12 posts tagged “dreams”
Case in point: an hour ago, while taking a nap, I foolishly let the soundtrack play. When it got to this song, I was dreaming about being a part of a SWAT team (or something similar), and we were approaching a door at the far end of a long, wide corridor. When it started playing, my dream-self was utterly convinced that clowns would burst through the door and charge us, doing horrible things to us on the way. This went on for a while, until I recognised the loud, horrifying music as coming from the soundtrack.
Eureka. Instantly I pictured fluffy bunny rabbits running through the door instead, and poof! The horror went away. The bunnies did come through, but that's okay; no killer rabbits here.
Interestingly, from then on my dream took on an interesting twist - being now aware I was dreaming, I think I actually started controlling my own dream - shades of lucid dreaming there. It was fun until I had to wake up to continue writing my economics essay.
Still, those few minutes of mind-numbing, inescapable horror were intense. Like nothing else I'd ever felt before. Ugh.
To lighten the mood, a rather nicer song from the same soundtrack:
The movie Paprika, incidentally, is also excellent. If you don't have an aversion to anime, it is definitely worth a look. Ironically, it's about a dream-travelling super-agent who can travel through dreams with the aid of a high-tech device. Surreal.
I had the nightmare - the stereotypical one where you're on stage and you realise you have no pants.
An omen? Hopefully not.
[Link to original comic.]
One evening, coming out of the doctors' club with an official with whom he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying:
"If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of in Yalta!"
The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted:
"Dmitri Dmitritch!"
"What?"
"You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!"
These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it -- just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.
Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And he had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly; he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything.
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?"Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Had a vivid dream this morning, where I asked questions of someone. It was a strange dream; I remember parts of it still.
I
went punting in some old college's halls, when we met her; I left the
punt, and we walked, and talked, and I asked some questions I needed
answers to.
She answered, but I do not remember the answers; yet I
no longer have that burning urge to ask those questions, which is
strange because I have not asked them yet.
I thought it was a pointless nightmare at first, but now I see it at least purged the desire to ask those questions, which is a good thing.
Now I am in a state of dissatisfied equilibrium, until. Until? Until something changes, and I will react, and so on, and so on.
Man got to tell himself he understand.
I don't know what I was expecting from this book, but it's pretty good as far as novels go. It's not gripping; it's not, perhaps, compelling. But it made me think, at least for a little while, and any book that makes me think is good by my measure.
Definitely a recommend.
-yawn-
Unfortunately, it also gave me nightmares. Thanks, Vonnegut. Although, of course, it's not his fault; the book was probably just the catalyst for the nightmare to occur. I don't even remember what it was anymore, only that it was set in the San Lorenzo of Cat's Cradle, and that I wasn't... hmmm, sure. About anything. It's one of those nightmares which seem to go on forever; I was glad when I woke up, except that life sometimes feels a lot like one of those nightmares where you Just Don't Wake Up.
Maybe it's all some horrifying dream.
False awakenings, I learn, are parts of dreams where you dream that you wake up, and are completely convinced (in-dream) that you are awake, and so on. I had one of those, complete with the idea that she had returned from her vacation and had responded to that last message, and soon we were at it again, talking about anything/everything.
That's good. Except, of course, that most of it was untrue. The only bit that's true is that she's back from her vacation. The rest of it was a very nicely detailed dream, right down to the actual individual words of the messages (which I shan't bother with, seeing as it was all imaginary).
When I woke up I just wnted to run around killing things for a bit. I was so frustrated. The capacity for the human mind for self-flagellation has ceased to astound me. I mean this really takes the fricking cake.
Suspicion: Perhaps insanity feels a little like this, where reality isn't quite what it purports to be.
I dreamt, again, during a 20-minute nap that felt much more interesting than anything I might've done during those 20 minutes.
I think I was in some Venice-like place (never actually been to Venice, but it had waterways for roads and lots of people and was very pretty and sunny - more than can be said for where I am now). I was a gnome, or some such little guy, with a little boat that was just big enough for me and maybe one passenger. I don't clearly remember the early part of the dream, except it involved showing some dignitary the way to a certain place - so we rowed there, me in my little rowboat and he in his big motor-thing.
In return he pointed me to a place where the fishing was good, because I was prattling about how the fishing in that place had gone down the tubes recently, while on the way to his destination. It wasn't far, just beneath a bridge that looked suspiciously like the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge, perhaps 100 yards off. I went there, and yanked out a fishing pole from somewhere on me (like in those games where people can pull out massive swords from seemingly too-small pockets) and settled down.
It becomes a bit surreal from here on out. Firstly, I've never fished before, and here I was going at it like a pro. The river was really clean and clear, and you could see all the fishes swimming around - quite a few, actually. I was kind of enjoying myself, actually, and thinking to myself how nice it would be if I had a friend with me.
