Cubists

I lose a lot of teeth in dreams. Why is this? I haven’t lost a tooth in 20 years, and yet twice a month, I lose a tooth in my dreams. I lost a molar last night, a guarantuan one. It was roughly an inch deep, as well as an inch square on top. I was talking to my father about it in the living room downstairs. I was like “I just lost a tooth.” He was like “where is it?” Meanwhile I was holding it in my hand, an enormous dental school quality molar. I had to shove it into his hand before he realized that I was holding it in front of his face.

I also always pee in my dreams, mostly in places I’m not supposed to pee. Earlier this week, I was in a fancy looking room, poorly lit by indirect noon-day sunlight smattering through curtains. It had lots of old antique looking things. I was not alone. I peed in a flower pot. Most of the time I have to urinate in real life as I’m having those dreams.

But I never need to have teeth replaced in real life, so, what’s the deal?

I’m obsessed with severe weather, so when I dream of tornados, that’s not surprising. But molars? Not sure where to go on that.

The cube next to me has two phones without voice mail set up on them. As a result, they will ring dozens of times before finally timing out. One is ringing now. It has been ringing for over a minute. The cube is, by my estimate, 8 feet by 8 feet. The call is internal, meaning that the caller knows this about cubes. How long does it take for one to navigate to the phone in an 8×8 cube? Not long enough to warrant 20+ rings, that’s for sure.

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So What’s Your Story

I woke up giggling at 3:24 AM this morning, having had a dream that, at the time, was very funny to me. Roughly once every two months I wake up chortling about something. I jotted it down in the dark for your benefit.

I was at the lab at work. Some guy came in, a repair guy or status guy – a semi-outsider. The techs started making fun of him behind his back while I was talking to him about his official business, which is pretty much standard practice.

The introduction went something like this.

Me: So, I’m Eric – what’s your deal? What’s your function here?
Him, somewhat embarrassed: My name is Pretzel. And, uhhh, I kinda like pretzels.

So I guess people called him Pretzel. Why? Because his defining characteristic was that he liked pretzels.

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Assinine Pertains To Donkeys

I had a dream last night where former kubemate Karl was describing some event that took place for an enumerated set of reasons. Instead of listing reasons, he merely counted to 30, one at a time. Slowly. So my dream focused on someone counting to 30. I woke up at 5:51, agitated by how boring it was, then, based on the light streaming through the window, realized that my alarm clock would be going off in three minutes. A thoroughly dissatisfying to end one’s night sleep, dreaming about someone counting to 30 for no good reason.

To make matters worse, it was a shortened night sleep, as I got roped into a “Top Chef” marathon on TV. This is why I don’t watch TV. I had no previous interest in this show. I have no future interest in this show. It took time out of my life, burned it, and threw it away. It didn’t even compose it. And then I got an hour less of sleep. All for no reason. TV is the mind killer.

When I did get up, I wake to a story about a band of storybook pigs who survive against all odds. Until, of course, they are shot by the sheriff just when you thought they’d make it to safety. This is how they roll in Iowa. I feel badly for the pigs, but the guy in the article has a point – the killing of pigs is how pork and bacon come to pass. And a pig’s worth of pork is not sufficient motivation to mobilize the national guard to relieve the beleagued levee from its procine scourge. By the way, if you’re interested, here are the terms needed to define various types of animals.

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Free To Dream

I’m back on Glucosamine/Chondroitin, which I postulate led to a dramatic increase in dream rate a few months back. I have had dreams the first two nights after starting to take it again, and I happened upon one that I can share last night.

It involved Captain Picard/me. I think we were essentially the same person, or perhaps he metaphorically represented me. I’ve always considered Stephen to be more Picard-like than I – I’m more of a Sisko guy myself, on the spectrum of Star Trek commanders. All of that aside, he/I were captured and held in a prison somewhere. Eventually the captors said that all we (the singular we, sometimes I was identically him, sometimes I was outside of him watching him as though he were me. We were never two separate/autonomous entities, but there was a duplicity anyway) needed to do for our freedom was leave. Go ahead, you’re free to go.

