Dream Journal: February 8, 2013

Doesn’t take much to guess what was on my mind with this dream.  I was told a couple days before that an agreement the company I work for didn’t pan out as expected and thus some open positions would be unfilled, contractors would be released, etc.  Nothing specific about layoffs.  (Yet.)

An e-mail went out that there would be layoffs at the company, including one from our group of about 9 people.

This was almost immediately followed by a second message, stating that the dropped person would not be from the Development team (roughly half the group).

In the dream, I wasn’t concerned for my job so much as the extra work that would come based on fewer people in our group.

Most curiously, the entire dream was text based.  No pictures, no people, just online messaging.

Dream Journal: January 22, 2012

Okay, Moses, interpret this sucker!

I took off on my hang glider from the Marin headlands, across the water, parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge.  As I sailed across the water, I saw thrashing in the water below, a shark feeding frenzy.  At first I thought they were megalodons, but then I realized that they were black on top and white on the bottom, black scorpion sharks.

After I landed in the Presidio, I finished off my pint glass of beer and set it on the grass.  Looking into the water of the bay near the shore, I saw a severed arm moving along the bottom, almost like it was crawling by its fingers.  The arm had been in the water a long time; I could tell by what was either algae on it or bits of flesh peeling off.

I went and got the park police, but the arm was gone when we got back.  They quizzed me at length about it, especially interested in what type of sleeve was on the arm.  (It had a dark band at the wrist, so I thought maybe it was a sailor shirt.)  They sent divers into the bay looking for it, but they couldn’t find it.  But they did find the severed head of an albino alligator, which they showed me on a turkey platter, sitting on top of a ring of lettuce greens.

Megalodons are giant prehistoric sharks, long extinct.  There is no such thing as a “black scorpion shark”.

I guess I slept in a weird position with my arm crooked up, and it fell (ahem) asleep.
 

Dream Journal: September 27, 2011

I slept really lousy on the night after returning from Folsom Street Fair.  Every time I woke up from this dream, I kept sinking back into it:

For whatever reason — dream logic doesn’t requires these things be explained or even make sense — I sat bare-assed on a chocolate frosted cake.  I then proceeded to clean it up by scooping big fingerfuls off my ass and licking the brown frosting off my fingers.  (Yeah, so it looked like that.)

At the same time, my father videotaped this.  He then posted the video to YouTube, under the name “kbd hong” (so I guess I was Chinese in the dream), with the title “Look what I did on my honeymoon!” (but I wasn’t even married in the dream).  The video immediately scored 80,000 views, and soon thereafter broke 300,000 views, and then got featured on Fox News.

My father refused to take it down from YouTube, so I sued them, and I sued him for both defamation of character and for damages (including the money made from page views and ads that came from YouTube).  And I had to deal with a media circus, and repeatedly send cease & desist letters and sue people for reposting and remixing the video.

Worst was the mashup of the video with the song “Chocolate Rain”.

I think I’ll blame this on the Reuben sandwich I had for dinner last night.

Let me revise the intro to this: I didn’t sleep lousy.  I slept crappy.
 

Dream Journal: March 27, 2011

I had this dream a couple weeks ago:

I was walking in a mid-size town waterfront area — the sort with boat slips and local shops, but also parking lots for a moderate amount of tourist activity — with either my mother or my ex-boyfriend.  We stopped by a green van, where an old Asian woman gave us a styrofoam ice chest.

Inside the ice chest were four or five puppies, each the size of a small loaf of bread.  They were asleep, and young enough that their eyes were barely able to be open.  We were told that they were Bhutanese Yak Hounds, and I was shown a picture of an adult one, which looked like a single-color St. Bernard with an Akita’s tail.

As we walked back to the car, me carrying the ice chest, my mother or my ex-boyfriend (I guess it wasn’t important which one) walked ahead, leaving me behind.  The ice chest started to get heavier, and puppies apparently woke up and started moving around.  Peeking in the ice chest, I saw that the puppies were larger than before.

As the dream continued, the puppies kept getting larger until they started to climb out of the ice chest and on my shoulders and head.  I tried to call out for my mother or ex-boyfriend to wait for me, but either I couldn’t or she/he couldn’t hear me.  Soon I had five puppies, each about the size of the original ice chest, clambering all over me as I stumbled along, trying to get to our parked car.

