Wax Michael Jackson and Funny Clothes

Last night I dreamed that I read this news headline somewhere: "Wax museum featuring figures performing 'Thriller' dance moves does not include figure of Michael Jackson."

I woke up and thought it was funny for some reason. Then I went back to sleep. Once I was again in the dreamworld I starting thinking, "I should really tweet that funny headline that I read in my dream. What was it again? Oh yeah, 'Museum featuring celebrities wearing funny clothes does not include Michael Jackson.' What a riot!"

Rattus Sculptoris

One of my neighbors is a rat.

I don't mean that he tells the police what criminals are doing.

The kind of rat I mean is Rattus mindorensis, the Mindoro black rat. This kind of rat usually lives in the Phillipines, not America, but my neighborhood is unusual. It is popular amongst wealthy and eccentric immigrants. I do not know why.

I have become friends with my rat neighbor. Sometimes I see him poking his head out of one of several little windows on the front of his house, and I start a conversation with him. His name is Iqougguef, but he had to spell it out for me before I could understand what he was saying. I asked if his name was common in rat society, and he said he had never known any other rats by that name. He said that it was derived from the name of a god worshipped by ancient rats. The advent of Postmodernism in rat culture has made religion unpopular.

Iq is a sculptor. I used to see new works that he had completed sitting on the grass in front of his house, but he has started putting his sculptures in his backyard because the other neighbors were stealing them. They do not recognize that rats can legally be property owners.

The sculptures are usually carved from columns of basalt that Iq has imported from Iceland. He polishes the sculptures to make them shiny and black. Many of them are depictions of ordinary objects like ceiling fans and street lamps, though I think seeing these objects carved from basalt makes them seem special. I once asked if I could purchase one, but he told me that he doesn't sell them. I often wonder how he gets the money to buy the stone or to pay the mortgage on his house, but I do not ask because I think it would be rude. Basalt is a very hard stone, so Iq uses powerful machinery to help him carve it. Even if he used soapstone, I think he would need the machinery because he is a fairly small rat. He is also very shy. He doesn't let me watch him sculpt.

But Iq often invites me and my son into his studio when he is not working. My son plays quietly, and Iq and I sit and drink coffee and watch his pet birds wandering through the garden in his backyard. There is a large rock face and two tall wooden fences surrounding the garden. To the birds the garden is a perfect little sanctuary and the sculptures are like ordinary rocks or trees. The largest of Iq's birds is a blue heron that never makes a sound. One of the other birds is a guineafowl that makes a sound like a crow. "Ka ka ka ka ka ka ka!" he says. The heron watches him solemnly like an old man watching his grandchild.

Physics in Motion

I own a small building downtown, and one of the units in that building is rented out to a fitness company that holds classes, the sort you might see taking place in a gym. Karate, cycling, Tae Bo, you know the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Well, the other day I was down there checking up on things, and a karate class was just finishing up. Now, there was an aerobics class of some kind called Physics in Motion, which was supposed to start right afterwards. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, the instructor wasn't there. She simply didn't show up. Of course, the people taking the class were there, and they wanted their exercise!

Obviously, I too wanted them to have their exercise. I wanted their money! So I did the only natural thing that any reasonable property owner would do, which was to pose as a substitute instructor and lead the class myself. I gave a little spiel which proceeded in a manner similar to the following:

"So, everyone gather around, Physics in Motion is going to begin. Your regular instructor isn't here tonight, but apparently I'm some kind of fitness expert, so I'm going to lead instead. You see, in aerobics we move our bodies a lot, and I guess the basic idea is that you sweat a lot and therefore start burning fat or something like that. I don't know, but people do this stuff, so I guess it works. Anyway, today's animal is the speed leopard! Er... I think it was maybe the cheetah? Nevermind, let's get started."

So I started to jog very lightly in place, and the people enrolled in the class followed suit.

"This feels pretty good. Starting to feel the burn. Yeah, that's good! Getting in shape!"

We continued to jog in place like this for about a minute.

"Let's just keep this up! This is good! Nice form, everybody!"

Finally, someone said to me, "I don't think this is going to work."

