Most mornings I wake up with a song in my heart and a crazy vision in my head. I've been writing down my most vivid dreams since I was 10. Now, technology lets me give you a peek into my sleeping brain.
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.
I fall in love with a man. He's not glamourous or perfect in any way, just a nerdy looking guy with a blue collar job. We decide to move up to the Yukon and set up housekeeping, so we load into an old Cutlass Supreme and point it north. it's already winter when we leave and there's snow on the road.
For a Canadian road trip it's a romantic experience; the truck stops are charmingly gritty and the parkas are toasty warm on the inside. We make out in parking lots a fair amount. By the time we pull in to our destination, a fair-sized northern town, the car is loaded with supplies and we have had a big adventure we will always remember.
Then we settle down to sensible Northern living in a modular house made out of two old shipping containers. My husband and I both work for the local transit company, him as a vehicle mechanic and me as a dispatcher. Sometimes my job involves knocking truly gigantic icicles off the doorways of the building I work in. My husband has a hobby that involves multiple vats of boiling liquids kept in a part of the garage, metallurgy maybe? It's delightfully geeky.
We still make out in the chilly garage sometimes, because we just can't help it.
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.
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.
I dreamed that I went to the house I grew up in (happens every so often) and found the place haunted by the ghosts of a man and a woman. Their bodies are in the house too, all dried out in peaceful attitudes. I asked them what they were doing in my childhood home; they said they are here to tell me I needed to take some things away with me: a black cat, a grey cat, and an apple from the tree in the yard.
I think I have been a little stressed out. Change is good - but it hurts - and it shows in my dreams. The other day I had one of those flying dreams that you remember from childhood - I was flying over the city I live in, looking at all the glass towers and the construction cranes, marvelling at how fast things are changing. After a little while, because I am not a kid anymore, I felt the need to rationalize my flying, so a helicopter spontaneously formed around me along with some friends. One friend asked to be dropped off at his new apartment on the 100th floor of a snazzy new condo, so the copter manouvered as close as possible to the building, and my friend, laughing, tried to climb in his window. Unfortunately, he doesn't make it, and plummets 100 storeys to his death. His buddies in the copter are all horrified and flee the scene.
Something supernatural happens then, perhaps due to the rage of the flat guy over his stupid death. An invisible force takes hold of everyone in the condo building, hauls them out their windows, and drops them all from the 100th floor. Hundreds of screaming yuppies and hipsters fall from the sky all around the building, creating a carpet of broken, but well-dressed, bodies. There is only one survivor, a young woman whose fall is broken by all the other people who hit the ground before her. She picks her way out of the carnage and wanders the city in a daze for some time, and since she is a person who has never really reflected on life or her place in it, the strange brush with death has a traumatic effect on her. Eventually, she decides to become an artist in order to process what has happened to her.
Her first project is to return to the building where the strange event happened and set up a trampoline over the empty elevator shaft and video displays on all four walls around it, flashing images and words while the artist jumps around between them. She then goes on to make a performance piece about the massacre of a pagan tribe somewhere under a great European city, suggesting that it was in fact a mass suicide orchestrated by the tribe's high priestess in protest against the coming of christianity. She performs this in a haunted hotel supposedly built on the site of the massacre. And finally, in her most famous work, the artist flies a helicopter over the Vatican while the Pope is speaking, and releases a swarm of stinging insects into the crowd. She then takes aerial pictures of the patterns created by the crowd's movements as people start running from the insects.
After these exploits, and given her history, the artist becomes world-famous. The developers of an ultra-modern condo complex near Amsterdam bring her in as a consultant as they try to create the hippest high-rises in the world. She is helicoptered in for a gala at the future site of the towers, and a bamboo boardwalk as long as the towers will be high is built for the event, and lined with banks of microphones and folding chairs. The artist sits on the floor in her vermilion evening gown. People forgive this eccentricity, but when she gets up to speak many notice that she has put on a lot of weight, and this starts the fashionistas whispering that she is "washed up", or whatever they are saying nowadays. The artist puts the final nail in her own coffin when she says simply, "This building will fall down," and walks off the stage. She is never heard from again.
My family and I are preparing for a farm-country fall fair or something, collecting bushel baskets in the pickup and carrying around armloads of pies. The fair is a big outdoor event, with a number of tents and trucks parked all over a field. Hundreds of people are socializing happily and eating well.
Then news comes over the radio that nuclear war has broken out. The news spreads fast through the crowd and the mood becomes sombre. People stand around their vehicles listening to the reports. After a short time has passed, the voice on the radio starts listing places that have been targeted and we hear with horror that a bomb will explode very near us in only a few minutes. People scramble to collect their children and find shelter, but we are in the middle of a giant field with only tents and trucks around us, and so all anyone can do is huddle on the grass and wait. A man near me asks me to look after his son if he dies.
Presently the bomb explodes. It's very hot and bright and skin burns. Everyone knows to wait for the big wind; it comes after a few seconds, and all the tents and some of the trucks fly away, spinning along the ground.
The man beside me has died. The boy and I get up and go looking for other survivors among flapping bits of tent and overturned vehicles. After walking only a few metres, we see three strange grey machines in a row, each with two green lights for eyes. They are apparently military machines - they see anything moving as the enemy. They fire on us three times. The boy is hit and dies; I crawl back and lie there among all the dead and wounded. My sister finds me there; she is unhurt and is walking through the crowd trying to help where she can. She brings me all the dying children to hold until they die. After a few hours I am surrounded by forlorn little bodies. I get up and limp around looking for more survivors.
