Posts categorized “Dreams”

I didn’t get very much sleep last night—only about five hours. So this afternoon after doing some work and delivering it, I decided to relax by playing some Animal Crossing: City Folk.

I very quickly fell asleep. And, since it was what was on my mind when I fell asleep, I had a dream about Animal Crossing. For some reason, though, it was kind of a hybrid between animal crossing and The Legend of Zelda.

For instance: The game had a cartoony, “Minish Cap” style of art instead of the regular Animal Crossing style. Also, in the real Animal Crossing, you will periodically see big bugs clinging to the trunks of trees. In my dream there was a Peahat clinging to the side of a tree. It got startled when I got to near it and started (slowly) fluttering away towards the east side of town, where there’s a big cliff. When it reached the cliff it floated up to the top of it. Luckily, in my dream a mushroom-like dog lived at the top of the cliff and caught the Peahat, dropping it back down into town so I could catch it in my bug net.

My favorite part of the dream, though, was that there were Octoroks running around all over town. They were absolutely harmless, and you could catch them in your bug net if you wanted. They always traveled in groups. There would be a large one in the front and then four or five smaller ones would follow it around in a straight line. Then my dream people got absolutely stumped. What do you call a group of Octoroks?

Y’know how you call a group of geese a “gaggle” of geese, a group of fish a “school” of fish, a group of crows a “murder” of crows, a group of buzzards a “wake” of buzzards, etc.? Well, my dream people wracked their collective brains to try to come up with what to call a group of Octoroks.

What they came up with was a “shelf of note” of Octoroks. “Note” as in the sense of importance or consequence (as in, “Nothing of note happened”). So there were all these shelves of note of Octoroks running around my Animal Crossing town.

I thought that was so absolutely bizarre a choice that I had to wake up and write it down. At first, though, I only dreamed that I woke up and wrote it down. I had to catch myself and say, “Hey, you didn’t actually do that. You’re still asleep.” Then I woke up for real and, like Abraham Lincoln, wrote “Shelves of note of Octoroks” on the back of an envelope.

I don’t mean for this website to turn into just a chronicle of my dreams, but I keep on having such awexome ones that I have to write them down! Case in point: last night…

Jack Black of Tenacious D fame lived in the back of an Australian zoo/museum with his new bandmates. Meanwhile, a middle-aged couple were arrested by a SWAT team (in a scene very much like the one towards the end of Brazil) for living an “alternative lifestyle.” Upon reading about this in the newspaper, Jack Black became so enraged that he briefly transformed into his John K animated version and declared that he wasn’t gonna just sit there and let the government dictate how people lived their private lives. Except he swore an awful lot when he said it. 

Back to his non-cartoon version, Jack Black sued the government and went to court, giving an impassioned speech in front of a white-wigged judge to the effect that it should be illegal for any public government anywhere to legislate private morality.

He promptly lost the case.

Six months later, though, he re-sued on some technicality. The case dragged on for months, during which time an extremely agitated Jack Black continually berated the Judge and jury for being “the man” and being hypocrites, “because who doesn’t like to smoke a little now and then, y’know? Yeah, you know!” He singled out a librarian-looking, middle-aged woman in the jury and began doing his soft-talking seduction voice on her, trying to get her to admit that she smoked pot. She was absolutely aghast.

Eventually the general public caught wind of Jack Black’s courtroom shenanigans and totally got behind him, cheering for this buffoon to actually win! In the end, exhausted from having to deal with this idiot for so long, the Judge and jury actually gave in and ruled in Jack Black’s favor! The “alternative lifestyle” couple was set free!

I (a court reporter at this time) went down to the zoo, which was also partially a museum, and found Jack Black’s bandmates hanging out in an unlocked cage in an artificial cave watching some TV. I asked them where Jack Black was, and they said he was probably around somewhere, as he’d just gone to get a burrito.

