D R E A M S

I just got back from seeing Michael Moore's new movie, "Farenheit 9/11." This was a very compelling film. I consider it every American's patriotic duty to see this movie and try will all the will they can muster to fully grasp the ramifications of what our "elected" commander-in-chief has contributed in doing. The "War on Terror" seemed like such rhetoric even as it was shoved down our throats by the media, but this film really made it all the more transparent. If there's anyone here who wants to see this movie, but doesn't have anyone to go with, I volunteer to see it again. PLEASE GO SEE THIS MOVIE. And, perhaps more importantly, get someone who is unsure of how they feel about this country's current administration to go see it.

Brian posted at 1:17 AM.

I am a student. It's the first day of class. My professor, a woman of about 50, lectures at the front of the room. I can't quite remember what the topic of the class is, but I believe it's something to do with literature. She makes a comment that is somewhat profound about the text of a novel that we are supposed to read. I turn to someone sitting next to me and say, "That's what I wrote my paper on."
"You already wrote your paper?" The boy balks.
"Yeah, I met the professor over the summer and she told me about the book and it got me so excited I read it and wrote the paper a few weeks ago."

Later, I'm in another classroom. It is a geology class, but it's definitely a lecture hall, not a lab. I am late. I have registered for this class late. Indeed, I am not even thrilled with being in it, but I also feel confident that I know the material already. Strangely, when I enter this classroom, my dream-consciousness is divided into both the professor and my student self. My student self is pompous and a class clown. He keeps making off-topic remarks. One in particular that I remember is when we're talking about drawing building materials from the earth. He says, "What if you build a building, and it's completely wrong for holding all of the babies?" My professor dream self is slowly becoming aggravated, but he is a teacher at heart and he really wants to make my student self understand the importance of the material, so he is patient with me. Or, rather, I am patient with myself.

Suddenly, we (the students, the professor and my dream student self - I have found myself mostly occupying the student self at this point) find ourselves on a field trip to something that resembles a modern monastery on an island as part of a field trip. I believe the monastery has been decommissioned and now the building acts as maybe a research facility. The only reason I think it's a monastery is there is this central hall that seems very much like a chapel. One of the most chapel-like aspects is this great pipe organ in the center of the chapel.

My student has been his general smart-alec self for most of the time, but then he discovers the organ. The keyboard is divided into three sections. I begin by playing the middle section and the keys cause the pipes to emit sounds of thunder. Different degrees of thunder and rain. It sounds really beautiful and I immediately begin composing a song of thunder and rain. I start to incorporate the left and the right sections of the keyboard. I can't recollect at all what the left section emits, but the right sounds like an organ with an electronic buzz to it. I only play a few moments, but the woman who was lecturing comes over and tells me I shouldn't be playing it. She touches the keys and all of a sudden, it sounds like a regular pipe organ. She is befuddled, but I just walk away, already sort of losing interest. But during the time that I was making the music, it was rapturous.

I walk to another section of what seems like a former monastery, and suddenly it is very domestic. I am in a small kitchen area and there are some people preparing food. An Hispanic woman puts a bowl of green beans into a microwave. As she does so, I notice the power of all the room surge a bit. She hits the "start" button and nothing happens. She opens the door to the microwave and says in a heavy Spanish accent, "It no work."

It's at this time my student dream self senses something is wrong.

Suddenly, as the professor self, I am on a speedboat, speeding away from the island. There is a woman at my side, perhaps another professor. I sense some sort of chemistry between the two. I am saying something about "doing what had to be done."

Suddenly, a large red duffel bag starts to unzip and my student self climbs out of the bag. I am saying to three other students as they climb out, "I knew something was going on when the power surged!" Just as I'm finishing the sentence, the entire island we were just on explodes in a huge ball of orange flame. We all nearly fall over from the explosion, but are otherwise fine. We continue boating toward the mainland. When we arrive, there are police waiting and the arrest the professor character, whom I sort of realize to be some sort of agent. I believe, for some reason, that his motives were altruistic, but I don't know what they were.

For the rest of the dream, I only occupy the student self.

At this point there is a middle part whose details completely escape me. All I can remember is that I am in a somewhat lavish setting for a while. Maybe it's a party. Me and the three other students are picked up by a man driving a long snowmobile. We are all able to get on the back. It is snowing and the ground is covered in white. It is dark now.

(n.b.: It is my understanding that one cannot sense changes in light intensity once entering the dream state, but I clearly can remember two different intensities, therefore, it is my belief that I exited one dream and re-entered r.e.m. in order to experience this shifting of light intensity.)

