posidreams-blog

[posidreams-blog]

October 17th, 2017

My girlfriend and I were out driving to the grocery store.  We couldn't decide which one to go to, so I just decided on my own.  The highways were a mess of rollercoaster-like twists and ramps, as they always are in my dreams.

We came up to the rear of what I thought was my grocery store of choice, but when we went inside and passed beyond the loading areas, we came out into a Walmart.  We wandered around for a bit until we found some merchandise with some kind of copypasta meme on it, and the grotesqueness of such a thing being commercialized by Walmart drove me to escape through the front doors.

At this point we were in the middle of a strip mall, and once you're on one side of a strip mall it's very hard to get to the other, so we had to figure out how to get back to the car.  We went into an Olive Garden-type Italian restaurant to see if we could find a way back through, but couldn't flag down any of the waitstaff.  We made our way to the kitchen, which started out as a rough rock staircase that had been worn down into more of a ramp that the waitstaff were traipsing up and down with carts full of orders.  To the left was a rock wall and to the right was a drop hundreds of feet into a massive cavern, where the kitchen sat at the bottom of the long ramp.  The only thing keeping anyone from falling off the stair-ramp was a long metal rod at chest height.

I found an empty cart nearby and tried to roll it down a few steps to a waiter who needed it, but I slipped and slid a few steps down the ramp, nearly going under the metal rod and over the edge, into the cavern.  I could now see that the cavern extended behind the ramp and under the restaurant, where it fell into an even deeper hole with waterfalls.  More cavernous holes lay beyond that, and while it was strikingly beautiful, it was also absolutely terrifying and too much to process in that moment due to its enormity.

[posidreams-blog]

July 23rd, 2017

It was ten or so years in the future, and my wife (currently my girlfriend) was leaving me and our daughter with her.  After wandering around the house for a bit and crying while playing with some of her LEGOs, I decided the only valid course of action was to go to Japan and kill myself.  I jumped on a flight, checked into my hotel room, flopped onto the bed and fell asleep for a few hours.

When I woke up (in the dream), it was late at night, and I was feeling a little better, so I went out to explore the city.  I stopped by some incredibly niche shops, had some food, and ended up in a mall.  In the dream, I could speak Japanese fluently, so getting around was a breeze.  The mall had a lot of fountains and areas that looked like bathrooms but weren’t, which was incredibly frustrating because I had to urinate.

[posidreams-blog]

July 19th, 2017

I had woken up in the middle of the night (in real life) and was having trouble getting back to sleep.  I turned to lay on my left side, and started getting drowsy.  As I was drifting to sleep, I noticed that the center of my vision had a red glow to it, as though I'd just been staring at a bright light.  I saw a small whiteboard at the foot of my closet door, with something written on it, and the red glow grew brighter as I looked at it.  I thought it looked like there was a pentagram on the whiteboard.  I woke up from my semi-sleep to see there was no whiteboard.

I began drifting in and out of sleep, and the closer I got to falling asleep, the more I experienced the familiar symptoms of sleep paralysis (loud, discordant noise in my ears; inability to move; physical discomfort; confusion).  I could roust myself when it became too much, but it felt as though something was tempting me into falling asleep.  When I closed my eyes as I was falling asleep, seemingly satanic words and phrases would flash through my vision, and the red glow would come back.

Finally I succumbed for a brief moment.  I was in a chapel, with my body standing to my left, and a bunch of people I knew bound and gagged to my right.  I was inhabiting some kind of dark, semi-corporeal figure, and before me was a typewriter.  On the page was written a suicide note detailing why I was killing all of my loved ones and then myself.  My vision went black and I heard loud robotic feedback noise before snapping awake and uttering some kind of exclamation, which woke my girlfriend up.

The day before, I'd been listening to Carpeter Brut's "Escape from Midwich Valley" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhhQrFfzFM4), which has a sample from John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" (the same sample is on DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing", an album I listened to a great deal in my formative years).  I haven't seen the movie, but I read the synopsis, and it very clearly inspired this strange half-waking dream.  I realized the connection pretty quickly, but it still scared the hell out of me.  It really felt like a warning that the devil was going to possess my body and kill my loved ones.

