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[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the eleventh of april, 2024 - sage

tw- body horror it is a dark night. I am traveling over a tan-colored marshland thick with grasses, not walking but somehow gliding, like I have no body, only a point of view. The grasses appear dead and dry but the earth beneath is wet, muddy, and torn-up. A dark tree-line stands in the distance. I am tracing the line of a rivulet or stream that runs through the field. The stream does not run with water, but with some sort of poison or industrial waste. If it gets too far, a voice tells me, it will poison a great area of good land and have a devastating effect on many people. I am asking the voice how I can stop the flow of the river, desperately trying to figure out what I can do to make things better, but the voice has abandoned me. I fly wildly over the field, taking in the branching, chaotic nature of the flowing stream, calling desperately for the voice to tell me what to do. Then I move down a slope and resume human form. I am walking between some ice-structures I can only vaguely remember, buildings made of faintly luminescent ice. I go inside one. I manage to look at my own bare back in a reflective surface of smooth ice. I have red inflamed spots on my back from which apparently living parasitic white worms are wriggling. I can't ever have nice dreams.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the eighth of april, 2024 - titan

tw- mild body horror, just kinda gross and weird a preface - Bioware and EA released a game a few years back called Anthem. I haven't thought about the game in years, and never even played it aside from a free demo weekend in like 2019 or something. I did, however, find the above digital sculpt pretty cool, as I am into digital art and have been making models of characters and creatures on my computer recently. As with most concept art creatures, the fellow above is comprised of shapes and forms which vaguely resemble human anatomy in a fairly abstract way. You can make out a vague impression of pectorals, collarbones, abdominals, lats, and so on. His 'abs' are more like a set of little mandibles or something. The same with his 'pecs' - they're not pecs at all, as they do not attach to the breastbone and therefore cannot possibly contract to draw the arms together. They look more like mandibles or jaws.

I bring this up because for some unfathomable reason, the above piece of digital art had inspired me to perform body-modification surgery on myself in my dream last night. As the dream begins, I have some pain on the surface of my chest, a burning, tender feeling. I'm in some house that's not my own, and other people are around, probably my hosts. I find a mirror in their home, stand in front of it and take my shirt off. Now this is a little difficult to explain, but it seems that at some point prior to the start of the dream, several days at least, I have performed some basic body-modification surgery on myself. It seems that I did not think I would ever look 'defined' or 'cut' enough unless I modified the appearance of my chest to include those little mandible-like extrusions that the creature above has. As I look in the mirror now, I have two small 'tab' like shapes that originate near the inner side of each pectoral and extend, lying flat on the skin beneath, to meet, symmetrically, at the midline of my body. I can barely remember how I got the tabs in there, or what they're made of. I can remember that I did it without anesthetic. Each is entirely covered with skin, but there's clearly some foreign object giving them their shape that doesn't belong in a human body. Each seems about the size and shape of a shortened popsicle stick. It's been long enough since I did it that the skin has healed completely, showing no scar. I can, with some pain and difficulty, lift the tabs away from the skin beneath, but they quickly snap down to lie flat when let go. I am worried that perhaps the pain I feel is due to an infection of the skin on the underside of these strange tabs. I continue to mess with this area of my chest until the objects beneath the skin become detached. I can shift them around under the skin. I am very concerned. I would like to have the things removed by a professional surgeon but I don't know how I would explain why they're there in the first place. The two pieces of material shift lower until they seem to come to rest on the side of my upper left thigh. There they are stacked neatly together, and don't seem able to shift any further down. I am worried that the pieces have severed blood vessels or connective tissues that are supposed to connect my skin to the muscle beneath. I think about making an incision in my skin to get them out but I don't look forward to it.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the seventh of april, 2024 - swordfish

A bit disjointed, this one. Again, I dream about aquariums. I am in a fairly claustrophobic space which somehow seems glaringly bright and inadequately lit at once, due to the harsh, fluorescent quality of the light. The room is filled with glass tanks filled with water, similar to the ones you might see in a Chinese restaurant. The tanks border the room and also stand in the center, leaving only very narrow passageways between them in which to walk. Some of the tanks have fluorescent lights built in. The tanks are filled with various types of fish. One of the fish has somehow ended up on the floor. It is alive. It is some sort of skate, wide and flat and diamond-shaped. I am trying to figure out which tank it belongs in. At the moment though, I am more concerned with preventing anyone from stepping on it, a thought which gives me great anxiety. Someone is standing over it, not paying it any attention, their attention rather fixed on the tanks bordering the wall. I go over and attempt awkwardly to manhandle the person away from the spot on the floor where the fish lies, while their shoes shuffle and stamp around it, causing me anxiety. Later in the dream, I drag a large swordfish or marlin over the floor. It is too heavy to lift. The place looks different, more like a rustic fish packing plant than the harshly-lit environment from earlier.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from april 2023 - sea serpent

