Weird Dream(s)

[SharonDee]

I hate those! I got that a lot back when I was pregnant.

[lisarea]

Shit, erimir. You're probably pregnant.

[Dingfod]

Oh, this is where one posts weird dreams. I had a dream about that.

[Dingfod]

Last night I dreamed I was scheduled on a red-eye flight out of Tulsa, leaving at 11:55 PM. And, for whatever reason, I decided to wait at the Hard Rock (Cherokee) Casino from the time I got off work at 6:00 PM and then, thinking I would just take the Casino shuttle to the airport and leave my truck in the casino valet parking, saving myself a lot of money. I didn't want to gamble, but I went to the bar and ordered a cocktail. It was $15. When I expressed outrage, the bartender said people gambling get free drinks. So I went to the cashier and got $20 worth of nickels and sat down to play about 40 minutes of nickel slot machines. During that 40 minutes I was served two very small and very weak drinks, and didn't win a damned thing, so I decided to up the ante and play the dollar slots. The machines took credit cards. The drinks flowed then, by heck. I even won some money, but not as much as I spent. It dawned on me that those drinks were costing me about $20 each. I noticed a business card on one of the machines, advertising a free introductory massage. I thought a massage would be nice. I called the number, they told me a room number in the casino hotel. I went up there. A young woman had me lie on a massage table. She was rubbing me with her hands, but it wasn't really a very good massage. However, she started rubbing on my nether regions. That was nice, but being that it was a dream, nothing came of it. After the massage was over, I gave her the card I found. She laughed, said that didn't include her tip. I asked her what was customary. She said $125. Yikes! When I offered $20, a very large man in a black suit came out from behind a curtain, cracking his knuckles. This free parking was costing me a lot of money. The dream ended before I could beat the shit out of his fists with my face.

[lisarea]

I am still trying to sort out the full narrative here, and probably never will, but there are some pretty good ideas in here if you want to do any inventions of business plans.

So I'm in a grocery store listening to Johnny Cash's last album on my MP3 player, and it turns out that it has a special secret feature where, on April Fool's Day (which was last night), it turns the aisle signs in grocery stores interactive, so that they display cryptic messages that you can reference in your commonplace book, which is full of cryptic messages. Everyone has a commonplace book full of clues.

Then, I got on the bus to go to an event that I was totally going to with Werner Herzog, a very small version of Sting who was a dear friend of mine, and a couple of other celebrities I'm having a hard time recalling. Possibly David Lynch and Patti Smith? I know I'm missing somebody. I will update if I remember, but I probably won't.

This event is a pretty big deal. Some kind of red carpet premiere event for Werner Herzog's latest thing, which all I know is that it was not a movie. But first, we have to go to "day care" to pick up our kids. Our kids who are all in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. And the day care is just a big, kind of labyrinthine shack with farm animals and house music, and the 'teachers' are all in the same age range, so basically, it's just a big scam in which adults get their elderly parents to pay for their expenses for going to their club and partying all day. My son is not there, but as a surprise, all of my siblings are, with their commonplace books, and we all compare our Johnny Cash messages.

There are SO MANY TURNTABLES in this day care, and one DJ is just playing a totally vintage Skrillex (like from 1940) record skipping at the end. I tell him what a bad DJ he is. There is a young woman there named Drama. She's a tall, plain, gangly, and generally sullen woman in her early 30s, and I think, "She's probably nothing like her parents imagined she'd be when they named her."

Then, me and Li'l Sting (he's maybe 5'1" or so--not doll sized, just a small man) are talking when he says, "You smell like death." And I say, "Oh, I was going to tell you. It's my goiter," and I show him my gigantic goiter.

He pokes it and tells me he is really sorry.

[BrotherMan]

I had just now the almost perfect dream.

I dreamed I was visiting some people and catching up with some other friends. The main people I don't know who they were, they were just some people. But the friends were the people I dogsat for. But the reason I'm visiting the people I don't know was to introduce myself and get to know them for a reason I will state later. They had this pretty and happy golden yellow puppy dog of indeterminate type whom I was happy to say hello to but also had this special needs kitten. I don't remember what exactly was wrong with it, but it was this adorable little ball of fur. Despite being a kitten we couldn't get it very excited or play with it much. And when it was time for the kitten to recover and rest from being played with the little bit we could we had to put it in a modified shoe box. It was a downer note to the evening.

