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 dreamed I was driving in Ireland on a hedge-bordered road at night, when a strange light in the sky caused me to stop the car and get out, and start wandering through fields, up and down hills in the dark. I keep exploring til I reach the crest of a hill and push my way through a hedge fence. There is a stone circle on top of the next hill, and people are dancing around it. A sudden flash of blinding white light comes from the stone circle. It expands til it fills my vision. The next thing I remember is being back at the car.

As I'm standing on the road in the headlights, looking around at the hills, I begin to hear the sound of footsteps coming slowly towards me in the dark ... slowly ... getting closer ... until finally an old man shuffles into the area of light in front of the car. He has a friendly face. He walks straight up to me and hands me a piece of paper. There is something written on it, but I don't know what it was.

This morning I dreamed that I was on a river cruise from Central Africa to Scandinavia. My sisters and I swam in the river and watched the water change as we went north - crocodiles and water snakes giving way to trout and kingfishers. I remember trying to recall the names of the countries we passed through on the map, but couldn't; can anyone remember that kind of symbolic detail while dreaming?



Today a twofer. Driving past the PNE yesterday I suddenly remembered a dream I'd had a few days ago, where in they had built a fancy new big ol metal roller coaster at the park. Not only was this roller coaster big and awesome, it had an amazing feature: the train was designed to detach itself from the track for part of the route like a caterpillar spinning a cocoon - connected to the track at the front only, and the rest of the length whipping around in the air as it sped along.

Dontcha hate that, when you dream of something cool, and only become aware later that it doesn't exist in the real world? Happens to me all the time.

Stuffed like a down pillow

'... the previous night I had been plagued with strange dreams about friends dying. "We say that when you dream of a friend's death," Kunley replied, "it means your friend ate too much last night." Anyone dreaming of my demise lately? Because I have been stuffed like a down pillow.)'

Exerpt, Seeking Happiness in Bhutan, by Steve Burgess, The Tyee.

Asian Holiday

I am steaming down a river in Asia in a giant American military ship. Little wooden boats scatter around us & trail off after us as we pass. The sailors seem concerned that we might come under attack from guns on the shore. Just as I am wondering, "what am I doing on a military boat anyway?" we dock at a tiny village and some friends and I disembark to do some touristing.

The village is all little bamboo & wood houses jumbled together with dirt floors and people cooking on open fires. I feel culture shocked being there, wondering how the people feel about being visited by a dozen curious people off a military ship, but the women are very hospitable. They lead our group out to a pretty hillside and we have a barbeque. I take lots of pictures.

Suddenly I see someone I know sitting by a bonfire - a friend who suddenly stopped talking to me a few years ago. Another woman is taking pictures of him, and suddenly I am very jealous. I feel boring beside this bold woman. I go off by myself and sit on a slope looking at a gorgeous view of emerald waters and misty mountains. Children go tumbling down the hill around me, laughing.

Black Powder

On a cruise ship one night, snow begins to fall out of the darkness, and some of the children on board go out onto the decks to play. The snow is so thin that it disappears under their feet, leaving dark little foot-shaped marks.

Then, as they stomp and jump in the snow, black things peel off the bottoms of their feet and float in the air like jellyfish. They are crisp little parachutes, crinkled at the edges and slightly stiff, like paper. They are alive.

More people come out to see the parachutes as they drift in a manner not at all random. They are drawn to people, bumping into legs and faces, and just as the people are becoming disturbed by their strange movement, the parachutes are joined by something else: swarms of black bats that come out of the dark, clinging with claws to whomever they touch.

Everyone the bats touch, changes. They turn into ghosts, and if you look a ghost in the eyes, you become one too. Panic ensues, and people run for the glass doors. Some get in with bats clinging to them. Once they have changed, the bats crumble to black powder on the floor, and the ghosts stroll dreamily around the ship, looking just like regular people until you look into their eyes.

A day goes by. People are hiding from ghosts and one another all over the ship. I walk around, staring at my shoes and calling, "Who's there?" whenever I see something moving. Anyone who answers is still a person.

The ship's pilot, thankfully, is still at his post and is taking us toward land, but night falls once more before we get there. Black winged gargoyles thump against windows wherever there is glass. In the morning, a small group of people pick their way carefully to a gangway, jump overboard, and swim the short distance to dock.

To the Far North

In this dream, I took my younger sister Colleen to the far north on a visit to some friends who live in a shack on a cliff over an icy span of water. Once we arrive, my friends declare that we are all going on a trip to a far-off, mysterious place. First, though, we have to go into town for supplies, and that involves crossing the icy water. We don't bother with a boat; we simply spread ourselves on the icy wind and fly over. As we swoop low over the water, I look down and see a pod of whales. "Hey look, whales!" I yell to the others, and they go "Right on!"

