stoutfellow | Entries tagged with dreams

Last night, I finally managed four hours of uninterrupted sleep. It ended with a most peculiar dream.

I was in Kohl's - not shopping, just hanging out. There was a large electronic signboard in the middle of the store, which listed all fifty states, color-coded (blue, green, red) to indicate the ratification status of the Equal Rights Amendment. As I watched, "Ohio" turned blue, and the display changed to a declaration that the amendment had at last been ratified. I was excited, and began writing down my thoughts (in longhand, in pencil). As I was finishing, one of the Kohl's employees came up and told me I would have to leave.

I very rarely have political dreams, barring the occasional "I am/used to be a Senator" dream. (I don't know where those come from either.)

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Music: Gordon Lightfoot, "Minstrel of the Dawn"

My caffeine-fueled second-sleep dreams (ca. 4:30 - 6:30 AM) are often strange and vivid.

This morning, dream-me was in his house; several other members of the family were there as well, all of them considerably younger than their real-world equivalents. For some reason, there was a doggie door in my front door. At one point, an animal - a small paca or similar rodent - came in through the flap. I picked it up and bundled it back out, with some difficulty. As I turned back, my niece Jennifer (a teenager in my dream) angrily declared, "That was *Beauregard*! I can't believe anyone in San Diego wouldn't recognize *Beauregard*!" I pointed out that I didn't live in San Diego. (Yes: we were in my house; my house was in San Diego; and yet I did not live in San Diego. Such is dream-logic.) A few minutes later, I saw motion near the flap, and stooped to look out. Beauregard was back, and he had several other small animals with him, including two dachshunds. I fell on my rump laughing, and finally managed to choke out an explanation: "He. Has. A. *Posse*!"

That's all I remember. The image of the indignant Beauregard returning, and bringing back-up, still tickles me.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Three Dog Night, "Old Fashioned Love Song"

The version of me who appears in my dreams - at least, those I remember - lives a rather different life than waking-me.

Dream-me has many more dogs, and much more trouble keeping them from running loose, mostly because his backyard fence keeps falling down. He also has several cats, and a couple of ferrets.

Dream-me has lots of trouble with contractors doing things to his house and property which he did not ask for - bricking up windows and doors, digging trenches, and so on. Sometimes they are contractors he has hired, but more often they are sent by the city, without consulting him. Often they insist on leaving the garage door open, which exacerbates the problem with the dogs.

Dream-me often finds himself on the wrong bus, and has a hard time getting home after he debarks. Some of the intervening territory is high-crime, which makes him *very* nervous. The rest of it is very hilly. He often has to cut across other people's property.

Dream-me frequently finds himself wandering the deep stacks of libraries - the areas where they put the minutes of meetings of legislative committees over the past two centuries, and stuff like that. Some of it may be interesting, but he never finds it.

The university where dream-me teaches is an amalgam of the places where waking-me has studied or worked. He frequently can't find his classrooms. (Sometimes he's trying to find a classroom that he's supposed to have been teaching in for the last few weeks, but he hasn't found it yet. Sometimes the course he's supposed to be teaching is a history class - not history of math, but realio-trulio *history*.)

I think waking-me is happier than dream-me. I wouldn't mind the extra pets, though.

Current Music: Boyz II Men, "On Bended Knee"

One side effect of going to sleep after drinking coffee is strange and vivid dreams. This morning, I woke from a dream in which the Enterprise had been taken over by aliens (again), and Kirk and McCoy were plotting to retake it. The scheme involved the two of them pretending to be drunk, and breaking off hunks from rather large glasses. (The glasses were apparently made of safety glass, and McCoy may have actually been drunk.)

That dream followed another in which I had a conversation with Robert A. Heinlein, trying to get him to reconcile contradictory passages in two of his books. (I never met the man; he died long before I became involved in SF fandom.)

Current Mood: confused
Current Music: Enya, "Silver Inches"

I have the strangest dreams when I take afternoon naps.

I often dream about my dogs - past, present, or imaginary. Today's dream featured Ben and Murphy. Dream-me also, apparently, had several cats, and at least two ferrets. One of the ferrets seemed to be bleeding, but the light wasn't good and I couldn't be sure. Murphy kept trying to sniff and lick him, but I wasn't sure Murphy hadn't bitten him in the first place, so I kept having to fend him off.

Why ferrets? I've never had ferrets, nor wanted to. Gerbils I could understand....

