A new family moved into my neighbourhood and my department at work - my dream neighbourhood that is. They were Pagans of some sort and although the husband/father was a new member of the science faculty, he was incredibly superstitious. Also he wore a cape. A black satin cape embroidered with metallic, colorful stars.
At their housewarming party I met his wife Carol, in a long flowing grey gown and a pointy hat. Their their only child, Rosabella, was 14. She sat at the kitchen table in a short black velvet dress passing her hand through a candle flame. She told me that contrary to conventional medical thinking, the organs inside the body floated in air, shriveled and preserved inside the body, each attached to the skeleton by a single fibrous stalk.
I asked the father what he would do if he were a surgeon; would he abandon his beliefs if, as he was cutting into a body, things were not as he preconceived them to be. He said no. I asked why. He said it simply wouldn't happen, because he was right.
I returned to my house where I had taken to sleeping in a large drawer at the bottom of a chest. Several of my friends were bedded down in the closets and one was curled up inside a kitchen cupboard. At about 1130 my wife got up to prepare for an evening lesbian dance. My friends were going too and tried valiantly to convince me to join them. I pleaded exhaustion and returned to my drawer.
In my dream, I slept. I woke up this morning in a real bed, organs apparently intact, other than mild heartburn from eating far too late last night.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Friday, May 3, 2013
The cop who couldn't die
This dream has cross-sexuality law enforcement infidelity followed by near-death hallucinations and a cliff hanger of an ending. A warning to our listeners that it may not be suitable for younger children or people with any physics background.
First/also the main characters come straight out of Continuum which I watched a few too many episodes of last night. This yet-another cops and robbers drama series features a female lead who has been dragged from her job as a Protector (read: cop) in 2077 into present day Vancouver by a giant time travel fusion reaction set off by seven convicted terrorists eager to escape their executions and start a revolution in the past. To achieve her personal goal of hunting down the terrorists and finding a way home to her husband and son, she poses as an American special agent and gets paired with Carlos, a hunky Vancouver cop.
IN my dream the Continuum girl cop is a lesbian. I'll call her Cameron because her first name, Kiera, makes that premise entirely implausible. Cameron is at a Chinese buffet with the beautiful but married Carlos, in a seedy part of town. They are discussing an accidental kiss the previous night. As they enumerate all the reasons why it will never happen again, their bodies come closer and closer, till the upholstery seems ready to catch on fire. Finally they give in and start kissing passionately in the cheap vinyl booth of the restaurant.
The transgressive make out session serves to dull their cop senses; as they exit the restaurant, they are confronted by seven gaunt, wiry, desperados easily identified as TV criminals by their disheveled clothing, distinctive creepy features, and piercing eyes.
The male cop attempts to reason with them - he explains the two of them are police officers and it will bring trouble down upon them if they "do anything crazy" but the ruffians seem unmoved. The girl cop palms her futuristic weapon and a firefight ensues. In the chaos Carlos and Cameron are separated. Carlos is shot through the chest and begins to bleed out. He is on the verge of consciousness when Cameron finds him and begins applying pressure.
As he lies dying, Carlos re-experiences the night's events in a vivid, hallucinatory and benign series. First he is inside of a nest made of turquoise and royal blue yarn interwoven with twigs. Cameron is there. The criminals are the hatching eggs, their siblings.
My dream ends after Cameron has requested an ambulance, called in "officer down" and continued to do her level best to keep Carlos from dying, but before help can arrive.
On TV he'd live, most likely. Unless it was the sort of show where the main characters are allowed to die and get replaced by more unrealistically beautiful actors. In real life he'd certainly die. By getting shot in my dream and failing to die before I woke up, Carlos gets to exist in that between place, an ever-unresolved purgatory. Dreams have rarely if ever a real sequel. I doubt I'll be seeing him again.
First/also the main characters come straight out of Continuum which I watched a few too many episodes of last night. This yet-another cops and robbers drama series features a female lead who has been dragged from her job as a Protector (read: cop) in 2077 into present day Vancouver by a giant time travel fusion reaction set off by seven convicted terrorists eager to escape their executions and start a revolution in the past. To achieve her personal goal of hunting down the terrorists and finding a way home to her husband and son, she poses as an American special agent and gets paired with Carlos, a hunky Vancouver cop.
IN my dream the Continuum girl cop is a lesbian. I'll call her Cameron because her first name, Kiera, makes that premise entirely implausible. Cameron is at a Chinese buffet with the beautiful but married Carlos, in a seedy part of town. They are discussing an accidental kiss the previous night. As they enumerate all the reasons why it will never happen again, their bodies come closer and closer, till the upholstery seems ready to catch on fire. Finally they give in and start kissing passionately in the cheap vinyl booth of the restaurant.
