Category Archives: nightmares

nightmares

Dreams: I hate ’em.

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Everything you need to know about how well I slept and how I feel now can be summed up like this:

It turns out that Worf and Picard were deeply in love, but their love was unrequited in their home universe. Here, they discovered they wouldn’t be judged for their actions.

Their passion wasn’t what saved the universe — that was done when the grape/eggs were implanted into one of the characters in my comic (Marin – again – poor girl). We were all assured when she gave birth the multiverse would gain new power and we’d see a rebirth of civilization on this post-apocolyptic moon world.

But the love Picard and Worf shared was so deeply touching it was a great way to end the episode. I mean, dream.

***
God, I need a soda.

More crazy nightmares

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Holy crap my head.

First Penn from Penn and Teller knocked on our door, came in, and started telling Nighthawk all these wild stories about getting a hamburger, and a couple other things I can’t remember. I couldn’t hear most of the conversation because I was concentrating on a cardboard box full of games (which was sitting right next to them on the couch) that I thought had a Playstation 3 game in it I wanted to show Penn. I pulled all kinds of gadgets and books and magazines out of that box but not the missing game, and just as he was leaving I remembered that all the playstation 3 games were in a box behind me.

As he left I asked him why he’d decided to visit us and he gave me a huge loving hug and said, “Because you’re you!”

I pulled out my phone to tweet about it, but as usual for my dreams I could barely read the phone, forget type. All the keys had been rearranged so the backspace key was above the letter R, there were three different kinds of cancel keys depending on what you were trying to do… It was a nightmare and I remember thinking that it was some of the worst usability I’d ever seen. I also remember thinking that this had to be a dream for the keyboard to be so bad, but my dream-self remembered that the new phone OS had just dropped and this must be the new version.

And then just when I thought I’d finally gotten the tweet written I tried to look up Penn’s Twitter handle and I couldn’t because a) I kept launching the picture-attacher accidentally and b) there were flowers growing out of my phone. Something akin to very small carnations, just big enough to block my view, were growing out of the phone. This was annoying, but somehow not unexpected.

Then I found out that Nighthawk had already tweeted about the experience for me, with pictures, which made me both happy and annoyed. He had also let Herbie and Basschica in the house. They were there to – ok I don’t know why they were there but they insisted on feeding the dogs, which Herbie had to learn how to do for some reason.

Once the dogs were fed (raw chicken is all we had, but it was in dog-sized portions) the conversation turned to what we wanted to eat. Magically my mom arrived and we all got in the car, following mom’s directions, and ended up at this old house (Victorian style) that used to sell crafts, but now sold seafood dinners, called “The crab tree” or something equally weird.

The restaurant had a large cement porch with a wooden roof, big enough to hold a couple of picnic tables and smaller bistro tables. We weren’t the only ones waiting for a table inside – there were other couples and families (all older than me but I think I was roughly 20 again) that were also waiting. After a short wait the restaurant staff gave up on seating us inside, and since it was a beautiful night they just started bringing out the food items of their choice, family style, and setting them on the table.

We had green beans in risotto, mashed cauliflower, mashed turnips, shrimp in a pasta, a different kind of shrimp with a spiny shell that was done in a garlic sauce, fried popcorn shrimp, and strange things. Strange things like live man-o-war babies (I could have my fish wrong. Round thing with a long tail, supposedly poisonous, had a shell covering one side. Maybe I invented it.) that were a bit scary to eat until my mother showed me how to pull them apart alive. (note: nothing like my mom to do such a thing.) Every table got different food so we spent a lot of time passing bowls back and forth and getting to know the folks we were sitting with.

Then things got weird again. I asked for something – or maybe they just recognized the name on our credit cards (Herbie and I were splitting the bill for father’s day) and we were ushered in this side door that looked like a closet, but had a door in the back, to see the rest of the building.

We discovered that this little house was just the tip of a much larger complex filled with science experiments being done regarding Jurassic, Cambrian, and pre-Cambrian era creatures. Even weirder, the were all kinds of robots and machines of a sentient nature in the complex, many of which appeared to be preparing for some kind of attack. It was like the TV show Sanctuary crossed with the comic Girl Genius crossed with a Discovery channel special on dinosaur-era sea creatures. Aunt G was showing us around and helping us get settled.

