Catching Up on some Short Dreams

Hi! Just a quick catching up post to describe a few vaguely interesting dreams I had over the past couple of weeks (dreams are what this blog is primarily about, right?).

I had a dream in which I was a policeman trying to stop four teenagers from vandalizing a closed store. When I say vandalizing, I mean that they were inside the store basically destroying all the furniture inside to the point that standing on the street outside the store I heard loud crashing and wood breaking noises. The youths came out of the store, and I told them to get on the ground. They did so, but soon they got up and started running away from me. I pulled out my gun and starting telling them to halt (I think I said "halt," not "freeze"), but they didn't, so I started trying to shoot them, but my gun wouldn't fire. Instead of a trigger, it had a power switch like you'd find on the back of a computer. Like one of these guys:

Eventually, I figured out that it was a revolver with an external hammer mechanism and I was failing to cock it manually, but by this time the hooligans had escaped me.

Another dream I had involved a duck being trapped in a large animal's mouth that looked like a second floor window. I mean, it was like a building, except I understood the building to be a creature of some kind and the window to be its mouth. Weird.

Anyway, the duck was afraid for its life and for the life of its egg, which it was holding in its mouth. I beckoned for the duck to simply jump out of the window to safety, which the duck did. But for some reason the duck neglected to fly and fell to the ground, slamming its head against the pavement. The egg fell from the duck's mouth and rolled away safe and uncracked, but the duck began dizzily sauntering about, clearly seriously injured. I felt bad for having recommended that the duck leap from the window, but I guess it sacrificed itself to save its egg? I don't know. Weird dream.

In a third dream my wife and I were sneaking into a high security warehouse district in search of the new textbooks for the upcoming school year. I guess we wanted a sneak peek? At one point I turned a corner and found myself looking directly into the lens of a security camera, and I was like, "oops." But whatever, nothing happened. We found the books, and I was very excited to look at the physics book. It had a pink cover.

The first dream (the one with the gun and the teenage vandals) was interesting in that normally when I use a gun in a dream, I don't actually have a gun but rather simply pretend to have one and make gun noises and then get frustrated that my imaginary gun is completely ineffectual. Of course, I keep trying, but it never works. In this dream, I had a gun in my hand. Perhaps the difference was that I was a policeman, and so it came with the uniform? Anyway, the gun was ineffectual all the same.

Interval Permutations

Drew F. Nobile has written an article called "Interval Permutations" about how interval sequences can be permuted in order to produce different pitch class sets that are audibly related. Of particular interest is his example 18, a graph that depicts all of the possible relationships made by such intervallic permutation between tetrachordal set-classes. I have created my own version of this graph to emphasize the natural symmetry present:

Post-Traumatic Math Disorder

Last night I had one of the usual "oops-I-forgot-we-had-a-calculus-test-today-wait-didn't-I-graduate?" dreams. Not a whole lot to say about it, except that I went through the test once and found it relatively easy, then looked at another student's test and realized it was harder than I thought at first.

"Oh! That one is an integration by discs problem? I'll go back and fix it."

"Oh! This one is more complicated than I thought! What was I thinking?"

"Oops! There's three more problems that I skipped somehow on the first pass! What a dummy."

And so on.

The professor didn't seem to mind that I had borrowed my classmate's test, so I guess it was one of those oh-so-popular "open everything" tests. Side note: I took a class once that was basically "How to Use Maple," and one my classmates suggested that we should have a group final, to which the professor responded, "Oh! That's kinky!"

Is there anything sexier than 3D graphs?

I was also buying books for the following semester or quarter or whatever, and the bookstore had a promotion where the first person to spend precisely $118 (before tax) would receive a $30 discount.

~  ~  ~

I had another longer, more interesting dream the night before. I'm thinking about how to handle putting that one up. It's not something I can do quickly. We'll see...

Weird Tales and Community

Last night I dreamed up a series of misadventures experienced by some of the cast of NBC's Community.

The gang were being harassed by an evil statue of a woman, and Troy decided that the only solution was to relocate the statue to a mythical island covered with landmines, where "no one could possibly be happy, except for someone who can't move, like a statue." Upon arriving at the island, Troy, careful to avoid the landmines, set about searching for a good spot for the statue. However, he discovered that the island was guarded by a legendary creature that he had to overcome. This creature was a female American Gladiator.