The driver takes us to a home. In a strange snowmobiling trick, the driver sort of spins us in a donut and we slide up the side of a small hill. It is exciting and a bit scary.

As I get off the snowmobile, I say, "Thank you very much."

In complete mockery, the way an annoying younger brother might, he sneers, "You're welcome very much."

I can't fathom why he is annoyed with me, but I am anxious to get inside the house. I have this sense that the professor will be there waiting, but I don't know why.

Once inside, I am greeted by a woman. She is preparing some food. I am taking off my boots when I realize that I did not tip the snowmobile driver. One of the other students is coming in the door and I ask if he tipped him and he tells me yes and I am relieved and sort of realize that maybe that's why the driver was mocking me.

I walk toward the back of the house, down a hallway (again, rather inexplicably, I'm pretty sure it was brighter inside the house than outside, but not as sure as how sunny it was on the boat earlier) and I see claude has just showered. He has a towel around his waist. I get the brief sense that he might be the professor, but it remains unclear. He tells me he'll be ready shortly, but I never see him again for the rest of the dream.

I walk into another room and inside I hear this sort of loud experimental-sounding music playing. I know there are brass instruments and guitar and bass and drums. Tim Kinsella, former singer of Cap'n Jazz, and singer of The Owls and Joan of Arc, is in the room. I say, this sounds a lot like The Flying Luttenbachers with Tim Kinsella singing. He sort of lights up and says, well, it's really just some of our earliest recordings, back when we were good."

The other students get to the room and Tim turns off the music, I assume because he thinks no one else will like it. The other students consist of two girls and one more guy.

One of the guys has taken a large plastic bag and dumped a huge pile of cocaine onto the carpeted floor. He begins cutting it into lines on the carpeting. One of the girls - the "prettier" one, says, "I want a line." The guy says, if you want a line, they're on the wall." I look over and indeed there are all these little cut lines of cocaine on the wall. She goes over and covers one nostril and sniffs a line. I don't want any coke, so I pass. The guy starts to give me some shit about not wanting to do some coke and the pretty girl says, "It's up to Brian if he wants to do it."

I am grateful, but my graciousness turns to discomfort as the kid that had poured the cocaine has now gotten a bowl and a hypodermic needle out. The bowl is glass and long and at one end the glass is exceptionally thin. He alights his lighter beneath the thin glass and some crystals melt. Then he sucks it up with his syringe. After he shoots up, he passes the needle over to the pretty girl. She is almost giddy to get her hands on it. She passes it to me when Tim Kinsella's mom is making some noise outside the room. I quickly hide the bowl under a couch and sit in front of it so that as Mrs. Kinsella enters the room, she can't see it.

She says something to Tim intimating that he's gay. He gets mad and frustrated and goes to hit the desk he's standing near, but doesn't even make a fist as he slams his hand down, so he doesn't make a very good argument defending his sexuality (even though I know and you know that masculinity and homosexuality aren't directly linked - still...). He starts advancing toward her saying how can he prove he's not gay, and she is backing up out of the room. Most of us follow. We are in the kitchen and he says something along the lines of, "maybe this will prove it," and he kisses his mom passionately, which naturally freaks her out. The the "pretty" girl is kind of outraged and she says, "what does it matter if he's gay anyway? Look I can kiss you and not be gay," and then she kisses Tim Kinsella's mom, too.

(I should note, not that it makes much difference, that by this point in the dream, the Tim Kinsella character has lost most of the physical attributes that make him Tim Kinsella, but I keep calling him that out of convenience. The person he has become is taller, has darker hair, is of a heavier build and has less delicate features as the real Tim Kinsella.)

Back in the room, the guy who had cut the coke looks over to the "nerdy" girl. He decides with all the kissing, he's not going to miss out. They kiss too.

Suddenly, we are all lying on the floor in Tim's room. There's sort of camera shot's of all our eyes. We are all wide awake (the rest of them, of course, because they've just done a bunch of coke) and our eyes are darting this way and that. This is the last image I have before waking up.

Brian posted at 8:21 AM.

In the town I grew up in as a prebuscent, my dream self was sitting with his friends. They bore no resemblance to my friends in my waking life. I think there were two or three of them. We were sitting in my friend's "clubhouse" which was located in his back yard. It was over a garage, but there was no access to the garage for a car, so I guess it was more of a shed. Either way, we were sitting on the second floor of it, all boys in our early twenties, it felt.