There are other machines arriving which also kill everything that moves, this time big truckosaurus-like things that chase people down and chew them up. I have to hide behind concrete barricades and even crawl under heaps of detritus to escape from them.
Relief doesn't come. People go into the forest and start acting all feral. At one point some others and I have to stay up a tree for days to escape cannibals, who eventually kill each other. Some people band together and decide to build a stockaded town. The interior is all broken up into apartments.
Finally, somehow, I get back to Grandma's house in the city. I hide in the basement crawlspace behind the water heater until others from the family arrive - Grandma, Mom, my sister and my cousin. Some semblance of normalcy has returned to society. We take turns keeping watch out the back door, and the front is barricaded. For a while it's winter, with huge drifts of snow in the backyard, but eventually spring comes. I spend some time telling Mom about the horrible things that happened after the bomb. In my mind I keep hearing happy songs about flowers and sunshine, trying to cheer myself up.
I go out walking behind the house and see sculpted cherry trees in blossom. Some of the branches have been packed into a sort of transparent plastic rectangle, making a sign that looks like it's been carved out of blossoms. Petals are falling out the bottom of the sign. There is a drift of petals under the tree, and I am so in need of comfort that I roll in the pile of petals like a dog in garbage.
While stuffing my hair with petals, I hear an ambulance siren very nearby. It sounds like it's going to pass the house but stops before I can see it. The siren changes to music,and I smile because it's one of the happy songs I cheered myself up with during the terrible times. Then that song ends and another of my happy songs comes on. It's too much of a coincidence, and I sprint around the house, trailing petals, to see the source of the music.
There's a van parked beside Grandma's house. It's not an ambulance but has a siren and loudspeakers attached to it. There's a man standing beside the van. It takes me a while to recognize him, but then I see he is one of the bomb survivors/forest people. He was severely traumatised by the, er, trauma, and I had thought he was insane, but he has recovered and now lives in the van. He is very different than he was before the bomb, very nervous, but he is a whole person. I am very happy to see him, and can't stop patting him on the arm and complementing his cool van.
I have many dreams in which my partner and I are royalty. This is the most recent one. My lover and I are jet-set royalty, enjoying all the luxuries that life can provide. We are overseeing the construction of our new palaces, a gleaming complex of towering silver spires complete with every conceivable luxury. Unfortunately, we seem to have run into some legal trouble and construction has been halted halfway through. Bankers are trying to figure out a way to take possession of our new party central, which we think is unfair, because the bankers are not kind, generous people like ourselves.
So one day my lover and I head out with our animal familiars to meet the bankers at the site. One of the towers is almost finished and two or three more are underway; we have to negotiate heaps of electrical insulation and other construction waste to get inside the tallest tower, but once inside we can see that it is truly palatial, rather like a hotel lobby with chandeliers, red carpeting, sweeping staircases, and a ceiling about 100 feet high.
Traveling by the stairs, or by gleaming but dormant escalators because the elevators are unpowered, my man and I climb to the Royal suite high in the tower, a ballroom where a rounded black console for the giant sound system is half-installed on a raised platform. The dance floor is huge and black and a glittering chandelier hangs over it. There are floor-to-ceiling windows all around, with a wide terrace outside. My lover and I stand at the railing for a while and watch rain fall.
Then suddenly we hear a noise: the bankers have arrived. One of them enters the room through an unfinished doorway, and before he can say anything, my lover and I rush him, knock him down, grab him by the arms and legs, and throw him out the window. The other banker makes a run for it, so my man sets his dog to chasing him. They go barrelling through the building, in and out of rooms, down stairs and up ramps until finally the dog catches the banker and holds him until we arrive to throw him out the window in his turn.
My lover and I spend some time afterwards exploring our half-finished digs, imagining the great times that will be had when the building is finally finished.
I dreamed that I was in a strange apartment building, about 100 storeys high. I am doing some discreet espionage, skulking around in the hallway outside the penthouse spying on my ex-lover who lives there. I peer through the spy-hole and, seeing him not home, I sneak in and search through the place.
Inside the door is a wide hallway with family photos on the wall, mostly shots of my ex and his daughter, who's about five. Shockingly, it turns out my ex is a Star Trek Ferengi! After I integrate that tidbit of information, I proceed to the living room, which has a big-screen TV, glass coffee table and a natty blue couch, as well as an astounding stereo system. It is enormous, has a million little knobs and doohickeys, edged with chrome wherever possible and shaped like a 1950's fin car. The apartment has a tiny balcony too, only a foot or so wide with a fence, and extremely windy (since we are on the 100th floor.) There is a comical Ferengi hibachi out there. Then I head to the kitchen, where the appliances are all chrome blue and match the stereo. I look in the fridge and eat some leftovers.
Next I find the stairs and go up. Upstairs there's a large bathroom with jaccuzzi, and the luxurious master bedroom, but there's also a mysterious dark doorway. I hear a noise and, fearing that the Ferengi is home, I nip through the mysterious door and find myself on another flight of stairs. The top floor is dark and rough compared to the luxury of the rest of the place. The decor is decades out of date and none of it matches, the upholstery is hideous and everything is dusty. I find a small dark bedroom with an unwelcoming little bed and a row of forlorn dolls, and I realise this is the room of an absent child, an occasional visitor. I am inside the bedroom when I hear the Ferengi moving around downstairs, and in a fit of guilty terror I consider climbing out the window and escaping down the side of the building, but the wind is gusting and the roof is slanted, so I have to admit that my only option is to try to sneak past my ex and get out by the front door. I creep back down and wait until the Ferengi is busy getting himself a drink, pause at the door and look back to see him settle himself on the couch with his back to me. Then I turn the bolt, open the door and slip out without looking back.
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.
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