Getting it on with Till Lindemann

Forgive my obscure and exotic taste in celebrity crushes. For the uninitiated, this is Till Lindemann:



...and this is what he does for a living.

My dream began with me traveling to Europe on holiday and meeting a random guy in a bar who turned out to be German rock star Till Lindemann. Oh lucky me! So I dragged him off into a corner and had my way with him.

Some time later, my back suddenly went out and I couldn't straighten up. I teetered around the neighbourhood on my way home, every step an agony, unable to raise my head, but sure that once I was home my suffering would end. I crossed a street precariously and entered my building from the back, passing a convenience store that is not there in real life. Searching for the elevators, I find a large meeting room full of people discussing matters of concern to the building, but I don't stay because of my impaired condition. Continuing my search for the elevators I find many features in the building that also are not there in real life, including restaurants, bars, shopping, a fountain, a huge terrace and a library full of neighbours doing research. The way to my own front door eludes me. Finally, I come to an enormous main foyer complete with doormen and escalators. Now I have my bearings and I head straight home.

My home is also full of things that are not there in real life. The dream ends with me lying down on a deck lounge on my new giant patio in the sky, relaxed at last.

Go North for Freedom

Unlike in real life, I had a whole lot of fun in my dream last night. I dreamed I was the type of girl who goes to parties every night. Some friends and I were getting drunk and dancing on tables in a run-down old house, well on our way to trashing the place. Once it was trashed, we moved on to another house, the one I lived in when I was 10. We started up the party again, an ounce of pot was spilled out on a table, and I was exploring the old rooms with a bottle in my hand. I came to what was formerly my parents' bedroom, intending to claim it as my own, but things felt different. The room had a creepy, hair-raising vibe it didn't used to have. After a few minutes in there, I started to hear voices coming from the ceiling, and once I heard a baby crying. My instincts said to get out of there, but I hung around a bit longer, trying to make sense of the voices from the ceiling, but they were just muttering disjointed phrases, like the hybrid in Battlestar Galactica. As I listened, the voices resolved themselves into a woman. She walked out of the shadows in a corner of the room, took hold of my hand and squeezed it. She said, "Go north for freedom," and a pilgrimage began.

"End of line."

My party friends and I set out on an epic trek towards the north. The whole world had been turned into a neverending series of malls and hotels; we never go outside. But this new world is populated with large spiderlike robots that lie dormant under staircases and in darkened rooms, waking up whenever they sense movement. They attack my friends and I. Our pilgrimage to the north becomes similar to a first person shooter game, where we scout ahead for robots and fight them whenever we can't avoid them.

Eventually, my entourage and I find new digs in an ultra-modern building, all glass and stainless steel, where all the cool features in the apartment are controlled with buttons on a sleek silver console. There's one in every room. I stand on the bed and play with the buttons that are supposed to move the window blinds into myriad stylish arrangements. Instead, they fall on my friends' heads. They are not amused, and they start listing all the ways in which the automation in the apartment will not work. They say the track lighting will leak and the windows will turn dark. Somehow, one of the cushions from a charcoal Danish modern sofa goes flying out an open window, and I can't go out to retrieve it because my keys have gone missing. To punish me for the falling curtains thing, a friend makes me drink gin from his cupped hands.

We do eventually head outside to look for the flying cushion. We walk all around the building and its in-house fine-dining restaurant in a quaint, old fashioned annex. Clear on the other side of the building, we find several people gathered on a patio overlooking a garden. Piles of detritus line the concrete walls of the garden, including my wayward couch cushion.

I took a brief break from reading scifi novels this summer and got into horror movies instead. Guess what I dreamed about (once I finally got to sleep, that is)? I dreamed longingly of a long and dangerous journey through conflict and adversity to visit my friends the aliens and space travelers. So I guess it's time I resumed my trek through CJ Cherryh's Foreigner novels that I started earlier this summer.

Still, the Lovecraftian horror story I read last night had me waking up with yet more heavy metal in my head, and since this blog is called "The Song In My Head When I Woke Up This Morning", here is some Tool.

And now, back to the nerdfest.

Bridge Crossings

... in which I explore two divergent ways to cross a bridge.

One: Two supervillains an a hovercar speed away from the scene of the crime, laughing evilly. Ahead, a huge bridge is just beginning to open to let boats through, but the villains gun the engine and sail right over. Just as one of them notices that battery power is getting low on the hovercar, the other suddenly remembers something they left behind, so they turn around and head back towards the bridge. It's fully open, a pillar of iron towering to a great height, but our supervillains are too important to wait. They speed up, fly vertically up the bridge deck, hover over the chasm in the middle, and, engine sputtering, make a rough landing on the other side.

