Dream from 6.28.11 - The Sushi of Luck

In my dream that night, there was something called the Sushi of Luck. It was two rolls of sushi, piece of fish wrapped in rice wrapped in seaweed. In one, the fish was pink, in the other, blue. A samurai ate one right before he slit his own throat, and as a result of the Sushi of Luck, the gash in his neck closed back up and he came back to life. This was beside a large creek or small river. There was snow on the ground.

Question from my friend Justin (a filmmaker): 

That's pretty cool. At least in this dream, everything is stylisticly consistent, right?

Answer: 

It was initially vaguely supernatural samurai film/fable. Then it was eventually something that involved a modern college dorm that was in Westeros (the world for Game of Thrones), and then there were some Russian Cossacks hiding behind some small hills with their big fur hats. All of this involved snow. So I guess that's consistent.

Dream from 9.30.11

I dreamt that Greg Rucka (the writer, and a very good one, if you haven't heard of him) lent me his car. I had a rental, but he said go ahead, his was better, just get it back when I was done. I left my rental parked in the parking lot of some roadside diner or some sort of eating place, that was outside of town, and took his car. It had a good radio.

Just down the hill from where I parked the rental, in a small prairie beside the road, with trees on either side, I saw an Amish woman. When I say the prairie was "down the hill from where I parked," I mean that it was far enough down that the parking lot was out of sight, but was still on the same hill, which was pretty big. A Pittsburgh hill.

After a moment, I noticed her daughter was with her. They both wore traditional dress, and stood quietly, hand in hand. Their backs were to me, and I could see the woman's blonde hair peeking out past her bonnet, blown about by the wind, just like the tall, yellow prairie grass. They were looking across at a distant road on the other side of the prairie, and I could faintly hear some cars drive past over there, beside some woods. I could not see the woman's face, but I knew she was very beautiful.

After I was done with whatever it was (it may have involved a sorceress, and sneaking in and sneaking out of her fortress with some information while she thought I was a minion, and a very close call it was too, or it may have involved driving cross-country to a conference in New York City), I went back to Rucka's, and we talked for a bit. My friend Dave R. was there for a while as well. We listened to some music. Possibly Rush. Possibly Jackson Browne. I thought to myself that Rucka had good taste in music.

Later, I drove home, and when I was almost there, I realized I was still driving Rucka's car. I turned around to bring it back, but then realized I needed to get the rental car as well, but I couldn't remember where I had parked it. I spent a while searching for it, still driving in Rucka's car.

Dream from Way Back in the Nineties

I was in a house, standing at the entrance to a room. Not a door, just an open throughway between rooms. And as I'm standing there, I look down, and I notice cracks are starting to form in the floor right at the edge of the room, just past my feet. 

The cracks propagate in two directions, to my left and to my right. They run along the floor, reach the walls, go up the walls, then cross the ceiling and meet again. The room moves away from me just slightly. I reach out with my foot and give it a gentle kick. The room drifts away about five feet. In the space between the rooms, I can see the void of space in all directions - stars and blackness above, below and beside me.

Then the room decelerates in its drift, then starts to move back toward where I'm standing. It accelerates as it gets closer and connects back with a thump. I swear and say: "Regravitating room!"

As soon as I say that, a bunch of metal tentacles burst out of the floor of the regravitating room and I have to fight them with a chainsaw.

There's a lady robot involved somehow. I think she helps fight the metal tentacles. There may be lasers involved.

In retrospect, the metal tentacles are not unlike something from John Carpenter's The Thing, except kind of a robot version.

Dream from mid-May 2011

Dreamed my old cat Uli showed up. He'd been gone for almost exactly four years by the time I had this dream. He leaned against me at the top of the stairs in the townhouse I used to share back in Pittsburgh. My old schnauzer, Kasper, gone nearly twenty years, had been showing up in a lot my dreams around the same time.

Dream from 5.31.11

I dreamed that Neil Gaiman told me my idea was bad.

Dream from a Long While Ago in the Oughts

I dreamt I was talking to Carl Sagan. Before he showed up, I had just done the "billions and billions" thing, kind of an imitation. And he walked over in his tan suit and red turtleneck and said, "So, you're making fun of me. Well, that's okay." And he seemed very good-natured about it.