The Hand that 30 Rocks the Cradle

Several nights ago, I dreamed that the final season of 30 Rock found the show reinvented as a "Political Intrigue/Science Fiction Thriller Serial Drama." The secret behind Jack Donaghy's success was revealed to be the fact that he is actually a set of identical triplets posing as a single person. Each Jack's personality, of course, was fashioned according to the treatment he received from his dear old mother, who for some reason deemed it appropriate to pick favorites. At the beginning of the final sequence of episodes, Liz Lemon and Good Jack were on the run from Evil Jack, who presumably intended to take over the world or destroy it or something along those lines. I cannot recall whether I knew the whereabouts of the third Jack or whether he was good or evil, but I have an inkling that Evil Jack killed him. Of course, this means he's probably going to do the old deus ex machina thing and turn up alive and well in the final episode so he can help Liz and Good Jack save the day.

I can't decide if I actually want this version of the show to exist or not.

The Gospel According to Virginia Woolf

Last night I dreamed that Virginia Woolf wrote a set of four novels, referred to as companion novels, that all depicted the same set of events from the perspectives of four different people. Two of them were titled Virginia and Ophelia. I cannot remember the titles of the other two books. Within the dream, my father remarked that the first scene was very accurate between the four books.

Bad Movie Better Butter

A couple nights ago I dreamed that there was a brand of butter called Bad Movie Better Butter, the claim made in their advertising being that the spreading of Bad Movie Better Butter upon bad movies would make the bad movies better. The product's slogan was "We make the bad movies better!"

A Portrait of the Clarinet as a Political Weapon

Last night I dreamed that I was working on a computer program of some kind, and upon achieving some measure of success with it, I was accused of being a hacker. Insisting that I was not seemed futile. My accusers persisted with their lies.

I found a clarinet somewhere and started to play it. I don't play the clarinet, really. I took a woodwind class years ago in which I was required to play one a little, but I don't actually know how to play it properly. Nevertheless, I discovered that I was not entirely terrible. Although I was only messing around with it, a crowd soon gathered around me to listen to my playing.

I stopped to explain to the kids in the crowd what the instrument was and its basic functionality. Knowing, however, that the kids would soon grow bored if I talked for too long, I jumped right into another piece of music.

Miraculously, this time I had a band accompanying me. I also realized suddenly that I was the greatest clarinetist who ever lived. We jumped right into it: at about 160 beats per minute, I played an extended lead part consisting of constant sixteenths with occasional triplets to mix it up. We ramped up the intensity and increased the tempo very gradually, until at last the band dropped out, and I finished off with two full measures of a relentless barrage of notes: sixteenth triplets first, finishing off with a flurry of thirty-secondths.

The band joined in again, and I tossed the clarinet to a nearby roadie. I started to sing. The lyrics are gone now, but they had something to do with finding a place where I could be at peace.

The melody was something like this:

After a single verse, the song was over, and everyone cheered until my accusers had no choice but to leave me alone lest the mob tar and feather them.

~  ~  ~

Ordinarily I reserve the label "Important (Long) Dreams" for those dreams that I flesh out into a sort of short short story. I didn't do that here, because I am busy. In any case, this dream felt important, and thus it should have been so fleshed out. I might have written some notes down for later blogging purposes, but usually what happens when I do that is that the dream never really gets translated into blog form at all. So I opted to write it more simply as I have done above.

I do sometimes dream about writing or playing music or both. What is interesting to me is that the music is usually not bad at all. I'm not sure what exactly this suggests about the human mind and how creativity is related to the subconscious, but it seems to suggest something. I don't know a lot about psychology or neurological anatomy, but as far as I can tell, the subconscious parts of the human brain are not altogether separate or distinct from the parts involved in creating artwork. Or the parts that create artwork are not turned off whilst in a dreamspace.

I also don't know why I played the clarinet in this dream. I play the guitar quite well, so why didn't I play that?

If one of my hundreds of thousands of readers who have extensive experience in the relevant fields would kindly give me some insight, I would be much obliged.

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.

Three Throwaways

Only three things remain from my dreams last night:

• A rollercoaster that I was about to ride that was cancelled on account of no one else wanting to ride it.
• An HR rep who was very rude with me and who... wanted... fish...    ...    ...I think?
• April from Parks and Recreation. She turned out to be kind of a fantasy/RPG nut and had a whole tub full of old NES and SNES cartridges, including Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo III, in addition to a wide variety of other games I'd never heard of (and which probably don't actually exist).

That's all.