Everyone tried to play a prank on Pierce that involved setting something on fire. However, the random kid designated to ignite the thing accidentally ignited a small plant nearby that had been specially bred to be completely inextinguishable if inflamed. This led to the tragic burning down of the building housing the college swimming pool, referred to in the dream as the "Swim House." For some reason, Pierce was blamed for all of this, but he later diverted the blame onto Winger by revealing that Winger had inadvertently included Pierce in the mass text messages detailing the plan for the prank. This, by standard dream logic, did indeed make Winger responsible for the damage done.

Troy somehow captured a ghost by leaping over a pool of mercury. The ghost turned out to be the owner of a chain of steakhouses called Berther Werther, and his method of marketing involved haunting people.

On account of his sensitivity towards being excluded, Pierce tried to get into the college's Biology class, which was historically reserved for 8 to 10 year old blond boys. He claimed his motivation was "because the class leads to getting into Chemistry." The young kids were trying very hard to prevent him from enrolling in the class.

Old Dream Papers

So I discovered a number of old papers with dream notes on them under the table beside my bed. Some of them are a little unclear about the dream they initially represented, but I think I can put a few details together. Most of these are rather short and unimportant dreams. Let's start with those.

On the night of September 25, I apparently dreamed that I was babysitting a tiny toddler. I don't remember that at all, but that's what my notes say.

Same night, I dreamed that I accompanied my brother and sister to a shopping mall in order to purchase my brother's Halloween costume. For some reason, he was looking for hummus shoes. We tried to visit one clothing store that sold clothes that were too expensive to look at. The doors were angled and had wooden slats, kind of like the doors on some changing rooms. They didn't let us in that store.

I don't remember this, but evidently someone said, "Radar?" to which someone replied, "It's not instant," to which the first person replied, "Huh?"

Now, my brother actually was Radar O'Reilly for Halloween, so I guess this had something to do with that, but I cannot recall the details.

We continued wandering this mall, which was strange in that although it was made up of many different stores throughout, there was a single checkout area at which shoppers would pay for all of their desired items, procured from any of the stores, all at one time.

Then I was using a huge invisible sword to battle a big guy with two huge knives. During this battle, I was an acrobat of tremendous ability, jumping and flipping and blocking a lot.

At some point, I had this conversation:

"Where are you going?" someone asked me.

"I'm not going anywhere," I said.

"Be careful. It seems like you're almost going to go somewhere."

"You make it sound like... 'Be careful. You're almost going to fall off a cliff. You're almost going... somewhere!' "

I felt rude.

The dreams ended with a scene in which I was talking to a couple of people about class statuses. Like... "Oh, I'm a first year," or "I'm a second year," or "I'm a transfer student." One of these people looked a little like Jessica Szohr. She was wearing white gloves, had a weak handshake, and was complaining a lot about something. I think she said her name was Sona, which I thought was weird because that's the name of the company that created the product used for the University's Department of Psychology Research Participation System.


Then, on the night of September 29, I dreamed that I was trying to drive my sister's car, which was parked in front of my grandmother's house. I needed it to go pick up my own car somewhere else. The only problem was that it was blocked in by another car and blocks and plants. I had to open the garage door and move a chair in the process of getting things untangled enough for me to get the car out.

I don't understand it, but apparently my sister was honored, because that's what my dream notes say.

I drove the car to a pizza place, and the person working there was some middle-aged trucker lady. She probably looked like Large Marge from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. She created a Sonic pizza for me. As in, Sonic the Hedgehog. She used a blue fruit rollup for Sonic and a gumball for his eye. Otherwise, the pizza was pepperoni. There was a special narrative to this pizza made clear by moving scenery. It was the most incredible pizza-oriented work of drama I had ever seen.


Many days later, I had a more substantial dream that really requires a post of its own, and so I shall leave that one for later.


But last night I dreamed that I was some sort of winged warrior doing battle with an enormous two-headed wolf. But the second head was the head of a slug. And the wolf head had an extensible neck. And the slug head could shoot laser beams from its stalk-eyes.

I cut off both heads, and the creature died.

