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.

Dream from 5.9.11 - Talking Pen, Talking Dog

Last night I dreamt my friend Justin, a filmmaker, had a pen that talked. It couldn't say much, didn't have a big vocabulary, but you could have a rudimentary conversation with it. It was a large black pen, like a fountain pen, and its voice sounded like paper on paper.

A little later, instead of a talking pen, he had a talking dog. Again, it didn't have a big vocabulary. Medium-sized dog. Its voice sounded like a hoarse growl, kind of like when you try to speak but have no breath. It had these plastic things on either side of its torso, which made it sort of look like it had been opened and operated on, ribs and bone and organs visible, but it hadn't been operated on, and the things on the side were just fake plastic. Underneath them, it was just a dog.

For part of the dream, I was supposed to be getting married to this Japanese woman I'd grown up with, not an actual person I knew, just knew in the dream, named Norako. Then as the wedding approach, we realized we hadn't seen each other in decades, and didn't really know each other, so we decided to call it off, though we were embarrassed to do so. (I did know a Japanese girl briefly while growing up. Her name was Naoko. Her father was working in Pittsburgh for a year.)

Some time after that, I was supposed to perform in a play Justin had written. Maybe with the talking pen, maybe not. We had to travel on foot to the place where the performance was to take place, like itinerant performers. We were split into two groups, I was in the smaller group of about 5 people. We were kind of like an adventuring group. Justin was in the larger group. We got split up. 

As my group got closer, we realized we hadn't had anything to drink for days, and were getting worried and started to look for water. We were in a deep forest at this point. Then, suddenly, we fell through a hole beside the path, which led to a muddy cliff, which led to a large creek. I remember thinking that the thirst thing should have been set up sooner. It had just been introduced at the beginning of this episode, and then was suddenly solved. There should have been nods to the fact that we were running out of water in earlier episodes.

Some time after that, we got to the building where the performance was to take place. There were many complicated staircases. Justin's group was due to arrive soon. I realized I hadn't started learning my part, and I was supposed to be the lead, and the performance was in a few hours.

It didn't feel like a cliche at the time. Definite real sense of failure, which meant that was the emotional state I woke up in. Not a great way to start the day.

When my group fell down the hole, right before that, a woman in the group had made a remark that following our feet had always led us to what we needed before, and hadn't let us down yet. When we fell down the hole, the "camera" stayed up at the top of the cliff for a moment, and after she'd fallen through, and after everyone else was already sliding down the cliff, she popped her head up, Wile E. Coyote style, and remarked that following our feet still worked.

The things on the dog were less like a costume and more like the flimsy plastic, shaped thing you might hang up on the wall for Halloween. Except instead of pumpkins, it was internal dog anatomy. And instead of hanging it on your door, it was attached to the dog.

The itinerant performers thing might have been pulling from the troupe in Floating Weeds, the first Ozu film I saw when I was studying Japanese film at Pitt with Keiko McDonald.

The episodes thing was about the way a lot of TV shows will introduce a problem then solve it in the same episode. It was always disappointing when shows did this, particularly shows with longer arcs like B5, which was probably the example I was thinking of.

Dream from 4.27.11 - Kurt Cobain

I dreamed that Kurt Cobain fried me up some bacon and served it to me. He seemed to be in a good mood. The bacon tasted good.

Dream Written Down 2.10.11 - Godzilla and Friends

A couple earlier, I dreamed Godzilla was being a big pain in the ass. He was always fighting other giant monsters just outside my house, and sooner or later a giant foot would come smashing through the wall. This had already happened several times. And you couldn't tell him to stop, because he was Godzilla. So I and the other people in the house would just watch through the windows, hoping they wouldn't notice us and try to eat us.

This was somewhere around Pittsburgh, as there were a lot of tree-covered hills. Possibly in Alpine Village, a neighborhood in Monroeville where my friend Bill used to live and have a studio.

Dream from 10.18.11 - Twilight Zone, Indy, WWII Movies, Robert Forster

Last night, I dreamt that my friend Jake had said he'd never seen any WWII movies. Which surprised me, because Jake, in real life, really knows movies. Really knows a lot of movies. So I was surprised and I started to do the "you haven't seen?" routine, and I was going to tell him there have been a lot of great WWII movies over the years, but then somewhere in there I stopped because I was worried Jake would be irritated, especially by the "you haven't seen" routine, so I tried to be more polite about it, and eventually just shut up.