Outside the cell opened into a huge, deep cavern with hundreds of corridors/rooms hewn into the canyon walls. It was subterranean, but well lit. People could be seen milling past the openings at a variety of levels. You could never see the people next to you though, at least only barely.

A large man provided the explanation why we were in this arrangement. He popped his head out of our opening, craining to see the orifices to his right. I don’t know why he wanted to directly, but the implication was that it was a right of his freedom to know everything around him. Unfortunately, it was the right of someone’s freedom to give him a kick in the butt. Our captors smiled as he was dashed beneath the crags below, joining the pile of severed body parts strewn about the walls.

“Yes, you can have your freedom,” they smirked. It seemed to me that this was the quickest way they could get rid of us, by letting us revel in our entitlement.

Does everyone else’s dreams transition as mine do? Some fragments of the setting of the previous dream, completely different plot? Immediately after or before I was still a captive, in a sense, though in a room not a cell. It was understood to be the same place as Picard/I was before, but the plot was completely different. That happens every time, dreams blend into other dreams. There is a metaphorical link between every thread of thought with every other one.

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Soon, I Won’t Need To Wake Up

My dream quest continues. I’m at something like 10 days straight, with the exception of one where I know that I had a dream, but can’t remember it. There are three-ish from the past two days:

1) Adam and I are walking through the woods in the winter when something charges us barking furiously. It’s a mountain lion/bobcat. I pin it to the ground, then we shove it out some door into a nearby river.

2a) We’re in a 6 story house, a nice one. Tim and Justin “Flaming J” Fleming are sleeping on couches in sleeping bags downstairs. Adam is looking for a bathroom. I’m looking for some hidden place in which to sleep. I stumble in upon several startled people as I look.

2b) In the morning Tim and Justin wake up (now we’re in my house in the ‘ville) to find that some drifter is trying to break in. Bolstered by the fact that there are two other able bodied young men there, I let him in. Nothing ensues.

3a) I’m in NYC, some crappy part like Queens, with my brother, some of his friends, friends from Goshen and a couple of people from Bucknell. Much of the dream focuses on peeing, since I had to do that in real life at the time. I peed at least three times, once in a sink which I thought was a urinal. As the bar clears out, I get in a discussion with a couple of Bucknellians where I am eviscertated for being a bad teammate/friend/person in general, so I’m a little depressed when it comes time to pee in the dream again. One of my brother’s friends has begun a game of Monopoly with strangers, and I have to pull him away.

3b) We go to a subway when I realize that my wallet is gone. I slip out and start searching for it, only to find it back in my pocket, miraclously. As I stumble my way back toward the subway (I’m somewhat drunk in the dream), I happen upon a random outdoor party, where I realize that I have a 90 degree Red Stripe in my hand. As I pound it, the cops show up. I am in the midst of getting in trouble when they find that I’m wanted for owing $108K to a credit card company. Upon further review, it is determined that Bess has stolen my identity to start a high end clothes business. I don’t turn her in and go to jail.

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Anti-Gravity Gravity

I had three dream sequences last night. Two of them blended such that the beginning of the second vaguely related to the ending of the first, diverging from that point. One was that I was playing basketball with my brother. I beat him. It was inside, in my living room in the ‘ville, though the ceilings were higher and it was close enough to realistic that he was upset about losing to me. Which he should be, he was a lot better than I was.

It’s the first that really blew my mind though. I was at Grandma’s house. Friends from Maryland where there, including Tim and Adam. It was loosely inspired, I think, by a thunderstorm that I witnessed from Tim’s house a few weeks ago – it was an awesome storm, but no one seemed to care.

Well, this time they did. We were in the garage doing something, when I noted that the clouds were becoming malevolent. Actually, the only time I’ve ever seen a tornado, the clouds did this. I was in high school running on a warm spring morning. Stephen, then running in the modified program, was separately on a run. As we were both near the high school, the clouds became menacing, the air electric. We both knew that something was about to happen, so I, at least, bolted straight for him. Since we’re kind of crazy, we raced straight to the top of My Olympus by the Intermediate School. As the sky swirled and growled, we looked toward town to see a funnel lifting after a brief touch down near South Street by New Heritage.