Then, the lord of the manor carried his crippled wife downstairs, singing a song to her. I don't remember the lyrics, though I do remember that they didn't rhyme, but I was nonetheless impressed with my subconscious for spontaneously producing lyrics to a song at all. Of course, it was probably garbage.

I said goodbye and went outside. I picked up my own wife and flew away. She asked me to sing her a song, but I told her I was watching for enemies in the skies above and around us.

Frustrations

Eternal night veiled the campus at the University I was visiting. Whether this is a natural feature of the surrounding area or a man-made one to accommodate the vampire population of the student body, I don't know, but the night-time that engulfed me was forever.

I was attempting to register an account at the campus computer lab in order to use the Internet, but the process of registering required that I complete a quiz about the points scored in the most recent baseball game that had been played on the campus. I had to identify which players from both teams scored in which innings (strangely, called pads in this area) and the final score at the end of the game. I had to do this in the form of an essay.

Needless to say, this is a very difficult thing to accomplish without having watched the game, taking notes as it progressed. I had not done so. And so I sought out the local scoreboard, which kept such records until another game was to be played. I started trying to take notes on when different players scored, but it was very difficult to read it as the information was scattered around, apparently at random, and every time I looked from the scoreboard to my paper and back to the scoreboard, everything had changed completely. The only things that were consistent were the letters "NMC" at the top.

Frustrated, I went to a nearby car wash and got my car washed. No one was there. I simply helped myself to the equipment and did it myself.

I went to class, but right before I entered, I realized that I was naked. Luckily, the blinds in the classroom were closed, so the other students inside could not see me. I hurriedly put on my clothes and ran away.

I went back to the car wash with my wife and kids. We entered the washing area, but we had no car. We had ordered personal washes. The machines sprayed us with water and soap and got our clothes all soapy and wet. I think I was screaming during this whole ordeal.

I tried to go use the drying machine, but the controls were too confusing. There were two big buttons, one of them labeled, "load." The other button's label was too faded to read. There were also six smaller buttons in two rows with just single letters on them. The bottom row were N, M, and C. The labels on the buttons of the top row were also too faded to read. There was also an unlabeled small red button.

I watched another customer dry off with another machine. He pushed some of these buttons and the machine dried him off.

So I tried the top button with the label worn off, and the airflow that came out of the machine had specks of spit in it. I realized then that the label had read, "Camel."

I tried "Load," but the same thing happened.

I asked the attendant for help, who looked at my receipt and informed me that no drying service is included with personal washes. She informed me that you have to get a car wash to dry. It was at this point that I realized that I was already dry anyway.

I told the attendant that I had used the machines earlier. She told me that they had been closed at that time.

"But I used it!" I said.

"The machines still work," she said, "but we were technically closed."

Whatever, I thought.

I returned to the baseball scoring table again, but this time it was really crowded, which made it ever more difficult to get the information I needed.

I was getting really frustrated.

Argh!

So... the fact of the matter is that my interesting dreaming seems to come and go in phases. For a while I'll have very vivid, fascinating dreams with long cohesive narratives. And then for a while I'll have boring dreams of which I might remember maybe a few details from one scene only.

Like last night... All I can remember is sitting in a classroom answering questions about what different signs mean.

"That one indicates an escalator," I said at one point.

This is an extremely boring thing to blog about.

I'm wondering whether I should only just blog when I actually have some interesting dreams or if I should expand the concept of this blog to include other things as well when necessary.

Argh!

The Pig Mask

I dreamed last night that I was about to be graduating from college again. I escorted an old lady to her mailbox, and while I was there I decided to check on all of my stuff for graduation, which was in an oversized mailbox measuring about 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet.

Then I was helping the cast of Parks and Rec put on a play for children called the Pig Mask. It involved an Easter Bunny that seemed vaguely reminiscent of Baby Jesus from a Nativity. But it was purple and talked in a really high pitched voice.

I opened an Easter egg, which contained shredded cheese rather than candy.

Some airheaded lady mistakenly thought that Mark Brendanawicz was gay, and so he persisted in making fun of her mistake throughout the rest of the dream.

I also dreamed that my wife and I discovered an additional closet in our home that we weren't previously aware of. This made us extremely happy, because we need more closet space.