The dream thread

[Qwynegold]

That must have some kind of Freudian meaning in it.

Well, an electric eel does have a sort of phallic shape.

[dunomapuka]

I dreamt that I was in possession of a big pile of cotton fluff, and I was molding it around my head like a lion's mane, laughing hysterically.

[alice]

I dreamt that two of my coworkers were watching a screensaver which rendered the currently-executing Unix command as a trail of multicoloured balls weaving through the sky, then zoomed through a randomly-generated cityscape complete with flyposts announcing upcoming gigs by bands with randomly-generated but convincing names. This is so cool someone really should write it.

There was also a cafe/restaurant where the waitresses wore short green skirts with black shorts underneath, but I'd better not dwell too long on that.

[Civil War Bugle]

I dreamt I was walking around in some town vaguely reminiscent of Cooperstown or one of those other mid-New York places, and there was an insane asylum you had to be careful of because many of the inmates were violent. Eventually some got out and were trying to kill me with explosive devices that looked like brightly coloured large pills. They had me surrounded but I somehow had the bag of bombs (they were sorted by size) and was trying to blow up the insane people but couldn't.

Then I was in my childhood house with my dad and someone who might have been one of my brothers, talking about how Doctor Who and other BBC shows are too violent and are causing the insane to become violent. Then we began to look for a play in a library by Thomas Beckett. When I was half awake, I wondered why I had never realised he had the same name as the saint, and then when I woke up more I realised I was merging the names of Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett.

[Jetboy]

This only part of a dream, but a pretty neat part. I was waiting to cross a street in a city when I heard the man behind me saying on his cell phone something to the tune of "Can you send in your man?" Though this did trigger some paranoia later on in the dream, at that point I began an imaginary conversation with my father while waiting for the walk signal. "'Your man' refers to something" he said, somehow implying that the phrase was therefore a pronoun. I recognized this argument from someone on the ZBB, and refuted it with the same response I'd seen here "So do all words" (I'm pretty sure this actually came from an earlier part of the dream, possibly involving the ZBB, but it could be real). I then started wondering what the phrase was, and after substituting several other possessive pronouns for "your", and possibly other words for "man", was starting to work out a formula for the phrase's construction as I crossed the street before being seized by the idea that there were people after me and waking up shortly thereafter. Yay, dream linguistics!

[bulbaquil]

I had a dream last night involving some sort of Japanese class. It was difficult to erase the chalkboard, and I was trying to figute out how to say "difficult to erase" in Japanese, and couldn't remember whether the "difficult to X" suffix was ～やぎる or ～まぎる. (It's neither, it's ～にくい, but in the dream it wasn't; I think I was mixing it up with ～すぎる.)

Anyway, I finally "remembered" it was ～まぎる and so I said 「消しゃまぎるんですね」 (yes, 消しゃまぎる, not 消しまぎる).

[Bristel]

I had a dream last night involving some sort of Japanese class. It was difficult to erase the chalkboard, and I was trying to figute out how to say "difficult to erase" in Japanese, and couldn't remember whether the "difficult to X" suffix was ～やぎる or ～まぎる. (It's neither, it's ～にくい, but in the dream it wasn't; I think I was mixing it up with ～すぎる.)

Anyway, I finally "remembered" it was ～まぎる and so I said 「消しゃまぎるんですね」 (yes, 消しゃまぎる, not 消しまぎる).

This needs to be a real slang term.

日本語、話しゃまぎるんですね。:(

[Timmytiptoe]

I was driving a car, and got into a race with someone else. Then I was ahead, but my batteries (indicated on my iPad for some reason) were almost empty, so I had to go slower. Luckily, there was a private road with no advertisements, so I could recharge my batteries there.

[Torco]

I dreamt I strangled a cop with my bare hands, an became a fugitive for it.

[Lyhoko Leaci]

I had a dream where I was walking/crawling down some train tracks in a tunnel or completely enclosed bridge or something, wherever it was it was almost completely dark. Then the track make a weird sideways loop-de-loop with a very small radius.

At some point this shifted to me making some sort of puzzle game where you had to press buttons to change the direction of some arrowed floor tiles, and these had to be in a specific order in order to complete.

Then I was watching a race and one of the drivers just missed the turn onto a dirt road, spun out of control, and ended up crashing into some trees. Then the cops rear-ended them. Most of the other racers had better luck.

Then I was back on some train tracks, this time out in the open and I was riding on one of those cart things that you pump a handle to make it move. Apparently I was a lot stronger than normal, as I was able to get it going quite fast all by myself. Two others were with me, one on the other side but not helping (well, not in pushing at least), and the other behind me. The person across from me was watching where we were going, though.