As the clouds raced by in the dream, I postulated that we’d be seeing hail with this storm. Sure enough, a few seconds later an enormous chunk of ice smashed into the driveway. It looked like a wedge of snow more than a hail ball. Soon after, the entire sky was filled with these hunks of icy frozen snow, shattering explosively against the driveway, sending flecks of ejecta hurling in all directions.

Once they hit the ground, they never really stopped moving. It was almost like they were rewound in slow motion, though in the opposite direction, refracted through some strange mirror into a reality without gravity. After being obliterated on the pavement, they bounced and reformed, then floated. A dozen or so of these 6 inch blocks of ice congregated together and began slowly spinning like an icy proto-planet off into the unknown. These collections of loosely associated ice and snow drifted their way out of view as the cacophony of hail stones continued to bombard the pavement.

Eventually I left the cover of the garage and went outside.

Needless to say, it was surreal.

Shortly thereafter, I was driving down a country road, I think out on Watermelon Run in the outskirts of Lewisburg, surveying the damage. Then I was walking, then I was in a house. I think it was the bathroom of my house growing up on Murray Ave. Spoons were involved.

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Dream Sweet Dreams For Me

A few days ago I had the obligatory “do you dream? what do you dream about?” conversation with a couple of people. Guys, actually. Anyway, I do. I go through spurts. I’ve had dreams the last two nights at least, and I think the last three nights. Last night, for instance, I dreamt I was in a bus and I was shooting at mobster types. Whenever I shot things in my dreams, the bullets are somewhat impotent, having little to no effect on the recipient of my wrath. This time the bullets were like cigarettes and they were barely even embedding themselves in my assailents’ flesh.

Anyway, it was last night that I had the most interesting dreams. I’ll give you a run down. First, I was at a river. It was the Patapsco, my home away from home. I was hunting sharks with a horse. The horse might have been Barbaro, but an aquatic Barbaro. Even though he was a horse, he was some sort of marine animal; a sea horse perhaps. Anyway he and I caught three sharks. Basically we used the current as our delivery vector, then pow, we were on them. I whacked them a few times (because these were somewhat unimpressive sharks, certainly not ferocious) and then sometimes Barbaro would stomp on them.

I had the horse, by the way, because I couldn’t do the rapids without him. One time (twice actually, though in the same spot), I went down by myself into the start of the rapids only to have the horse come get me right before I hit the rough part. I believed that he would get me too, it was a faith thing. Another time we came up on a shark in still water, which means we had to be stealthy. Good times.

Anyway, the shark meat was to be used as a part of the radar processor that I was testing at work. I’m not sure what electronic properties shark meat has (we’ll call it “calamari” for lack of an accurate term), but I accidentally started cooking a big wad of the stuff, even though it was already sold off as part of one of my processors. I had that sinking “oh my God, I’m cooking a piece of sold off merchandise” feeling, but it turned out ok. I’m not sure why I wanted to eat calamari anyway. I mean, I like real calamari, but shark calamari? I’m not banging down the door to eat it.

Then I was back at the river, this time with my family. There was also a TRex there. A female, for what it’s worth. As ferocious carnivores are apt to do, she started chasing us, for the purpose of devouring us. We decided that since she was on foot and we could float, it would be a good idea to swim downstream. You might have heard that TRex’s are lazy. Not this one, she followed us for hours. Eventually we got out of the river and into a city, though I’m not sure what city and at no point did we consciously get out of the water. The dinosaur was not wearing a mexican restaurant hat, however.

Anyway (I can say “anyway” every other paragraph, but no more frequently), we ran through the city, she neglected all other people morsels and continued to persue us. No one else found it particularly odd that a monsterous dinosaur was trying to eat us either. Eventually we went inside a building or two. At this point, the dream seemed so familiar to me that I started telling my brother (who was the only one left, mom and dad had vanished, though were not, to the best of my knowledge, dinosaur food) what was going to happen and how to deal with the situation. Then we ran into some new age religious center and ended up in a big room which had 20 feet ceilings, but the doors were about 12 feet off the floor and there were these floating platforms. You’ll have to take my word for it, the room was perfectly natural at the time.

At some point it ended. And I woke up surprisingly dizzy. So, in answer to your question, yes I dream and this is what I dream about.

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