Dream 6

Oh, goodness. I mean, I have all sorts of dreams all the time, but fortunately (or unfortunately) they've been more tame the last few years. Granted, most nights, they're pretty cool. On occasion, they're awesome. But then, every once in a while, I get the most bizarre things, sometimes disturbing things. And although it didn't start out that way, this dream certainly became one of those.

Dream 6: A Sharp Staff Picture, night of 18-19 August 2010

I am approaching the bottom of a grand staircase in slow motion. There's no one around yet, but there's a voice from my past encouraging me, "If you want to affect the way the world sees these things, go do it. You can be that kid who makes the difference." It is clear that this voice is a father figure, though he's a mixture of two roughly equal parts... one of my actual father and one of every other male I've ever looked up to.

Whatever exactly my "father" was alluding to, I'm here now. A new beginning. There's a great hallway behind the staircase and many rooms on either side. An ornate wooden door with shiny, brass handles is at the bottom of the staircase, sort of behind me, but not quite.

I ascend slowly to the top of the staircase and retrieve a large, ovoid mirror, about 2 metres high, 3 metres wide, and at least 30 centimetres thick. The mirror's edges are rather jagged and its back is weathered rock. It's as though someone took a roundish boulder, somehow made a clean, flat cut through it, and stuck the glass on the flat part. How I can lift this monstrosity, never mind why I'm doing so, is beyond me.

As I move the mirror into its position about a third of the way down the staircase, people start filing in. Another young man in a suit and tie, about my age and stature, but a few inches taller, is nearby. He calls out to one of the faceless others, "Hurry up; you'll miss the staff picture!"

I assume my place in front of the giant inexplicable mirror. The others fill in the remainder of the staircase. I am halfway to my right of center, with only the young man in the suit between me and the plated railing on my right.

Then the President comes in. Roughly equal parts George W. Bush and Barack Obama in both appearance and personality, but that's unimportant. He smiles, makes some small talk with the others, then comes to me, shakes my hand, and situates himself at my immediate left, directly in front of the giant mirror.

The photographer at the bottom of the staircase sets up his shot, and it's only as he's ready to take the picture that I notice I'm a bit squished between the President and the young man in the suit. And then I realize my face is being squeezed from both sides. Not squeezed out of the picture, no. Just squeezed. As though the President and the young man in the suit were playing some sort of practical joke on my visage. Except they weren't.

Somehow that all ends and everyone files back to their offices to resume their normal duties. Someone else takes the mirror back to wherever it was before. As I make my way back down the staircase, it shifts from mid-afternoon to some time in the middle of the night. Everyone else is sleeping but me.

A faint streetlight outside the front door is the only light entering the spacious anteroom. I lock the door, but just as I turn away from it, there's a knock. I look through the marbled glass into the darkness and can just barely make out the silhouette of a familiar face. I let him in and relock the door behind him.

"Good evening, Mister Prime Minister. How are you tonight?"

"Oh, hello. I'm just fine." Then a pause and a smile. "Did I miss the staff picture?" We start chatting amicably and jovially about policy or whatnot.

This jolly, old chap is, at least in appearance, roughly equal parts Benjamin Franklin, Nick Clegg, and Robert Gibbs in a top hat. There's not really a well-developed personality to speak of, except I already knew from prior experience that I like the guy and that we got along quite well.

Before I know it, we've spoken for several minutes and the Prime Minister decides he'd better depart. I turn to face the staircase and he disappears into a large room to its right.

But instead of ascending the staircase to where I belong, I sit down for a while. The door immediately behind me and the staircase directly in front of me, I just think. My legs are crossed, "Indian style" like they teach you in kindergarten.

I soon discover that, somehow, I am floating some distance above the floor. As if I were sitting in a chair with my legs crossed, but the chair is not beneath me. A small puppy briefly passes underneath me.

"Hello, there, Beverly."

Beverly just scurries off silently into the pitch blackness, into the distant reaches of the building.