At the store, my friend starts to tell me about all the hardships we are going to face on our journey, walking for days over the snow and suchlike. My sister starts to freak out and ask me why I brought her along, but my friend gets impatient with her and keeps belabouring the point of how difficult and dangerous it's going to be. Finally I roll my eyes and say, "Can we just leave?" and so we start out. Step one of our adventure is to turn ourselves into a lynx, a wolf, a caribou and a bird, and we set off across the countryside.

No honour among thieves

Sometimes in my dreams, I come face to face with the extreme moral ambiguity of my beliefs and actions. Breaking into my ex's apartment and poking around is one example (see below); here is another.

I dreamed I was part of a deep-sea exploration team, searching inside sinkholes and underwater caves for something very valuable that has been lost, and which we are going to steal. We stop our submarine over the sometimes tiny rocky openings of sinkholes and send down our remote camera to see what's there. At one hole, I am watching the monitors as the camera pans around, and I catch a glimpse of something that looks like a person.

My first thought is that someone got stuck in the sinkhole and drowned. I send the camera in for a closer look, and see that the shape is a person, a woman wearing a gold one-piece suit, and she is still alive. She's standing on a thin ledge and looks exhausted and scared. I bring the remote camera in close to her, and although she doesn't seem to be able to see, she reaches out and grabs it and I carefully use it to pull her out of the hole. Once we have her on board our little submarine, we send the camera back down to finish the search.

The woman from the hole is shaking and crying, and tells us she had been trapped in the hole for weeks and has eaten nothing all that time. She is barely sane, and doesn't yet dare to hope that she is no longer buried at the bottom of the ocean.

Meanwhile, our camera finds something else in the hole: a bunch of black nylon bags lashed together. It is our quarry! We excitedly hook it and bring it to the sub, but soon we realise our sub is too small to carry both the bags and the rescued woman at once. Being profit-minded thieves, we decide that our only choice is to put the woman back in the hole, make off with the quarry, and send someone back to collect the woman later. Of course she fights and screams and pleads and cries, but we force her out of the sub and lower her back into the dark hole. I watched her go down into the darkness; the last thing I see is her terrified face peering up at us.

Philosophy Quest

This was a fun dream to dream. I was starting university (something I have not yet done in my waking life) in a program where I'm required to take philosophy. I enroll in a class with a prof named Torquemada. Her classroom is in the dank, oppressive basement of a crumbling old building; her teaching methods consist of torturing her students, and instructing students on how to torture each other. If anyone screams "This isn't fair!" Torquemada snaps her riding crop, tightens her lips across her teeth, and says, "Fair doesn't matter. You have to take philosophy to graduate, and mine is the only philosophy there is. You can either accept that now, or keep repeating my class until you accept it." Because I am new, don't know any better and want to fit in, I believe her. I attend the class, all the while keeping my eye on the prize, course credit and the right to say I have learned "philosophy". In a few months I have really started to hate myself.

Then, one happy day, a friendly young woman strikes up a conversation with me, and when she hears I am in Torquemada's class, she shakes her head and says, "You've gotta get into a different class." She gives me a pamphlet with all the philosophy courses listed, points to one and says "This one's the best." For the first time, I know of an alternative to Torquemada, and I decide to go meet the teacher of the recommended class.

It's not so easy as going to her office and making an appointment; instead, I have to show up early one morning and join a safari of 10 or so other seekers for a trek on elephants. We all mount our elephants and head off on land a short ways, then we come to a lake. The elephants swim across with us perched on their backs, climb out on the opposite shore, and carry us off across country, through fields and forests, until we come to a huge 60's modernist building where we dismount our elephants and are greeted by a group of profs. There's a bit of mingling and conversation, and then someone says, "Okay, who's going on to meet the philosophy professor?" three or four of us put up our hands.

The profs tell us to get back up on our elephants and climb the staircase all the way to the top. We go round and round, lumbering on our elephants, and the higher we get, the older the building gets. The staircase changes from concrete and glass to carved mahogany paneling, and then finally at the top there's a chandelier and everything looks very Victorian. I go in to meet the professor and she looks Victorian too, in a comforting, grandmotherly, traditional kind of way. "Do you have your staff?" she asks. I don't. "You'll need your own staff or wand to continue," she says, and sends me off to find an appropriate stick. "Can elephants go down stairs as well as up?" I ask. "Yes," says the teacher, "but hold on tight, and yell at your elephant a bit, it helps to calm them down." So I head off back down the stairs, lurching and yelling at my elephant and wondering what to use for a staff. I think about my grandfather's handmade walking stick, the one that's shaped like a shillelagh; it's the closest thing I have to "my own staff or wand." Then, whaddaya know, I see the walking stick lying on top of a mahogany railing! So I pick it up and head back up to start my philosophy career.

And that's where the dream ends. They are seldom very literary.

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.