But, and this is why it was almost perfect dream, the reason I was being nice to people I didn't know is because later that night, when they were off doing some event thing, I was going to dogsit my dognieces. I don't know why I was dogsitting for some folks that were already going to be dogsitting, but who cares, I was going to romp and pet and be facemawled by my very own dognieces Consuela and Esmeralda!

I also had to wake up before the time when they would be there.

[Beth]

I had a creepy one last night. I slept on the couch because I was angry, so I suppose my foul mood helped it along?

I remember being a nurse in a mental institution. I had white clothes and a white hat, with shoulder-length forties style curled under hair. We had parties and jokes. Then that ward of the hospital became a brothel-like place. We had various rooms in which doctors and politicians would come in and party. My daughter hung out there when clean stuff was going on.
We decorated for Christmas and had a huge bash. But then I saw a distress letter on the counter...a goodbye to a loved one. Then everyone around me turned grey and froze. I had remembered that there were a number of slayings in the hospital, and the authorities trapped the murderer in our ward, then they walled it off. I survived. I was puzzled and distressed. Then I remembered that I was the psychopath who slayed all, and I ws a mere spirit, wandering aimlessly through the hospital.

It sounds like some dumb movie, but I have never watched one with that same story. I gave a general recount of it because I can't remember the details. It just really bothered me. I don't think I have ever dreamed that I was psychotic before. Now I really don't want to go to sleep.

[Janet]

I feel confident in predicting that the other famous person hanging out with Lisapea and Werner Herzog was Errol Morris.

[Corona688]

An odd one happened to me lately... Pure audio, which was strange, since sound is the thing I remember least about dreams.

I was kind of the opposite of lucid dreaming -- lucid waking, dreams invading a waking state. It probably happened since I was lying on my side, a posture I almost never manage to fall asleep in.

I was lying in bed, pondering getting up, when I heard strange, pounding techno music from the neighbors' apartment, gradually louder. They're octogenerians -- they don't like loud music, and don't like techno. About when I realized this, I tried to get up... Couldn't move. Then the noises started changing, all sounding bizzare until recognized... people speaking... a power screwdriver... more music, some of it glorious... Then it all faded, and I closed my eyes, and I lost three hours in an eyeblink.

Since I knew what sleep paralysis was, it was more interesting than terrifying. I can see where a lot of alien abduction stories come from.

[Corona688]

I almost forgot, but I'd had another real doozie, some months ago. My weird dream generator came back online and generated a complete fable.

One day a man married his childhood sweetheart, as sometimes happens. They moved into the same house they'd been playing at since they were toddlers, and it was a bit odd to see how tall the trees had grown. They'd spent so much time climbing them, which would be all but impossible now. For a while things were calm and blissful, but the arrival of their first child brought an odd curse along with it. A strange little man barged in the day after the child was born like some backwards rumplestiltskin, there not to claim the child but protect her. The house wasn't safe, he claimed. But he was obsessed with spirits and chakra and feng shui; 'protecting' their daughter meant rearranging all the furniture and building bizzare contraptions of pipes.

The police just laughed when they called, and the man would just reappear if thrown out. So they were forced to leave him be -- briefly. But when he rearranged the baby's room at night, while everyone was sleeping, that was the last straw. They wouldn't tolerate him doing god-knows-what to the baby, he had to go! Bullets did nothing, knives did nothing, poison did nothing, and the oblivious little creature had no idea they were even trying to kill it. Finally, all patience gone, the father took a great big axe to him and chopped him to bits. Thirty strokes it took to hurt him, but the little man died.

Rrrrrrrrumble. ***CRASH!*** The whole house shook, long branches pushing in through windows as an ancient, gnarled oak tree toppled fully upon the house, chopped down. The ceiling cracked open like an egg. They tore through the wreckage searching for their child, who was fine thanks to rearranged furniture -- the trunk had passed straight through the nursery, but missed the crib by a meter.