Facing the staircase, I'm presented with a list. Boldface Roman type, numbered from the bottom upwards, alternating white and pinkish-tan rows. Two columns: a song, and a key in which to sing it. Almost like a track list of sorts.

Suddenly, I start vocalizing. But these were not songs. More like wails. Think Moaning Myrtle, but twice as loud and thrice as demonically creepy. Each "song" is only a few seconds and a few words long, and while it may start on a "note" of sorts, the very nature of wailing greatly distorts the eventual final pitch.

Basically, I'm screaming beyond the top of my lungs.

The process soon becomes entirely involuntary. My voice becomes raspy and the "lyrics" become increasingly random. One "song" is a simple plea for Beverly's return. Another states that it's not dinnertime.

And, every four or five, there would, quizzically be a "song" called "A-Sharp" to be sung in the key of A-sharp. It was always prefaced by a brief pause, but once it started it was far louder than the rest, and the only words were "A-sharp." Often, but not always, this was followed by a slightly softer, but still obnoxious song listed as "B-Double-Sharp," again with titular lyrics, but to be sung in G-sharp, even though it only sounded a single semitone lower when it came out.

Though I was still floating, this semi-paralytic process continued for some time. I physically couldn't do anything else. I probably came back to "A-Sharp" three or four times before I felt a pair of hands abruptly squeezing my neck.

I was only able to glance up for an instant. The darkness obscured the Prime Minister's face as he swiftly grabbed a blunt object and hit me twice in the head. I fell to the ground.

* * *

I awoke from this dream at 04:48 EDT and could not move for several seconds thereafter. The chorus of wails was still resounding in my head, "A-Sharp" being by far the most prominent. Once I came to, since I am a geek, my curiosity was naturally piqued. After having checked the time, I reached for a nearby pitch reference. Eerily enough, the original A-sharp itself was perfectly in tune.

Dream 5

Great. I kept putting off posts. Posts about my recent trip to Pittsburgh and daytrip to Linesville, baccalaureate and graduation ceremonies for the Class of 2007, and International Spam Remembrance Day ©. We're in a transitional phase Internet-wise at this house, one that is hard to describe succinctly, but I couldn't get online easily to write about this stuff, telling myself, "Oh, I'll do it Saturday. Saturday will be better."

While all of that stuff remains somewhat important to me, and will hopefully be blogged about soon, it has all been preempted by this dream I had, one year to the night after my own high school graduation. The details of the things in the dream were quite realistic, even if they were fraught with inconsistencies and were often nothing like the actual version. Nevertheless, it felt very real, and as such, I don't want to have this dream again.

And so, it is with utmost regret (although not really), that I continue my dream series:

Dream 5: Tower of Terror, night of 08-09 June 2007

It was early on a partly-cloudy summer day in mid-July, 2007. I don't know why, but my family was in Pittsburgh. Well, my mother, my brother, and I were. Dad was elsewhere. For some reason, Laurel was with us.

We pulled off of one of the local highways, and there was a sizeable parking lot. We had to park near the road, farther away from the complex. On the other side of the road was nothing but trees. In retrospect, it was set up much like the Millcreek Mall back before they started building on the other side of the road.

The four of us gathered my stuff, and even though the highway wasn't busy, and our part of the parking lot was nearly empty, we proceeded to cross somewhat busy traffic as we got closer to the complex. Mom was familiar with this area, as was I. David stayed close to Mom (although, being David, not too close), and as Laurel lagged behind, carrying most of the baggage for whatever reason, I helped her get across safely.

We walked straight into a complex at street level. The inside was quite yellowish. There was an office immediately to the right, so we turned left with our luggage. After walking a distance we veered to the right a little bit, up a broad tile ramp marked "C." Yes, the office was Panther Central, and these were the Litchfield Towers, my home for the coming year. As it was July, though, we were just there to quickly check out my future room (which, by the way, would be impossible in real life).

We made our way to the Tower C lobby, and found the elevators, which were on the outer ring of the tower rather than the inner part. Actually, the tower switched from circular to rectangular a few times, but whatever.