The transgressive make out session serves to dull their cop senses; as they exit the restaurant, they are confronted by seven gaunt, wiry, desperados easily identified as TV criminals by their disheveled clothing, distinctive creepy features, and piercing eyes.
The male cop attempts to reason with them - he explains the two of them are police officers and it will bring trouble down upon them if they "do anything crazy" but the ruffians seem unmoved. The girl cop palms her futuristic weapon and a firefight ensues. In the chaos Carlos and Cameron are separated. Carlos is shot through the chest and begins to bleed out. He is on the verge of consciousness when Cameron finds him and begins applying pressure.
As he lies dying, Carlos re-experiences the night's events in a vivid, hallucinatory and benign series. First he is inside of a nest made of turquoise and royal blue yarn interwoven with twigs. Cameron is there. The criminals are the hatching eggs, their siblings.
My dream ends after Cameron has requested an ambulance, called in "officer down" and continued to do her level best to keep Carlos from dying, but before help can arrive.
On TV he'd live, most likely. Unless it was the sort of show where the main characters are allowed to die and get replaced by more unrealistically beautiful actors. In real life he'd certainly die. By getting shot in my dream and failing to die before I woke up, Carlos gets to exist in that between place, an ever-unresolved purgatory. Dreams have rarely if ever a real sequel. I doubt I'll be seeing him again.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Cops without the robbers
You know you've been watching too much late night TV when you wake up at 3m in a panic, to solve a friend's murder, become convinced after self-interrogation of your own guilt, and only give yourself the benefit of the doubt when your alibi is that you were home sleeping in your own bed at the time. I mean, hypothetically speaking.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Murder v. Midlife Crisis
I've been too busy with my midlife crisis to write much lately. I have also been watching far too many late night detectives solve grisly crimes in a matter of days or hours.
I find these shows comforting which seems odd; by rights it should feed my fears of under-achieving since most days it's all I can do to put clothes on, much less intuit the plan of a serial killer from the microexpressions on the face of a traumatized victim or the angle of hanging art in their apartment.
Last night I dreamt I was solving a murder which I dubbed "acellular" because all the components of a crime were there, but there was no body. It was all "in vitro". And no, *I* am not even sure how this biochemical analogy works.
My world of deadlines and minute personal drama lacks the urgency of solving murders and rescuing kidnap victims. But what it lacks in importance, it makes up for in the amount of fear and anxiety every small real life crisis generates.
I do not feel stressed, waiting suspensefully for the crime drama's protagonist's latest hunch to pan out. I know that despite the dark artsy dungeon and the look of sincere concern on the faces of the police on the scene, the girl will be found, 90% of the time still alive. I know the psychic's vision or the PI's intuition will be initially misleading but ultimately key to unraveling the mystery.
Meanwhile, I agonize over things like how to word that email, and live in constant fear that my experiments in the lab are not only not working but irrelevant. And 90% of the time, I am right. The email's recipient misunderstands me. The Western blot fails, the clone has a mutation, my brilliant idea was published ten years ago.
Real life is mundane but for all its unimportance, exhaustingly tense. Watching brutal crimes solved in a neat 42 minutes on the other hand... priceless.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another episode of The Killing cued up in Netflix.
I find these shows comforting which seems odd; by rights it should feed my fears of under-achieving since most days it's all I can do to put clothes on, much less intuit the plan of a serial killer from the microexpressions on the face of a traumatized victim or the angle of hanging art in their apartment.
Last night I dreamt I was solving a murder which I dubbed "acellular" because all the components of a crime were there, but there was no body. It was all "in vitro". And no, *I* am not even sure how this biochemical analogy works.
My world of deadlines and minute personal drama lacks the urgency of solving murders and rescuing kidnap victims. But what it lacks in importance, it makes up for in the amount of fear and anxiety every small real life crisis generates.
I do not feel stressed, waiting suspensefully for the crime drama's protagonist's latest hunch to pan out. I know that despite the dark artsy dungeon and the look of sincere concern on the faces of the police on the scene, the girl will be found, 90% of the time still alive. I know the psychic's vision or the PI's intuition will be initially misleading but ultimately key to unraveling the mystery.
Meanwhile, I agonize over things like how to word that email, and live in constant fear that my experiments in the lab are not only not working but irrelevant. And 90% of the time, I am right. The email's recipient misunderstands me. The Western blot fails, the clone has a mutation, my brilliant idea was published ten years ago.