I waited and he eventually did come back, munching on his burrito. He led me on a brief tour of the museum portion of the zoo, where he seriously orated his beliefs in the importance of preserving the environment, and how he wistfully longed for those turn-of-the-century days when Australia was a much wilder, freer place.

The funniest thing about the whole dream to me (aside from the half minute where Jack Black became a cartoon) was that it was never actually specified what the couple’s “alternative lifestyle” actually consisted of. Everybody in the dream seemed to know, but it was never actually said by anyone, so I have no idea what was so “alternative” about them!

I have to tell you about this dream I had last night. It was one of the craziest in recent memory. I didn’t actually dream it in order, but I’ll try to have it make more sense here:

Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor from the Superman movies, Danny DeVito from the Romancing the Stone movies, and Sandra Bernhardt from Hudson Hawk all teamed up to bring about an apocalypse. Their plan: to use two tiny, gold-filled barges in a small pond on the side of a hill to perform an arcane ritual during a lunar eclipse to summon Unicron. 

I’m completely serious.

My brother, Geoff, and I were all secret agents (who were staked out in the house I grew up in) who were supposed to stop this from happening. 

Unfortunately I was distracted by having to deal with an enraged (and strangely small at only about 10 feet tall) Optimus Prime, who had arrived on earth in his day-glo dune buggy and was driving it around the city like a maniac, looking for those who were in league with his arch-enemy Unicron.

I eventually got him to calm down some, but the time I wasted in dealing with him meant that the united villains had time to initiate the ritual! Mike & Geoff called me to tell me that they’d pinpointed the location where the ritual was taking place, so I hopped in my car and started driving north on the freeway to get there. I looked off to my left and saw the moon for just an instant before it was completely enveloped in black. Not just a lunar eclipse, this was unnatural, black-magic black. It was a portal! I had to hurry and stop the ritual before Unicron could cross through!

Suddenly, though, the black disc of the moon got all distorted and stretched out. I asked Geoff (over the car’s radio), “Is that supposed to happen?”

“Um… I don’t think so,” Geoff answered.

Pretty soon the moon suddenly blinked back to normal. Had the ritual succeeded or failed? I drove on, arriving at the side of the hill just after dawn.

Disguising myself as an elderly black gentleman, I secretly parked the car out of sight and climbed the hill, pretending to be merely out for a morning stroll. I soon came across the site of the ritual and saw what had prevented it from happening: there had been a small landslide that had filled half of the pond and buried one of the barges! We’d been lucky.

The villains’ henchmen, dressed in the red uniforms of the aliens from the V miniseries, were busy draining the rest of the pond and digging out the barge. One of them saw me and shooed me away with, “Hey, you’re not allowed to be here!”

“What’s going on?” I asked in my elderly black gentleman voice.

“We’re just cleaning up a landslide,” the henchman said. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

I glanced down the hill towards the pond where I saw the three main movie villains all acting very upset. Sandra Bernhardt was so upset that she was drinking the bottle of Champagne that they’d planned on saving until after they’d summoned Unicron.

I made my way back down to the bottom of the hill and was confronted by a confused but unreasonably attractive young Japanese woman who wanted to know what was going on. I kind of hit on her while telling her that it was just some forest workers cleaning up a landslide. She giggled and thought I was a charming old man. Something seemed suspicious, though; she seemed very out of place.

I excused myself and made my way back to the car and drove back to the house where Mike and Geoff were. For some reason they were making elaborate, extremely risky plans to retrieve the gold barges. But I got the sense that they didn’t want to retrieve the barges to stop the ritual, but because they wanted the gold! They’d gone all greedy! And I was certain the plans they were making were going to compromise all three of us (if they hadn’t already), so I quickly gathered my things and slipped out of the house through the backyard.

That night the trio of villains had cleaned up the hillside and pond and were ready to try again. There was a funny scene where they all waded into the pond up to their waists except for Danny DeVito, who was so short that the water came up to his chin and he had to tilt his head back to keep from getting water in his mouth. They stood in between the two barges. Gene Hackman kept on having to shove them apart because they kept on drifting together, threatening to crush the trio.

