1 + 4 = 5 ghosts

Wow! I had the craziest, well not crazy, but messed up dream last night. It started off all well and good, but a relationship breakup set off a strange chase dream.

I was running for my life. Because friends got in the way, they lost their lives and then, all of a sudden, the person doing the chasing disappeared. The next thing I know I am at a house having a meal of undercooked steak and sausages with chips, baked beans and mushy peas - mostly foodstuffs I hate in real life. There are three cards on the table in front of the woman whose house it is. When she takes the plates out, I pick the cards up and read what's inside them. They are from the bloke who had been chasing me. It is the second card that gets my attention. At the bottom of the card there are two sets of pictures of little stick men with big heads. The first picture shows one little stick man, an equals sign, and "1 ghost". Underneath it says "Me plus her, alone, in her room." The second set shows one little stick man, a plus sign, four little stick men, an equals sign, and "5 ghosts". Underneath it says "Her, plus her friends, if her friends get in the way." I ask if I can take the cards to make copies (morbid, I know) and give them to boyfriend to pass back. But I forget the boyfriend's name. The woman's husband shouts, "Hey, Robinson, get over her. She's forgotten who you are!" As he says this, I remember his name and say, "Alan. I will pass them back to Alan," while rolling my eyes at my silly memory.

This isn't the whole dream, and I know I woke up at least twice during this dream. The first time I woke up I remember thinking, as I fell back to sleep (I was fighting going back to sleep because the dream was at a particularly frightening part), "I can't let this dream beat me." Still, it was a pretty harrowing dream, all in all. I wonder what my subconscious was trying to work through?

Well, I think I have about 600 words so far for the essay. But at least it seems to be coming together. If I can remove a Principessa from my shoulders (she is there now, watching Nick Jr.) then I shall get the books out and start writing again. Hopefully, I'll get the first draft done today.

Whales and dolphins, whales and dolphins, yeah!

(Pic from http://www.kidzone.ws/)

But no. Sharks and dolphins, no whales. In my dreams. Evoloved sharks and dolphins. Sharks in smoking jackets and dolphins in lab coats. Yes, I am mad.

So I had this weird dream, obviously. Above water level there was a TV station. There was some sort of Jeopardy style game show. The winners, well, they won. The losers, they were chucked into some massive vat and flushed away, where sharks waited in anticipation like dogs under a dinner table. When the losers appeared the sharks caught them, again like a dog catching scraps at the aforementioned dinner table. Some losers escaped, and found themselves at this strange, enclosed underwater complex.

Lots of rooms and corridors. The rooms were all plush, with all mod cons and any creature comforts you could think of. In these rooms, lots of peeps. There was only one problem. There were sharks inside. Sharks that could walk on their tail-fins, and use their pectoral fins as hands and arms. They would walk to a room, and just as a trained squirrel would do, pressed a button, the door would slide open, and the shark would snatch a person from the room. This happened a few times in the rooms that the dream me happened to be in. I became really annoyed by this, so found an interconnecting door. When the buzzer went on the door the shark was opening, I went through into the other room, quietly opened the door to the corridor, and attacked the shark from behind. (Here is where dreamtime goes anti-physics!) I grab the shark by his throat, and start screaming that I was fed up of him eating my friends. I walked down the corridor, shark by the throat, until we reached a set of double doors. Through the double doors we go, into a laboratory run by dolphins in lab coats and spectacles. I throw the shark at them, shouting that they can have him back because I was really pee'd off with him. The dolphins were mightly happy at the return of thier lab pet!

Then I woke up.

So yeah. I think I must have a fevered brain. Or maybe, after reading the Timothy Leary turn on-tune in-drop out stuff last night my brain decided that sharks and dolphins are to be my religion. Who knows. It must have been the repercussions of the "Death. Life. Structure" thing in the source reading. Must have been changed to Dolphins. Lab. Shark.

Well, off to continue reading the music unit, as the religion stuff is clearly playing with my head! (Though the music is doing my nut, too. Listening to "The Dangling Conversation", I am sure that the second "Are the borders of our lives" - as it is written in the lyric in the block book - is more "Are the warders of our lives" when you listen to it. It would make more sense to the song.)

These dreams...

Don't you just hate it when you have a dream, you are quite sure you are dreaming, but you wake up feeling that the dream was real?