Two: A rickety wooden bridge in a forest is cared for by two elderly people. The bridge has been in disrepair for many years and no-one has been able to cross it, but now, some younger people are there to help fix it. They start by fencing off the edges for safety. They acknowledge that the repairs will take some time, but that they will do it safely and with joy in their work.

The neighbourhood is changing

There was a bit of time travel in this dream: two eras of my life sitting site by side on the landscape.

At the beginning of my dream, I am back at mom & dad's, painfully depressed and wondering how I got back here. It's the suburban bungalow where I lived (miserably) from age 10 to 14, in my room in the basement, on a tree-lined street. The house is full of mom and dad's friends, a family reunion or something ... then my sister arrives! I go out and meet her in the driveway, and there's also a kitten or two out there on the lawn, one of them white with flowers on its collar.

My sister is, of course, as uncomfortable at mom and dad's house as I am, so we grab umbrellas and go out for a walk. I offer to show her around town, as I now live in a different city. I suggest we go to my place, where we can visit with the ancient cat we had as kids, but she says no, she doesn't want mom to be able to find her. So instead we just walk around the block. On the corner, we pass the squashed-flat body of the white kitten with flowers in its collar, run over in the gutter.

It turns out that my apartment building is directly behind my childhood home. We get to it by crossing an alley. I decide it would be fun to show sis the weird shop in the basement, a high-end automatic vendor where well-off tenants can buy $50 steaks and gourmet salads and basically anything they want out of an automatic dispenser machine that takes credit cards. So we go in the back door of the building and find ourselves in a concrete passageway that branches off in several directions, as if there were also a subway stop under there. We try to get to the shop, but there is a security guard who wasn't there before and he stops us. I have forgotten my keys, so he doesn't believe I live in the building. He sends us away.

The time I drowned

This dream felt so much like memory that I woke up re-evaluating my beliefs on past lives.

I dreamed that I was a fifteen-year-old girl living with my father and grandmother (who were the same as my father and grandmother in this life) in a small wooden house in a forest on a river. It was a gloomy, depressing place, all drooping trees and rotting wood and sticky mud, and, then as now, my family seemed obsessed with keeping the dim, dirty past alive with dusty old pictures and books about virtuous girls who died young.

There is a rickety dock behind our house, and it's one of my household duties to wait on it every evening for my father to come home and help him tie up his boat. Sometimes I beg my family not to make me stand down on the dock at sunset, and I always do the chore sulkily, but it makes no difference; my father needs help tying up the boat, and my grandmother's too old. This duty is the most hated thing in my life, because I am afraid of the river. In the daylight it's not so bad, but as the sun goes down, things appear on the water that were not there in the light.

Every night when the shadows lengthen, a boat like my father's appears out of nowhere, just sitting on the water near the opposite bank, absolutely still regardless of wind or current, and the man in this boat simply stares at me and leers. He never moves nor makes a sound, but he is always there when the sun goes down. And some nights whispering voices can be heard, and when I look around, I see a man and woman standing on the bank near me, or worse, walking through the water towards me. I know none of these are of this world, and I know equally well that they want me. They make my skin creep like spiders in my bedclothes.

One night there is a storm blowing, and I fight long and hard with my grandmother to let me forgo my duty down at the dock. It is already eerily dark out because of the clouds. I beg and whine and threaten, but finally my grandmother shouts me down and calls me names and tells me that if my father drowns trying to dock his boat, it will be all my fault and so will the abject poverty that will follow his loss. She hands me a lantern, shoves me out the door, and slams it in my face. I walk down to the dock wailing in anger and fear.

The creepy little boat and it's leering occupant are already there when I assume my post, sitting perfectly still in the water while waves rage all around. Groaning voices are in the air, and the ghostly couple are already out in the water up to their shoulders, reaching toward me. I can't see my father's boat anywhere, and there's no way of knowing when he will arrive home. The dock pitches under me as I stand there crying in terror, and I cling to a rotten post for support. I look up to the house, but it looks so far away and closed to me, offering no safety. When I look back at the river, the ghostly couple are right there, their hands on the edge of the platform, their mouths hanging open. When the waves lift the dock, they heave at it, seeming to laugh at my fear. Tree branches whip back and forth as the wind intensifies, and finally, after a number of tries at it, the waves and the ghostly hands manage to tear the dock away and flip me into the water. I hold on to one side of the loose dock, trying to keep my limbs away from the wraiths that are in the water with me, just a few feet away. There is an iron hook on the dock that has come loose from the ring that holds it to the supporting posts, and I brace myself as well as I can against the muddy bottom and try to bring the two together again. I come tantalyzingly close a few times, but the waves are too strong. I keep losing my grip on the solid post, and losing track of which way is up and home, and which way is the rushing river. Exhaustion finally overtakes me, and I slip under the surface. The last thing I see is the dock over my head, cutting me off from the air.