They looked up to the moon and started calling out things like, “O Unicron, great and powerful! We implore that you hear us!”

After doing this for a while Gene Hackman and Sandra Bernhardt got bored and waded ashore, but they told Danny DeVito that he had to stay in the pond for the ritual to work. Sandra Bernhardt started drinking more Champagne. Danny DeVito was upset, especially when as a side effect of the ritual the pond water started to rise! There was even wacky background music as Danny DeVito struggled to stay afloat and keep the barges from crushing him!

At some point I had a conversation with Optimus Prime in which we realized that even if we stopped the ritual this time, someone might try again and succeed later in the future. The only way to be sure was to destroy Unicron completely. At that, my dream cut to a scene of a Unicron-sized Optimus Prime grappling with Unicron.

What was the ultimate outcome? I have no idea. I’d like to assume that Optimus Prime won, but my dream ended with Danny DeVito still struggling in the pond while Sandra Bernhardt drank Champagne with Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. So I guess I’ll never actually know.

A few nights ago I had a tornado dream! Hooray! I ♥ (heart) tornado dreams.

There were a bunch of small, duplex-like white buildings to my right (east), and a broad sidewalk ran parallel to them. Off to the left (west) was a large, flat, grassy plain that continued on to the west for a few miles, eventually meeting up with some low mountains. All of these features (buildings included) continued north and south as far as I could tell.

Several people I know (including me) were walking south along this broad sidewalk. It was rather crowded, with various unknown people walking in both directions. The sky was an intimidating gray. I happened to look off to my left and said, “Oh, hey, look; that looks like about an F-4 to me.”

Indeed, a quarter-mile-wide tornado was silently plowing its way south through the plains to the west. Nobody seemed very concerned, though—there was nothing over there it could actually damage, and it wasn’t heading in our direction, just going steadily south at barely more than walking speed. So we all just kinda watched it like you’d watch a pretty sunset as we continued walking on.

Eventually the fact that I’ve been playing a lot of Super Mario Galaxy became apparent: a bunch of tiny (18″ wide), blue, rope-like tornadoes began to appear on the sidewalk and slowly move back and forth across the width of it so that all of the people had to maneuver their way around them.

After we got past a couple of them I guess my dream people ran out of ideas for the dream, because that’s pretty much all that happened.

I just discovered that if you type “Samus Aran” into Google, my site is the 2nd listed! holy crap! Just because I wrote a humorous article about the endings of the various Metroid games… like three years ago! Take a wook:

So, if anybody wants to know anything about Samus Aran, it’s either Wikipedia or me!

Anyway, let me tell you about a dream I had a couple of nights ago. It involved Carrie, Me, and my whole family going on vacation together. First off we went to one of the San Juan Islands, which was historically famous for having the first-ever freeway onramp in America. It was also famous for having the first-ever comic strip written about a freeway onramp (my dream people actually showed me a closeup of the comic strip, and it was drawn in a glorious 60s-futurism style. Very cool).

After the excitement of the freeway onramp, which was strangely high-tech, we all headed to the area between Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens, which (you might not be aware) is a large desert basin that stretches for miles and miles, ringed with rocky hills.

While we were wandering around the cartoon-style sand dunes in this desert, all of a sudden Mt. Rainier erupted. It wasn’t an all-ash eruption like St. Helens in 1980. It was more of a single, quick, but very large explosion. Very fiery and red. It wasn’t at all scary. It was just kind of like, hey, look: Rainier finally erupted. huh.

A few moments after rainier erupted we all saw the shockwave from the blast as it caused the desert floor to swell up like a big wave (which we all calmly and un-eventfully rode out). We all stood there and watched as the shockwave traveled south across the desert, until it disappeared in the distance. Then a couple of seconds later we saw Mt. St. Helens erupt in a big cloud of ash. We all kinda nodded knowingly, like, “Yep, the Rainier eruption caused a huge earthquake, and once it reached St. Helens of course it erupted.”