Most likely, I was tangled in the sheets and my head had slipped off and under the pillow as I slept.

There is no such thing as a “Bhutanese Yak Hound”, although the Bhutia Sheepdog, related to the Tibetan Mastiff, might fit the bill.
 

Counting Sheep

Around five years ago, as I approached 40, I started having an increased problem with falling asleep.  Not quite insomnia, I think, but I would sometimes lie there on the edge of sleep for quite a while (often 20–30 minutes, occasionally an hour or more, and a few times, genuine “I’m not going to sleep, am I?” insomnia).

I assume that this was primarily biological, part of the aging process, but I was having some issues with my relationship at the time — which ended in late 2007 — which sometimes kept my mind whirling.  I’ve also recently seen some news stories that the glow from electronics can have a sleep effect, and around that time, I was trying to find a clock radio to replace one that had died; I went through three before I found one that didn’t keep me away from the glow, so that may have had an effect as well.  Hmm, I was also in the middle of an unhappy period at work then.  Man, it all piles up, doesn’t it?

Anyway…

Trying to find something that would help (other than drinking myself to sleep), I resorted to counting sheep, something which I had also pooh-poohed before.  But when you’re desperate, you’ll try anything.  So I imagined up a setting with a pasture and a fence for the sheep to jump over, but something very cartoony and almost a stage setting with cutouts of trees and clouds, a lot like one of those late 50s/early 60s Bugs Bunny cartoons.  (Wish I could find a pic.)

Out trotted the first sheep — white and puffy, very cartoony, little blinky eyes.  He trotted over to the fence, jumped it, and trotted off stage.

The next sheep trotted on, jumped, trotted off.

The next one trotted on, jumped, didn’t quite clear the fence, scrambled over, and trotted off.

This continued on for several more sheep, each having progressively more difficulty getting over the fence.  Some tripping over it, some squeezing between the bars, etc.  Still not sleeping, I rolled over, from my right shoulder to my left.

Suddenly the stage flipped 90 degrees in my head!  The next sheep plummeted from the right side, smashed into the fence, and bounced over and fell off to the left side of the stage!  And another and another followed it!

Fuck.  I think I got up and had some cocoa with peppermint schnapps in it at that point.

These days, no cartoon sheep die to put me to sleep.  Instead, I start at 100 and count my breaths backward to 1.  Usually somewhere in the 80s, I’m off.  Sometimes I come back to awareness that I’ve stopped counting and I pick up again where I think I left off.  If I make it to 1, I roll over and start back at 100; if I make it to 1 a second time, I give up, get up, and do something else to shut my brain down.
 

Dream Journal: July 8, 2010

Short but dramatic:

I was standing near a swimming pool, wearing just a pair of cutoff shorts, and I had my iPhone in the pocket.  Suddenly someone started to piss on me, and on the pocket where the phone was.  Shortly, I was separating the layer of the phone and laying it out on a counter to dry, using a handheld hair dryer to hurry things along.

Note that I got a new iPhone on release day, just a couple weeks before, and I was heading to Palm Springs the next day, for a weekend to be spent around swimming pools and such.  Also, I have previous had phones doused in liquid (although not that from the dream), and did try the hair dryer trick to rescue one.
 

Dream Journal: June 15, 2010

This morning’s dream:

I dreamed that I was riding on my scooter, just about to get onto I-5 southbound at the MLK ramp, going somewhere south (although not as far as Portland, 170 miles), when something went wrong.  Snapped, broke, slipped, I don’t know.  But my motor revs went way down and I suddenly couldn’t sustain speeds over about 20 mph.  I limped home and had to give up on wherever I was going.

This was one of those “too close to home” dreams, since I rode past that exit on I-5 yesterday, going down to a site visit at an airport hotel (as a potential site for an upcoming event).  Also, last Friday, I took my scooter in for a checkup and was told that I need a new air filter, a new belt, new rollers, and a new back tire.  And thus I shouldn’t ride it long distances, which means I won’t be taking it on the trip to Portland this coming Saturday.  So I guess that stuff is weighing on my mind.
 