Out of nowhere I remembered seeing mysterious black swimming shapes wandering the waterways at high speeds, and eating things, damaging boats and such. Nobody had ever gotten a good look at them before, either, because while they were huge, they were also blindingly fast. And here I was, sitting in a small boat in a deserted waterway (though it wasn't so far from a major junction, there wasn't a single person in sight). I could just imagine a big river monster suddenly rearing from the river and gobbling me and the boat up in a flash, so I quickly pulled over to shore and sat there instead, pondering the intricacies of a urban waterway network ecology all the while. (Wouldn't the monsters need lots of food to survive?)
After a while, a fish bit, but I felt like letting it go, so I tossed the whole bleeding fishing pole into the river. Whoops. Bad move. The fish, already panicked, took off like a little aquatic rocket and disappeared with the pole. Great move, Einstein. While berating myself over the loss, I slipped and fell into the river.
Panic. Blind panic. I immediately had the feeling that the local river monster had spotted me and was coming over double-quick for lunch, and I pedalled water like a man possessed - quickly enough, in fact, that I shot out of the water and landed on the opposite bank. At this point I start suspecting it's a dream, and sure enough, I pull out my boat from my pocket and toss it in the water in readiness to return home. Except the damned thing goes into the water nose first and begins sinking to the bottom of the river. Great. I bat aside the panic and dive in after it, and then I wake up.
-----
These dreams are getting weirder and weirder. Boat? Gnome? Fishing? RIVER MONSTERS? Wtf, really.
A brief one. I woke up at 8am, stumbled around blearily for a bit, and went back to sleep. Almost instantly, I began to dream - a very sweet, gentle dream, where I dreamt that we had lunch. Normal enough, except for the attendance of a motley assortment of other characters from my childhood - those were strange.
I finished my food, and I touched her arm as a signal for us to leave - and then I woke up. That's when it became a nightmare, because there was just this huge feeling of intense disappointment - a gaping, unfillable void - as I realised that it was but a dream.
Fascinating stuff. I haven't had a lucid dream for quite a long time, and would love to know if there's some way to enter a lucid dreaming state intentionally. In a way it's almost like extending your life for free - instead of being confined to your waking hours, now you can do stuff with your sleeping time too! (Except, of course, it would be quite different qualitatively. For one, it's not "real" - you can only really work with what's in your head already, which can be either a good or bad thing.)
I made my afternoon seem really long by taking a lot of 20-minute naps. Inexplicably, my 20-minute naps always seem to last a very long time, and I am invariably quite disoriented as to the actual time after emerging from one of them. They always seem to last much, much longer than they really do. (e.g. I'll sleep at 1pm, wake at 1:20, but think it's probably 3pm or some such thing.)
(Or perhaps I do sleep for very long, but before I awake an army of little gremlins storms into my room and sets all the clocks to 20 minutes after the time I fall asleep... improbable, but not impossible.)
I especially love the brief period of time between my falling asleep and my being fully awake. It's quite fascinating to observe how reality and my desires for how reality should be mesh. It's like someone's crossing the wires in a telephone exchange (one of those old antique things) and there're two versions of reality suddenly talking to each other. So I'll suddenly be very convinced, for example, that I'm talking to a certain person who I used to enjoy talking to but don't anymore, and we'll be having an excellent conversation - then, abruptly, the brain realises that something's wrong, and some kind of realignment occurs, and I'm shunted into one of the realities properly. I have absolutely no idea how long these... episodes last, because there's no way to tell the time without being in a single reality properly (and thus breaking the state I'm in).
Other things I've experienced - the "I'm falling!" sensation. Apparently that sensation between wakefulness and sleep is called hypnagogia. Fascinating.
Had a nap today. Was supposed to last 15 minutes, and wake at 5; it lasted 1.5 hours instead. Self-loathing, for that reason alone. Heard alarm at 5: disregarded it.
Same as this morning's fire alarm. Heard it; ignored it. Could be fatal, or embarrassing, or both.
Wasn't restful. Had nightmares. The worst kind - the kind that resemble real life. A surreal, nonsense, half-mad Lewis Carroll sort of real life. A conflation of sense and nonsense that makes it hard to realise the dreaminess. Also, thirsty. Room must be too warm, air too stale. Enjoyable in perverse way, but not eager to sample again.
I like dreaming. Especially vivid/ lucid ones. Breaks the monotony of
Mess is slightly better. More order. Still messy. Think mad poor impression on Singaporeans during TK's birthday shindig. Haven't heard from them since. Wonder what did wrong. Regret. Confusion.
Bad news: Bursary not yet paid. Must investigate.
Want hat like Rorschach's. Not sure if want the mind. Writing style here looks like poor imitation of his.
Think it's a fedora. He appears in the 300 trailer, I believe.