I am standing under a broad leafy tree, like an oak or maple tree with bright green leaves. It is a sunny day, and I am in a nice suburban neighborhood. The tree is wide but low, the lowest branches only a few inches above eye level. I am standing in a crowd comprised of young people. One of them is a specific guy I was friends with as a child. I have a book in my hands, an antique hardcover with age-yellowed pages. It has architectural sketches of classic-style stone buildings, like you might see in a Victorian English city or historic New England town. I look up at the architecture around me. It is modern. The buildings incorporate glass and steel and some unidentifiable laminate or something. I remark to my friend how ugly I find modern architecture in comparison to classical stone buildings. I, him, and a few others break away from the crowd and go walking. There is a church nearby, and we are heading toward it. It is old and made of brick, and more appealing to my taste in architecture. It is a very strange church - just a single circular tower, very tall. With the tower still a long ways off, we are walking down a long steady decline in the asphalt road which is bordered tightly on either side by high, very very high brick walls. Against the wall on the right leans a ladder. I start to ascend the ladder, and the others climb with me. The wall is wide and high, inset with uniform rows of identical windows all the way across and all the way up. It looks like the side of a hotel or apartment building. There are also mossy rock outcroppings intersecting the wall, as if the building were built around them, without regard for these extremely craggy and uneven geological formations. The rock formations remind me of Scottish Highlands. I climb off the ladder and onto one of these rock forms. Then I climb in through the nearest window. Inside is a hallway. A row of outward-looking windows makes up one wall, and a series of doors to individual rooms make up the other. There is another hallway that runs away perpendicular to this one, forming a T shape. The other people have climbed in through the window and now stand with me in the hallway. There are several aquariums in the hallway. The smallest one, a rectangular prism, taller than it is wide, is fitted to a stand that brings its base to about waist height. The tank stands at the convex corner where one hallways runs away from the other. There are a few plants and small tropical fish inside the tank. Around the outside of the small aquarium is a planter growing decorative plants. At the corner opposite there are large windows through which I can see the interior of a darkened room. Inside I can dimly view another glass aquarium, much larger. There are bigger fish inside. Between the two corners, taking up a large area of the floor at the entrance to the second hallway, is a third, even larger, free-standing glass aquarium with schools of fish inside. There is another component to it, at its rear side - a wide, low, glass-walled pool. The water's surface is open to the air. At the bottom of the pool is a layer of light-colored sand, which can be seen in cross section through the glass walls. The water is only a little over a foot deep. In this pool lives an aquatic serpent. It is about eight feet long, with skin that looks smooth like the skin of a stingray. The serpent is very friendly. It lifts its head under the palm of my hand like a dog that wants to be petted. Its skin is smooth when you run your hand down its length, but rough and will graze your skin if rubbed the other way. It hurts a little, but it is hard to only pet the serpent the right way when it keeps moving around playfully. It has splotchy black, white, and yellow coloration, a snake-like head, and a long, featureless body. I think there was a sign saying not to pet the serpent, but it seemed to like being petted very much.

I dream about aquariums or strange aquatic creatures more often than I dream about anything else.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the second of august, 2023 - charms

I am in a place that appears to be a darkened movie theater. I am not in the screening room, nor in the lobby where you purchase your tickets, I am in the wide hallway with entrances to the screening rooms on either side, the area you gain access to once you've shown your ticket but before you've entered your screening. There doesn't seem to be anyone around, however. The place is quiet, dark, and comfortable. It is a modern-style theater, like a Cineplex. The color profile of the place tends towards a dark , muted purple. The floors are carpeted wall-to-wall. I am collecting small cast-metal charms and coins which I find throughout the place. I have collected a medium-sized handful of them. The coins are from many different countries and bear beautiful unfamiliar designs on their faces. The charms are minute models of animals and animal heads. One I have collected is a fish, maybe a salmon or trout. I am searching my handful of trinkets for this particular charm. I cannot find it, and am worried that I've lost it. I kneel in a very dark theater entryway alcove and pour out the handful on the floor. I parse them. I find another charm in the shape of a different fish, but it seems I've lost the one I was looking for.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the twelfth of january 2023 - tragedy