Dream Journal: May 24, 2010

First, some background.  One of my cats has some toy mice, which she loves to fling in the air and a few feet across the room.  Inevitably, she ends up letting one “get away” under a piece of furniture where she can’t reach it; three of the six are currently AWOL that way, not even under their usual pieces of furniture.

In the dream, I found a small pile of mouse turds.  Opening the cabinet door under the sink, I found three mice (maybe these are the missing toys?), which started to squeak and scramble away.  I swept two of them out onto the floor, but the third got away.

The cat scrambled in and caught one by the tail, and flung it in the air and across the room.  But not the little flings she does in real life; here, the mouse sailed a good 8 or 10 feet and smacked hard into the wall about 5 feet up, then dropped to the floor, dazed.  She picked it up and flung it again, with similar effect.  It then did a drunken (concussed!) scramble for a hole under another cabinet and got away.

Movie Review — Waking Life

Waking Life was an experimental animation film from 2001 that I thought I wanted to see.  Thanks to Netflix, I finally got it.  Unfortunately.  “Experimental” means “fucking weird”, of course.

A one-word review: “Queasy”.

The trailer makes it look interesting and implies a narrative much more cohesive than actually exists.  In reality, the plot can be summed up by “A guy is dreaming and slowly comes to realize that.  Along the way, he dreams about people expounding on philosophy.”

Yeah, it’s just about that exciting.  Frankly, any movie that references existentialism and quotes Kierkegaard and Thomas Mann — and not just uses their words but directly says stuff like “Thomas Mann wrote that <blah blah blah>” — is clearly not intended as either entertaining or educational.  Masturbatory, maybe.

There is a really narrow audience who gives a shit that you can quote Thomas Mann, but there’s a broader audience who would rather you present those ideas to us as ideas rather than as quotes, and as dialogue rather than as monologue.  Talk to us, don’t preach at us.

So to expand, this movie is a bunch of disconnected monologues about philosophy and dreaming and the meaning of life, where one character expounds on some deep matter to an ostensibly main character who mostly just sits there and nods.  (As opposed to me, who would have nodded off if I were just sitting and watching rather than ironing clothes as I watched.  That shit puts me right to sleep; maybe it’s a defense mechanism to prevent me from having to struggle to decipher what is being said.)  Each monologue is software animated by a different person, which results in some bizarre and sometimes jarring art styles.

For the first half of the movie, neither the viewer nor the main character has a grasp on what is going on.  (Well, the viewer has the title to go by, which leads you to get that it’s all a dream before the character does.)  Eventually the character understands that he is dreaming the whole thing, including the bits where he thinks he is waking up, and then then he starts to say what the viewer is thinking: “What the fuck is this?  What does this have to do with anything?”

(There is a truism in comics — where the writer often has much more control over the final product than is usually the case in film — that if the characters start to say that the story is stupid, then the writer agrees.  I felt that way with Waking Life.)

I’ll spoil the ending right now (highlight to read):

The lead character doesn’t wake up, and nothing is resolved.  Maybe he’s dead.

Now, in comics, sometimes a crap story can be saved by cool (good, innovative, intriguing) art.  Does that happen here?

Hell no.  The entire film is rotoscoped, with underlying video used as the basis for the animation.  The computer software they use for this does interpolation, so they can (for example) draw the curve of a character’s face in two key frames and have the software map that curve through the intermediate frames.  This saves an immense amount of work, of course, and sometimes it produces great work (but too few frames interpolated and it becomes jumpy).  But they also tend to use interpolation for all the static elements in a scene, individually.  This wall, that wall, the floor, each table… all their own layers, interpolated.  (Compare to the minimalist work with static and even reused backgrounds don by Hanna-Barbera.)  And since the video is from hand-held cameras, the viewing point moves throughout the scenes, which means that the view of each static element changes a little all through.  The result is that each static item in the scene “floats”, moving independently of all the others.  Result to the views: nausea.

Now, any individual one of these monologue scenes — ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes — as a self-contained bit can be quite interesting.  But string them together, with art styles changing throughout and no graspable narrative from one to the next, and you end up with a jumbled mess that doesn’t build to a value greater than the parts.

