dream was related to something I was doing earlier in the day when I was awake. I had been trying to figure out the best way to rearrange the furniture in my apartment, and was frustrated because all the floor plans that I came up with wouldn’t work — I’m limited by the location of electrical outlets.
I finally gave up in frustration and went to bed, and dreamed that I came home from work to find that Sarah had rearranged my apartment. Perfectly. I was thrilled. Then we made out on the couch. But I woke, up, so I got up and rearranged my apartment in the exact way she did in the dream, at three in the morning.
Cool, she likes the way I cook, wants to make out with me, and does all my lateral thinking. Too bad she’s not real.
I keep a pad of paper near my bedside so that I can write down vivid dreams if I have them. Sometimes, though, if I haven’t quite shaken off the sandman, or if they aren’t particularly memorable, I won’t be able to fill in the details later – that’s what’s happened here. I can’t remember the actual dreams from any of these. But the notes are… well interesting. Honestly, I DON’T dream about my brother Todd that much, I just happen to have written some of them down.
Woman telling me that after you’ve been single for so many years, it’s basically over.
Singles Group pitch-ins
Trying to change clothes
Priestess – malevolent look
The Lemon Orchard
picking lemons and putting them in the back of a truck
Neal and Mitch with tatoos
Peg all dressed up invading the bathroom
Dre & Ten – the pond
Outside someone’s building – still waters – everyone’s swimming
Fire in the house – at first part of 2nd floor gone, come back, my “room” gone. Looters that I chase off
Dream One – Accidentally reformatted Steve’s Hard drive
Titanic – dream with lamb
House dream – Beer cam (yes, that’s “cam” not can)
Kite dream – flying kite with real people into radiation — 50 people’s skeletons, they start to fall off the kite – Todd was flying it
I was at some sort of archeological dig in swampland – tarpits?
Their were piers running out into the water.
They found people holding onto poles – as though the poles were holding them up out of the mud. It was some form of ancient torture.
Ellen (Degeneres) was there – and she was helping demonstrate how to walk thorugh the tarpits on the poles. It was all about how deeply you pushed your poles down in the mud.
At the end of the dream – I demonstrated that I could pole my way across the mud pit by using my poles lightly.
the roof dream
the rat dream
the electricity dream
Bathroom dream – my own room but two bathrooms – fighting with Todd.
And in the dream, she was herself, not Buffy. Not that I know the difference, really, but I called her Sarah, and she said “hmm?” sort of absent-mindedly, because she was preoccupied with rubbing up against me, which was really nice, and I’m not sure why I was trying to distract her with all the talking.
I don’t remember much else except there was mostly a lot of kissing, and rubbing up against each other. And come to think of it, there wasn’t really any nakedness or actual sex, but I still think of it as a sex dream anyway, because it felt like it.
According to one website I read, when you have sex with someone in your dreams, it really means that the part of your personality that’s most like that person is experiencing growth, which is why you sometimes have sex in dreams with people that you aren’t necessarily attracted to. That’s a nice interpretation.
But I’ve noticed since the dream that I watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer like a fiend.
Update: Since this dream, I’ve had several more about Sarah Michelle Gellar.