tw - child death, firearms Very similar to the one on the night of the seventh, in that it stems from a similar fear of technology. I was walking along the edge of a road, a fairly wide gravel road in the countryside. Thick, fresh snow lay on the fields. Only one structure could be seen- a modestly sized home with an acute peaked roof standing a short distance from the road's right shoulder, in the field. I saw a man staggering wildly through the snow toward me. At first I thought he had no shirt on, but as he got closer I saw that he wore a light-colored shirt and jacket, similar in tone to his skin. I was apprehensive, as his wild staggering struck me as rather unhinged. I soon realized that he was actually trying to flag down a van that I hadn't noticed driving down the lane toward me. The van pulled off onto the verge. A woman stepped out as I reached the scene to join the two. The woman was young, thirty at most, black, and wore a long wool jacket with lapels. The man was old and white-haired. He had a white beard as well. He was rather short and wide. He was raving in distress. "I shot my daughter," he said. Apparently, according to him, his daughter had shut him outside of the house in the cold. In order to get back in, he'd gone and gotten his shotgun from a shed or somewhere and tried to blow the wooden door open from the outside, not knowing that his daughter was still standing right on the other side of it. I followed him back to the house at a run. The three of us went in past the splintered door and into an entrance hallway. A few steps inside, a little girl of about twelve lay in the corner on the lacquered wooden floorboards. She seemed strangely young to be the old man's child. I couldn't see any blood, but she wasn't moving. She lay facing the wall, curled up, her face hidden. She was far enough inside that I thought she must either have been moved after the incident or managed to take a few steps back from the door before falling. She had long straight brown hair drawn back into a ponytail. Being so young, it seemed that she hadn't known or hadn't thought that shutting her elderly father out in the cold could do serious harm to him, and that the whole event had just been a tragic accident. I was struggling with my mobile phone, trying to dial 911, but it seemed that the ability to simply view a keypad and dial a number had been removed in an update. I could see pre-existing contacts, but no way to simply use the keypad, as if this feature was seen as too old-fashioned and obsolete. As I tapped and swiped at my phone screen in a panic, becoming more and more frustrated, the little girl stood up. Showing no sign of harm, she walked away down the hall and further into the depths of the house, never turning in my direction.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the seventh of January 2023 - how to save a life

A lanky man lies flat on his back on the floor. Someone is trying to resuscitate the man. It is a crowded place, many people are kneeling all around the man. I take over the CPR for a short while, giving the other person a break. Then as the first person resumes CPR, I attempt to look up online instructions, using an iPad, on how to best perform CPR and maximize the person's chance of survival. I begin to panic when I realize that I cannot seem to clear the screen of pop-up ads and actually see the article. I keep thinking I've cleared them all only for more to pop up.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the fourteenth of november, 2022 - indigo

I am standing in a great big bookstore in a mall. The store, like the mall, has not opened yet, as it is early morning. There is a step down in the floor ahead of me, and a rise further on, the lowered area of floor almost like the main deck on an 18th century sailing ship which sits lower than the foredeck and aft deck. At the far wall are elevators. The doors slide open and several female employees of the bookstore walk out, talking amongst each other. They are of different heights and ages but mostly young. They look ready to start the day. I know that above the mall are high rise condominium towers, and that these elevators must have just descended through the residential levels to arrive in the store. I think, 'ah, so these women live on the upper floors and come down here to work.' Not a bad commute. Then I think, 'Hold on, how can the people who work in this bookstore afford these condos?' I don't know what I'm doing in the store outside of business hours, but no one seems to take any notice of me. I go across to the elevators and up to one of the highest floors to investigate. It's not what I'd expected. It seems more like an overcrowded slum. I walk down a narrow and confining hallway, lit dimly in amber light. Without doors or even walls to separate their living space from the hallway, most of the tenants have no more than hanging bedsheets, each in different colors and patterns, to provide privacy. I walk into one of these living spaces. Two young women who live there stand a ways off to my right, one taller one shorter, talking to each other while tidying something up. They take no notice of me as I enter, and I feel that this is because there is little concept of personal property or personal space up here. An emaciated, naked old man wanders in through the curtain on my other side. This place is fucked up.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a nightmare from a mystery year and date - nature is wonderful