[posidreams-blog]

20170618

In real life, Oakland is connected to San Francisco by the Bay Bridge, the middle of which rests on the mostly-uninhabited Yerba Buena island.

In my dream, all three were totally isolated islands but still in the same formation.  I was about to drive to San Francisco for work in the morning as I usually did (when in reality only crazy people do that), but as I and the hordes of other commuters got to Yerba Buena island we saw that it was covered in mysterious eggs.  Before we had a chance to investigate, horrific flying aliens came down and attacked us and we beat a hasty retreat to Oakland, which was also being attacked.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, the aliens had insinuated themselves into human society, rather than attacking outright, and had become the leaders of every realm of public life, maintaining the existing corporate and government structures but making them extremely efficient and productive for some mysterious reason.  The humans seemed to be aware of what was going on and unhappy about having to work so hard, but unable to resist.

Back in Oakland, I had joined a resistance movement as a bumbling junior conscript on some kind of flying ship we were using to fight the alien menace.  After much grueling combat we were able to liberate Oakland, then Yerba Buena, and finally San Francisco in a climactic and bloody battle that leveled much of the city and left many dead.

[posidreams-blog]

LEGOs

I’ve noticed a theme recently where I come across a lot of LEGOs and experience an immense sensation childlike wonder and joy.  Sometimes I’ll go to a LEGO store and buy practically everything I can get my hands on, sometimes someone gives me their massive collection of LEGOs and I spend all day playing with them on the floor.  Makes me very glad I kept all of my LEGOs from my childhood, maybe someday soon I’ll become one of those misunderstood individuals with a dedicated LEGO room.

[posidreams-blog]

February 7th, 2017

I was in a strange dormitory, which a rough ring of rooms in a single story structure with some hallways branching out in confusing ways.  At multiple points in the dream, my teeth fell out.  The third time it happened, I thought to myself that this had happened before, but I became distracted by the white and red foam (toothpaste foam with blood?) constantly pouring out of my mouth into the sink.  I tried to call my girlfriend repeatedly but she wouldn’t pick up, even though I could see she was at a bus stop through location tracking.

The sensation of my teeth falling out was strangely realistic, considering it hasn’t happened since my baby teeth came out.  I would feel one come loose, and feel the sharp tips of the root poking my tongue as it rattled around my mouth.  Then I’d feel another one or two loosening up as they continued to come out.  The feeling of the gaps was also very distinct and familiar.

A little research shows that this is a fairly common theme in dreams, which strikes me as very odd.  But it was so realistic; maybe it’s some kind of universal, primal human experience.

[posidreams-blog]

February 2nd, 2017

I was being seduced by a vampire.  He was very tall, slender, with nice, natural-looking breasts, a very short haircut, and sharp, beautiful features.  He invited me into his house, which he shared with four or five other male vampires; very much like a bunch of college guys living together.  As we walked up to his bedroom on the top floor, he briefly introduced me to each roommate we passed by.  He had his own room, with a loft bed and various junk and dirty clothes scattered around.  He took me up to a different bed though, a mattress on top of his dresser.

I knew throughout the dream that this particular day was a well-known vampire holiday, where they would go out and find a human to eat.  I was also almost certain that I was being seduced so that he could eat me alive, and that the mattress on top of the dresser existed solely for him to do so.  I could practically see my blood staining the mattress, and yet I was so enchanted by him that I also believed that he really wanted me just to be with me.  I feel like this is exactly what the protagonist of many a vampire story has felt exactly, and I understand how it can happen to people, both in fiction and, less literally, in reality, with unscrupulous people.

[posidreams-blog]

January 20th, 2017

I was in my bedroom (a room I'd never actually been in or seen before, but in the dream I knew it to be my own room).  Most of the room was taken up by a large, old-style pool with ceramic tiling.  The pool was extremely dirty; the entire bottom covered in furry algea, and the water was a murky greenish brown.  Every minute or so, a large bubble of odorous gas would emit from one corner of the pool, which I instinctively knew to avoid touching the bottom of for fear of being grabbed by whatever creature was lying there.