There was an elevator waiting for us. It was one of those "express" ones. Cool. Mom and David got in and pushed the button, while I stayed back slightly, calling at an encumbered Laurel. Eventually the elevator started dinging, so we couldn't wait any longer for Laurel. I called out "six-two-zero" to her (interestingly not my real room number), so she could catch another elevator and find us easily. Lucky for her.

I quickly looked at the console in the yellowish elevator. Yes, 6 was selected, but so were 12, 15, and 18 (note that Tower C has 16 floors). I initially looked at David, but Mom ensured me that they had been that way when she and David first got in (which makes you wonder why the elevator was waiting for us). All the while, the elevator is dinging away, telling us it's about to go.

And then it just went. The door didn't close or anything, it just started moving up. The elevator dinged for 2, 3, 4... and we could see into every floor (though express elevators don't even have a door on those other floors). It also wasn't quite moving straight up and down, but rather at a slight diagonal. Even though the elevator floor was always level and parallel to the regular floors, it was as though the elevator shaft itself was diagonal, and we were somehow being pulled in that direction.

When we finally got to 6, the three of us were so taken aback by all of this that we didn't move. What if, while we started to get out, it decided to just start moving again, crushing someone in the process? After all, all those other buttons were pressed. We decided to wait until the twelfth floor to exit with a more coordinated, collective, and determined effort to get out of that elevator quickly. Then we'd catch another one back down.

After a pause, the elevator began to move up again, toward the twelfth floor. Somewhere in here, a door came into existence, and when the elevator finally got to 12, the door opened vertically from bottom to top, like some of those doors in Star Wars or Star Trek or some other space-age thing.

Another surprise. Again, we were frozen with shock, and after a while, the door closed, and we were moving up yet again (although really, we probably would've been so freaked out by this point that we'd have run screaming the first chance we got).

Even though earlier, there had been an "18" button, we arrived at the fifteenth floor, the last stop for the express elevator (at other points in the dream, the tower had up to 25 floors, and there were buttons to prove it). Again opens the freaky space-age door in a building with which we aren't yet familiar. Again we go with the totally awkward and irrational response of staying put. I guess our thought was, "Let's just take this elevator back down to safety at the ground level, alert the building management, and then catch one that isn't so... weird."

So I pushed the "L" button, and when the door closed, our freaky yellowish elevator started heading back down the shaft. I looked up at the little electronic sign that counted the floors. Fourteen, thirteen, twelve, .... Then I realized my mother was gone. That was unsettling, but at least we were headed to safety. Nine, eight, seven, .... "It's clicking away a bit faster, don't you think, David? .... David?"

Great. I was alone in this freaky elevator that was gaining speed down a diagonal shaft along the circumference of a circular tower... if you can imagine that, because my brain sure had a fun time doing it.

The elevator passed through the familiar "4, 3, 2, 1," then proceeded to the awkward "0," and then the unfamiliar "M, B, L, R, F, 39, W4, U, ..." I thought I was going mad, and all the while, the elevator was gaining speed. I looked at the console, and of course saw the inscription, "Elevator No. 13."

I was practically in a free-fall (although that's pretty hard in a diagonal shaft), and the electronic sign now housed an unfamiliar blur of letters and numbers. I knelt down to the emergency call box, which wasn't working. Neither was the stop button. My only hope was to push all of the regular buttons, and hope that the sign would eventually pick one of those numbers and stop, giving me enough time to get out... anywhere. It didn't matter where. Just so long as it was far, far away from this elevator.

I looked up at the console only to find two buttons: three and nine. The centripetal force from whirling diagonally around a circular tower was becoming sickeningly unbearable. I reached, with great difficulty, for the lone two buttons in desperation, and pushed them... then I sat back down, curled up into a corner, braced for impact, and prayed.

I awoke in that very fetal position, curled up in the corner of a yellowish elevator, stopped, door open (horizontally). All the buttons were there, and the sign read "6." Laurel beckoned from the hallway, "Come on; get out. We've been waiting for you. Don't you want to see your room?"

