High School Polyamory/Retconned Death/幽靈海灘/Star Wars: Dune

I was a teenager, standing with my girlfriend in a school hallway by some lockers, making out passionately.

As we stopped to take a breath, a lovely girl approached us. She was clearly attracted to my girlfriend, and my girlfriend to her, so they French kissed right in front of me.

I wasn't angry or jealous; I only wanted my turn at kissing this girl. But when I leaned in, she stopped me, making it clear she wasn't interested in my tongue. Respecting her bounds, I took an amicable step back.

My girlfriend and I were soon approached by another girl.

(She resembled an older, bespectacled, brunette version of Ponyo from the eponymous anime.)

She wanted a kiss from me. I didn't find her attractive, but I didn't want to leave her dejected, so I slipped her some tongue.

* * *

My father showed up, alive. Though I knew he was supposed to be dead, no one else remembered his death.

I don't often have bad dreams, but this was certainly one of them.

* * *

I visited my local food bank to receive a hamper. Unlike in reality, the food bank was the size of a hotel. Thousands of people had come to receive food, but there wasn't enough staff to serve them in a timely manner, so tempers began to rise, with visitors cursing out the workers, some of whom began suffering nervous breakdowns from the abuse heaped on them.

The dream then shifted focus. It was the '80s, and a boy was standing over a cliff overlooking a large lake. A prepubescent white kid, he was dressed only in swimming trunks. He either jumped or fell in, dashing his head against the rocks on the way down. With a bleeding head wound, he floated onto the shore of a local beach, where he was spotted and dragged in by beachgoers. This boy, who was white, suddenly was black, and his head was missing. It was implied his head was eaten by the ghosts haunting the beach.

This beach belonged to a small park only a couple acres in size. Prior to the 1920s, it had been used as a graveyard for Chinese immigrants, though by the 1930s, it had ceased to be used as a burial ground; only a pair of turn-of-the-last-century cremation ovens left outside to rust and a handful of water-eroded graves stood as testament to the original purpose for this plot. All this was related to me by the ghost of a Chinese woman who had died in a fire; her burns diminished as she told me the story.

* * *

When Denis Villeneuve said his Dune would be Star Wars for adults, he meant that literally; the script for his movie placed Dune inside the SW Universe. The Bene Gesserit were an all-female Jedi splinter group; Duke Leto and Poe Dameron were one-and-the-same character; the Harkonnens had a fleet of TIE fighters.

One absurd image from the dream has stayed clear in my mind: a TIE fighter, chained to the moon, desperately trying to take off but failing, repeatedly chipping its panels against the stony ground. No, not the moon of Arrakis or any other world from Dune — Earth's moon; the big blue marble hung right up there in the sable sky.

Limited Flexibility/Who's That Homeless Man Goose-Stepping Across My Mother's Bed?/Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Deluxe Edition/So I Grabbed Dina Meyer's Sweet Can

The following's a fragment of a larger dream I no longer remember.

I met a girl. She was big — tall, taller than I, and voluptuous.

(With a huge, round pussy.)

Unfortunately for me, she was homosexual/homoflexible.

(She was using deliberately obscurant metaphors, so I couldn't figure out which.)

In either case, her attraction to the opposite sex was marginal and her attraction to me nonexistent.

* * *

This dream was incredibly short. It lasted fifteen seconds at most.

My mother and I were standing at our kitchen window, looking outside. That's when we saw a homeless man cut across our front yard. He resembled a young(er) Harry Dean Stanton, wore a red-&-white baseball cap over longish hair, and was pushing a shopping cart, goose-stepping all the while. She and I exchanged glances; she was mortified/bewildered by this man's presence and desperately wanted to know who he was. Then we both turned to the living room. The man was suddenly there; he goose-stepped across her bed, air-gripping the handles of the shopping cart he no longer had.

* * *

I bought/received/found a copy of The Alan Parsons Project's Tales of Mystery and Imagination on vinyl.

It was a deluxe edition which included three records.

* * *

The following's a fragment of a larger dream I no longer remember.

I was in a buffet, helping myself to eight slices of toasted French bread — four with just butter, four with dark plum jam. Beside me in the line was a young Dina Meyer.

She let me grab her sweet can.

