Blogmare On Supergroup Street 4: The Dream Master

Well, I thought I would have lots of dream related things to talk about, but I can't remember most of the recurring ones I should remember right now. So I'll just mention a few.

I guess the dreams that stick out the most are the nightmares, or the really bizarre dreams. When I was a kid I had a recurring nightmare in which I would stumble into my parents bedroom, and on the tops of the walls there would be the shadows of many icicles illuminated by the television. I would never see the icicles, but I remember this dream very vividly, and it always freaked me out.

I mentioned in one of the responses to somebody's post earlier that I frequently have dreams in which a meteor crashes out of the sky to the horizon and creates a huge explosion, but more common than that is a dream in which I will be walking or driving along and I will witness a passenger plane crash two or three blocks away. This dream predated September 11, and even my fear of flying. I've had the dream so much now that whenever it happens, in my dream I actually say "And this time, it's not a dream." Whoops, dream Glenn, you're so dumb.

The classic recent (past 5 years) nightmare that I've had (and it's weird because it's so stupid) is that I dreamed that a paid a surgeon to remove all my bones. For some reason, he had to pull them all out through the soles of my feet. The feeling it made was a lot like stitches being pulled through you when you just have a local anesthetic. But the worst part was that after I had all my bones removed, every time somebody touched my skullless head I would lose a memory, and get slowly dumber. All my friends thought it was hilarious, and kept touching my head, and I just got dumber and dumber as the dream went on. I guess it sounds lame written down.

I still have countless dreams in which I am still teaching 7th grade. In each dream I begin by thinking I finally have a handle on the class, and I will be capable of teaching them. But by the end of the dream the class is always in chaos again, and I can't restore order. I think I had a variation of this dream the other night, even, except I was teaching at some college, and the college was located in the middle of a refurbished mall.

I don't think Farnell reads this blog at all, but I recently had a dream that for some reason I let him drive my car. He was doing fine, but then the steering went out, and we careened across a huge intersection and into a parking lot. We were fine, but then he forgot how to put the car into park and we bumped into somebody's parked car. They got totally pissed and started keying my car like crazy. This losing control of a car dream is something I have a lot. I will take a turn a lot faster than I mean to and fly off the edge of the road, into trees. Or suddenly my feet won't reach the pedals, and the car just keeps speeding up.

Well, I probably have infinity more interesting dreams that I can't think of right now. I'll try to remember them and maybe edit this post. Or this is probably already plenty long.

Dream a Little Dream

But not of me - that would be kinda creepy depending upon the context of the dream.

I have the unhappy situation of not being able to remember my dreams. There have only been a few that I have been able to remember - like the one where Amber and I did heroin. I guess it stands out because I remember the feeling in the dream so much, though I've never taken heroin, so I have no basis of comparison.

The other ones that stand out were ones I had about the end of the world, and there are several I can remember. One was that there was this gigantic earthquake, and chaos everywhere, and my mother was missing - and somehow because of that I knew it was the end. There was a split, and you had 2 groups of people - The New World Order, and the Old World Order, and the newbies were using violence to bring people to their side. Next thing I remember was that I was in a room with a bunch of people - in some government building - and the women were taken to a room and given a bag full of makeup. I knew something was wrong, so I asked one of the chemists who were in the room for some reason (it was Caitlin's dad), and he said it was ok - as long as they didn't take my picture. Then I was at some movie theater, and I had the choice of seeing Pretty in Pink or Reservoir Dogs, and I had the feeling my choice decided if I was going to heaven or hell.

It's kinda neat to pick it apart - like the fact that some cultures believe (or past tense, believed - as I'm not sure many still do) that having your picture taken steals your soul. Ok - so maybe that's the only thing, but when I told my mother she read a lot into it, and then started talking about how there was scripture saying people would have prophetic dreams and stuff.

Another one I had, there were demons everywhere, and the humans were rounded up and put in concentration camps (or something like it). It was pretty terrifying, and we were all sure we were going to die, but then one of the demons told us it was only going to be about 12 people killed worldwide. (Obviously, not so scary after that) The last one involved parts of the moon breaking off and falling to earth. Though in the whole dream, it was more about me finding someone and saying goodbye than it was about the destruction.

I was reading a theory that people who can't remember their dreams are subconsciously afraid of the content of their dreams - which made me think: If the stuff I can remember is pretty scary - what kind of crap am I dreaming about that I block out?!