Now, I’m sure some people would try to defend this entire process, saying that the art styles and the floating animated items and the minimal narrative work in concert with the dream nature of the plot, and I can’t really disagree on that front.  It is all very dreamlike.  (Although I’ve never in my life had lucidity in dreams sufficient to sustain several minutes of philosophy monologue.)  The problem with is that “experimental” goes fine for 10 or 20 minutes, maybe, but this film is 100 minutes long.  Intellectual curiosity fades into boredom quickly, and allows the nausea-inducing animation to rule.

Queasy.
 

Dream Journal: February 23, 2010

Tiny, tiny dream:

I dreamed that I am going to be the inker of Legion of Super-Heroes #41, and that I found this out by my name in the advance solicitations for the issue.

Mind you, I’m not a comic book inker, and there’s no Legion comic currently being published.  (But vol.6 will start this summer.  Maybe if I start practicing, I can make this dream come true in 3.5 years?)
 

Dream Journal: February 20, 2010

I had a small dream this night, while I was in New Zealand:

I was taking apart aluminum picnic tables with my stepfather and stepbrother.  (I don’t have such in real life.)  We were having problems getting the nuts loosened and I said “I don’t understand this.  I’ve taken apart wooden picnic tables before.”

A moment later, my step father — who looked like comic book artist Keith Giffen — said “There goes Jim, lying again like always.”

I completely exploded at him, tackling him and trying to throttle him (but also trying not to) while yelling at him that I don’t lie.  My stepbrother just laughed at me while my mother sat impassively nearby, knitting.

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Updated on May 26, 2010

In retrospect, the tackle/throttle part of this dream felt a lot like Lost.  Picture any cast member whaling on Ben until he's scraped and bloody.

Dream Journal: February 9, 2010

Every now and then I have one of those dreams which has nothing particularly weird in at all.  Those are the ones that freak me out the most, because I really wonder what’s up to lead my head down that path:

I was in a real estate office, signing papers to purchase a new house.  Only after I signed did we go to look at the house.  (Okay, so there was one weird bit.)

The house was in a residential neighborhood, at the end of a street with some trees beyond it.  The house was small, one story, with an attached garage.  Inside, one room was painted blue with white trim, and had a loose pile shag carpet of the same color blue, with white flecks in it.  (Lint would never show on this carpet.)  Another room was olive green, with the same style carpet, again matching.

The garage was small, only suitable for a small car, and it still had boxes in it from a previous tenant.  There were also a couple cool bookcases (with no books on them).  With the stuff in the garage, there might not have been room even for a car.  I remember thinking that the house didn’t have room for all my stuff and my boyfriend’s.

Beyond the trees was a small ravine with a rushing stream at the bottom.  I was worried that the stream might flood with the rains, but when we went into the house’s basement, it was well sealed (although I’m not sure how we could tell).

That’s it for the dream.  In the real world, my boyfriend and I have talked about eventually combining households, presumably selling our existing houses and buying a new one together.  But it wouldn’t be this house; way too small (and he’s got to have a garage or work space for his tools, not to mention all my comics, his tikis and masks and ethnic art, and so on).
 

Dream Journal: January 23, 2010

Tiniest dream yet:

I dreamed I was making banana-peanut butter chip muffins, and to prepare the bananas, I took a fork and punctured the peel a few times, then put them in the oven to “roast” for a few minutes.

That’s the entire dream.  Obviously informed by my plans to make banana-peanut butter chip muffins for breakfast (which I did, although I merely microwaved the chunked bananas for 30 seconds rather than roasting them).
 

Dream Journal: January 19, 2010

Tiny little dream this time:

I was riding my scooter along a country road — one lane each way, gravel siding, untrimmed grass beyond that, telephone poles, etc.  I came upon my friends Roger and David walking along the siding, so I stopped to give them a ride.

My scooter was now a motorcycle built for three — three complete seats.  I didn’t have spare helmets for them, and in fact didn’t have one for myself.  I pulled the hood of a black rain coat over my head to disguise the lack of a helmet and we rode along, hoping to not encounter any cops.