I collected my bag and walked out shaken, but not stirred. Immediately across from the elevator, the first thing I saw was a room which had my mother and brother in it. The number? 620. My room.

It was nothing like a Tower C room is in real life. It was about the size and setup of a standard hotel room with the bathroom on the left. The two beds were miniature, though, placed in front of a grand wardrobe with a mirror in the center. The chair and lamp often found by the window were a couch, and the TV stand and desk were an actual full-size bed. Everything was upholstered or covered with varying fabrics of abstract "jazzy" new-age patterns. The mini-beds were blue, the real bed was pastel yellow, pink, and green, and the couch was turquoise, purple, and red-orange.

The walls, of course, were yellowish. The bathroom was shared with the adjoining room, room 699; I wouldn't meet its tenant for another month or so. But this was going to be home, and I would get used to it. I'd just be taking the stairs.

* * *

So apparently, my dream-self daydreams quite a bit. And when he does so, he has a lot of nightmares "day"-mares. He must have slipped into daydream mode when he was heading up that ramp to Tower C, because apparently everyone got in the elevator okay.

I awoke from this dream at about 06:40 this morning, and was unable to get back to sleep until I wrote about it, effectively getting it out of my system. My mother has since told me that she dreamed about being stuck on a bus last night, and when I mentioned that she disappeared from the elevator in my dream, she posited that that was when she left for the bus in her dream. I wonder what David was dreaming then...

Here's hoping that later today I can actually post some of the things I was meaning to write about. And here's also hoping that that dream is never going to recur.

Random tangent: As I was finishing up writing this, all I could think of was "Darkness and the Elevator," even though everything in my dream was well-lit... albeit yellowishly lit. Maybe I should take over the writing of that, since my brain seems to have done a good job on its own.

Dream 4

For the third time, I will get back to posting about my life shortly. And I mean it this time.

However, I've been putting off this continuation of the dream series for quite some time now. Much of this post has been sitting on Blogger's servers as a draft for nearly two months. It barely counts as a dream worth blogging about, but it will ultimately serve to explain something about me that tends to bug people (and frankly, I don't see why).

Dream 4: Why twenty-four?, evening of 05 February 2007

It had been a very tiring Monday, so I lay down to relax for a while. And then, somewhere, in that state between wakefulness and slumber...

It was my PHYS class. Apparently, we were all on a field trip with my professor, climbing the mountains of India. Which I guess means we were in northern India, seeing that most of it isn't all that mountainous.

And so there we were, a large bunch of us, hanging from a rope, walking up this mountain thing. Since I was only half-asleep, everything seemed extremely exaggerated, almost cartoon-like. So of course, for whatever reason, we can no longer go up the mountain via this rope.

Obviously it didn't break, or we would've fallen. Maybe we felt the rope give a little bit? I don't know. Whatever it was, that's not the point.

Even though our course material is on electricity and magnetism, our professor proceeded to go into Physics I teaching mode. She started talking about why there's too much tension in the rope and how to calculate the speed with which we would hit the ground should we let go or should the rope give completely. Remember, I'm having this dream in February, back when I didn't care for this professor at all, so after a while, there was a general uproar from the handful of students behind her, basically imploring her to quit lecturing and help us get out of this mess. And she did, all while continuing to help us conceptually grasp why we were to do as we were told.

"If you cry, the tears going down your face will lower your center of mass!"

"Stop wriggling; you're causing too much torque!"

And so on. It was quite annoying.

Somehow, we were able to finally reach the top of the mountain (which apparently wasn't all that far away)...

...Then I woke up. I rolled over and looked at my clock; it said 11:15. Crap. My PHYS lecture starts at 11:00 on Tuesdays. I panic slightly, get dressed, and gather my belongings in about 45 seconds flat. Then as I was heading out the door, I noticed something peculiar.

It was dark outside. It was actually 23:15, still Monday night.

And this is why I prefer using a 24-hour time system.