The woman of the world were launching a militant takeover of the world, subjugating the men. We were all scared. We left the security of the clubhouse to investigate. It was dark, nighttime. We climbed his back wooden porch, which was a pretty big deck. My friend's mother had lied to the women in charge, saying she didn't know where we'd gone. We were thankful, yet still a bit untrusting of her. She had black hair. No resemblance to any waking life woman I can think of.

On the porch, sever strings of white christmas lights illuminate suddenly, sending us scrambling to the floor of the deck, hitting the deck, as it were. To the north, we felt someone was watching. We scoured the horizon, looking for some evidence that we'd been detected. When we finally felt it was safe to move on again, we started heading away from that direction, to the southwest.

What must have been months later in dreamtime, I found myself in the city of men, which was being built on a mountainside. We men seemed to be doing OK in the absence of women. Our city was coming out beautifully, with huge plinths of white stone, like marble or limestone. There were gardens and fountains and I felt safe.

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The next morning, I had a dream and all I can remember about it was that I was in an Asian restaurant and there were numerous skinny Asian boys running around as the waiters. They were very feminine and silly. I was trying to walk through the restaurant toward the bathroom (I think). One of the waiters got in my way and just as I said to him, "I'm trying to go that way, you stupid, subservient prawn." I guess I must have some issues with either Asians or subservience (or both) in my sub-conscious.

Brian posted at 10:45 AM.

I've never, to my knowledge, had recurring dreams. I have had, for the past few years, dreams occurring in a recurring environment. The environment is a house similar to the house I lived in during my teens in Burbank, Illinois. It is similar in that it is of old construction and that it was built in stages. It is different in that it is three floors, was built in three stages, not two, and has secret doors in it leading to different locations throughout the house. I discovered the first secret door a few years ago. It was a trap door hidden in the ceiling of a closet (again, much like my old home), but inside the attic there was a false wall with a hidden door leading to yet another hidden attic.

Last night I dreamt that I was in this house and during the dream, I remembered dreaming a couple weeks ago that I could not find the secret door. Last night, I rediscovered the secret door and I was relieved. Now, I am not really sure if I really dreamed of not being able to find the secret door a few weeks ago, or if my dream-consciousness just created that memory as part of this dream. It's very convoluted, I know, but how else could I explain a memory of another dream during a dream in which I am not even actively conscious of the fact that I'm dreaming in the first place.

Later, I was dreaming about working somewhere at night. I remember changing clothes in a dirty bathroom stall or perhaps a small room. I distinctly remember the latch lock for the door. I don't really remember changing my clothes the first time, or what my job was. But I got the sense that my dream self fell asleep. At that moment, my waking self woke up and I think I looked around, maybe answered the phone, then went back to sleep. When my dream self awoke, I went back to the same changing room and when I got there and began changing back into my normal clothes, I realized that I had left my watch, a pair of sunglasses, a ring and some other belongings in this little room and I was relieved that it was all still there. I was slightly reassured by the fact that the amount of time that passed when my dream self had fallen asleep was short and that it had all occurred very early in the morning, while still dark outside.

Brian posted at 1:22 PM.

A toy company released a series of toys looking something like derigibles. The company reported that on a given date at a given time, all of these toys would from then on be imbued with the capability of real, self-sustaining flight. All the children in the world wanted one of these toys. There were several models, but they were mostly all grey and long and pill-like in shape. Many of the adults were concerned it was just a media hoax, but shortly before I woke up, I saw three different models flying by in the sky. We were figuring out that one needed to activate them in order for them to fly. One particular flyer breezed past me relatively closely, just about 30 feet from the ground. It was long and snake-like and flew in a corkscrew pattern. It was mesmerizing.

Brian posted at 3:37 PM.

I was enrolled in some sort of mystic arts school. Kinda like Harry Potter, but much darker. It seemed like the system of magic was derived from a living force that had to be tapped, but that was very hard to control. Whenever I would cast spells, I would be visited by this veiled figure, much like the classic black-robed death archetype. It would fly toward me as though walking without moving it's legs and at a very high speed and then it would get very close to my face and then disappear. I don't really remember much of a plot to this dream, though I think there was one. My dreams are much less vivid upon waking lately and I find it disconcerting. I don't know how to remedy this. Perhaps I need to meditate more in the waking life?

Later in the morning I dreamed in animation. It was somewhat Simpsons-like, but there was way more absurdity. One this that stood out was an elephant that lived inside of a wall, like a mouse. I also remember there was a lot of nonsense-language, but I can't remember any of the phrases now. We were all watching for something, but I don't remember what.

In either of these dreams, there was no one I recognized, including myself. Every feature was entirely synthetic, including location.

Brian posted at 8:49 AM.