I was in a different corner of the pool, trying to sort some objects on the edge of the pool.  On my dresser, there were two jars.  One jar was full of long, thin, brightly colored pills.  The other jar was full of M&Ms and very fine sand.  The sand was so fine that it was somehow causing the M&Ms to shift around, making a constant clattering sound that was very annoying.  After I woke up, I realized the clattering was the sound of heavy rainfall outside.

[posidreams-blog]

October 12th, 2016

Trump won.  Immediately, law and order started breaking down and everyone in society was reduced to their baser impulses.  I was with a group of friends, and their priorities went immediately from board games and high minded pursuits to reality television and sexual debauchery.  I tried to hold onto a more civilized atmosphere along with a few holdouts, but almost immediately decided against it as well, with a "can't beat em, join em" attitude.  Pretty soon I was establishing my dominance in the group by having sex with any woman I could find and filming my own reality shows (a few of which featured David Spade).

San Francisco is separated from Oakland, where I live, by the Bay Bridge, which has a toll plaza on the Oakland side.  Pretty quickly after the Trump victory, people stopped paying the toll and started rampaging through the bridge, running over anyone in their way, until the government quit trying to stop people and make them pay.  In an effort to increase my prestige I made great effort to harm as many people and cause as much destruction as possible, both on the bridge and in general.

Most of my sexual partners were willing and enthusiastic, but there was one woman who clearly didn't want to be a part of it.  She looked like a younger (but still middle aged) Paula Deen.  No matter what, every time our paths crossed I'd have sex with her.  She clearly didn't want me to, so I was knowingly raping her, but my morals had been so degraded that towards the end of the dream I didn't see anything wrong with it despite her many objections, even though I knew it had been wrong in the past.

This was an extremely disturbing dream, and very long.  The scenario played out over many weeks, with various interludes involving the various, increasingly despicable reality shows I was producing, the progressive breakdown of society, the various changes in geopolitics (at one point I partied with Kim Jong Un in his palace, as North Korea was now a wealthy ally of the Trump's United States).

[posidreams-blog]

July 26th, 2016

A friend and I were watching an anime about giant angelic robots who inhabited a city in the style of Rivendell in the Lord of the Rings movies.  This somehow turned into that friend and I being said robots watching a different show, this time about a guy on a US Navy submarine (who I can only assume was meant to be my other friend in the Navy).  The antagonist was a bookish girl nuclear power officer who had some nefarious plot involving the reactor, and the protagonist and the tomboy character had to steal a huge cart of bread loaves from the mess hall to break down the doors to the reactor area.  In true anime style, the reactor area was an ornate mansion within the sub with incredibly high ceilings, sparkling chandeliers and gorgeous wood staircases and hallways.

I can't remember the exact scenario, but somebody, possibly someone I know, was pointing a gun at me.  I tried to run, heard a bang, and felt a great deal of moisture run down the side of my neck and shoulder.  I tried to paw at my neck to assess the damage as my vision went black.  I woke up still frantically feeling my neck to figure out what was going on; the feeling of blood had been so vivid that I had to go to the bathroom to make sure I wasn't actually bleeding.  When I looked in the mirror, there was no blood, but there was a long red mark along the side of my neck, tracing the path of the bullet in my dream.  I have no clue what could have done that to me, it didn't look like I'd been scratching my neck, or like any kind of bug bite I'd ever seen before.

[posidreams-blog]

May 20th, 2016?

I had some coworkers visiting Austin with me, and I was feeling bad because I had run out of things to show them.  My boss suggested we make s'mores, so we went to the local health food store to get some good stuff but ended up striking out on supplies.  I decided to leave them at the store and go looking for a better grocery store somewhere else in town.

