Your dream clearly symbolises the technological collapse of civilisation.
Those objects in reverse form one of the cute analogies for iterative software development: don't try to build a car from scratch, build a skateboard so the customer can at least move around a bit, then build a bicycle, then - if they still need more and have the budget - build the car.
Two fellow ers appear in this installment, though one was in name only.
First, lisapea and I and a couple of rando dudes went and had breakfast at a greasy spoon in a narrow mountain pass. We chose this place because it was on the way to my mom's where I was driving next, and it was one of pea's favorite places to eat. The restaurant had huge windows for enjoying the mountain views, which allowed me to dream-POV the events from outside (as opposed to from my own eyeballs), but that meant I couldn't hear what was going on inside.
There was an issue when it came time to pay the bill, because the cashier was on the same end of the long, narrow restaurant that we entered, and I needed to exit on the other end if I wanted to continue through the pass instead of returning the way I had come. My car was already on the correct end, which I could see from my god's eye dream POV, so no idea why the me inside the building couldn't simply walk around to it, but like I said I couldn't hear what anyone was saying so I was really just guessing at what the problem was.
***
Second, I was at a conference at a hotel, and it was in the format of some of my "favorite" dream venues, where the hallways and elevators and escalators make zero sense and it's impossible for me to find anything and this is the source of the majority of the dream anxiety.
I checked in to the hotel and then dropped off my bags in room 109, and there was a guy there who in retrospect looked like T.J. Miller, but in the dream he was just this guy I already knew. He was like, "Why are you putting your shit in my room?" and he had a girl in his room and she was also like, "Who is this chick and why is she in your room?" to the guy.
I looked at my keys (old-timey metal keys!) and they were for room 209, and I was like, "Oh, my bad, wrong room. Can I leave my stuff here until I find my room?" and they were OK with that. Apparently I was dream-genre-savvy enough to predict that even though my room should just be one floor up, there's no way this was going to be easy, and I was right.
Cut to boring and annoying sequence of me trying to navigate this hotel and find my room, and I asked for help from the hotel employees and people from the conference, and everybody was a complete asshole about it. "Yeah I know it should just be one floor up but how the fuck do I get there? Yes I tried the escalator, it only goes to the bar," etc., etc.
Then there was the business with the conference badges, and my coworker (portrayed by an actual coworker that I would be likely to attend a conference with, in a rare realistic dream subversion) hands me my badge and another badge, this one a press badge, with the complete real-life first and last name of our friend curses on it. She's like, "You know her, right? Can you give this to her?"
Some more stuff happened at the hotel bar, with enough detail that I remember well enough to share, but it's just more of the same boring and stupid and anxiety-inducing flavor of stuff so I'll stop here.
Last night, I remembered that I have to make yogurt today to preserve my new yogurt culture, so naturally:
I was living in a sort of shanty town. It had been a campsite with a row of outhouse toilets at the front and then a bunch of marked off spaces for trailers and tents, which now had little hand built shacks instead. My neighbor was native and the last surviving member of his tribe, so people from the Smithsonian would come and interview him to get recordings of his language and ask him questions about his traditions and stuff. He had had both arms blown off below the elbows from picking up a package bomb. He wasn't very old, but people were writing articles about how he and his culture were dying, and it just seemed rude, you know?
And there were two or three really sketchy shacks toward the end of the row right on the edge of the dense woods. The guys who lived there were some kind of artists and would put up lots of flyers for their shows, but it was all a cover for this predatory shit. They did it to lure young women and then abuse them in various ways. I caught one in the camp toilets crawling under the dividers, so I stomped on him while he was on the floor, then I stuffed him down inside the toilet, and I saw a couple fetuses in it before I got him all in there. I think I killed him, but he bit me real good.
Moral of the story: I have to make a new batch of yogurt today.
Met some vampires in a diner while delivering local newspapers to the few remaining houses in a suburban light industrial area. Weather was grey and overcast. It had rained earlier.
Random neighbourhood features:
An abandoned building with broken windows someone set up some orange sheets and a fan to look like the interior of the building was on fire.
A cartoon painted Donald Trump on another basement window like a sewer clown and the words “Ask Donald.”