Real life is mundane but for all its unimportance, exhaustingly tense. Watching brutal crimes solved in a neat 42 minutes on the other hand... priceless.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another episode of The Killing cued up in Netflix.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Dream job quickie
Sometimes I have dreams so far-fetched that there is simply no life equivalent to compare it to. Last night, I dreamt that postdocs in my field make $80,000 a year. The mind truly boggles at its own imaginative capacity.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Hiking, tigers and car theft rings. Oh my
I dreamt I was hiking with a friend by accident - a trail called Hike the Rails. We'd stopped at a tiny rest area to stretch our legs and while we were in the bathroom, someone stole our car. We waited for hours at the side of the rural road but no one else drove by so eventually we began walking a wide clearly marked trail that passed through the rest area and led deeper into the woods.
We walked till nightfall before I finally regained phone service and could map our location; we were on a cross country hiking trail that followed old railway beds. The closest marked highway was 50 miles away. We were unprepared but many people were walking the trails and we were able to cobble together a tent, sleeping bags, and a small amount of food.
The forest service came through to check for our permit and, as we hadn't planned this trip, we didn't have one. My sister appeared and paid the forest service agent to fake the paperwork. My sister insisted we not mention the theft; after he left I argued with her, frustrated that we hadn't asked for his help. But my sister said there was a larger conspiracy at work and the agency couldn't be trusted.
Abruptly I was in a friend's living room. She had a miniature pet tiger confined by an invisible fence in the corner. The tiger was nearly sentient and very well trained but everyone warned her it was still wild and would turn on her or her other pets without warning. She often sat on a couch nearby with her legs stretched into the tiger's space, and allowed him to rest his tiger head on her ankles.
The other pets - two dogs and a cat - were constantly trying to get at the tiger behind the fence. Initially the barrier was an invisible noise fence that deterred animals as they neared the boundary. This kept the tiger confined but the other pets simply jumped through it, willing to endure the momentary discomfort in order to reach their target.
Next she put up an invisible electric fence that dispensed a pwoerful shock if you crossed the set lines. This worked on both the tiger and domestic cat but the dogs persisted.
I was constantly anxious that the tiger would eat one of the dogs or bite on my friends' feet. Once the tiger yawned, a slow back tilting of the head that revealed massive shiny white jaws. I panicked as its head came down, jaws wide, but at the last minute the tiger closed his mouth, licked my friend's feet once and settled back in to nap.
I walked out the door of her house, and into the parking lot where my car had disappeared. It was now a giant parking lot outside a mega box store and the police were questioning me. Apparently there had been a string of car thefts from this lot, that resulted in thousands of families stranded all across the country. This was why I'd encountered so many families while hiking. It had appeared literally like a migration.
We walked till nightfall before I finally regained phone service and could map our location; we were on a cross country hiking trail that followed old railway beds. The closest marked highway was 50 miles away. We were unprepared but many people were walking the trails and we were able to cobble together a tent, sleeping bags, and a small amount of food.
The forest service came through to check for our permit and, as we hadn't planned this trip, we didn't have one. My sister appeared and paid the forest service agent to fake the paperwork. My sister insisted we not mention the theft; after he left I argued with her, frustrated that we hadn't asked for his help. But my sister said there was a larger conspiracy at work and the agency couldn't be trusted.
Abruptly I was in a friend's living room. She had a miniature pet tiger confined by an invisible fence in the corner. The tiger was nearly sentient and very well trained but everyone warned her it was still wild and would turn on her or her other pets without warning. She often sat on a couch nearby with her legs stretched into the tiger's space, and allowed him to rest his tiger head on her ankles.
The other pets - two dogs and a cat - were constantly trying to get at the tiger behind the fence. Initially the barrier was an invisible noise fence that deterred animals as they neared the boundary. This kept the tiger confined but the other pets simply jumped through it, willing to endure the momentary discomfort in order to reach their target.
Next she put up an invisible electric fence that dispensed a pwoerful shock if you crossed the set lines. This worked on both the tiger and domestic cat but the dogs persisted.
I was constantly anxious that the tiger would eat one of the dogs or bite on my friends' feet. Once the tiger yawned, a slow back tilting of the head that revealed massive shiny white jaws. I panicked as its head came down, jaws wide, but at the last minute the tiger closed his mouth, licked my friend's feet once and settled back in to nap.