I started driving, lost track of where I was, and by the time I came back to my senses I was in the far north part of town.  I went into a nice looking grocery store (which was apparently a German chain, as everything was in German and all the employees had accents), and stripped naked as soon as I walked in and spread all of my dirty laundry all over the front of the store, then went looking for graham crackers.  After some perusing I realized being naked was a bad idea (although no one seemed to notice) so I went back to my strewn piles of laundry and put on some socks and underwear.  I then went to the back of the store, where I found some really fancy crème brûlée Oreos.  The tag said they cost almost $2000 per package, but it seemed like a mistake so I spent a few minutes reading the fine print trying to figure out if it was true.

I suddenly realized what a terrible idea it was to leave all of my clothes in a place where someone would probably gather them and toss them out, so I hurried back to the front of the store only to find that all of the employees had congretated around my mess, and one of them was lugging the bag of gathered laundry into a pet food delivery truck.  I grabbed it out of the truck as soon as they put it in and ran to my car as all the employees followed me, asking why I had done such a thing in the first place.  I was able to get in the car and lock the doors, but they had surrounded me, so I drove off the parking lot edge.  It was higher up than I expected and I scraped my undercarriage pretty bad and clearly bent some stuff when the front of the car landed hard, but I was still able to make my escape.  I felt like a huge idiot.

[posidreams-blog]

March 31st, 2016

I was at a party in a brightly lit nightclub-type space, with high ceilings and a light blue color scheme.  About a dozen other people were there and we were in small groups of casual conversation.  I was with three other people, two women and one man, and we were playing some kind of party game in which I had to basically vivisect the man while answering questions, and taking a small dose of sedatives every time I answered incorrectly.  The man was partially awake and aware of what was happening but powerless to stop me.  One of the women had some connection to the man, and I could tell that if I took too much of the drug and lost the ability to defend myself, she'd probably do the same to me.

The imagery of cutting into the man's flesh and tendons was extremely vivid, and I spent a lot of time hacking through it to remove his limbs and cut deeper into him.  I was compelled by something within me to continue torturing him despite not having a clear idea of why I was doing it.  It makes me sick to think about now, but at the time it wasn't that disturbing.  I was more afraid of losing the game than of succumbing to the drug and being tortured and killed.

[posidreams-blog]

January 3rd, 2016

I was living in a house in suburban USA in the 50s.  I woke up in midmorning and when I opened the blinds, I saw that everyone outside had blue skin and was gliding around with rigid limbs, one leg extended out, their mouths open in a silent scream, all of their eyes on me.  I turned away, shaken, to get some breakfast, and when I turned back, everyone was normal again and it was another idyllic 50s suburban American scene.  When I looked back outside a third time, everyone was sort of between the two states, with blue patches of skin and their heads all turned to face me with terrifying, accusatory expressions.  I heard a knock on the door and was filled with dread that they were coming to get me.  I began to realize that I was having a schizophrenic episode, and this was probably the beginning of a lifetime of struggle with madness.

---

My father had gotten my family on Family Fued and insisted I participate.  The stage was a cavernous, sparse cylindrical room, and the board where all the survey answers show up was this enormous jumbotron-thing in the middle of the room.  It was somewhat religious, like some godless media cathedral.  Louie Anderson walked over and hurriedly handed us packets that had the acceptable answers for all of the questions, which was several pages long and very dense.  Before I had a chance to read them all, the show started.  I lost us the first question, and my dad had to play a hyper-realistic Mario video game to help us recover.  Mario had to swim into a deep, dark underwater cave and drag an object through to the other side.  Giant, horrific eels and centipedes would occasionally bite Mario in an extremely graphic manner.  After what felt like an eternity, my dad finally completed the game, but he exceeded the time limit and still lost.  I wanted to go home very badly.