High fences around the houses. One place had a few weeks of newspapers still on the porch. I went to get the one I left there when I met the first vampire at his house around the corner that turned into the diner and I was out of papers.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
A former coworker and I needed to go shopping because we were the two adults responsible for our family. The reasons were unclear as to why we shared familial responsibility, especially since he (currently) lives in Illinois and I am in Washington state.
This was the first outing of both of us as the patriarchs of the family, so I didn't want to mess up and be outshone by the other guy. We split the shopping list, and I needed to go get toilet paper, and possibly other paper products. I went to a plain industrial area of the store - more like the warehouse part of it. It turned into some Kafkaesque drama. There were a series of booths, each person behind the desk sold something, but they were uncommunicative and what they sold were on small brass signs on their desks.
I approached one desk, "read" the sign, and realized there was instructions on which desk sold which items. The desk I was in front of was not the correct desk. I backed away, the woman behind the desk ignored me the entire time. I stating to the woman that I approached the desk to read the sign, and now I was going to the proper desk. She looked at me approvingly that I awkwardly stated what I was doing, as if that were the polite thing to do. I thought to myself that I only made those statements because I didn't want to look like a creep that walked up to a woman, apparently staring at her, then walked away silently. I also thought that this was a very rude store design that made people who didn't know where to go unwelcome, and I didn't need her approval, but was glad that she appreciated that I tried not to look like a creep.
Well, I went to the right desk and ordered toilet paper, but received very thin cotton socks. When I protested, the clerk (dressed like the model from the
) offered that I could find what I wanted for myself, and so I searched the shelves behind the desks and only found thin rags and very narrow toilet paper - soft like tissue, but as only as wide as a receipt. I was worried I wasn't keeping up my end of the duties, and wondering what my coworker was going to say.
At this point I was fretting over the fact that I knew this person's last name, but wasn't recalling it correctly. This happened right before I woke up, and it took me another hour to correctly recall his last name.
There were like 20 people living here at the house except it was a much larger, weirder house.
Bill Gates had some disability and he lived in a little alcove with a curtain in front of it off the main big room, so someone forgot he was there and said something insensitive. I was mostly his caretaker, I guess, because it was my job to guide the conversation gently around when that happened and cheer up my friend Bill.
Anyway, he got sick, and some other people were starting to feel poorly too, so the rest of us went to work developing cures for them.
Naturally, this included spells. We had a drafting table in the garage with different charcoals for different purposes, so you'd write down your spell according to a complicated system where different charcoals were used for different words. Once it was written properly, everyone would chant it roughly to the tune of 4 Non-Blondes' What's Up.
So then we had to go to a store to pick up supplies, but there were a bunch of cars in the driveway and garage and we were having trouble rearranging them because too many people were sick, and they couldn't move their own cars, so I drove someone else's car and my friend and her son came with me. The problem was that the steering wheel was on the other side, so I couldn't parallel park it, and also I wanted to keep it close because there was a bunch of stuff in it (electronics and guns) and it had no roof so I couldn't lock it up. We were hovering around the lots trying to find a close up space near the store, and I ended up driving a little too far to one side and ending up at the beach. So we decided to park at the lot there and just walk back to the store, but everyone was angrily yelling "GET IN THE OCEAN!" and we were like "NO!" and we ran in the back entrance to the store.
But apparently, the back entrance of the store was an office building, so then we're like oh, shit we're at work now. So we're just bullshitting our way through this office, acting like we're important business people, trying to find the exit that leads into the store.
As far as I know, we're still there in some meeting or something.
I was just attempting surgery on a cat until a real veterinary surgeon took over and berated me for the attempt. I’m not sure what the problem was though because due to the tools used, the cat was clearly a plush.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
I was just attempting surgery on a cat until a real veterinary surgeon took over and berated me for the attempt. I’m not sure what the problem was though because due to the tools used, the cat was clearly a plush.
