RatCreature's Journal

Last night in my dream appeared a cauliflower tree, i.e. a tree producing cauliflower like fruit, even though I am well aware of how cauliflower looks when it grows, that it is a variant of cabbage, and thus grows on the ground. I might be alienated from food production, but not by *that* much. (Despite being a city dweller, I don't believe in lilac cows that are the direct chocolate producers either.)

Since my sleep schedule is currently very out of whack, and I did not sleep much last night, I ended up napping just now after I fell asleep while reading (not that great sleep either, I'm groggy now), but I had a cool dream with some sort of complicated plot. I don't remember the all the plot, but right before I woke up the dream had some celebratory feast (maybe because I had no lunch), but the weird part was that eating things, in particular from animals like meats and eggs, facilitated a temporary telepathic connection with still living siblings of the animal that was being eaten, while eating it. So the character in my dream in whose head I was, had a weird telepathic connection with a goose still being fattened, while eating another one...

Lest you think that I only dream horrible stuff, last night I had a dream in which the Nu!Trek characters (mostly Uhura and McCoy, but I think Spock and Kirk were around too) were involved in a sort of scavenger hunt for finding or solving something. The details have been unfortunately fading fast, but the best part was that one team was in a balloon, flying low over some kind of city (there were dogs below?) while another team was in communication with them, only it was much much faster and more maneuverable than a balloon (though you were in a kind of basket). So it felt basically like a flying dream, only that my dream POV (it was one of those dreams where upon waking I'm not sure whether I was in the dream as myself present somehow, or just observed the dream as a story) was next to my favorite trek characters solving puzzles while at the same time flying over a city.

I had the most awesome dream right before I woke up this morning. Unfortunately it is fading fast, but basically I dreamed the pilot episode for a new tv show (well it wasn't a show in the dream, but I wasn't in the dream, so I just watched this original fiction plot unfold, one that actually made sense and had a cast and a premise).

The concept was more or less SF with crime procedural mixed with the quirky small community dramedy setting, because the premise was set in a future when humans had settled other planets, so it takes place on this colony planet where the humans settled alongside the couple of humanoid earlier alien inhabitants, who don't mix that much but the long time settlers somehow got some odd habits as a result. While not actually rural the settlers were considered somewhat backwater by space travelling humans, I think. There was cool worldbuilding hinted at in the plot, I don't remember all the details, but it manifested itself in things like small superstitions and also everyday customs, they got from early interactions with the aliens, also, some of the alien wildlife or animals or something I think was gross to the outsiders but of course the settlers were used to it.

Anyway, as a cast we have this, I think it was a crime lab or some sort of police investigation force with a quirky mix of geeky characters, at least one of them a settler who came back after his education elsewhere (he had a meddling family, kind of like RayV's and also a girlfriend appeared), and a recently transferred cop from elsewhere who has to adjust to life out there, think like Bones only with more SF thrown in, like if it had some Farscape aliens but a lot of humans settling elsewhere kind of like Firefly, and a humor element like the "city guy gets transferred to small town", only the contrast is not from big/small town, but from going to the other planet. And then they solved crime and run into quirky people and sometimes the aliens.

It's too bad that I forgot the case investigation that was in my dream, but there was actually a plot, and also subplots where we got to know the characters and slowly noticed that the planet and world is different too.

As background info you have to know that one of my recurring nightmare elements is my teeth crumbling and falling out. It usually appears as part of other dreams and slowly gets worse, but happens so often that whenever it gets bad enough, i.e. more than one tooth breaking and crumbling, I become aware in a dream that it is a dream because I recognize the "symptom" and try to wake up.

Anyway, the dream as far as I remember actually starts with me having just woken from a dream in which my teeth crumbled as part of it and I remember that dream within the dream. What I recall from the dream within the dream was that it took place in feudal Japan, something with Samurai and war anyway. Maybe fantasy Japan. So I "wake up" from this dream within this dream, and my whole family is there. I think I'm still a teenager, in any case my mother is still alive. Shortly into it I notice that my teeth are still crumbling, even though I'm not in the Samurai dream anymore, so I panic. I realize that this must be a dream too, and talk crazily to my family trying to convince them that this is a dream. They think this is real and that I need to get my teeth fixed.