There's also another thing I want to talk about that's related to sleep, and has happened to me quite frequently. I wake up, but for whatever reason am unable to open my eyes. I'll struggle, but they're so heavy I can't get them open, and I just eventually fall asleep again. When I wake up the second time, I'm fine, but it's so scary. I don't know if this is some weird dream or if my body is just too tired and unable to wake up with my brain. I've started writing a story about it, and we'll see how that goes - I'm kinda stuck right now.

I could gush about my love of Neil Gaiman, but I think I'll save that for another post.

Mr. Sandman, bring me a.....

Dream, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels

I am absolutely in love with everything Neil Gaiman has touched. I was first introduced to Gaiman's works back in college, when a friend lent me all of the Sandman graphic novels. I recently read Smoke and Mirrors (thank you, Linda!), and when I was finished, I found myself craving Gaiman to the point that I re-read Neverwhere again. (No, that's not redundant; I really do mean that I re-read it again. I've read it several times.) Anyway, I'm not sure if it's the influence of Neil Gaiman's specific brand of insanity right before I turn out my light, or the recent problems I've had with my suspect prescriptions from Vanuatu, but I've had some crazy dreams over the past few weeks. I wish I'd thought to write them down. Instead, all I can tell you about are two of my most recent dreams.

Yesterday I left work early, as I was ill. I went home and slept for several hours. I should probably mention that my landlord owns a gigantic white bunny rabbit named Toto. Toto always greets me when I come home, so I had petted him briefly before staggering upstairs and collapsing into bed. I dreamt that I was at a restaurant with a group of people. One of them was Caitlin; I don't remember who the others were. Caitlin was encouraging us to order a certain dish from the menu, so we did. However, when it was her turn to order, she only requested tea. It turned out that we had ordered rabbit stew, made with Toto, boiled whole - fur and all. Luckily, that was where I awoke.

While I'm sure I dreamt a lot last night, I only recall what I was dreaming right before my alarm went off. I swear I don't usually have dreams about high school - after all, that ended ten years ago! In my dream, the band was going on a trip somewhere for a concert. Evil Mr. Atkins was still the director. It was winter, and raining; the weather was thoroughly miserable. Gwen, Melissa, Avery, Chris and a few other were there, no one else. Fatkins (nope, not a typo) was furious that everyone was late. Slowly, people began to trickle in, and we were told to get on the bus. It took so long for everyone to arrive, however, that they decided to give us a 30 minute lunch break. One of the chaperones asked me and Gwen to stay on the bus to make sure no one stole anything. Except that then the parking lot flooded, and the bus was swallowed up by a giant whale. Gwen and I barely escaped, and were holding onto the top of a chain-link fence to keep from being swept away when my alarm began beeping.

Who knows what any of this means. I would just like to add that Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley received the inspiration to write Dracula and Frankenstein, respectively, from dreams. Obviously, my dreams last night were far from that caliber!

I'm just gonna go find a cash machine.

[Just a note: I had a very substantive post idea all ready, but don't have the energy/time to tackle that one. So I'm doing this one on the fly.]

Due to some recent issues (without going into details), I have begun to take some medication. For a short time, while trying to find the right "med balance," I was taking a relatively large dosage. While on this dosage, one of the side-effects was very vivid, strange dreams. I was only on this dosage for a couple of days. But it did get me thinking about things like dreams and reality. It also got me thinking about reality being what we perceive, and things like: Does reality differ from person to person? Is there such a thing as "objective reality"? Etc. Now, among other recent things, I suffer from something called delayed onset sleep disorder. Meaning, I'm a night person. It is very hard for me to go to sleep at night when I want to. In the past, this was never a problem, as I had jobs with late hours that allowed me to stay up until I would naturally fall asleep, which is not necessarily an unreasonable hour, but now that I work an 8-5 job and have to get up no later than 7am, I can't go to sleep early enough to get a decent amount of sleep. So for the past couple of years I've been taking over-the-counter sleep-aid. Anyone who has taken this stuff knows that it's really just an antihistamine, with the side-effect of sedation making its use for a sleep-aid. I've always hated the fact that I had to take this stuff to sleep at night during the week. Now that I've began taking a different prescription medication, I decided to find an alternative to the over-the-counter antihistamine sleep-aid (I was concerned about any interactions, etc.). I wanted to get a prescription to Rozarem, but due to my general doctor's gross misdiagnosis (she likely won't be my doctor for much longer!), I didn't get one. When I discovered that the main ingredient in Rozarem is just melatonin, I went down to the natural food store and got some melatonin supplements. It worked very well, making me sleepy but not the "artificial" sleepy, a more natural feeling sleepy. However, I got a kind that you drop into your drink in a little dropper, and was likely using too much-- the result being, very realistic and vivid dreams that I easily remembered. This morning, for example, I had a couple of "false awakenings," which is where I woke up, looked at the clock and realized that I was running late, decided to eat my cereal anyway, and then started to get ready to shower- only to wake up when my alarm went off. Due to this unintended but not unwelcome side-effect, I decided to keep a dream journal, and things such as lucid dreaming, etc. have taken my interest. All of this rambling on is leading into a few things to choose from to talk about under the general topic of: dreams.