Cassandra

In this dream, which I had when I was in highschool, I felt like Cassandra, the prophet whom no-one would believe. I dreamed that I woke up one morning convinced that the Earth would be invaded by aliens that day and that we would no longer be masters of our own destinies.

I go to my mother, my friends, my teachers etc, but they all think I am playing a joke even though I am in a rising panic. I keep having visions that I don't understand, but it looks like terrible things happening to people I care about. Finally the fear and frustration get too much for me, so I go to my sister and ask her to give me the huge cardboard box that her refrigerator came in (not that she had a fridge in real life at the time!) I tuck the box into a corner of the basement and hide in it. Not long after, there is a wave of scary booming noises and gusts of wind, as alien spacecraft come down from the sky by the hundreds. Strange creatures pour out of the ships in every city on Earth and go from door to door like commandos, herding everyone out onto the streets at gunpoint. The streets are full of screaming, panicking people. They find my hiding place and throw me out into the road where I stand with my mom, my sister and a friend, wondering what will be done with us.

After some time, something seems to be happening: the aliens are circulating through the crowd, doing something to people one at a time. As they get closer, I see they are using something like a Star Trek hypospray, a little gun they fire into the skin from a few inches away. They reload the gun with little capsules full of compressed gas or powder. I feel very frightened when I see the people already injected start to look sick and scratch themselves frantically, as if they had fleas.

The aliens shoot my mother, my friend and my sister. Then, finally, my turn comes and I get shot at close range with one of the capsules. My skin starts to tingle right away. In a few minutes all my hair falls out (so does everyone else's) and tiny green vines grow in its place. Soon I am standing in a crowd of mossy, vine-trailing people. Once we are all growing foliage instead of hair, the aliens set up an arrangement of fences like what's used to control livestock, pass us through one by one, and harvest the plants we have grown. Some of them eat right off of our skin. Then they send us all home, telling us we'll be rounded up again tomorrow and every day to have our foliage harvested.

A childhood dream

I had this dream and wrote it down when I was about 14, so the main players are family members: my mom, stepmom and siblings. There's also an old man who looks like Wilford Brimley. We are all in the midst of climbing a treacherous mountain with a fortresslike monastery on top. Falling rocks and dirt roll past us, and we look up and see that evil-looking monks are throwing themselves off the monastery walls. (Maybe I was prophesying my future Umberto Eco fascination!) The Wlford Brimley man tells us that we'd better hurry and get to the top, because when all the monks are dead, the mountain and everything on it will disappear right out from under us. Luckily, one of the monks lusts for power, so he stays behind after all the others have killed themselves and names himself King of the Mountain.

When my group and I get to the top of the mountain, we sneak into the monastery through the storeroom, then follow WB through the building, climbing stairs and ladders until we reach a large room. In this room is a giant cat the size of a bison sitting next to a table and holding a bowl of soup in its paw. Old WB takes a piece of bread from the table and dips it in the soup, and suddenly, strange words appear on the bread. Apparently it's a magic map of the monastery, and WB follows it until we come to the throne room, where the King of the Mountain is sitting looking paranoid. He does some kind of magic when he sees us, and presto, we are magically expelled from the building and find ourselves looking up at the walls from outside. We sneak in through the storeroom again, climb to the cat room, go through the bread-dipping routine again, and wait for a message to appear. This time all it says is "A1 - 1" WB reacts to this as if it were a bomb timer showing 2 minutes: he yells "Run!" and we take off as a group trying to get out of the building. We can hear the King of the Mountain chasing us and shrieking terribly, but we manage to stay ahead of him. At the end we all have to jump from a broken staircase and run out of the storeroom, but the giant cat appears suddenly and cuts us off.

Old WB comes forward and explains that the monks and priests of the mountaintop monastery have been tormenting his family for generations and he wants it to stop. The giant cat agrees, as long as the old man agrees to be the last victim. He agrees, and we all make it home safely. A week later, the old man starts acting strangely, getting up in the middle of the night and pulling people out of their beds, or moving his own bed into another room. Then one night he just disappears, and so does the mountain and the monastery on top of it.