Eventually the land beyond the road sloped away down to the ocean or a big lake.  We pulled over to stop — I don’t know if it was to let them off or to look at the body of water — and the bike skidded and threatened to tip over in the gravel.

That’s pretty much it.  Roger, David, and I were all in Washington DC last weekend for Mid-Atlantic Leather, and we were on the same flight coming back.  They offered me a ride home (since they live nearby), but my boyfriend was coming to pick me up, so I passed.

In June 2009, I had a small spill on my scooter, pulling into a gravel parking lot.
 

Dream Journal: December 4, 2009

On December 4, I was scheduled to start the Landmark Forum, an event I didn’t really want to do.  (More on that in a later post.)  I had a brief dream the night before:

I was in a building with a high arched ceiling with glass skylights.  Sort of haphazardly placed around the large room were false walls, the sort that went halfway to the roof but not all the way.  Each wall had landscaping — ferns, moss, flowers, trickling fountains — and barely audible New Age music was playing.

It felt like a 1970s/1980s sci-fi show set, something from Logan’s Run or Buck Rogers.

I was talking to two guys who were also there for the Forum.  We all had on name tags and one had a black bar on his, an indicator of someone having taken the Forum before.  His name was “Belief”.  The other guy was named “Don”.  (I’m not sure if we were all wearing form-fitting jumpsuits or not.)

Some chimes rang, signalling that we to go in to the start of the Forum.  As we filed into some other room, Don and I noticed that Belief had vanished.  When we sat down, Don had also vanished.

Then I woke up.

Jeez, talk about your blatant and ugly symbology: that Landmark was New Agey and sci-fi, that any “Belief” would vanish from me, and that anyone (anything) else I knew would also vanish and I would be left alone.

The next night, my dream was Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” repeated over and over and over.
 

Dream Journal: November 1, 2009

I rarely have any dreams, or at least only rarely have any that I remember past waking up.  (I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about flying, although they say such are one the most common kinds.)  So when I do have a memorable one, I try to preserve it.

It was early evening and we were standing on the deck.  (There was a definite sense of “us”, but whether the other person was my real-world boyfriend or not, I can’t say.)  Down below, our cats (not my current cats, though) were leaping off the ground, landing in the top branches of trees, and then jumping down again — and not just jumping up and down, but 10 foot leaps into the air, into delicate twig-like branches, and doing backflips on the way down.  I soon realized that the trees were loaded with twittering birds, so the cats were jumping and catching them.

Looking closer at the branches nearest me, some of which extended onto the deck at foot level, I could see that the branches were laden with big plump berries or small plums, and the birds were feasting on them.  The berries were so ripe that they must have fermented and the birds were passing out after eating them.  There was even a stack of birds three deep in front of me.

Our dog (not my current dog, because I don’t have one) came over to the stack of birds, sniffed at them, and took the top one in its mouth, then dropped it over the edge of the deck.  The dog took the second one, and dropped it over the edge.  The dog then took the third one — a small, pure white bird which had been under the other two — took it in its mouth, and crunch crunch ate it.

And then I woke up.

I have no idea what the dream means.  (Do dreams always have to mean something?)  I can make up something sexual about watching other people doing fancy “tricks” and not settling for the first “bird” when a better one may be hidden behind it.  But the whole eating metaphor with the cats and dog gives that one a hard twist to the right.

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Updated on February 3, 2010
 

Dream Journal: Celebrity Dreams

I only rarely remember my dreams, and even then it’s usually just a single snapshot.  Of the dreams I do remember, a few have involved celebrities:

• Most recently (June 15, 2003), I dreamt that country music singer Terri Clark had died and her sister came by carrying a huge banner, asking people to be in a tribute show.
• Sometime around 1993 (maybe), I dreamt I was taking a tour of San Francisco, and we were underneath the Bay Bridge.  Our tour guide was Connie Chung.
• A couple years before that, I dreamt I was in a snow drift on a ski slope at Tahoe, strangling Annette Funicello.  (The memory snapshot I have of this dream is similar to Kirk strangling the shape-changing salt monster on Star Trek.)

As you can imagine, I try not to analyze these dreams too much.

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Updated on October 21, 2003

Updated on July 26, 2010

Added links, retitled to merge into Dream Journal thread.