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, part 2

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.

I have not actually been sleeping these past few days. It's a pattern: when the hottest nights of the year arrive, sleep goes away, and I walk around for days in an altered state, feeling giddy, thinking in symbols, not language, and feeling like I'm on the brink of big changes.

All you folks who reliably sleep through the night have no idea how much time there is in a week. To pass the time, I have been plowing through a compulsively readable science fiction series (CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books - so far, 3 books in as many weeks). Now I'm walking around in two universes at the same time. When I leave my apartment, I have to remind myself of where and when I am. I confuse the names of real places with fictional ones. I feel sad to be all alone with my monumental nerdiness.

Maybe I'll try being a writer again ...

Luxury Towers

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.

Nuclear Apocalypse

This dream I had back when I lived in Toronto, years before any thought of moving to Vancouver had crossed my mind. I've thought of it a lot since coming to BC in 1999, and especially since the wages of greed came home to North America in 2001.

Here's what I dreamed: I am somewhere in BC, living in a little cottage-like house, when nuclear war begins. I hear about the approaching disaster on the radio, and then a few minutes later, the ground shakes with a subaudible "whump!" I look out my window and see two fiery mushroom clouds, one to the south and one to the east. Immediately, I start thinking about what to do and where to go, and as I get myself organized, black billowing clouds of smoke start speeding through the sky overhead. A neighbour comes by, a man who doesn't speak at all, and we drive into town in his pickup to get supplies. On the way in to town, we run into a crowd of well-dressed young people standing around their SUVs on the road, strutting about arrogantly, talking and laughing at the tops of their lungs and making plans to go and get drunk, as if nuclear war were a sporting event. Then when we get into town we encounter several people who are walking around in that frighteningly unpredictable state where they are struggling to behave "normally" while inwardly they are losing their minds. My neighbour and I look at each other and communicate without speaking our amazement at people's reactions to events, and once we have bought the water, radio batteries etc that we need, we bail out of town and hop a boat to Vancouver Island, the likeliest place I could think of to survive the war.

Edit: 2004: A few years after moving to Vancouver, I did in fact see my dream image of nuclear bombs going off near the city - on the SciFi Channel. Prophetic, eh! Image from Battlestar Galactica.