Hyperspace-Innerspace

It's infuriating, my rotten luck. After an untethered space jump, hours of fighting my way through a space station shaped like a mushroom, and improvising a means by which I could cause the space station to induce a jump through hyperspace by tumbling end over end repeatedly, I find myself trapped in a distorted version of my own childhood.

I don't understand it. One minute I'm hurtling through space at well over three times the speed of light, and the next minute I'm stuck in a child's body trying to deal with these damn oppressive authority figures. They think they are providing me with well-deserved discipline, though in reality they are endangering the galaxy and all its inhabitants.

The big guy is bad, but the old woman is the worst. Yes, it's the bouncer with rectangular muscles that is forcing me into the prison cell. But it's the old woman who's telling him to do it. I wonder, if he were to be made aware of her corruptions, would he turn against her? Somehow I doubt he has quite enough brain cells to manage the justification of a moral upheaval on his own. I'm not sure...

Why the hell are they putting me in here anyway?

No, it's pretty clear. After seeing the alligator pit in the back of the room, it seems obvious.

So I calm down a little, feigning exhaustion, even going along with their prodding in a display of reluctant surrender. I wait until the opportune moment, and then I dart for the door.

The bouncer tries to grab me, but I anticipated that. I shift my weight the other way and circle around him. He's strong, but much too slow.

The old woman is shouting something behind me that I don't register. It doesn't matter now. Now what matters is getting the hell away from this place.

Out the door I go and I'm in a large hall. Something seems familiar about this place, but I don't have time to think about it. I have to keep moving.

I go through the double doors at the end of the room. I go up the stairwell there and open the door on the second floor, but I go back and hide in the corner. The others run right through the door, too hurried in their pursuit to think of every possibility for my escape route.

Back down the stairs I run, out into the main hall again. I remember now why this place was familiar to me. It has the same layout as the old church where I grew up. They've made it into something terrible. I see the old woman running on the catwalks above me now. Laughing, I cry, "This place could be good! It could be beautiful! It's neither of those things!"

~  ~  ~

I no longer know the exact date of this dream. I'm sure that it dates back to shortly after my last post, which was a little over a month ago. So given its age, the details here may have been ruined a bit.

When I wake up, I write down some notes about my dreams so that I can remember later when I have time to sit down and write a proper blog entry. However, these notes are usually pretty hurried and not very descriptive. They're generally intended to remind me of what happened, not provide a complete depiction of anything.

For instance, the notes for this dream read as follows:

Space Jump, Mushroom Space Station, Tumbling Hyperspace.

Spirited Away, Old Church, Big Guy Bouncer, Alligators, Running, Double Back, Get to 2nd Floor, "This place could be good! It could be beautiful! It's neither of those things!"

That's it.

Sometimes I wonder what someone would make of these notes if they found them lying around on a bus stop bench or something.

Granny (and Some Burst Dreams)

It's all very hazy now. I can't remember how I came to be in this place, but for some reason, it's important that I stay.

I can't remember why I stay. There's nothing preventing me from going outside. Indeed, I go out for fresh air often.

The place is obviously an old abandoned orphanage. There aren't any children here any longer. It's completely empty except for me.

No, that's not true. There is one child, a small South Asian girl, under my protection. I don't think she can leave. Maybe she can, but she won't.

I think she is why I am still here.

She talks often about the old woman who used to be in charge of this place. Apparently, the kids used to call her Granny. I don't remember if I've specifically asked her anything about the old woman. She simply volunteers the information. Mostly I don't listen anyway. I already know everything I need to know about her.

She is evil.

She is coming.

I'm trying to persuade the girl to leave with me, but she doesn't seem to want to go.

"This place is dangerous," I say.

She doesn't answer me. She only talks about Granny.

She does leave the building with me sometimes when I go outside for air. She seems happy enough in this miserable place. But I can't leave her here. She doesn't understand. She thinks Granny means her well. Maybe she does. But I can't let her stay here. She mustn't be here when the old woman comes back.

Every time we go back inside, the girl shuts the door. She always leaves it unlocked for Granny, just in case she returns. I never lock the door. I'm sure it's dangerous, but I intend to get out of here before the old woman gets back, anyway.

We're sitting outside on the porch. I'm talking to the girl, trying to get her to focus. Finally, she seems to be hearing me.

"We need to leave this place," I tell her.

"Why?" she says.

"There are things you don't know."

"About Granny?" she asks with an innocent smile.

I'm not sure what to say now. She doesn't need to know everything.

"Well," I say at last, "it's my job to make sure you're safe. You won't be safe here any longer."

She seems to be thinking.

"I need to take you with me," I say.

Reluctantly, she agrees to leave.

We go back inside to gather our things. This time she enters first, and I shut the door behind us. My muscles are working automatically. I lock the door.