I knew somehow that my cousin Plantnerd was sleeping a few rooms away but I could see the shadow of someone sinister hovering over her bed wih a gun, so I sprinted through three or four doors in a hallway marked “no entry” until I reached her room. I found Plantnerd lying in bed half asleep with an IV in her arm and sugar around her lips. She’d had a sugar crash while on the tube (she lives in England) and the man at the foot of her bed had saved her and brought her back home.

Only it wasn’t really a sugar crash, it was a milk crash, because she required some kind of special sea cow milk, and the man wasn’t really a man… The best way to describe him would be take a leprechaun and cross him with a little grey alien, make him as tall as a short woman with normal eyes and a pasty face. He looked a bit like a sea creature himself.

We needed to go get something for Plantnerd but it was risky to get to and required crossing the loch in the back of the building. I didn’t even hesitate to do so, even though the only way to cross the loch was to jump from one tree root to another where they made a natural bridge down the center.

I don’t remember what I went to get. I do remember that the equipment rooms on the other side were full of robots hiding themselves so they’d be more effective if they needed to ambush the expected intruders. (I had been accepted by the system.) the was also a giant 6-tired amphibious vehicle that Aunt G showed me how to drive in case I needed it to escape.

When we returned to the loch, the water had risen and the roots were obscured. I knew that an amphibious creature that looked like a cross between the Loch Ness Monster and a rowboat lived in the water and was tame (and very smart). His name was Doodle (I think) and he very happily carried each of us across the pond. I remember being annoyed, though, because I expected to ride on his back and instead he’d only let me hold on to his neck.

Then I woke up.

The weird part of all this is how much of the loch felt familiar, like I’d seen and dreamed it before. I’ve been there before, to the loch, anyway, though the buildings and my family running things all felt new.

I slept for 11 hours last night. I’m still a little tired this morning, but it’s mostly because I’m dehydrated I think. The dream still feels like a real memory, and I’m a little afraid to go to sleep tonight for fear that I’ll land back in the same dream in time for the attack.

Now it’s time to start my day, and hope it’s less exciting.

Lava oil maybe?

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If I tried to write down everything that was in the nightmares I just woke from we would be here all week. But here’s a quick summary.

A friend from work had a new car (SUV actually) that had voice activated controls. She told me I could try them by telling the car to become a camper, and she handed me a fancy phone/microphone/doohicky. When I told the car to become a camper it became a playground instead – the swingset I’d had as a kid, to be exact, but with one lone tire swing and a largish (30×30) square of AstroTurf that the swingset sat upon.

That drew a crowd, and suddenly I wasn’t going out to lunch with a friend, the car was part of a number of booths at a home show / car show / convention type thing. We did have a camper then, but it was a separate vehicle, which I had to chase a different co-worker through to get the car remote back from. He was planning something nefarious, or maybe he just wanted to run off with the senator (who looked like a different woman I know from work) because they were a couple.

Anyway, I went back outside and asked the car to transform into a camper so we could leave and the car agreed so long as I made sure the senator (the car recognised her) got off the swingset first and wasn’t in danger. Once I did that the car transformed into an armored vehicle, and the senator and I drove away.

Now the dream was no longer first person adults. (Although I have to admit in most of my dreams, including this one, by “adult” I mean I’m about 22 years old.) Instead, the camera is on some toys on a bedroom floor that are being controlled by a child (9 or 10 years old) who is never quite on-camera. Bare arms capped with the dark green sleeves of a teeshirt, brown courderoy pants covering knees, and the occasional white sneaker were glimpsed, but the camera was at head height of our protagonist (and yet it wasn’t the child’s view of the toys) so that’s all we saw.

The child was narrating a converation between some terrorists in their fort (a closet door) who had taken the child’s mother (a Barbie doll in her underwear) hostage, and given the child specific instructions on what he could do to get Mom back, which strangely included trying to blow up the terrorist fort so the terrorists would know he arrived. (Blind & deaf terrorists perhaps?)

Instead, the child used a battering ram (soda straw) that he kept cutting shorter and shorter, to slowly bang the closet door open so that, while he was still negotiating with the terrorists, mom could run out and jump into the armored jeep and then they drove away.

The rest of the dream was a long and complex chase scene, back to normal first person, sometimes taking place in a Hummer, sometimes in my Saturn, sometimes in our Camry, sometimes in my brother’s new Subaru, and sometimes in my parents’ Oldsmobile. I was the driver most of the time, and I was back to being me. Mom was safe at work. I don’t know where my sister was but she was safe as well. Nighthawk, as far as the dream was concerned, didn’t exist.