[Astraios]

Me and my ex were in possession of a small dog that had fallen into a very cold lake somewhere in the Yorkshire Moors. We were trying to give it a hot bath at my grandad's house, because that was the only thing that would save its life. I went outside for a moment, and almost got run over by an insane farmer driving a yellow tractor with some kind of horrid spiky farm machinery on the front.

[joey]

I was standing at the mouth of this famous alleyway in my city whose walls are entirely covered in graffiti. I was looking at a black man in a sleeping bag. He noticed me staring, and got pissed off. Somewhere in there I offered him something from the lunchbox I was carrying, which he rudely refused. A few moments later I waved "hi" to him, which set him off. He stomped toward me, hurling obscenities, yanked my lunchbox away, rifled through its contents, and finding nothing of value, pointed a gun at my head and fired. It was a very scary situation.

[dunomapuka]

1. I stopped by a local school to see the middle schoolers' performance of some version of Gawain and the Green Knight. But one of the actors was missing, so I stepped in and played the part myself. I was the chief antagonist, a giant cat-demon. But I didn't know my lines, so I just pantomimed a lot and improvised things that I thought a cat-demon would say. By the second act they figured out a way to get another actor to stand next to me so he could feed me my lines. And I totally stole the show. Afterwards, all the parents came up to congratulate me, slightly confused.

2. A girl was throwing a dinner party, and had cooked a prime rib or something in a brown sauce. The sauce was a bit thin and it was running off my meat.
"The sauce is running off your meat," said our hostess.
I looked up. "Spoon the sauce back onto your meat," she said very slowly and threateningly.

Then we discussed the origins of the sauce. It seemed that we were rabbinical scholars talking about which meat/sauce pairings were in accordance with Jewish Law. What we were eating was a sauce of Argentinian origin with goats' blood as a chief ingredient. We talked about how to get your blood to coagulate properly.

"I always wanted to try that as a kid," said my mom. Everyone looked at her strangely.

[Soap]

I was talking to someone on the Internet whose screen name was Kaleid, and he was telling everyone listening that he wasnt the person behind the music attributed to that name, and that "Kaleid"'s songs werent even the same singer, it was just a mistake by the recording labels.

The source of this dream probably is the fact that I have some music on my computer labeled Kaleid that is actually from different artists. I really dont know why. The real-life Kaleid appears to be a composer named Andy Hagerty but he doesnt use the name Kaleid anymore.

[Astraios]

I was a Buddhist monk in France somewhere. The dream was basically "A day in the life of a Buddhist monk in France", nothing exciting happened whatsoever - I got up, meditated, went begging, ate, meditated some more, then began some rituals, and then woke up to find I'd overslept by two hours. I was cross. I mean, oversleeping for such a boring and uneventful dream!? If it had been a dramatic dream about dying or something I wouldn't have minded so much, but for most of this one I was just sitting still in the monastery garden in the rain. Stupid dream.

[Soap]

Driving home with three young boys I noticed that there was a "SPEED LIMIT 61" sign. I wished I had had a camera so I could put it online as I had never seen such a sign before. A bit further down there was a SPEED LIMIT 66 sign, and I decided to get out and see if anyone had a camera with them (or a cellphone with one). For some reason I lost interest and started wandering around and wondering if I could get away with not going home (I dont know these kids in real life).

[ná'oolkiłí]

I had a dream that I had to finish something my dad who died a few months ago left me—something about retiring his car. I've had several of these dreams recently =/

Then I had a very long and detailed Harry Potter dream. I was Harry, and I had a gang of people helping me, including a squid robot, Pikachu, one or two friends of mine from highschool, two black stallions, and some people who were actually in the HP series. We had to sneak into the chamber of secrets, so one of our agents gave Bellatrix some sort of lobster curry with a potion in it that would make us invisible to her. Then she (the agent) had to slide all the way down on the banister of some marble stairs so that the spell would take effect over the entire area. After the spell took effect the whole gang waltzed passed Bellatrix, who was guarding the Chamber of Secrets, towards a colossal snail/dragon hybrid. It had to swallow all of us so we could get to the chamber, and it did, but somehow it also wasn't aware of us because of the lobster curry spell. Once we were swallowed we were in this clearing with the aforementioned marble stairs and a field of swaying grass and a river bed and in the distance the huge, menacing entry to the chamber of secrets. I had to pee at least once, so I exited the snail and use the bathroom right next to Bellatrix, which was quite a nerve-wracking experience. Eventually one of my friends opened the chamber with her magical necklace or something, which set off fireworks. The fireworks were out of bounds of our lobster spell, so Bellatrix could see them. She sent a squad of deatheaters to find us, but we were invisible to them. However, they knew someone was there, so they announced that there was a "thousand million dollar reward" for whoever turned me in to Bellatrix. They left and I entered the chamber, but I woke up after that.