Earlier, or perhaps later, I was stuck in the middle of some sort of Twilight Zone episode, where people were winking out of existence because a device had been turned on which was supposed to simplify things - which it did by making people not exist. The machine looked like a large, black synthesizer, like a Roland or something. Actually, maybe not that large, about the size of a good boom box. The simplification thing was explained in this way: The number 16 is complicated, so the machine will change that number into 7 (1+6) which is less complicated. The machine would do this with anything in existence. Once switched on, the machine could not be turned off. And once a person was erased, no one would know they'd ever existed, because they never existed.

This whole thing was vaguely based on a Twilight Zone episode called "And When the Sky Was Opened," which I don't think I've ever seen but which I read about recently. I was vaguely aware of this in the dream.

At one point, while this was going on, I was in an office where people were vanishing every time you turned around, but no one would know they'd vanished, they'd just go about their business. We were in a board room high up in a skyscraper, dark walls, wooden table, low ceiling, and we were trying to talk about business, and someone hadn't done something for a client they were supposed to, and it was difficult to discuss, because people involved in the discussion, as well as people being discussed, kept ceasing to exist. And there'd be a moment when we stopped noticing they were gone, and the discussion would go on but not get anywhere.

And then I realized that Robert Forster was in this episode, and I was like, all right, Robert Forster! His hair was very black. He smiled reassuringly. Then I realized he was going to disappear too. As would I eventually, probably. And I was worried about that. Forster seemed very nice, but I turned my back on him a moment and when I looked around, he was gone.

Before that, I realized I'd started to really go bald, and that there was a patch of hair at the front of my head that had been left behind by the retreating hairline, and you could really tell when I pulled my hair back, or just brushed my hair back from my face and held my hands on top of my head, and I realized that I do that all the time so my students had probably already realized that I was bald. And there was nothing I could do about it. (I have baldness anxiety dreams like I have teeth-falling-out anxiety dreams, periodically. And a character in the film my students are editing has the sort of baldness pattern I'll probably have. Also, I'd read an interview recently with Forster where he talks about starting to go bald. Hence, probably, Forster, or hence this from Forster.)

Earlier, or again, perhaps later, I was in the middle of some archaeological dig with two people, one of whom was Indiana Jones. And we were in a temple which was sort of like the Well of Souls or whatever the place with the snakes in Raiders was called. Except instead of housing the Ark of the Covenant, it held some kind of ancient demon, which could only be seen with special sunglasses, or a special visor, kind of like a space-age version of a knight's helmet, made of metal. And we found the central chamber, and climbed up on some pillars which were about 30 feet high, kind of like the tall statues in the Well of Souls in Raiders, and there was a sunken platform at the top, with an altar, and from that we could each take one item, as a boon, without releasing the demon. 

We had to leave our sunglasses and visors behind though, and I thought about the fact that, centuries from now, someone else would find their way into the chamber, and find the sunglasses I'd worn, and the sunglasses would be covered with dust and sand, and they would wonder who brought them here, who was the person who had worn them, and they would never know. And I felt a bit melancholy about that, and thought of taking the glasses with me, but I knew I couldn't. (This was probably connected to an old book by David Macaulay called "Motel of the Mysteries," which I'd read when I was in 5th grade. The whole setting was connected to the images in that book somehow.)

So Indy took something for a boon, I forget what, the other guy, who was some kind of professor maybe, with glasses and a beard and professor hair, took his thing, and I took mine, which was some sort of stone cylinder, slightly cracked, about two foot long, a half foot in diameter. It had hieroglyphics on it, and was probably a variation of some old rolling-pin I had for making patterns in Play-Doh when I was growing up. (I saw some rolling-pins in the store the other day, and I thought, you never see cartoons with women chasing men with rolling-pins anymore. That was in real life, not in the dream.) So, I don't know what this thing was supposed to do, but the torches were getting low and we had to leave.

It was shortly after this that Jake said he'd never seen a WWII movie. It was night, and he was sitting in the burnt-out husk of a car, which was on a ruined street outside the temple that held the Well of Souls thing. There was debris and sand all around, and some small fires here and there. Jake said he was just starting to watch WWII movies now. At the very least, I knew he'd get to see some good Lee Marvin movies.