I have no idea whatsoever when I dreamed this. It may have been as a child, teenager, or adult. I am watching a nature documentary about life deep in caves. There is a narrator. The subject of the documentary, at least for the present scene, is a grotesque humanoid thing. The shots are framed uncomfortably close, with a long lens and close optical zoom. A bright directional light shines on the thing, the light source mounted behind the camera. It seems uncomfortable in the light. It is collapsed against a wet, rocky cave wall. It seems capable only of twitching and shuddering in a manic, disturbing way. Its jaw shivers violently and snaps open and shut. I'm not sure exactly how to phrase this, but its jaw is 'hollow', in that there is no flesh to make up the 'floor' of its mouth. Like a jawbone shrink-wrapped in skin. It has no teeth. Its maxilla and mandible look as though they have degenerated through the bone erosion that occurs in humans who have lost their teeth. Its skin is wet and slick with a jelly-like translucency. Its eyes look like a couple of peeled lychee nuts, resting uncovered in their sockets, with no lids, no iris or pupil. Altogether very disturbing. The narrator tells the audience that this thing preys on humans, and 'devours first the eyes of its victims.' He then says 'It is the Golem.' Go watch Aphex Twin's 'Rubber Johnny' for a fair approximation of the 'feel' of this dream, it is certainly what inspired it.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from some time in 2022 - octopus' garden

I am walking through a snowy pine forest. The snow is fresh, bright, and crystalline. Its surface sparkles. The trees are old, tall, and widely spaced, allowing a patchwork of sunlight to reach the forest floor. Even the lowest of their branches are well above my head. Snow weighs down their boughs. Their trunks are stony grey. I am walking the length of a ravine that widens and drops lower ahead into a broader valley. Its sloped walls, about sixty feet away from me on either side, run together behind me to terminate in a V. Around the point at which the ravine walls run together and join stands a small town upon the high ground, its shops and restaurants immediately overlooking the drop. At the moment, I am not looking at the town. I am looking at the forest floor, because it no longer looks like a forest floor. It looks like the bottom of the sea. The topography is exactly as it was before, a gentle drop ahead of me into a deeper, wider valley. But now the ravine appears more like a deep undersea trench. It is almost pitch black, but the seabed is covered over in a web of bioluminescent, translucent root-like growths. They almost look like human neurons but they glow and pulse a pale blue-green. I don't know if they're plant or animal life. They seem to possess a central nucleus and a spreading network of branching, fleshy tendrils anchoring them to the sea floor. Despite all this, I can still see the snow and trees. The image of the seabed is overlaid in a double exposure. Every undulation in topography is matched perfectly between the two environments. I look back the other way, and the spell is broken. I see the town standing along the ridge behind me. The word that first comes to mind in describing the town is 'artisanal.' It looks like a trendy little spot to go for coffee or meet for lunch, compensating for its remote wilderness location with an insistence on uniformly hip and trendy design. I see Edison bulbs, exposed brick, weathered reclaimed wood. It's the sort of town to sport a brewery startup and a vegan restaurant or two. I see two young women walking past the shops along the ridge above me. One wears a pitch black dress of a weightless gossamer fabric that rises in the wind and streams from her figure. The other wears nothing, despite the cold. Her fair skin is very bright in the overhead light of day and ambient underlight of fresh snow. I find it very strange that she does not, apparently, feel the cold. I climb the ridge, reach the town, and walk along by the storefronts. There are so few streets and alleys in this town that you could count them all on two hands. The storefront windows are bright, clear and reflective. There is not a cloud in the sky.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the nineteenth of june, 2023 - first wave

tw - plane crash, civic destruction I am in an unfamiliar country. I stand in a dingey alleyway bordered on one side by a chain link fence and on the other side by a brick wall. Burned-out car chassis lie at odd angles, partially obstructing the thoroughfare. Empty shopping carts and garbage are strewn around. Strangers pass by around me. I have a small mirror or reflective surface which I am using to adjust my hair, possibly it is the side-mirror of one of the derelict cars. I'm trying a sort of goth or emo look where my hair hangs in wet lank strands. I am running my fingers through it. Spanish speaking teenagers walk through the alleyway, shouting to one another. A strange reverberation runs through the ground and up through my body. At first I assume it is maybe a distant car stereo, the bass frequencies inaudible but felt as physical vibrations. There is a feeling of dread associated with the low sound. I speculate on whether this is some kind of automatic response, like a standing wave, if it is a frequency capable of biologically stimulating a fear reaction somehow. I notice that not only I seem to have been affected in this way. The passing teenagers have stopped in their tracks, they are experiencing fear and trepidation too. The tone rises and becomes audible. It is a guttural yet simultaneously mechanical rattling, occupying a perfect middle ground between organic and robotic in nature. It is distant yet directionless, seemingly emanating from all around. We begin to experience an earthquake. All of us run inside the nearest building. It is a stone building with wide, tall windows which terminate high above in rounded arches, overlooking the street. It looks like a stately old bank or maybe a train station. It occupies one corner of a street intersection. Close by is a train yard. As I watch, a single traincar is lifted off the tracks by an invisible force and carried into the sky. As it goes up, a commercial passenger plane comes down. It comes screaming out of the sky and streaks past all the windows on one face of the building. Through the row of windows in the adjoining wall, I see the plane punch straight through the stone facade of another stately old stone building across the intersection from ours. After a moment, the entire facade peels away and topples forward as one piece, shattering on the road and pulling down a telephone pole to fall across the scattered bricks. I am aware that hundreds of people have just died.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the second of july, 2023 - 'running up that hill'