As I'm crossing the living room, the girl is already upstairs. I'm gathering some things for the trip when I realize that this is the first time the door has been locked since I arrived.

Suddenly, I understand.

The old woman has been here the whole time. She knows that I've locked the door. She knows that I want to keep her out.

She is angry.

I turn and fly to the door to unlock it in the desperate hope that it might appease the witch, but I find that though the bolt is thrown, the door is ajar. A mere sliver of the light of dawn shines through. And then the sliver swells and the light fills the room, blinding me.

Then I see her. The old woman has finally revealed herself in the doorway. Her skin bears the pallor of asphyxia. Her hair is of the exact same color, long and stringy, floating stiffly behind her like shards of glass. Her face is short, but very, very round, and protruding from its center is a profoundly long and pointy nose. Her back is hunched over dramatically so that she stands somewhere between three and four feet in height, though upright she would stand about five. In her left hand she is holding what appears to be the carcass of a kangaroo. In her right hand she is holding an enormous three pronged fork.

This, I understand, is meant for me.

I'm not having this. I have a long invisible lance in my hands, and I make good use of it, stabbing her in the gut again and again and again. She is bloodied, but she still comes at me, apparently unphased. I retreat backwards and continue to maim her.

This continues for a while, and finally the witch seems to have had enough. She declares, "I'm resigning! It's no longer good for the kids anyway."

Suddenly there is a red Cadillac outside with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. The driver is a young man who looks like a greaser straight out of the 1950s. In the passenger seat on the left side sits a young woman that I understand to be a marginally famous South Asian film actress, though I have no idea what her name is.

The witch rides away in the back of this vehicle, and that's that.

I go upstairs to find the girl.

~  ~  ~

I don't know what happens next. I woke up. This dream gave me chills, although I lay in bed for a little while thinking about how I would alter the details in a film adaptation to make the dream more terrifying.

I closed my eyes again and I could see the Cadillac's skeleton as though the car's skin and muscle were invisible or removed. The skeleton was formed by long, curved blades like katanas. I've often thought about Ubiquitous Trees* made from blades. They seem to me especially deadly if they appear everywhere at once out of nowhere, simultaneously gouging anything that is anywhere. This was not a U-Tree. It was merely a skeleton, the foundation upon which my subconscious mind had built up a more detailed dream-entity. As my mind was demolishing this particular entity, I returned to the ether and witnessed its skeleton, sort of like observing the wooden framework revealed by tearing away drywall.

I wrote down the details of this dream and then returned to sleep. I drifted wearily in and out of the ether for the remainder of the night, experiencing a variety of burst dreams. These included:

• Being lost at a new school. My class was starting soon, but my schedule was not in my backpack.
• Lying in bed, writing down the details of a dream. I realized that I was dreaming and decided to do some stream of consciousness writing while still dreaming. I distinctly remember writing down some random words strung together incoherently. These were structural words like "because," "after," "in," and "the." Then, I wrote down, "there's a place for me in Heaven, no matter what you think," followed by scribbling frantically, and then, "OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD," whereupon I woke again.
• Running into one of my professors. I asked him if I could still do an Independent Study. He said that I couldn't. The policies had changed and now disallowed what I wanted to do.
• Waiting in a queue of cars, each one being accosted in turn by a very, very shady looking carjacker with a knife. When I was second in line, I resolved to floor the gas pedal and escape when he tried to approach my window. But when he approached, and I tried to floor it, I realized that the car was backwards, I was in the back seat facing backwards, and there were no pedals. I scrambled for the driver's seat as the carjacker started scratching the window with his knife.

 Amongst others that I must have forgotten.

~  ~  ~

* Please see the end of The Ubiquitous Shredded Chicken Tree for more on U-Trees.

Assorted Throwaway Dreams

The night before last I dreamed that I was Kevin Arnold from the Wonder Years. The family and I were sitting at the dining room table, and Karen was complaining about something, although I can't remember what it was.

Last night, I dreamed that I was setting up my equipment for some kind of talent show or competition or something. I was going to play a CD of a piece of music that I had written, and I was quite sure that I'd win the $250,000 prize. My only real competition in this competition was this guy who looked like he must have been a member of the royalty of Yemen or Jordan or some such place.

But then I realized that the CD I was putting into the CD player was not my music at all, but rather that of Matt Glickstein, an old peer from my days as a music student. He was the only other person in my class with the same major as me, Music Composition. Now that I think about it, I don't think it would be fair to win the contest by playing his music. But at this point the contest was forgotten anyway, and I simply told Matt, who was suddenly present, that I really liked his album.

