Recently in Dream Category

Younger, I used to wonder quite frequently at the oddness of my dreams. Where did they come from? Sometimes the symbolism would be all too obvious, but then at other times the narrative presented would be all too strange, and self-contained, to be the random firings of my brain cells, or even a hidden message from my subconcious (clever as it is). Of course, the meaning isn't always obvious from within. I remember once a friend of mine said she'd dreamt that a giant spider had laid eggs on her abdomen and they'd erupted into thousands of tiny little spiders that started to consume her. She said she had no idea what it meant. I thought it was obvious and said she was clearly anxious about getting pregnant. The look of realisation on her face was quite something, like I'd smashed a door down and light streamed in- even though I couldn't understand why that wouldn't have been the first thing she'd thought of. Maybe our subconcious hides things from us because it's afraid to look straight at them.

Last night I fell asleep listening to PseudoPod, the horror short-story podcast. The story was called 'BagMan', which was about a the vengeful ghost of a child that went around turning criminal's brains to mush. Which no-one had much of a problem with, until all the criminals were gone and the ghost's bar for evil dropped. I tell you this not to recommend it, just to add more information. I wonder if listening to stories before you sleep encourages one's brain to dream in a more storylike fashion.

This morning I dreamt that I went to a sort of upper-class private (I guess the English would call it public, confusingly) school, of the sort that wears blazers and pins and plays polo and claps fingers-to-palm. Not that I've ever attended such a school before, but I've certainly seen plenty of shows in which people do. However this school enforced discipline via a device called 'The Impeller', which, as the name implies, impelled people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do. It wasn't clear how it functioned (I never saw the device, but the general fear of it was present throughout all aspects of school life), but it seemed clear that when you were being impelled, it also hurt. So if you imagine private schools with blazers and pins as generally buttoned-down places, you can imagine how this particular school was even more buttoned down than that, nobody wanted to step even slightly out-of-line, for fear of being impelled back in.

Everyone except for me, that is. I had a small plastic bracelet (one of those one that it used for labelling things, like it had a little slot for a piece of paper, on mine was written, in pen in big blocky letters: "wave") which protected me from the impeller's effects, so while everyone else lived in fear of being bought back in line, I naturally flaunted my protection from its authority, stepping out of line, making cracks, leaning back in my chair, generally being the Randall P. McMurphy of the campus (at least, in my own eyes- who knows how others saw me).

A good portion of the dream, which I will not recount here, involved a sort of chase between myself and the (horribly stereotypical I'm afraid, old men with round glasses, loose skin and square hats) dons of the school, who would regularly catch me and lock me up, but since they relied on the power of the impeller to bring students in line, they were a little unsure what to do with me once I was in detention- the moment they left me alone, I'd just walk out and the chase would begin anew. Eventually one of them figured out that my tacky talisman was the font of my special protection, at which point I realized I was in serious trouble (a good deal of resentment had built up towards me in the faculty, due in large part to having chased me around so ineffectually) and now was the time to go AWOL from the school- permanently.

I enlisted a friend of mine to help me escape (what help I needed from him I can't recall- in fact I'm losing dreambits by the second as I write this, in something of a flurry I'll admit), we were hiding out in his dorm and he gave me some hot spicy tea -the bastard- which promptly knocked me out. I remember feeling very betrayed and seeing all the angles of the objects in the room being made out of words.

I came to in a darkened room, my bracelet gone, sitting on a wooden chair. There was no-one else in the room, but they used the impeller on me anyway, making me do horrible things to myself, hurting all the while.

Waking up feeling uneasy was something of a relief.

I dreamt I was in this enormous, gothic, like, larger-than-a-city sized spaceship of some kind, which, like, it was in a battle with...someone....not really clear who....anyway all of a sudden we hear this tremendous noise and the whole place shudders really weirdly, and someone, this woman standing near me says: "It's beginning." and starts running in one direction, and so I start chasing her, and it sort of 'comes to me' (you know how it does, in dreams) that this ship is crashing into something, sort of like the Super-Star Destroyer crashes into the Death Star at the end of Jedi, except much, much more slowly, and this woman I'm chasing is running to the stern of the vessel, in an attempt to stay in front of all these blast doors that start closing in order to seal off parts of the ship.

So, like, we're running to the far end of the ship, trying to get through these enormous doors (like, the ship had streets and buildings and things in it, it was so big, so the doors were actually more like enormous walls that dropped into place) before they closed, and all of a sudden....I come to a ticket barrier! As in, of the sort you would find in a tube station. And the barrier won't let me through if I don't have the right ticket, so in the middle of this life-or-death situation (and I should probably add that the majority of the city-ship's population, while aware that we were in a battle of some kind, didn't seem to have come to the realization that the ship was crashing and that they should really be running to stern. Like, it wasn't all-out panic except on my part). So I'm jumping up and down in this queue to get my ticket, and when I finally get to the machine you buy the ticket from, I'm so nervous and agitated that I keep screwing up the procedure, like, the machines are all in another language (I'm kind of wishing it was an alien language, but I'm ashamed to admit it was actually more like French- I remember it said 'Sortie' at one point), so I don't know which 'section' to buy tickets for, and there's all these different options and I just keep screwing it up. And, at this point, I swear I was so frustrated by it all that I shook myself out of sleep, and leapt up in bed, terrified, my heart pumping wildly, like I'd just had an awful nightmare. It was bizarre.

Chasing a woman? Through different rooms? Before doors closed? Blocked by inability to operate ticket machines? Wrap yer Freud around THAT!

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