Meanwhile the teeth crumbling gets worse and worse, yet I won't wake up. My plan now is to fall asleep again, to have a chance to wake up "right". But that doesn't work, I fall asleep to teeth crumbling and wake up in "reality" (the dream one) yet it persists again and again. Though for a little while after each "waking up" it gets better, so I think I'm alright for a little while, only to start again and get worse even faster. So then my plan changes to get back to the Samurai dream specifically. I'm not sure why that was my plan, I think the idea was to backtrack and "reset" so that I could wake out of the dream that was clearly fantasy and started all. So I try to find some historical fiction tv set in Japan to fall asleep to, so my dreams will be like that.

I try to recruit my family to find this kind of thing to watch, but at this point for some reason they don't believe me anymore that I'm me, and show me videos that are supposed to remind me of something? And I'm supposed to answer their question right (I don't remember that part well, but it was also panic inducing, because half my family accused me and the ones still helping me that I was some sort of impostor, there was running around and hiding and fleeing too.) Keep in mind that the teeth crumbling is still going on, resets or not, at this point so bad that I actually don't just spit out broken teeth and fillings and crowns, but these things have morphed into strange, steampunkish medical-mechanical contraptions that break, so I'm spitting out broken metal parts mixed with blood and teeth, still trying to wake up already.

And eventually I do, though it left me disoriented for a while.

To dream an awesome mystery plot (mine somehow involved a carnival, elephants and some sort of scheme that caused all electrical devices to be set up to use as little energy as possible, and rigged in weird ways, which made the investigator suspicious for some reason), and then to wake up before you had a chance to dream the revelation/climax scene, so that the stupid mystery continues to bother long you after you woke up even as the details of the dream fade. And of course it is impossible to come up with the solution while awake, because it was a dream and never made any sense to begin with, no matter what it felt like while the story in your dream unfolded and one your POV characters investigated while the others evaded and hid something.

I tend to dream about the stuff I do or read right before falling asleep quite a lot. Yesterday I spent time reading SPN fanfic/fanart combinations from the Big Bang comm and thinking about quilts and their design, which led me to dreaming about collaborative SPN fanworks that actually *were* quilts. I don't know, it made sense in the dream, but I can't really explain it awake.

I dreamed about a group making a quilt as a gift or based on a prompt, but the parts of the quilt were an SPN story and art at the same time. One with action scenes and time travel I think. At least besides Dean and Sam there was definitely also time travel in this dream, or rather some kind of time distortion bubble that had formed around a building(?) that resembled my former high school's gym, but was also a flying(?), steampunk-like train at the same time. There were also people in hazmat gear (to protect them from the time distortion effects) outside. Or maybe they wore it for a different reason. Lots of running around and being chased too, which is a common theme in my dreams.

Understandably I have a really hard time to recall the images from the dream, because nothing makes sense, less so than usual even, what with being both an action plot and a patchwork quilt, i.e. while all the action unfolded as is normal in a dream the same things were also that quilt. It worked in the dream somehow. Then again, maybe it isn't that odd in light of this this traditional image of fate being a spun yarn that represents life somehow controlled by a group of women, Moirae I think? At least patchwork quilts are two-dimensional patterns, that were the fanfic plot here...

So I guess in a way I dreamed fanfic (the SPN steampunk-flavored timetravel action plot, which I unfortunately don't recall in detail) and fanfic meta (the group of women making a patchwork quilt somehow representing the former) at the same time. Still -- WTF, subconcious?

What an extremely freaky dream I had last night! It was like a kind of mix of SF story and room escape computer game, with a really complicated plot, so I have already forgotten many of the details, but the gist of it was like this:

It started out fairly normal. I was on public transport and had to get somewhere, only I noticed that some people act off, not obviously weird or anything, but as the dream goes on, something seems not right with them in how they act to me. Then I come to a store, or at least it seems like a store, but it is closed, only I'm certain I will be admitted.

Anyway, there's weird door mechanism thing admits me, at first glance it seems just like a locked revolving door, but it is some kind of disguised airlock thing that you can push through if it lets you. Meanwhile the clerk protests on the inside, only then she seems to realize something, as if I just should have told her, and her behavior changes, and the room shifts, not like a holodeck illusion but as if the material rearranges, and it turns into this slick futuristic thing with a machine in the center, against which I press my head or which I touch anyway, which then lets me into another (virtual?) environment.

And I'm left to wonder whether I'm one of them, i.e. the not quite right acting ones, who seem to maintain some kind of illusion, only I still don't know what's going on. Meanwhile I'm in this second environment, which is even more like a room escape game (in that I know that I have to collect things or go to certain places to "progress" as you have to with an escape game). Again there are some slightly freaky people who, while freaky, act like me in that they know this isn't real either, and normal humans acting like regular people who treat this all as normal every day environment, not realizing the odd things.