Then the aftershocks started hitting, and the whole desert was going up and down in waves. Then one of the waves actually broke like an ocean wave—it broke right over Susan’s head, burying her in the sand! She was easy to find, though, because when the wave settled down there was a susan-shaped mound in the sand. She was just a couple of feet down, and it took me only a second of non-worried digging to get her out.

The whole family then decided to head somewhere else, but I woke up before we actually got anywhere.

Yesterday (Wednesday) when I went to work I found a birthday present on my desk: a robotic bank and some candy! After work I picked up Carrie for lunch and made Mandarin chicken. I took Carrie back to work and headed straight to SafeWay to buy some burgers and buns.

It was an exceptionally nice day, so the two of us sat out on the front porch for much of the late afternoon. I played Kirby Squeak Squad (birthday gift from Kevin) on my DS and Carrie played some backgammon on the MacBook.

Originally we were gonna barbeque with the Tarbet clan, but they all got the sick, so Carrie & I just barbequed out on the front porch. Well, Carrie barbequed on the front porch; I got really sleepy and took a nap. The burgers were very tasty.

In the evening was an hours-long Ghost Hunters marathon. So we watched that and did some rudimentary cleaning during the commercials, like laundry and going through the mail that had piled up on the chair.

At 11:00 I made Carrie a root beer float and for myself made a bowl of ice cream into which I crumbled a lemon cupcake (with chocolate frosting). In bed I worked on a movie review—look for it soon! I had a heck of a time falling asleep, though! I was up ’til all hours. ALL.

When I finally did fall asleep, my dreams were basically a combination of Ghost Hunters and Castlevania. Like as if the Ghost Hunters team were investigating Castlevania.

Okay, I’ve been having crazily vivid dreams all week long. So I’m gonna have to write them down now just so as not to forget about them.

This most recent one happened between 8:00 and 10:00 this morning. For some reason I was following the characters “Spinner” and “Toby” from the TeleVision show Degrassi The Next Generation. Degrassi the school existed about where the real Stadium High School exists. Well, it seems these two characters had been vaulting a fence near the school (in fact within sight of the school) and going to a marijuana den. Having followed them there and realizing what was going on, I attempted to vault the fence back outta there.

However, just then the owners of the property, a middle-aged couple, came walking back towards the property. I couldn’t hide in time and they spotted me in their front yard (which had some walls within it for no reason). I lamely excused my presence by saying that I thought my dog had pooped somewhere in the yard, and I was looking for it so I could clean it up. I don’t think they believed me, but they turned out to be incredibly pleasant and apparently saw that I was a trustworthy sort of fellow, so they began showing me around.

They first spread their arms wide, encompassing the whole front yard, and said, “This is the front garden.” I noticed that off to the left a Polynesian-looking gardener was eying me suspiciously and dragging some cargo netting across an opening in some shrubbery that looked like it led to another garden area, no doubt where the pot plants were.

The woman, who now looked suspiciously like my capoeira instructor, continued the tour, walking right past and completely ignoring the pot den. She instead brought me to the edge of the hill that looked down onto Puget Sound. Their property dipped all the way to the edge of the water, and they’d built a fake beach down there (a tiny one). It was gorgeous. She brought me around to the other side where a wide, gentle stream emptied into the sound and was framed by stately, lazy willows bathed in golden sunlight. Even more beautiful! They were in the process of creating another beach just where the stream met the sound. As we were talking, the gardener re-appeared, eyed me suspiciously, got on a jet ski and sped off.

There were two out-buildings up on the hill overlooking these breathtaking vistas, and I inquired about them. The husband re-appeared and showed me the outsides of these. The first one was decorated Polynesian-style, and had a rather long staircase lead up to a small coffee bar with tons of flavored syrups up there. He said it wasn’t done yet, but that it was indeed going to be a coffee bar.