Later, Tracy Jordan from 30 Rock set up a fun house with colorful rubber bouncy walls and floors that allowed people to jump really high and far. Mr. Jordan was also on a throne in a prominant position in this fun house, from which he was throwing large inflatable rubber bouncy balls at the people in the main area. I don't remember what he was shouting as he was throwing the balls, but I'm sure it must have been pretty hilarious.

TJ: Get outta my fun house!

Later still, my wife and I were putting gas in our car and using squeegees to clean the bird poop off of the windshield and rear window. Suddenly, a small Asian girl, about nine or ten, appeared out of nowhere and starting helping us clean the windows. We thought it was very strange that she would do this. Then, she was in the back seat of the car, and we said, "She's stealing our stuff!" I told her to go home, and she wandered off.

The Ubiquitous Shredded Chicken Tree

Last night, some old friends, some new friends, and I were playing some kind of weird game involving golf balls in the courtyard of a shadowy motel. This courtyard consisted of a peanut-shaped swimming-pool-like depression in the ground, which was covered in grass at the bottom rather than cement and was surrounded by an ordinary sidewalk. At the two central points in this depression were pits covered by grates consisting of only a few iron bars. One could easily fit through these bars if one tried to. These pits were quite deep, and at their bottoms we could see dark murky water. I jokingly referred to these pits as sewer foyers.

By accident, some of the golf balls fell into these sewer foyers. We knew, sadly, that they were lost forever.

I was planning to jump up to the sidewalk surrounding the grassy depression, as all my friends did, but I became aware that this area was a sort of "horror movie/game area, or something," and my curiosity held me there. I wanted to see just how scary the horrors of this area were.

So I stayed put.

I had the option of loading up different "levels" of this horror attraction, and so I tried some. The water level rose until it was at the brim of the grassy depression, and I was submerged up to my shoulders or so. Piranhas and sea monsters came up out of the water, but they didn't bother me, as I am tough.

I asked my younger brother what he felt the scariest level of this arena was, and he told me it was called Undermann.

So I loaded that one up.

Instead of sea monsters and piranhas, a young girl, probably around eight or nine years old, came up out of the water and started floating on her back at the center of the flooded depression in the ground. Her face was pale, and her eyes were off-white with no pupils. She tried to grab me and pull me down under the water, deeper and deeper, I was aware, into some unfathomable watery abyss.

I withdrew upwards in that dreamy sort of magical flight and escaped her grasp. But she leaped upwards after me without altering her horizontal position, though she turned as she rose, sometimes orienting herself face down, sometimes face up.

"You can't escape," she insisted. I believed her.

Nevertheless, I continued to withdraw higher and higher. Still, she continued to rise after me, reaching toward me.

"I'll pull 2,000 Bibles down, too!" she cried. I understood clearly that this was an extraordinary measure of evilness.

There was something in this whole ordeal that had to do with Islam. The girl, Islam, and fear were all connected somehow, though not in any obvious way of which I was aware.

As I drifted back to life from the world of the ether, there existed a Ubiquitous Tree. This is a tree-like structure, a thing with a root and branches but no ends to the branches. It extends forever in all directions, continually branching out and filling every part of the Universe. This particular Ubiquitous Tree was made out of soaking wet shredded chicken.

~  ~  ~

What?

I've been reading a book called The Muslim Next Door by Sumbul Ali-Karamali. It is about the misconceptions that people have about Islam and Muslims in general, and particularly about how the sensational images of brutality and oppression that many Americans have come to associate with the religion do not actually represent most members of its community of believers. It's a very good book, I feel, that has taught me how little I actually know about Islam and the Qur'an.

I am really starting to like Islam a lot, though I am not becoming a Muslim at the present moment. I don't believe that I am presently capable of choosing my religious beliefs volitionally, but let's leave the discussion of that matter for another time, because it's large enough on its own to serve as a whole blog entry without a dream to report at all.

Islam is very interesting to me. It's amazing to me how backwards the misconceptions about the religion appear to be. Now I'm having dreams in which Islam appears to be taking form subconsciously in subtle ways. I'm pretty sure that this dream does, in fact, stem from my subconscious reaction to reading about Islam, although I'm not sure what it indicates. I'm very uncertain what it indicates.

The 2,000 Bibles bit seems suggestive of the moronic Qur'an burning that's planned for this weekend in Florida. Let me just go on record officially by saying that it's a stupid idea. It's a very, very, very stupid idea. While we're at it... If anyone is even reading this, if you see Muslims celebrating on 9/11, they are not celebrating the destruction of the twin towers. They are celebrating Eid al-Fitr, which occurs at the end of Ramadan, which happens to fall by coincidence right around 9/11 this year. They are not being hateful! They are just grateful to God that they are once again allowed to eat and drink during the daytime!

The shredded chicken forming the U-Tree probably has something to do with the tacos that I had for dinner last night.

I'm kind of a weird person, I think.