It was quite disconcerting, though not quite a nightmare, because the whole time in this cliched SF trope I didn't even know which "side" I was actually on wrt to the setup, why there were these people cooperating and deferring to me, whether something was being done to the less aware, whether we were actually all human, or some aliens pretending to be human... it was like having amnesia, only not really, since I still remembered the "in character" things I knew before I realized the weirdness.

Also, I actually woke up in the middle, but managed to get back into the same dream storyline, which rarely happens for me.

I had a horrible nightmare last night. The details are a bit fuzzy by now, because after I woke up in the middle of the night I eventually went back to sleep, but the worst thing was that it was recursive. At first it was a regular dream. I have forgotten most of the details from that, the only odd thing I seem to recall was that I wasn't really myself in the dream. Anyway, at some point it turned scary, when a guy turns around and his face has no eyes but kind of a dark depression that looked somehow horrible, like unclean? Anyway that not-quite face was really, really frightening inside the dream. Anyway at that point of the dream I "woke up" only to find myself still dreaming (though it took me a little bit to realize), just this time completely paralyzed and unable to scream though I tried to. That moment then turned really panic inducing, because when I realized the first was a dream and then kept trying to move only I couldn't, some part of my brain pointed out that I had read somewhere that you can't properly move during REM sleep as some protective measure, so I concluded that the complete paralysis was a sign that I still must be dreaming (the suckiest lucid dream ever). Only that didn't even make things less terror inducing, since I now tried to both move and to just "surface" from the dream, and neither worked. Also, I think something scary was still threatening.

Then early this morning I dreamed about some weird low-budget alternative SF convention, which could have been fun, if it hadn't turn into a plague catastrophe movie, with an outbreak of some horrible infectious diseases.

Also, even now, hours later and wide awake I still have that scary eye-less face stuck on my mind.

Well, all that Spider-Man reading has some nice side-effects: I had a neat Spider-Man/Superman crossover dream last night. Sadly no slashy content or anything, just a wacky action-adventure, and I mostly forgot the details soon after waking up. Still, nicer than lots of other dreams.

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #5-7 (written by Peter David, pencils by Roger Cruz and Michael Wieringo, inks by Karl Kesel)
These issues were kind of forgettable, except for the brain-hurting part where they somehow compressed or relocated the timeline to make weblogs a common thing when Peter attended high school, but it is best not to notice these details. Also, I'm really not interested in wrestling, much less into mythical wrestling gods or whatever that villain was, so it didn't do anything for me, and some angsting by Peter about the origin of his powers (i.e. are they (comic-book) scientific or from magical totems?) didn't make up for my lack of interest in the rest.

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #8-10 -- Jumping the Tracks (written by Peter David, pencils by Roger Cruz and Michael Wieringo, inks by Karl Kesel and Mike Manley)
And this story was just-- it just didn't work for me. It's not even the timetraveling future Spider-Man whose daughter is the future Hobgoblin as such. I mean, yes, that's weird, but this is comics and you deal. But the whole setup was lame. First, some crazy torturing Peter with his guilt over dead relatives and friends yet again gets old, and really there is no need to bring back Uncle Ben (again? maybe they don't count the ghost thing). Also, to me it made no sense that a future Spider-Man ends up as the boss of the time police, and that they don't even prevent that stereotypical apocalypse that apparently happened. And the whole thing with the alternate Uncle Ben just got more boring with him seemingly shooting that Spider-Man. Obviously the "real" Uncle Ben, or a reasonable equivalent from another universe as the one in the Spider-Man as pro-wrestler AU flashbacks seemed to be, wouldn't just turn into a homicidal lunatic, even when he's depressed, so the shooter isn't that Ben, no matter what the artificial tension is supposed to be. So he's either some evil!Ben brought from yet another universe (but that crazy timetravelling Green Goblin said she only brought one) or some shapeshifter bad guy who will then try to trick Peter (*yawn*), only I was confused by the clothing issue. The guy who confronted alternate!Ben first appeared to wear a woolly hat, and then later the dead!Ben (whom I assume is alternate!Ben) wears a baseball cap, so where did that come from? Alternate!Ben didn't wear any hat. Other random annoyances: as far as self-referential meta jokes go the "retcon bombs" were on the really clumsy side and not that amusing.