My father was being hunted by the aforementioned terrorist gang, but since they were a secret society we couldn’t tell who they really were. Everywhere we went at least six cars were following us. We tried lots of ways to shake them, most of which were temporarily successful, but none of which were foolproof – after the next turn or the next car switch they’d be back on our tail in different cars.

Eventually we figured out how to ditch them all and we went home (my parents’ house). Dad and my brother worked on making a giant inflatable toboggan/slide out of a twin air mattress that was at least 30 feet long, and I was in the house thinking about dinner. Dad came in and said that he wanted to go out for a drink and I agreed. I said I’d drive because he was in no shape for it.

We stepped out the front door discussing where to go, and just as we yelled our choice out to my brother, we realized there were at least 10 cars in the yard & on the street, filled with “friends” we recognized, who said they’d all meet us there. They all left.

Mom arrived home from work to find us discussing whether the air mattress would work yet (no) and suggested we go somewhere else for drinks. I got Chance and Kaylee into the house and we all got into my car, but then I got nervous that someone would attack the house while we were gone. I went back to the house with Dad to collect the dogs and that’s when we realized the house two doors up was on fire – at least, the yard was. By the time we saw it, the yard next door was glowing too, and it was starting to seep into our yard.

I thought it was lava, so I ran inside and got the dogs. My brother, and I debated who was going to call 9-1-1, while Dad whipped out this big phone and called. He apparently recognized the man on the other side of the line and explained that it looked like “the rig was leaking again”. When I looked down I realized it looked like a mixture of vegetable and motor oil was running through the yard.

Then a second person cut Dad off on the phone and demanded that if he was going to call 9-1-1 he needed to join the calling club to get the best discounts. We could all hear the argument over the phone between the legitimate dispatchers and this loud screaming man, who was trying to get Dad to admit that his last name was Hochstetter (it’s not) and then hung up yelling he’d be right there.

I suddenly realized that Dad wasn’t on his own cell phone. He was using some other phone he’d picked up somewhere. It was the same phone controller thing from the transforming SUV, which we didn’t even have anymore, and the whole chase was because the terrorists were after the fancy car.

That must have been too logical for my right brain to handle. I woke up.

Macguffin hunting

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It’s hard to describe last night’s sleep.

OK, I take it back: “crappy” is just fine as a descriptor.

First I was at a meeting where we were trying to do some visioning, but it required 3 full-sized whiteboards and a ladder for me to start documenting everything. I should have started that process before the meeting but for some reason didn’t, so everyone was milling around the room waiting for me to catch up.

The meeting was supposed to run from 3-5. Sometime around 20 after 3 I realized that I needed a thing. I think it was a piece of software. We can call it a macguffin. In a fit of dream insanity I decided to go get the macguffin right then, accompanied by my business lead Danielle, my prototyper Karen, and my husband, who was so skinny that he shared the front seat with me and didn’t get in the way of my driving.

I think the macguffin was supposed to be at Best Buy or a craft store, but rather than going to any of the real Best Buys, my brain dialed up one that was only reachable by driving through a bunch of Prnnsylvania small towns and confusing back roads. I missed the Best Buy and had to turn around to go back, but somehow that made things worse. Eventually Karen volunteered to be dropped off at the Best Buy and the other three of us would proceed to the craft store.

The craft store looked like a mix of hardware store shelving and Old Navy clothing, with no crafts whatsoever, and lots of bins of technology. We spread out to look for the macguffin in the bins of phones, PDAs, and mice, but came up empty.

Then I realized I’d set my iPhone down and couldn’t find it. Cue the panic. But I realized I couldn’t find it because I was so exhausted that I kept forgetting what I was looking for. I constantly picked up mens’ wallets (the men in question were trying on clothes & would keep their clothes folded neatly on the floor with their wallets on the top of the stacks. I was fascinated by the abundance of wallets, and kept forgetting about the macguffin and the iPhone, until Nighthawk would remind me again.

Finally I pulled out my iPad, intending to use it to find my iPhone. The iPad was the same size as my current model, but roughly the thickness of a filmstrip, and I kept it rolled up in my pocket when I wasn’t using it. But I couldn’t get a signal on the 3G so I couldn’t use it to find my phone. I did find my sister, so I borrowed her flip phone circa 2003 but I couldn’t convince it to log into the Mobile Me website.

Danielle reminded me at that point that we still had a highly critical 2-hour visioning session to run, so we left, with no macguffin and no iPhone. (Why I didn’t use my husband’s iPhone to find mine I don’t know.) but it was clear by they point that exhaustion had totally consumed me. I had to keep reminding myself that I shouldn’t leave the store without Danielle, who had gone back inside to use the restroom or ask directions or something.

