I dreamed an episode of Doctor Who.

Walking with a neighbour, I come to a park bench and there's a man sitting there. He's Asian, with dull bushy hair and dressed in jeans and a hoodie. My friend speaks to him gently for a while. Someone passes by and says, "Why are you so nice to that guy?" My friend says "He's going to die soon." She puts her hand on his leg and shows that he is skin and bones, his leg the thickness of a bone under his jeans.

We sit with the man - it seems his mother is there too. Then there's a party; a bunch of neighbours gather. The man takes an interest in me and tells me I too will be dead soon, maybe in a year and a half, unless I make changes. I lean over the table to reach for something, and while I do he leans on my back and spits on me. Supposedly that's healing.

Later, we are walking past a business and the owners are closing up, taking some things out to a vehicle and tidying up inside. There's a sign on the window proudly describing the oil well that used to be on that very spot a century ago.

Suddenly there's a mild rumbling in the ground that continues for several minutes, and somehow we know the building is possessed. Some otherworldly creature has moved in. It's in the basement. The owner angrily goes down there and comes back enraged, because the whole basement is sealed off with grown-in roots of some sort, white like bratwurst.

Then The Doctor arrives. He says in his giddy way that such-and-such has taken over the building and we must be very careful of it. The owner, hearing this, decided, against The Doctor's advice, to go back to the basement and try to force the thing out. He saws at the roots that clog the door but before he makes any progress, there's a scream from below and the building quakes severely. The floor bursts open, the building shatters, and a giant insect crawls out of the roof and into the house next door, where the sleeping owners wake in horror and run into the street in their pyjamas. The otherworldly creature now has their house; the business next door is a ruin.

People keep on using the house, because it's in one piece, but the energy inside is so fearful, so oppressive, that everyone connected with it goes through their days with a haunted look around their eyes. The Doctor, meanwhile, tries to find a way to expel the creature.

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.

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.