---

On my way home, I dropped by a store in Austin to buy a newspaper (something I've never done in my life).  I parked on this raised parking platform situated on a pole 7 stories in the air that required me to slink down these incredibly convoluted metal stairs (like one of those really tight ladder stairs on ships, but more complex) to get to the ground level.  As I was buying the paper, my childhood friend Matt (who looked like a cross between himself and Mike Stoklasa of Red Letter Media) came up to me and quietly informed me that I was being followed by undercover agents, and pointed out a Hot Wheels car mounted on the wall that had "YOU ARE BEING FOLLOWED" painted on the roof of the little car, planted by someone in the know before I'd arrived.  I didn't really trust Matt, yet had no choice but to believe him.  I just wanted to get home.

When I got back to the parking structure, I managed to catch the elevator, which was a huge relief after having taken those awful stairs down.  The elevator was an open metal cage with two facing seats that were like rollercoaster seats, and sitting across from me was a very attractive woman who I began making small talk with.  As the elevator rose, the shaft became extremely narrow and scrapped my shoulders, forcing me to really fold myself in.  The elevator's path twisted all around the structure and went sideways in some places, and as I watched this process in awe, we missed my floor.  The woman in the elevator parked above me, but decided to take the elevator back down with me.  She seemed to be flirting with me, but I remembered what Matt had said and became suspicious that she was one of the agents.  After the harrowing elevator ride I got off on the wrong floor and still had to take those damn stairs to my car.

[posidreams-blog]

December 29th, 2015

I was with my mom and grandma doing some kind of arbitration deal with a stereotypically southern black lawyer, when some friends dropped by and invited me to the local country club for a game of golf.  It was a very informal game where everyone took a turn hitting the ball around without really trying to get it anywhere, and drank a lot of beer.

I decided that, in order to efficiently drink the most beer, I would just piss in my pants instead of bothering to go all the way to the bathroom every time.  I guess everyone else was doing this too because it wasn't a hard decision to make.  I did check out the bathroom and it was a typically unwelcoming public mens room so I felt even more confident in my decision.  Soon my entire lower body was drenched in warm, deep yellow and the course was muddy with it.  It was horrifying, but still perfectly okay to me in the dream.  Once the game was over I finally decided to go to the bathroom again to fully drain myself before going home.  The floor was covered in urine and mushy toilet paper, and the toilet I chose, in addition to being large enough to fit a whole person inside, was smeared in all kinds of substances and drenched in urine.  One of my friends also asked why the hell I’d been wetting myself the entire time, so I guess not everyone was doing it, and I started to feel really self-conscious.  I woke up shocked and relieved to find that I had not wet the bed despite all the vivid sensations I'd just experienced.

I think this one stems not only from really needing to pee, but also from seeing my uncle over Christmas, who is stuck with a catheter and a bag which is always filling with orange urine due to some kidney problems he's been having.  Easily of the most disgusting dreams I've ever had.

[posidreams-blog]

December 22nd, 2015

I'm back in Texas for the holidays and I was staying at my grandmother's apartment in waking life.  I dreamt that I had to go to the bathroom, so I got out of bed and sat down on the toilet to pee (due to both laziness and not wanting to wake my grandmother up).  At this point my thinking became very cloudy and my body felt heavy, as if some drug had taken effect within me.  From the door to my grandmother's room I heard her speaking quietly, as if she were asleep, but then I heard another voice, that of a young woman, speaking in response.  I got up and crept to the door, but as I approached she stopped talking, and peering inside I saw no one else in the room.  I realized that I was in a dream and experiencing sleep paralysis, and finally woke up only after realizing I could kick my legs despite the rest of my body being useless.

I was sleeping on an air mattress on the floor, and as I lay there I was overcome with my usual fear of roaches, which is always more pronounced when I'm not sleeping on a raised bed.  I got up to turn on the light, and then woke up still in bed in the darkness.  I tried again, but still hadn't actually woken up.  This happened over and over again more times than I could count.  At one point I realized that I couldn’t remember actually flipping the light switch, so I made sure to go through the motion.  As I did so, I was clutching a pillow, and when the light turned on, a plush rabbit toy slowly rose from behind the pillow in my arms and bared its menacing teeth at me.  Finally I remembered the trick to kicking my legs and actually woke up.  I slept the rest of the night with the light on.