[S.Vashti]

For the last couple of nights I've had dreams about my dad being alive...but dead. We had to "wake him up" temporarily at the hospital to get something, and then mom insisted that he might as well come home with us. Though he said he'd rather be dead, please. So he sort of moped about the house in the background.

These dreams are mildly upsetting.

ps: he did not fit the description of any of the zombie's in miisa's new taxonomy.

[The Lone Ranger]

A couple of years ago, I went to a comics convention. While there, I encountered a woman dressed as Wonder Woman. She was perfect. I mean, she could have stepped right out of the comic -- her hair was perfect, her costume was perfect, everything. We never spoke or anything, because there was no reason for me approach this strange woman except to say "Great costume," but I guess I remembered her.


Last night, I dreamed I was back at the convention, and that I ran into her. And that the two of us wound up in a long conversation about sexism in the "geek community."


Personally, I blame FF.

[BrotherMan]

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger

Last night, I dreamed I was back at the convention, and that I ran into her. And that the two of us wound up in a long conversation about sexism in the "geek community."


Personally, I blame FF.

Didn't you get the memo? That's the new official wet dream. OMG misandry, indeed!

[Adam]

Saturday night, I dreamed that my SO's grandmother and some of her old lady friends came to visit, and one of them wanted to introduce us to her new fiance. It turned out to be my (deceased) maternal grandfather, who looked like himself, only painfully, almost skeletally, thin, and with one eye blacked and missing. I ended up talking to my mother in disbelief, and learned that he had been living in one of the bedrooms of her home (which was actually a weird mishmash several family homes over the years) for some time, and required special care and medicines because he was, technically, dead. I remember confronting her in disbelief, saying, "So, let me get this straight. We buried grandpa, six weeks later when we buried gramma, you somehow discovered that he was still alive down there, you dug him up, he's been living with you, and you just now told me?" Anyway, I went into his room to talk to him, and it was him, but not him, and it was very disquieting.

Later, he showed up again with his fiance, who had changed into my paternal step-grandmother, and holy shit was that weird.

Later still, he had to be moved into some sort of special care facility, which was inside a post office for some reason, and I took a sleeping bag and slept on the floor in front of the counter in the lobby so I could make sure to see him as soon as visiting hours started. I was kicked out because of the post office's policy against letting homeless people sleep in the lobby, and ended up sleeping outside next to the public mail boxes. While I was there, I received several packages I had been waiting for, and had a chat with a very attractive mail lady, who let me back into the facility to see my grandfather. When they brought him out, he was just a head and a foot being kept alive on life support. They wheeled him out in one of those incubator things you see premature babies in. He had things he wanted to tell me, and I had things I wanted to tell him, but I don't remember what they were.

[erimir]

You were probably going to warn him against foot-and-mouth disease.

[JoeP]

:groan:

[Dingfod]

I dreamed my father-in-law gave all his money to a woman named Willa Mae. A 35-40 year old daughter of hers, who was at the meeting about the dissolution of the trust he set up for his wife and kids, looked just like my father-in-law only with stringy blonde hair. The dream was so vividly real that I had to ask my wife if she knew a woman named Willa Mae, someone who might have known her father. Known, as in biblically.

[lisarea]

I went to go get a haircut at this place. It was super busy, but it was Sunday and for some reason, it was the only place open. So I go to check in and they ask me all these questions about what sort of haircut I want and then tell me to go wait in the waiting room. Which is HUGE and crowded. I wait for a really long time. My son shows up to wait with me for some reason. He's probably about 14.

I'm getting hungry and tired, so I decide I don't want to get the haircut after all, so I go up to tell them, and the lady is like, "But he's on his way. We got the one you ordered," because it turns out that this is actually not a hair salon at all, but a black market adoption store. The haircut I told them translated in their code language to a white teenaged boy, and they're bringing one back for me to adopt, and I'm like Oh dang. I mean, I feel bad for the kid, assuming he actually needs to get adopted and wasn't just kidnapped or whatever, but oh dang, I really don't want to adopt a teenaged boy.