Random tangent: In case you haven't heard, Pitt has no Easter break. I know, it sucks, but I went home last weekend and celebrated slightly with my family (by playing Yahtzee with my parents). Besides, I already have my Easter candy down here. And on top of that, I've been loving the recent weather. Everyone looks so happy! Spring is here at last! Or at least it was before the slight flurries we had this evening. But still, it's been nice seeing people lazing about on the lawns in front of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial or behind the Petersen Events Center, and just generally having smiles plastered on their faces. It's quite refreshing, at least emotionally if nothing else.

Dream 3

It's been ages since I've posted a dream, and this one is probably the weirdest and most far fetched yet. And the best part is, this isn't the first time I've had this one. I distinctly remember having this dream at least once before, although it was before this blog existed, so I'll write about it now.

Dream 3: A Fishy Plan, night of 01-02 December 2006

So there were these fish. Four of them, I think; all different types. And this whole thing was sort of told from their point-of-view. So swim, swim, swim they go.

It's nighttime, and a sort of wintry day (although underwater, what does that matter?). And these fish decided that they were a little bit hungry, so what did they do? They went to a local fast-food restaurant of course. Sadly, however, this restaurant, although it was sort of reddish in color, was not a Wendy's, so these fish could not "eat great, even late" as they had hoped, because the restaurant was already closed.

So the swam, swam, swam some more, and they find the sub-basement of this restaurant (not the basement, below that). And because these fish are apparently stupid fish, they decide to go in, swimming through some sort of crack.

The structure of the sub-basement is awkward. It's completely circular, obviously filled with water, and the restaurant rests on a single round beam in the center. So the fish are free to swim around and around the donut-shaped expanse surrounding the support. And that's exactly what they do.

Then the little fish finds a stairwell leading up to the next level. As for why it's a stairwell, I don't know. It's not like the fish are going to stop swimming and sink to the bottom so they can physically walk up the stairs. But alas, the stairs are there. It's just one of the many anomalies one can find in my weirder dreams.

Mind you, these fish are really hungry. So of course they decide to go up the stairwell.

Bad idea.

The owner of the restaurant is there with a sort of sinister grin on his face. Rather than just saying "I caught ya" and turning them in for breaking and entering, he has other plans for these fishies (and it's not to fry them; they don't serve fish at that place anyway).

No, he scoops them up and keeps them confined overnight. Then in the morning, the fish awoke to find themselves being watched by hundreds of people (apparently, the tide went out and the restaurant was now above the water). The restaurateur then reveals his elaborate scheme.

The fish were now in a sizable container, and there were three more areas separating them from the rest of the lake. They were desperate to get out to see their families... and perhaps to eat, because they never did get that late-night meal they were craving.

In order to advance to the next area, the fish had to complete a task. In most cases, it was something like biting through a net. But the last area had a concrete wall at the end. And the fish had to win a game of Battleship for the concrete wall to open, leading them to the vast lake on the other side.

Meanwhile, a second concrete wall would constantly be closing in behind them. If the fish didn't complete the last task in time, they would simply be squished against the other wall and die. But that wasn't all.

In the basement of the restaurant, just above the new water level, the restaurant owner held captive all of the Olympic swimmers from the Western Hemisphere. How he got them, nobody knew. But that's not the point. The point was that their fate was directly tied to the performance of the fish.

As the concrete wall closed in on the fish, the water displaced would fill up the cell in which the swimmers were held. And at the moment the fishies would get squished, the cell would be completely full of water and even though they were the best swimmers in the hemisphere, the swimmers would drown. Of course, at this point, the "camera" of my mind immediately panned to the swimmers, who were frantically panicking for their lives.

Well, to make a long story short, the fish ended up completing all the tasks and winning Battleship with just a few short moments left. By opening the second concrete wall, the water in the cell rushed back out into the lake, and the swimmers were subsequently released. The restaurateur lamented the demise of his master plan. Not that he wouldn't be able to try again, because he wasn't arrested, despite the spectacle he made of the whole thing.