When I was little, I used to be afraid to go to sleep because I was afraid to dream. The dreams seemed real, and while I never recall having nightmares, I always had extremely fucking weird dreams, and this scared me when I was little. So I used to sneak into my parents room at night to sleep, because it made me feel safe (I was like 3 or 4 at the time), and my pediatrician told my parents to turn the lock on my bedroom door around and lock me in my room if I started to do it again. So they locked me in and I got over my fear of nightmares. After that, I was always fascinated with dreams. I found that I often explored things in my dreams that upset me in real life. When I stayed at a friends house and his parents scared the living shit out of me with stories from the Book of Revelation (rivers of blood, red moon, stars falling from the sky, etc.), I had dreams of the end of the world for weeks. When in grade school a classmate told me that "if you die in a dream, you will die in real life," I got killed in my dreams (and, to this day, every once in a while, I will randomly get killed in a dream). I've always been fascinated with dreams, and there are times (I'm not sure if everyone has experienced this) where a dream has been so real, it sticks with me for days. I can remember something or someone that makes me feel something or brings up old feelings, good and bad, or something will happen in a dream that sticks with me, whether it be an image or a feeling, etc. And there are times when, in reality, I feel depersonalized, or I get a very surreal feeling, and wonder if I am dreaming. Supposedly, people can have lucid dreams, in which you realize within the dream that you are dreaming, in which case you may be able to control things, bring your "real world" identity into "dream world," etc.

So everyone can talk about dreams and dreaming, the nature of dreams and reality, etc.

Lastly, I want to ask a question: some of my favorite movies/books/music etc. concern the blurring of the real and the unreal. It also occurs to me that, if I lie to you about something that impacts you, I have altered your reality. But if you experience it as reality, is it any less real? I want to compare two movies that are largely given very bad reviews, and the very mention of their titles (at least one of their titles) will likely elicit groans: Vanilla Sky and Solaris. Now, both movies have their flaws: Vanilla Sky is largely a piece of crap, especially the nature of the reveal of the twist at the end; Solaris is actually pretty great (I'm talking about the new version, not the extremely long older Russian version). But I bring them up for this reason: (if you haven't seen one or both of the films, you're likely not ever going to see them- but I'm going to spoil the twists of both if you haven't seen them, so there's a fair warning) Vanilla Sky ends with the main character realizing that he has been cryogenically frozen and has been experiencing a lucid dream- unfortunately, his dream has been infiltrated by subconscious guilt etc. and turned into a nightmare. However, upon realizing this, he is told that he can erase all of this and start over with the dream, where he can basically have whatever he wants, including the girl of his dreams- or he can wake up, it's 150 years in the future, the girl of his dreams is obviously long dead, and his wealth will not last. He opts to wake up to reality.

In Solaris, the main character is confronted with a strange planet that brings back people from people's pasts- this planet brings back his dead wife, who committed suicide (if you haven't seen the movie- watch it, it will make sense). His mind being haunted by his dead wife, the planet brings her back from his memories, and basically the end of the movie is, he can choose to leave her behind, her being a fake construct of his flawed memories and desires, or submit to the dream- he chooses to enter the dream, where his wife is still alive, though it is not real and is a construct of the strange planet. Both characters were faced with a similar choice: Dream or reality? Both chose differently: In Vanilla Sky, the character chose reality, as flawed, unfamiliar and possibly bad as it may have been. In Solaris, the character chose the dream- to stay with his dead wife in a fantasy, including his flawed fantasy of how he remembers his wife and wishes her to be. The question is: Which would you choose? Not necessarily as the characters in these movies, but if you were faced with similar circumstances?

Many people would say that life is a dream. I've read many different things: that dreams are a gateway into another world, like "astral projection." At the very least, dreams are interesting and can tell us things about ourselves. Hopefully you all can make something out of this topic.