It is a dark night. The sky is clear and stars can be seen, but no moon. A large meteorite has fallen and landed part-way up a high, wooded mountainside. People from nearby settlements are running up the hill toward the meteor. When any one of them reaches the meteorite, they break away as many pieces of it as they can, then dash away down the slope bearing as many fragments as they can carry. The meteorite is rich in mineral ore. I dash up the hill myself. The meteorite used to be a rough, uneven globular shape with craters all over, but under the onslaught of the villagers it has been chipped away until its outer shell resembles a jagged-edged bowl or broken eggshell with many partially loosened fragments occupying the remaining bowl-shape. When I reach the meteorite I see a man whom I know. He is standing on top of the meteor, wearing a long leather duster coat with a hood. He is not salvaging minerals from it himself, he only wants to stand on top of it and watch the chaos. I see a large blue-tinged clear crystal formation among the pieces. 'What's that?' I say, 'Doesn't matter, mine now,' I seize it, as well as two shards of amber-colored crystal. With these three pieces of crystal and a large armful of glittery dark angular stone fragments containing traces of metal ore, I turn away. Another scavenger who has just arrived looks at me aggressively and says "I'll be taking the diamond.' I begin hustling away down the hill toward my car, with him and other scavengers in pursuit. I am hoping I will be able to get inside the car and shut the door before my pursuers reach me.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from october, 2023 - gashadokuro

tw- gore I guess I am in the house my grandparents used to live in when I was growing up. It is a large, airy, modern home in the countryside on an acre of property, built right on the edge of a small valley. There are several people in the house, some are family, some are not. A girl is standing alone by the tall row of windows that overlook the valley. She holds a spyglass, looking down into the valley with her eye to the eyepiece. The slope of the valley is thick with cedar trees but you can see as far as the floor of the valley between the trees. She hands me the telescope and tells me to look where she had been looking. I raise it to my eye and scan the floor of the valley until I find anything strange. After a moment, I find the aberration - there are a few large stones lying loosely in a row, widely spaced one after the next. The stones are around five or six feet at the widest. The first one I see, however, seems to be 'hatching'. A red, slick human skull is emerging from the stone, as well as part of the backbone and ribcage. It looks as though a large human skeleton with some meat on it was curled up inside the stone and is now breaking out. I look from the first stone, to the second, which has not 'hatched' or broken open and appears normal, to the third, which has a similar gore-slicked skeleton emerging. This one pulls one arm free and points directly at me while I am looking at it through the telescope, an accusatory gesture. It's pointing directly at me and its mouth is open wide. I lower the spyglass for a moment and report this to the girl standing next to me. When I look again, the skeleton is looking away in another direction and pointing, possibly, I think, at someone else who was observing it from another point along the rim of the valley.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from the fourth of january, 2023 - weird fishes