And the four fish were thereafter lauded as heroes, and of course they lived happily ever after, but they became ever wary of fast-food restaurants at night.

Random tangent: Didn't my last dream have something to do with tartar sauce? What a coincidence that is.

Dream 2

Finally, I have time to post this dream, which I had well over a month ago. It really struck me as quite weird. I mean, honestly, how does my brain come up with these things? So, continuing my Dream Series:

Dream 2: Throwing Tartar Sauce, night of 07-08 March 2006

This dream was set in late February, over the course of one school day. Apparently, I had first-period gym, and I don't even have gym this year. But anyways, being February, it was really cold outside (frigid, actually), but our gym teacher wanted to go outside. Instead of putting on the standard gym T-shirt and shorts, I donned a standard gym sweatshirt and sweatpants (which don't exist). But, no. Our teacher insisted that we wear the lighter uniform. I refused, and thus was turned in for one day detention for insubordination (which is actually 3 days ISS).

But that wasn't all.

At lunch, they were serving those breaded chicken patties that you could easily get confused for a fish fillet sandwich. Anyways, I was eating my lunch when all of a sudden the principal comes up to me and says, "What do you think you're doing?" I have no clue what he's talking about, and I express this.

"That tartar sauce. You just threw a packet of tartar sauce."

First of all, the cafeteria wasn't serving fish, so they wouldn't have put out tartar sauce. Secondly, our school doesn't have packets of tartar sauce; you squeeze it out of a bottle. Lastly, I despise tartar sauce, and even if I had been eating fish and it had come in packets, you wouldn't catch me dead with it.

So, despite the fact that I had not thrown the tartar sauce, I got two days detention for it.

It must have been a slow day in the school office because I got my detention slip back later that day, and they even took the time to condense the two infractions into one slip. When I went to look at the bottom of the slip to see the dates I was to serve, my dormant mind produced the first dates it could, and they appeared in red pen: "3/25, 3/26, 3/27."

How convenient! The last three days of the Florida trip (including a Saturday and a Sunday)! Oh, well. Just before I woke up, the dream quickly skipped ahead to after the trip. Apparently, they weren't going to make me make up the days after all.

Whoopee.

Dream 1

I had a rather weird dream last Tuesday night. As such, I decided to tell you about it, and make a sort of series out of this and future dreams that strike me as interesting. So here we go:

Dream 1: Holiday Welcome Mat, night of 13-14 December 2005

Well, first of all, this dream was set in the present. One night, probably about 23:00, in this dream, I was walking down my road, talking to myself (which I actually do a lot...it helps me sort things out) . There was not a flake of snow on the ground and it was clearly December, as there was a Christmas tree visible through my neighbor's window.

Well, apparently my neighbor from across the street (who is a junior) overheard what I was saying to myself, because he was sitting on his porch (which he doesn't even really have).

The next morning, he came over to visit me (which he never does, nor I to him). Interestingly enough, both of our houses were abnormally larger than they actually are. As a mentioned earlier, he had a front porch, which he doesn't really have. Also, instead of a downward-sloping hill in my backyard, I had an upward-sloping hill in my frontyard, so that my house was above the street by a good four or five feet.

Anyways, my neighbor came over and stepped on our holiday welcome mat. Some sort of festive word of about five letters was printed in the middle of the mat...maybe "jolly." He saw this, excused himself, and he ran across the street back to his house. He came back with a nearly identical welcome mat, except the festive word printed in the middle had about eleven or twelve letters all squished together. We laughed (I don't know why).

I invited him into my house, which looked completely different on the inside, like one that you might find in Better Homes & Gardens magazine. We talked for a while, and I realized that he came over because he overheard me talking about my problems. It turned out that he had similar problems, and thought that if we were friends, we could work on them together.

After a while, he had to leave, but he promised to come back again, and that our friendship would last. As he left, my attention somehow was drawn to a large painting of a green apple on a sky blue background that was hanging to the left of the entryway. It was a Van Gogh.