:is puzzled:

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Jackson Browne, "Love Needs a Heart"

Peculiar dream this morning. Three or four small but unfriendly dinosaurs had gotten into the house; I was chasing them with a hammer, trying to whack them on the head. One of them escaped through the doggie door into the garage; I was lurking by the door, hoping to coax it into sticking its head back through so I could clobber it. I don't remember what the dogs were doing during all this, but I know they were around.

Current Mood: befuddled
Current Music: Barry White, "Baby We Better Try to Get It Together"

I just woke up from a dream in which I was filling out my tax forms for next year, and one of the questions asked me to tell a story about myself, with legalistic assurances that they did have a right to ask this, and warnings of dire consequences if I refused.

I never got around to picking a story; I was still bemused about the request for pictures of my dogs.

Current Mood: bemused
Current Music: Heart, "Strangers of the Heart"

This morning, when I woke up, I got out of bed and went to the window. I saw a tornado bearing down on us from the north. I screamed the dogs' names and raced to the basement. As I hit the base of the stairs, one of the basement windows exploded....

Then I came to myself. I was still in bed. I got out of bed and went to the window. I saw a tornado....

Cripes. I swear I ran through that pattern four or five times, with minor variations, before I finally woke up for good.

Tornadoes have featured prominently in my nightmares for years. (Before that, it was volcanoes, inspired by reading an article about the Parícutin volcano in Mexico.) I don't recall ever being trapped in a loop like that, though.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Billy Joel, "Shameless"

I have a... well, to call it a recurring dream might be excessive; the details vary greatly each time. Call it a recurring theme. I am outside my home; there are quite a few people around. Sometimes some of them are relatives, but rarely all. There is something wrong with the backyard fence. It's bigger and more extensive than its waking-world equivalent, and parts of it are damaged - broken, fallen down, or missing altogether. I am scrambling around, trying to jury-rig repairs, but the equipment and tools are inadequate and insufficient.

I am worried that the dogs will get out, though none of them show any inclination to bolt. The dogs are numerous; my waking self doesn't recognize most of them, but all of them are mine. This morning's version featured a lanky bloodhound. I've never lived with a bloodhound; I'm not sure I've even seen one in the flesh.

I have no idea what, if anything, this means. (House-anxiety is not uncommon in my dreams; strangers doing things which affect the outside of my house, up to and including blocking the front door, frequently appear.)

Current Mood: puzzled
Current Music: Jim Croce, "I Got a Name"

Today has been a mixed, but, overall, I think a good day.

This morning I awakened from a rather odd dream. I had just written and had published a couple of papers; the journals in which they appeared were in front of me. (There was someone else in the room, who kept distracting me.) I kept picking them up and trying to read them, but I couldn't. (I can never read in my dreams; the letters are always blurry.) They seemed to be of an analytic nature, which is odd, since analysis is my least favorite of the great branches of mathematics. Still, I was happy to have published them; and when I awoke and realized that I had been dreaming, it made me sad for a while.

Monday, in calculus, I delivered a rather bad lecture. The topic was the Chain Rule, and I botched up the details of the proof.... I think I redeemed myself today, though, with a lecture on implicit differentiation. The guts of the idea - why it works; how to carry it through smoothly; why implicit is frequently better than explicit; the things that can go wrong, and what they mean. The students were attentive, answering my questions (sometimes correctly) and asking their own.

This afternoon I Mentored. We have a new program, whereby each of the graduate students with a teaching assignment gets a mentor from among the faculty, and I have been assigned a young man who is teaching College Algebra. He's a friendly and enthusiastic fellow, and I am determined not to show that I am squicked by his lip-ring. Anyway, I sat in on his class today; after the students left, I offered him what wisdom I could. He received it gratefully, and gave me copies of a quiz and a test. I'll probably sit in again sometime next week. ("Sit" is the wrong word; I stood leaning in a far corner, arms crossed, and tried not to look threatening.)

And I am home, having just finished the last of a bag of salad. I should shop tomorrow, but there are half a dozen other tasks crying out for attention as well. Also two dogs, likewise.

Tired.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: America, "Muskrat Love"

I've heard of the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, but until this morning (perhaps) I had never experienced it. I was downtown, in a city which my conscious mind does not recognize but where my dream-self seems at home, and I sensed that something unpleasant was about to happen, or was already happening. I said to myself, "No, I'm not going to put up with this. I am wearing pants, and I have my wallet with me." Neither of these things was true at the moment that I thought it, but a couple of (subjective) minutes later, when I thought about them again, they were. The dream proceeded without embarrassing incident from that point.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Steppenwolf, "Move Over"