Once everyone was in the car and heading back, in extremely rainy dreary weather, I started reminding myself that we still had to pick Karen up. But that thought would leave immediately on someone mentioning that I needed to stop driving like someone falling asleep at the wheel. A quick glance at the car’s clock revealed it was already 17:30 (why my clock insisted on doing 24 hour time I don’t know, but the math was *hard*) and we’d missed the Very Important Meeting, plus we still had no macguffin. We decided (since I was in no shape to be driving anyway) to go home.

Danielle & Nighthawk had to keep giving me instructions on how to get home, but we arrived safely, although a bit wet and miserable.

Then I realized we’d forgotten to pick up Karen. The 2/3 majority vote was to let her stay where she was (across from the Best Buy was a hotel, magically) but I insisted I could still drive, so we got back in the car and drove to Best Buy where a soaked and angry Katen revealed she had the macguffin. We drove back to work and found that everyone was still waiting in the meeting room, with a couple of pizzas. They were annoyed.

I didn’t get in trouble right then but I knew the next work day was going to be hell, especially since as soon as I arrived they announced that it was too late at night (8:30) to vision now & we should all go home.

I woke up then, to a screaming headache. I feel like someone’s been trying to flush my sinuses with hot air. I feel as exhausted as in my dreams. I should probably stay home, but I have too much to do today.

At least I know where my iPhone and iPad are.

So far.

Not a fan of these dreams

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It was a long & convoluted dream, so we’ll pick up where I looked in the mirror & realized that I had a second molar coming in behind the current set. And by “behind” I mean “on the roof of my mouth”.

Since that couldn’t possibly be right, I investigated further and determined that one of my molars had split clean in half and the cap was the bit stuck to the roof of my mouth like an errant popcorn kernel. Why that didn’t hurt like hell I don’t know.

Anyway, my dad took me to the dentist in his old pickup, after we dropped Nighthawk off for his surgery, and I was able to get an emergency appointment with some dentist I’ve never seen before in a ward-like setting very similar to the big room where my orthodontist used to have four kids worked on at once. And that’s how I knew this was gonna hurt.

They got halfway done the work and sent me out to the waiting room so the sealant could cure (did I mention this was a dream?) when for some reason Dad and I decided that it was the perfect time to take me to a doctor’s office I’d never visited before to have them look at my sinuses.

So off we go to a building that was halfway to the architecture of the junior high I attended, and halfway to the architecture of the training building at work, to see a doctor I didn’t know about an unsolvable health problem while I still had exposed nerves in my molar.

When we arrived I was handed my medical records & told to wait. Of course I started flipping through them. I discovered that other people’s records were scattered in with mine, including a “whiny Chinese woman” (that’s how the nurse had described her in the notes) who’d been in an accident and was so bruised that half her face looked gangrene and dead, and her ear had fallen off.

The staff kept confusing her with me.

Maybe it was the absurdity of that mistake, or maybe it was the 5 alarms I’d set this morning, but I woke up soon after.

***

Many years ago I read a conversation between a group of folks wih cystic fibrosis about the prevalence of nightmares where their teeth would fall out. As a group, it was a consistent indicator that their lung issues were flaring up.

I doubt a lung infection is my problem, but I think I’ll take my vitamins this morning anyway.

Ok, THAT was terrifying.

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Got a job at the Apple store. Overslept my first day, (woke up feeling awesome, then instant panic attack) so I didn’t get to work until 1pm. When I got there…

  • The store was laid out like a Circuit City, with dingy grey carpet & white linoleum.
  • Nobody would tell me what to do or how to greet customers.
  • The registers were a combination of the VAX terminals I used in college, the computer system they ran at Waldenbooks in the late 90s, & Windows 3.1. If you didn’t know the mainframe keyboard codes, you couldn’t do anthing correctly, but you could do a LOT… all incorrectly and/or against company policy.
  • The computer mice were all beige 3-button monsters circa the IBM PS2.
  • I had to check people who were buying new macs against a web-based database of people who were likely to become violent if they bought one.
  • One of the staff members was hosing a customer’s 6-year-old kid off (fully clothed) in a laundry sink in the back room because somehow the kid had managed to piss himself & get it in his own hair.

Woke up.

That was the most terrifying f’d up dream I’ve had in a looooooong time.