So I'm sort of embarrassed and I apologize and leave. Once we get out, though, I realize I left something in there, so I ask my son to go get it for me because I'm all embarrassed. And for some reason, he starts to belly crawl in there to go get my stuff, which makes him look fishy, so these two guys at this stupid pickled egg stand* outside the salon jump him, so I go over and pull them off and beat the crap out of them. I was picking them up and just tossing them! I was pretty badass! They both started crying, and were trying to make me feel sorry for them, but I was all, "NOPE."

* The pickled egg stand was p. gross. They had this dingy little plastic 'barrel' thing with one hand sized hole in the side, so you'd stick your hand in and grab a pickled egg out and then put it in a paper bag. I blame whichever of you guys started talking about pickled eggs a while back. You know who you are. I don't, but you do.

[Adam]

I know who they are, too, and I think we can all agree that the parties in question are bad, and they should feel bad.

[Qingdai]

I had a dream that Lisapea developed a fart noise app. and was bugging the Hell out of Matlock.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by Qingdai

I had a dream that Lisapea developed a fart noise app. and was bugging the Hell out of Matlock.

I have a relevant story that I just remembered recently. This is a true story, but it is a dream in the sense of a goal or aspiration, so I decree it is still on topic.

After second grade, my parents had to pull me out of regular school, so they sent me to this private 'open' school, where the deal was that you'd do some basic amount of schoolwork to keep up to grade level, and then the rest of the time, whatever. I tested out above the grade levels they taught because I am such a big fat geneous, so pretty much I just got to do whatever I felt like all the time.

So I had this super great entrepreneurial idea of inventing the most realistic fake vomit possible. I suspect the adults thought I was just fucking around, but I wasn't. I was dead serious about it, and I genuinely thought somehow that if I could perfect some super-realistic looking AND smelling fake vomit, I'd like get a patent and become rich and famous or something. They had this little kitchen area at the school they let me use, and I'd come in and dutifully cook fake vomit on the stove, experimenting with getting the color and texture and smells just right, and for real, I did come up with a pretty convincing recipe.

Only then did I discover the value of actually researching the market for a product. You have to ask yourself, "Is there a market demand for simulated versions of this bodily emission?"

So that is a pretty accurate insight, actually. The only reason I know that's a bad business plan is that I have actually devoted a great deal of time to working on a remarkably similar project.

[Ensign Steve]

I apologize in advance for the borings, but this is the thread where we talk about our damn dreams, so I guess I will also forgive myself in advance.

So there's this thing among programmers called "dreaming in code" and I guess it's pretty much essentially what the name implies, but I don't know how literal that is for everybody. I think I have maybe once dreamed in raw c code, actually visualizing the & and * and -> characters in orange on a black background like if I was typing at a terminal. More often I dream in the images of abstractions I use to design my code, like some shit like this:



Fucking not last night, though. Jesus what the fuck was that?

My program was like this giant performance art piece where the subroutines were a bunch of people mincing around in black body suits, and they communicated by holding up big white cards with messages written on them. It was chaos, like spaghetti. Tens of subroutines running all over the place and interacting and reacting to those interactions and I was like, "I have no idea wtf is going on, how the hell am I supposed to debug this shit?"

[ceptimus]

A few times I've had one of those "coding dreams" where, in the dream, I realise that the code I'm dreaming is so brilliant it must be written down or otherwise recorded before it might be forgotten - so I wake myself up.

Of course, once I'm awake, I think about the code and realise that, like most things in dreams, it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. So I tell my dreaming self not to bother waking me up again with such nonsense - but that dreaming self isn't an easy person to convince.

[Qingdai]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Only then did I discover the value of actually researching the market for a product. You have to ask yourself, "Is there a market demand for simulated versions of this bodily emission?"

So that is a pretty accurate insight, actually. The only reason I know that's a bad business plan is that I have actually devoted a great deal of time to working on a remarkably similar project.

Ah, but your market was you, bugging the crap out of Matlock, so not much market research needed, really.