This morning I was woken with that kind of start. I was dreaming that I was asleep, yet I was somewhat awake at the same time - I was able to view everything in the bedroom. Or maybe I was dreaming that I was in the bedroom in the dream. Anyway. I could hear a buzzing sound. I pinpointed it to the curtains, but then it started getting closer. I had in my mind 'There's a bloody wasp coming to get me!' The next thing, the buzzing is right at my ear and I could feel the displaced air on wisps of hair, the proximity of the sting making me sleep wince! Then the wasp landed on my ear, and I was trying to move without moving, hoping that the thing didn't crawl into my ear and sting my eardrum or something! I gently and quietly moved my head, so that the wasp was brushed onto the quilt, and hid my head under the covers. It was this move, in my dream and in reality, that woke me up. I spent the next five minutes listening for waspy buzzing, just in case I hadn't been dreaming!

Can you tell I don't like wasps? I think that this dream was residual fear from last week when I was buzz attacked by an absolutely massive wasp in the bathroom. What freaked me out more than this wasp just ending up dropping from somewhere and buzzing around behind me for a few minutes, and me being just a little incapacitated to get away from it, was that the wasp somehow ended up caught in my hair just above my ear. The buzzing alone is enough to reduce me to tears, but the proximity of the sting to my head completely shook me. Then the bloody thing just dropped from my hair and onto the floor by my foot! Argh! I think I did scream, too!

Well, enough about wasps and dreams of wasps. *Shudder*

I should get my Wallace essay back in the next few days. I am so worried about it. I know now that I didn't answer the question properly, as I've moaned about already. I'm not even sure now that I had enough in there to give me a pass. I'm so disappointed in myself *sigh*.

Rousseau before bed = weird dreams

So. I have decided that it is not worth wasting all my time trying to write (though I should really say writing. There is either do or do not, no try) TMA04, and have started reading the Rousseau section of block 3. Big mistake. Not because I don't understand it (once you get into it, it's okay), but because it sets my subconscious off on one while I am sleeping.

• Implicit assumption: Rousseau before bed = weird dreams.
• Premise 1: I read Rousseau's thoughts on legitimate authority versus naked power (that can conjure interesting, yet disturbing, images even before sleep!) before I went to bed.
• Premise 2: I had weird dreams about men with guns kidnapping me and some friends, not wanting them to drill through my head, so doing what they said to save myself and my friends because they now had guns and drills and therefore had naked power over us.
• Conclusion: So reading Rousseau before bed gave me weird dreams.
  

All through the dream it was a constant struggle to do what the men said to stop them from drilling my head ('Is it safe?' now echoes in my mind!), while trying to find a way to escape, therefore disobeying their instructions. More and more people seemed to end up being kidnapped and sitting with me. Somehow or other, the men and their threats became tolerable, though we were still making plans to escape. We finally got our chance when they went outside to a small brick building to sleep. It was still worrying because if they hadn't gone to sleep they could see us trying to escape through the open front door (this is how cruel my mind is; the door was open so we could see our deprived freedom). Just as we were about to make our escape, the children ducking down and out through the front door, the adults over the fences of the back gardens, I woke up.

I hope this doesn't happen every night I read the Rousseau section. Or maybe I do. It might provide some useful ideas for stories. It's also nice to know that my brain is trying to work at some level to make sure I understand things, even when I am asleep!

Brain is in subconscious overdrive.

I like sleeping. Lots. But not when my mind is playing funny tricks on me (even when these tricks could be used in a story.).

The last two nights, I have been having the strangest of strange dreams. The dream the night before last wasn't too bad, it was a chase and hide dream, so for the most part whoever I was sat back in a hiding place watching the action. And interesting action it was too, with super-fast martial arty blokes with swords...

But last night, a totally different chase type dream all together. Whoever I was happened to be on the run. It was tense and dangerous, and when it woke me up I was breathing shallow, hoarse breaths (like it was actually me legging it) and my heart was pumping like it never has in my chest. (Okay, I lie. It pumped like that a few months ago when I had another dream where I had been eviscerated by some weird alien. Well, I never said my dreams were sane!) Not only was my heart thumping and my chest hurting, but blood was hammering out some tribal beat in my head. It all made me feel quite afraid. I had to wake myself up fully before I had the chance to go back to sleep, so worried was I that I would close my eyes and the dream continue.

It only makes me think that my muse wants me to start a new story. There are some intriguing ideas appearing in the dreams of late, but by God, do they hurt!