(In real life, Sagan is one of my heroes.)

Dream from a Long While Ago in the Nineties

I had this dream where I was in an alleyway at night, and it had just rained, giving it that nighttime movie look. And I was talking to Brandon Lee, who was dressed like he was in The Crow, except he didn't have any makeup on. I was standing in the alley and he was perched atop some boxes near a chain-link fence, looking down at me. And I said to him, "So you didn't get to finish, huh." And he smiled ruefully and said, "No, I didn't get to finish."

Dream from 7.22.11 - Seventh Doctor, Companion, Daleks

During the latter part of my dream from that night, I was a Companion of the Seventh Doctor, along with Ace. Daleks were about to attack the auto garage/document storage facility/computer-music-cult meeting place we were in. It was daytime, and I could see the daylight through the large garage door entrances to the facility. The facility itself was a little dark, with light coming in through high windows. The Doctor locked me in the Tardis then went back for Ace. Earlier, there was a dog.

(In real life, I'm generally not a fan of Seventh Doctor stories, though the McCoy himself is okay, as is Ace. Also, for those not dorky enough, Seventh Doctor is Doctor Who. Ace was one of his Companions. She was mildly new wave and beat on Daleks with a baseball bat.)

Dream from 8.5.11 - Turtle, Boxes, W.C. Field

I dreamed I had a turtle in a box. My friend BBV took the turtle out of the box and started shaking it. I told him not to do that. He stopped and said okay, then he started shaking it again. Shortly before that, he showed me a W.C. Fields boxed set that he had just picked up. It had four films. He was quite happy about this.

(In real life, BBV is a big fan of W.C. Fields. BBV is also one of those film scholars you hear about sometimes.)

Dream from 4.4.11 - Sailing Ships, Orangutans and Killer Bees

I had a dream involving orangutans, killer bees and a pair of full-scale replicas of 19th American sailing ships (the ones with the masts and the riggings and so on).

Much of it was on the decks of the replica ships. I think at one point I was kind of gliding or sliding across one, almost like flight in terms of my pose, parallel to the deck, but it wasn't flying since I never fly like that in my dreams. (Flying in dreams for me is always more like standing on air, kind of a balancing act, always in danger of falling. It kind of feels like when you try to bring the same poles of two magnets together.) I also had to be careful about not tearing the deck of the ships, somehow. Someone lectured me about that.

Overhead, every so often, there would be one or two swarms of killer bees, flying maybe 50 to 100 feet above the ships. Which were not at sea, but sort of docked on dry land, possibly on Saunders Station Road, which was a long road that wound through woods and up and down hills back where I grew up in Monroeville, PA, outside of Pittsburgh. 

When the bees flew overhead, you had to be careful, lest they attack.

A little later, I was off of the ships, and standing near a large semi that was parked in parking lot next to where the ships were not-docked. There were three orangutans, and one was leaning out of the driver's side window of the cab of the semi, reminiscent of the old TV show, BJ and the Bear (which, for those who don't know of it, followed the adventures of a trucker named BJ McKay and his best friend, a chimp named Bear). 

And I and someone else were trying to get them to clap by getting the orangutans to mimic us clapping. Which they eventually did. Then I and this other person (a guy, possibly with a beard), led the one orangutan out of the cab of the semi, and we each took one of its hands, and we walked away from the truck and the ships with the orangutan between us. 

There was something irrevocable about this, like I'd missed an opportunity, though this wasn't immediately apparent. And I thought to myself, Shit, now we're like Jay and Silent Bob, and I'm the Jay in this, which made it worse somehow. Somehow, that was a mark of failure.

Then I woke up.

There was some deep symbolism beneath the absurdity of that dream, which I think I get.

Question from my friend Laura after relating this dream to her:

Have you been traumatized by killer bees in a previous life?

Answer: You know, now that you mention it, there was a time when I was really worried about them. It was while they were still working their way up Mexico, before they made it to Texas. Around the time "The Swarm" came out.

Hadn't thought about that part.