None of the dreams were especially frightening on their own, but I felt completely trapped by the paralysis and it seemed like I had been trying to turn the light on for an eternity.  I'm curious to find out if the kicking legs trick will work next time it happens.

[posidreams-blog]

November 13th, 2015

I was in a seaside town, probably along the California coast between SF and LA.  It was a lot like Carmel by the Sea, except the whole town consisted of one small road that tightly hugged the coast and was dotted with adorable little houses or restaurants and local businesses.  While I was there I was filled with this wonderful feeling, but it wasn't until I woke up that I realized that it was exactly the kind of place the Hotel would be, although it wasn't actually in the dream.  In any case, it was my paradise.

I was staying at an old man's apartment through some kind of Airbnb situation, which was in a rather stuffy building with lots of carpet and 40s-style accoutrements in dark colors.  I went down the street to have a nice meal at a local German restaurant, and then to the gym.  The gym was owned by a retired rock star who looked like George R R Martin and used half of the building as his dance and singing class studio.  On the wall there was a message scrawled by my friend Dave about our friend Fred, some in-joke I didn't quite understand.

I was leaving town when I realized I hadn't left the key at the old man's place, so I turned around to give it back.  I was riding a Segway scooter, but instead of handlebars there was a large video camera on a tripod in the center, because I was filming something about the town I guess.

The whole dream was very peaceful and the town was overwhelmingly quaint.  No doubt it's derived from my many trips up and down the Pacific Coast Highway.  If I could choose anywhere to spend the rest of my life, it'd be in a town like that.

[posidreams-blog]

November 2nd, 2015

It rained for the first time since the beginning of the year last night, and I guess that's what sets off my dreams because I had some really crazy ones last night.

I was an old man living on a palacial estate, which I'd bought through exploiting my connections with both the local Catholic political machine and the mafia. In my garden, a sprawling maze of walkways and neoclassical columns, two of my hispanic servants were by a record player. One of them was operating the turntable and the other was at a typewriter, and the voice of my dead business parter started to speak as the writer recorded it. He said that I shouldn't be alarmed that he was speaking to me this way as I walked out of my house in my robe to see what was going on. He then told me that the US president was having a rally nearby to try and bring down the Catholic machine's stranglehold on the city. I dispatched one of my many teams of themed cartoon characters to the shack to deal with the president, which was made up of various Hanna Barbera Top Cat-style animals. The leader was a goofy moomin-type creature with a crown, and the others were an assortment of animals who made up his court, and they held the president at gunpoint.

I had just gotten off a flight and back to the bay area, but somehow it looked like Houston and was supposed to be NYC. I met up with a friend from middle school who lives in Michigan now, but as we transferred trains on BART, the escalator to the train didn't have any steps, it was just an open pit between the two moving hand grip belts. I managed to perch my luggage and myself on the belts, but by the time I got to the train, the doors closed and my friend left me behind.

When I finally got home, my apartment complex was suspended in the sky and really falling apart. My neighbor's door had a huge hole in the bottom where the cats went in and out and I can only assume vermin did the same. Someone was knocking on the door to their place, so I went to find them. They were laying on the back porch (the one from my mom's old house in Kerrville) crying with each other, but the husband got up when I told him about his visitors.

The visitors were a large hispanic family in slowly-sinking hot air balloon contraption asking about crystals that caused things to rise, and the husband, now a comical fat cat wizard, created a ton of golden rocks that did the trick. I had also become a cat at this point.

There was also a series of sleep paralysis dreams. In the first, someone was trying to break through my front door and I couldn't get up to do anything about it. When I finally did, a package delivery guy was coming in through my other (nonexistent) front door, and I crawled up to him and was barely able to whisper in his ear that the package wasn't for me or anyone living here. After that I was in bed again, and I saw a huge cockroach on the floor which flew up at me and I woke up while making the most pathetic whimpering sound I've ever made. Reminded me of this Louis CK bit: https://youtu.be/ogy72eg1rjw?t=4m55s