The second building was more old-west in style, and had a sign that said something about it being a bank. It even had a fake counter in front. The wife then took back over and led me around the corner from the counter, where the building had a wide and tall opening and I was able to see that it was actually an enormous two-story library. I expressed my admiration. The wife jokingly said how when they’d visited their daughter at college they found it so strange that all of the daughter’s books fit on one bookshelf. This was a lifetime of collecting books. She informed me that I could borrow anything I liked.

I found a sci-fi and fantasy section right by the door, but all it had were dozens of anthology books of Asimov’s and Clarke’s stories. I asked if they had any more anywhere else, and she said they might have more upstairs. So we went upstairs, which was packed with people. Evidently they were having some sort of a party. I quickly glanced through many of the shelves but didn’t find any more sci-fi books. I did, however, look out all of the windows, which looked out through the golden willows at the lazy stream. Breathtaking.

The woman came back a couple of minutes later with a book for me (something with “Mice” in the title, though I can’t remember specifically). She said she thought I’d enjoy it, and checked it out for me. I opened the front cover and, indeed, the return date was stamped on a card on the inside there, just like in a real library.

She went into a door and started down a long staircase that (I believe) went to an exit door at one of the two beaches I’d seen earlier. I thumbed though the book for a minute and then decided I might as well follow her.

When I got to the stairway doorway, however, I discovered that she was stopped about halfway down by my brother, who was asking her some questions about where some certain books were or something. She said he was welcome to look around, but that she didn’t have time to show him herself. My brother then stated that it was very important that she answer, because this was a “police matter.” I looked up and noticed that there was a man wearing a dark trenchcoat and a fedora standing on a balcony, menacingly overlooking my brother and the woman.

I backed away from the door and nonchalantly began reading the book, pretending that I hadn’t heard. Evidently my brother was a DEA agent sent to bust the pot-growing operation on the property. I thought I had plausible deniability—I could plead ignorant about knowing there was pot on the premises. I thought that I should probably come up with a better excuse than my dog took a dump in their lawn, especially since I don’t actually have a dog…

At this point I decided that, as nice as this couple had been to me, that if the law was gonna crack down on them then I needed to just leave before the shit hit the fan. So I went up and returned the book at the counter. The girl there seemed confused by the fact that it was just checked out moments before, but accepted it nonetheless. As I turned around to walk away I heard someone else say, “That was fast.”

At this point my alarm went off, but I so wanted to see what happened next that I told it to go off in another fifteen minutes or so and went back to sleep.

Continuing: I figured for some reason that it wouldn’t be safe to just try to walk out the front door. No doubt there was a swat team waiting to arrest all of the people leaving the pot den, or something. Fortunately on the roof of the library there was a gigantic hover disc.

Now here’s where the dream started to break down. There was some sort of indistinct action scene involving me vs my brother, and in the end I ended up getting injured. My ribs, I think, and there was blood involved. The problem was I didn’t know exactly what had happened because my dream people skipped right over all of the details. All I knew was there was I had had to hide next to the Polynesian-looking outbuilding from the fedora-wearing detectives and now I was hurt. So my solution was to climb back up the outside of the library to get one of the flying discs (now there were several, and they weren’t any bigger than a manhole cover). I used it to fly myself to the hospital, which was conveniently just around the corner. My dream people started to try to initiate a chase sequence a-la that scene in The Incredibles where the people in those discs are chasing Dash around. But they decided it wasn’t a good idea or something, because it was quickly dropped and I made my way to the hospital with little incident (all that happened was I had to figure out that you had to tilt the hover disc in the opposite direction that you wanted it to go; very counter-intuitive).

At this point I woke up again, and grudgingly decided to wake up. My dream was no longer taking place at the completely awesome property that my dream people had designed, and I had escaped from the DEA agents, so there seemed little point in continuing.