From the Dream Archives: All that We See or Seem Is but a Dream Within a Dream (Within a Dream)

(ORIGINAL ENTRY DATE: 10 JULY 2016)

Basically, this dream began with me going back to my old high school to finish off my high school education. This is a recurring dream theme of mine — going back to my old school, where I was expelled back in 2004, the only student there in his twenties, with all the classmates I knew from way back when long gone, leaving me peerless and lonely. Anyway, in these dreams I usually just go through the motions. I may be searching for someone or a photograph of someone I knew from the past,

but otherwise I handle myself well under the circumstances. This time, however, this time I had a nervous breakdown. I started screaming that I shouldn’t be there, that if it weren’t for all the bullshit I had gone through, I would’ve graduated years ago.

That’s when the dream got really bizarre. Suddenly, it was revealed that I wasn’t really myself and that none of this was really happening. I was really a teenaged kid — fourteen or fifteen — who resembled a young Rod Taylor,

the adopted son of a lesbian couple, who had suffered a psychotic break, leading me to believe I was a completely different, older person.

Oh, but the weirdness really jacked up from there. I then slipped on a red visor,

and in doing so I was able to perceive another person in another world; this person was me — not the teenaged Rod Taylor me, but the me me.

Only I was dressed like a man from the '50s — with short, slicked-back hair, attired in a neat black suit — and I was seated in a chair, hooked up to a virtual reality machine.

So, to make it clear, the dream was about this: A 1950s version of myself was hooked up to a virtual reality machine, causing me to experience a VR simulation where I was a teenaged Rod Taylor, who was suffering delusions of being a far older man, who was suffering a mental breakdown as a result of having to go back to his old high school.

(I think Philip K. Dick would’ve been proud of this dream.)

From the Dream Archives: The Misadventures of Daniel Jackson, Samantha Carter, a Woman Driver, & Carrey Lantern

This is a new feature of mine called "From the Dream Archives", Here, I showcase old dreams, dreams I had months or years ago, ones which I wrote down for posterity way back when. These posts will be supplementary to my regular posts.

If I can, I will mention the dates I had the dreams on (or the dates when they were first recorded down).

* * *

(ORIGINAL ENTRY DATE: 11 JUNE 2014)

It began with Daniel Jackson and Samantha Carter from Stargate SG-1 

getting trapped inside a virtual reality simulation of an elevator (if elevators came equipped with several rooms, corridors, and windows which looked out onto the street). Basically, they could only escape the simulation if they inflicted tremendous pain on either themselves or another person trapped in the simulation. If the damage they dealt was too great, though, they could end up killing the recipients in the real world. So, instead of tossing some balding guy through a window like they originally planned, 

(Take your pick; they're equal pains in the mikta.)

they ended up burning themselves or something along those lines to get out of the simulation.

(It fells awful. And it works.)

From there, the dream changed to focus on a woman in a car (I think it was a station wagon) who was being followed by a malevolent alien in a car (also a station wagon, I believe) who was wearing a one-piece, head-concealing olive green bodysuit and a Cyclops-type visor.

"Remember me? Abduction of '74? Yeah, I was the guy with the anal probe."

Somehow, though, that one alien became two bizarre aliens in bronze spacesuits with telescoping stilt-like legs.

Finally, the dream became a bizarre Green Lantern movie. Green Lantern was played by Jim Carrey, who looked exactly like the Riddler from Batman Forever save for the absence of question marks on his costume.

(I shudder to think of what he would do with a power ring.)

Having failed as a superhero, he was bouncing from one minimum wage-paying job to another in search of steady employment. At one point in the dream he got folded into a giant quesadilla or taco.

(Good luck getting to sleep tonight.)

The dream started coming to a close when Carrey Lantern got inside the flexible rubber walls of an elevator(!) where he saw the outline of two men swap chewing gum while making out with one another(!). Believing one of them to be a woman, he got aroused.

As that happened, though, Carrey Lantern got stuck in one of the rubber walls, leaving it up to one of the men — who had a pocket knife on him — to cut Carrey Lantern free. 

"Don't thank me! Thank the Simpsons reference!"

The man cut him free, and Carrey Lantern came out looking like a silver-purple rubber banana man.

(Just pretend he's silver-purple instead of, y'know, banana-coloured.)

At that point the dream came to a close and I woke up.

To end this strange recollection on an even stranger note, I was woken up by one of my adult cats, who was kneading and sucking on one of my armpits like it was a teat.