I'm glad I thought of this thrad immediately on waking randomly in the middle of the night because I don't remember this, just that I wrote something down.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
Thanks, from:
Ari (02-11-2021), JoeP (01-06-2021), lisarea (01-07-2021)
It took me a moment to realize I must have been asleep and having a catastrophization dram variant dream variant of the time I went through a giant row of toll booths leaving San Francisco and I couldn’t see the gives change booths just that the no change booths existed and got mildly scolded at the booth despite being one of maybe three cars in sight that fine Sunday morning leaving town. That was about the extent of the real event but the dream PTSD version the lady in the booth wouldn’t let me go and eventually I was explaining to a cop why I didn’t know what I was doing on the very first time I’d even seen anything like this in my life and all this over a fiver for a two dollar toll? Can I just go? Seriously? This here my last impression of California because really if this is this much of a problem I can’t see me coming back because holy shit.
And that’s when I think I was about 50% awake and it might have been the over powered pain killer I took before bed that I don’t usually take except in unusual pain situations and this wasn’t unusual pain it’s just the first jar I grabbed and looked at and thought “sure, why not, it’s just low dose OTC codeine.”
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
If you're paying toll leaving SF, that's the Golden Gate heading to Marin County. Last I heard, it was way more than $2, so you got a deal!
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"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
I'm sort of embarrassed at how hamhandedly metaphoric this probably is, but:
I start out with my usual trying to navigate stuff, and end up headed home, but the newish part is that I'm walking along the berm on a straight, unlit, paved road. So it's dark and relatively desolate, but what traffic comes through comes fast. And I start noticing litters of kittens, puppies, raccoons, etc., abandoned in the middle of the road right in the path of oncoming traffic. So I'm moving them out of the way and trying to settle them a bit so they don't dart back out into the road, because every now and again, cars come through really fast without time to dodge them.
Then it starts being litters of human babies in the road--dirty, skinny little babies--and I work harder. Then, instead of cars, it's tigers and lions running at fast car speeds. Like giant scary super-powered predators, but also just hungry and needing sustenance so I know they're going to eat all those baby animals I moved out of the road.
And then I wake up. For almost a whole week in a row, I wake up right at that point.
Good news everyone!
The bridges now have no toll takers, the systems that used to snap a picture of your license plate and send you a ticket for blowing through the toll, now snaps a picture and sends you the toll bill, if you don’t have a fastrak toll beepy thing.
We finally got the fast-trak thing, on account of the shutdown. We had been paying cash everywhere since we moved here.
Anyway, my weird dream is spoilered because it's graphic and has to do with childbirth.
I was in labor, and the baby was flopping all around inside me. I told the doctor "I don't know what's going on but if it wasn't breech before, it is now." Then my whole abdominal/pelvic situation gets flipped around like a kangaroo pouch, and I'm looking down the birth canal at this floppy baby flopping out of me.
The doctors and nurses take the baby away right away, and I'm like "wait, is it alive?" and they won't tell me anything, so I'm sure that means it's dead.
So then I'm trying to walk around the hospital in my gown and there are plops of this moussey-bloody viscera plopping out of me onto the floor, like that mechanically-separated chicken mousse they make the nuggets out of.
This post uses the words "flop" and "plop" a lot, because those were the main feelings of it.
I frequently dream about my Ex... but the last dream was pretty special... as it was just a calm random dream I cannot specifically recall the details except he dropped into it from a helicopter on a damn winch. WTF.
I really wish he would leave me alone. Do I have unresolved issues?
Landed in some US city (Houston?) and transferred from the airport to hotel. Went from hotel to a conference centre for a seminar led by a tall skinny black guy with a messy mop of short dreads and a nonstop smile.
Went to next seminar down through some offices and down some stairs. Conference centre was apparently a former shopping mall converted to classrooms. It still had its food court.
Woke up and we to toilet.
Back to sleep. My wallet, backpack, and passport was missing so I asked a staffer for help backtracking to the first room because I’d clearly left them behind. We couldn’t find the other conference room but did find the offices. Went looking for lost and found.
Backpack and stuff miraculously reappears.
Boarded shuttle bus to airport and was in view when I woke up.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
Re: Weird Dream(s)
ers appear in this installment, though one was in name only.
and she was also like, "Who is this chick and why is she in your room?" to the guy.
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Linear Mode