I am with a group of people. I'm almost always with a group of people in my dreams, usually without a clear picture of precisely how many people make up the group, nor an ability to discern between them or remember specific individuals very well. As far as I can remember, they are all rather young, college age, and I'm sure one is this blonde girl with the definite air of a student. We are all collaborating on something for a day, outdoors, in a fallow field. We're setting something up, a concert stage or something like that. We are far from the city, way out in the countryside. It is a grey, overcast day following a long and heavy rainfall. A very thin rain is still falling as we work, I think. We break for lunch-time. I go walking off down a dirt lane which runs in a straight line between two fields. The lane is raised on a built-up ridge of earth which divides the two fields from one another, and the verges on either side of the lane slope steeply down into two deep ditches. The ditches are filled with rainwater. The water is so deep and so wide on each side, it is like walking on a ridge between two parallel rivers or canals. Further out on the fields I can see countless pools of rainwater, some as wide as ponds or small lakes. I notice fish in the river on my left. At first, all I see are schools of minnows. Then other types of fish appear, a little larger, iridescent, silvery, and blade-thin, rippling along just below the surface in small schools. They look like tiny, baby oarfish. Larger, slower-moving fish swim deeper below the surface. They are very strange looking, something akin to very large, fat tadpoles with scaleless skin like a frog's, wide and green and rather meaty looking. I realize I am hungry. The lane comes to an end where it dips down into a great big rainwater pond. More of the same types of fish are swimming here, with the addition of a new type - a wide, flat, flounder-like species that swims parallel with the surface. If I remember rightly, it is cyclopean, with only one eye. I wade into the water, now hoping to catch one of the meatier fish by hand and have it for lunch. I am not yet really thinking about how I plan to cook it, maybe I'm thinking I'll just eat it raw. I worry slightly about parasites but think I'll leave that concern until after I've filleted the fish and had a look inside. One of the fat, tadpole-like fish lies on the grassy bank, a couple of feet higher than the water's surface. How did it get there? Maybe the water level had dropped and stranded it there, or maybe it had leapt from the water and inadvertently gotten itself stuck on the shore. It is dead, in any case. I briefly consider eating this one, but then think better of eating a fish that has been lying dead for some indeterminate length of time. I remember something my Dad once told me, that you can eat a saltwater fish raw but not a freshwater fish. I stand there, waist-deep in the water, wondering what the rule is for rainwater fish.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a dream from summer 2018 - homunculus

I am in Las Vegas. I am staying in a hotel above a convention center. The hotel is a skyscraper with many, many floors. My room is on one of the highest floors. At the start of the dream, I am downstairs in the convention center. I meet a beautiful woman who is a minor celebrity I've heard of before. She has bright blue eyes and red hair that hangs in long tightly curled ringlets. We hit it off, but I have to go up to my room for a few minutes to deal with some responsibility, I can't remember what. I leave her for a while and ride the elevator up to my floor. Soon after taking care of whatever it was I had to do, I leave my room again and set out to find her downstairs so we can talk some more. Looking forward to seeing her again in a few moments, I step into the elevator. Since the hotel is so incredibly tall, this elevator actually goes into freefall when transporting guests to lower levels, just to get them there in a reasonable amount of time. I am soon joined in the elevator by an old white couple and by two massive bodyguards in black suits. At first I am not sure who these men are guarding, as they have no association with the elderly couple. I soon notice, however, the mason jar that one of the guards is carrying. Inside is a tiny, shriveled man suspended in preserving fluid. He is very wealthy and has paid for a rare and expensive treatment whereby his life can be extended indefinitely, albeit in a paralyzed, pickled, half-dead state. This is his life now - unable to move, curled in the fetal position inside a mason jar, shriveled like a raisin. Apparently, he prefers this cursed existence to dying of old age. The elevator begins to descend. I feel that slight weightless feeling you get in a descending elevator- only this time, the feeling just intensifies until we are all experiencing the 'zero gravity' sensation of being contained inside a free-falling object. My feet lose contact with the floor, and I am suspended in the middle of the elevator. I have no hand-holds, and no control over where I drift. I realize I am drifting toward the bodyguard who holds the mason jar. The pickled old man inside is looking at me. I really do not want to go anywhere near this thing, as I find the whole concept mildly horrifying, but I am drifting closer and there isn't anything I can do about it.

[lsd-lovelysweetdream]

a nightmare from 2009 or 2010 - botanical

tw - murder, gore I dreamt this one when I was eleven or twelve. I am watching a newscast. Two presenters sit at a desk, a man and a woman. They are both as photogenic as newsreaders tend to be, the man older and the woman younger. They present a story on an active serial killer in the area, whose identity is unknown. A series of victims have been found, their faces and heads flayed by knife blade. The presenters are visibly shaken as they present the material. I distinctly remember the waver in the woman's high pitched voice as she described how the killer was known to 'botanically carve the face.' Botanically. A strange word in this context, but somehow, in the dream, its intended meaning was perfectly clear to me. The killer made an effort to flay each subject's face in a different way, often falling back on a fondness for removing eyes and tongues but exercising creativity on each victim. By some dream logic, this was considered comparable to a gardener clipping or pruning a hedge into a desired shape, the commonality being that of carving or cutting away at a living thing so as to make art from it. She did not explain this thought process, but as I said, by dream logic, the intended meaning of the word 'botanical' as applied to the mutilation of a human face seemed perfectly clear.