[Soap]

Dreamed I was playing a game called East of Eden, which started out deeply emotional and with artwork like Renaissance paintings, but turned out to be just a Mario-like platformer that even had fire flowers.

[Nesescosac]

Two guys pulled out knives and started chasing me because my skirt was too short and my hair was braided. Not fun.

[SHiNKiROU]

Got surrounded by 5 snails, then the dream ends. (I have gastropod-phobia)

My notable dreams include:
- a Japanese song playing, while I'm not even fluent at Japanese
- in a Pokemon map, wish I can draw it after I woke up
- sometimes I saw good buildings, wish I can draw them
- writing a math contest, then entered a dream of writing the math contest

[Astraios]

Had a very vivid dream in which I was variously a pelican, a human, and some kind of medium-sized carnivore. The dream was literally just a journey through some bizarre mixture of city and wilderness, all set in a very moutainous region, and it was filled with dangerous things, like frigatebirds, Voldemort, chavs, elevators, and wolves. I was journeying as a pelican with my three offspring, as a human with my ex (grr) and two of our mutual friends, and as a medium-size carnivore alone.

It was a pretty scary dream, as I didn't know where we were going, but I knew we had to get there before the people following us did. It was also probably one of the most shapeshifting dreams I've ever had - nothing stayed the same for more than a few dreamminutes, and even my ex turned into a woman, a fox, and even a window at one point. I didn't notice this was odd though, I was more relieved that we could disguise ourselves from the followers.

[Colonel Cathcart]

Maybe it's because I spend so much time watching movies, but lately I've been having these long, vivid dreams that feel like movies, complete with compelling plots and coherent narrative structures. Last night's dream was probably my best yet. I'm actually kind of proud of my subconscious for coming up with something so cool.

In the dream, a Russian oligarch who bore an uncanny resemblance to Daniel Craig was set to give a conference or symposium on US-Russian foreign policy relations that I was somehow involved with. While researching in preparation for this conference, my best friend and I stumbled upon a defunct conspiracy from the Cold War, which involved a vast network of undercover Soviet spies in the US in the 1950s.

My friend and I travelled all over the country searching out evidence of this conspiracy, which usually involved finding hidden passages and secret rooms in universities and government buildings, rooms filled with faded Soviet propaganda and dusty old documents and tapes. Each time we'd find some evidence, I would have a flashback to the 1950s, where I would be an OSS agent (precursor to the CIA; in real life it shut down in 1945) with a young female partner, hot on the trail of the very same conspiracy at the time it was unfolding.

Throughout the dream, during each flashback, there would be a visual motif identifying someone as a Soviet spy: a series of five photographs of the person's face, the first four in black and white and shot at weird angles, the fifth straight-on and in colour. At the end of the dream, as the conference was starting, I entered the convention centre and saw that the banner had the same photographic motif of the Daniel Craig guy, indicating that he was somehow connected to the conspiracy. (Not that he was secretly a communist spy or anything like that--he was a Khodorkovsky-esque capitalist pig, after all--just that he knew a lot of secrets about US-Russian relations that he wasn't telling anyone, which may have helped him in amassing his ill-gotten fortune.)

[Torco]

Got surrounded by 5 snails, then the dream ends. (I have gastropod-phobia)

So... no escargot ?

[Risla]

I was persistently growing a small garden. Finally, I successfully got the plants to grow, except they were not plants; neat rows of mascara brushes were sticking out of the well-watered ground.

[Risla]

Apparently other people have stopped dreaming.

Last night I had a dream that was basically like a movie; I was not really present in the dream and was following this person who somehow set a terrible world-destroying beast loose and had to contain it somehow (they were the only person who could). The narrative followed them (no, I do not recall their gender) into the depths of the sea and underground, where the person had to run from the beast both times, and finally to the moon. The person knew that the final showdown must be there, and told everyone to stay back, that they would go face the thing alone, and walked out of sight. Then someone else left behind on the moon pointed up at the earth in the sky, and suddenly I became aware of myself in the dream as I looked up at the tiny world above me, and I knew that the person had died and that it would kill us and destroy the earth. It was actually quite poignant. Then I woke up.