I walked out the door of her house, and into the parking lot where my car had disappeared. It was now a giant parking lot outside a mega box store and the police were questioning me. Apparently there had been a string of car thefts from this lot, that resulted in thousands of families stranded all across the country. This was why I'd encountered so many families while hiking. It had appeared literally like a migration.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Ex sex without the sex
I was working as a nanny and I had the night off, which was very unusual - in my dream life as in real life I worked many hours at my job. My science experiments do need a lot of babysitting so maybe the distinction between child care and biology research isn't as sharp as one might think.
It was the end of my shift and I was getting set to board the elevator that served as the door to the penthouse - my employer's lifestyle was opulent, to say the least. The door opened and my last long term boyfriend stepped out, pushing a rack of mens' suits. He had just flown in on business from Toronto, and wanted to know if I was free for dinner.
I have not dated men in any serious way since meeting my first girlfriend 15 years ago, so our relationship was literally in different decade. In my dream I was still married but separated from my wife.
We went back to my place to change. I shared a renovated very open floor plan 70s-era two bedroom apartment with my sister, who was in the living room virtual-snowboarding on the X Box when we arrived. We chatted with her while I scoured the hall closet for an outfit. My ex came up behind me, spooning me upright. I leaned into him. Sighed.
I remembered suddenly that we had another roommate. "When is mom due home from work?" I asked my sister. She told me 430. I checked my phone: 438. Not enough time.
I woke up. Looked in urban dictionary for "c-blocked by your dream mom". Found nothing. There *was* an interesting thread trying to decide on a female equivalent for b-balled. No one had proposed the term I heard from a friend in grad school: t-walled. Hilarious.
When I stopped dating men I was 27. I knew virtually nothing about women as erotic partners, aside from the years I had spent in my own body.
As an aside, I find the common* straight male assumption that women have a "home field advantage" in lesbian interactions just a little annoying. It's not that I can't see the value of knowing the terrain; but these same straight men never mention their own hypothetical home field advantage as a plus should they ever suddenly wake up gay one morning.
(*this statement is not based on a blinded, controlled scientific study but on hundreds of datapoints collected from dozens of straight men in too-many-to-count conversations between the ages of 19 and 40.... but if I had ever bothered to track the numbers, I would bet it is at least statistically significant.)
The dream felt curiously healing. I stood for a few minutes in front of the mirror and realized that today I don't hate my body.
It's 824 am. Sunday. Time to go babysit the science experiments. In the afternoon I'll be dancing with one of my favourite leads. His partner is a great lead too. I think I'll wear something nice. Something I might wear to dinner, if I was trying to seduce my ex.
It was the end of my shift and I was getting set to board the elevator that served as the door to the penthouse - my employer's lifestyle was opulent, to say the least. The door opened and my last long term boyfriend stepped out, pushing a rack of mens' suits. He had just flown in on business from Toronto, and wanted to know if I was free for dinner.
I have not dated men in any serious way since meeting my first girlfriend 15 years ago, so our relationship was literally in different decade. In my dream I was still married but separated from my wife.
We went back to my place to change. I shared a renovated very open floor plan 70s-era two bedroom apartment with my sister, who was in the living room virtual-snowboarding on the X Box when we arrived. We chatted with her while I scoured the hall closet for an outfit. My ex came up behind me, spooning me upright. I leaned into him. Sighed.
I remembered suddenly that we had another roommate. "When is mom due home from work?" I asked my sister. She told me 430. I checked my phone: 438. Not enough time.
I woke up. Looked in urban dictionary for "c-blocked by your dream mom". Found nothing. There *was* an interesting thread trying to decide on a female equivalent for b-balled. No one had proposed the term I heard from a friend in grad school: t-walled. Hilarious.
When I stopped dating men I was 27. I knew virtually nothing about women as erotic partners, aside from the years I had spent in my own body.
As an aside, I find the common* straight male assumption that women have a "home field advantage" in lesbian interactions just a little annoying. It's not that I can't see the value of knowing the terrain; but these same straight men never mention their own hypothetical home field advantage as a plus should they ever suddenly wake up gay one morning.
(*this statement is not based on a blinded, controlled scientific study but on hundreds of datapoints collected from dozens of straight men in too-many-to-count conversations between the ages of 19 and 40.... but if I had ever bothered to track the numbers, I would bet it is at least statistically significant.)
The dream felt curiously healing. I stood for a few minutes in front of the mirror and realized that today I don't hate my body.
It's 824 am. Sunday. Time to go babysit the science experiments. In the afternoon I'll be dancing with one of my favourite leads. His partner is a great lead too. I think I'll wear something nice. Something I might wear to dinner, if I was trying to seduce my ex.
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