Dream reports

Strikes me (for selfish reasons as I remember most of my dreams and like to tell people about them and see what they say) that a thread for reporting dreams is needed, and I haven’t been able to find one.

I am told the reason I remember my dreams so well is that I don’t sleep well, although I see no other signs of not getting enough sleep (I don’t feel drowsy and get about eleven hours a night). I have my doubts; I think I remember dreams well because I remember dreams well.

Okay, here is a dream I had last night:

Three witches are making their way along the curb of an American interstate highway at maybe 20 miles an hour (this is obviously inspired by a certain British author who wrote a lot about such witches but whose name escapes me and I’m too lazy to look it up).

The first one is a standard issue witch with long nose and black hat and robes on a broomstick floating maybe three feet above the ground. The second witch is fat and dressed the same and riding a mule with a big cat asleep on the mule’s backside. The third is riding a broomstick but is young and beautiful and dressed in pink silk.

Behind them is walking a broom (like from the Disney Fantasia episode where Mickey Mouse is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) carrying a couple of empty water buckets. Attached to his back is a big sign, “We need water.”

As it so happens I have a backseat full of full water jugs, so I pull over and ask them if they would like some of my water. They are appreciative and two of my water jugs empty out and the buckets the broom was carrying fill up with water.

I then tell them I have plenty and they can have more if they want it, so the broom stick grows two more arms with two more buckets and they too fill up with water, and so on.

Then the head witch comes over to my car and says, “For your kindness we will grant you a boon: May you never thirst or lack for water.” Lo and behold the empty jugs in my backseat fill back up with water.

I ask (who wouldn’t) why they didn’t just fill up their own buckets directly, and the answer was, of course, “Oh, that wouldn’t be ethical.”

No doubt my mulling this over in my head this morning has cause me to make it’s telling smoother – it’s hard to tell about dreams with absolute accuracy – but this is basically what it was.

Oooohh, I’ll play.

I’m inside a model railroad hobby shop in a strip shopping center, location unknown, but it feels like Florida. In the middle of the floor is an undecorated Christmas tree. Under it there is an H0-scale track running around the perimeter of an oval wooden platform, with beveled edges, painted dark green. The wood platform is a bit warped and the track is hanging out over the edge. Running on the track is a model of a Chicago & Northwestern 4-6-0 steam locomotive, numbered 1328, towing a tender and two dark green passenger cars. The train gets hung up on a switch and I give it a little shove to get it going again. It makes a couple of circuits, then speeds up and derails. The female shop attendant accuses me of derailing the train, and I say it sped up on its own.

I look outside through the window of the shop and see a couple of vintage cars pull into the parking lot: a '60 Ford sedan in black with a white top, followed by a '62 in the same color scheme but with red wheels. The '62 is dirty and the sides are rusty and dented. Both cars are full of heavy-set hispanic-looking guys. It’s a sunny day but the light is weak, as though shining through a light overcast. I then notice an area of the parking lot has been roped off and people are lining up inside it, dressed in what look like Halloween costumes, among them animal outifts and Nazis; one of the Nazis is wearing an absurdly oversized helmet with an SS symbol on the side. A little farther down are more vintage cars parked side-by-side. I recognize a metallic green Chevy Vega and a '58 Rambler. Beyond that there are what look like a half-dozen European-style fishing boats lined up on trailers; each one has a vintage car sitting on the deck ahead of a stern-mounted wheelhouse.

Back inside the shop, it seems I am staying in an apartment there but I don’t have my key, and the shop lady won’t give me a spare because I don’t have ID with me. I need to get in because I need to change my clothes; I’m only wearing trousers but I’ve got four or five shopping bags full of clothes sitting in front of me. I’m mentally debating whether I can change my trousers in the shop without anyone noticing when a noise draws my attention back outside: It’s a couple of beat-up old hot-rodded Camaros, engines revving and belching oil smoke, being loaded into a trailer. At that point I wake up.

Welcome to the SDMB, Frank Merton. Cafe Society is our forum for discussing the arts – which we define fairly broadly, but which don’t really include dreams. I’ve moved your thread to MPSIMS, our “miscellaneous” forum.

Again, welcome – enjoy your stay.

twickster, Cafe Society (and MPSIMS) moderator

Shame on you for derailing the train like that; I know it sped up on its own but it was your dream that made it do it. You probably wanted the excitement of a crash.

I’ve always lost something, or myself, in my dreams. Always searching. I don’t remember changing trousers in a shop lobby though, or even contemplating it.

Where something goes is bureaucracy, but I do think dreaming is most definitely an art form; and reporting them is another art to avoid getting bogged down in the uninteresting parts.

OK, here’s a dream from last night – one of several but since I doubt these get read by many rather than myself I won’t go to the trouble of trying to record them all.

I was having a really brutal verbal fight with my father (now long dead) about his refusal to buy for me some expensive paper and pens and inks I needed to finish a school project on Native American art history. He refused saying I should have saved the money since I knew this expense was approaching and I had just assumed he would buy me the stuff so I had wasted my money on other things.

The fight was terrible and I called him things and accused him of things that make my heart break now.

At the same time I had another project, a speech to give, for which I was totally unprepared, but which I figured I could wing, especially if I could get audience participation going in some sort of argument. (During my real career I did that fairly often).

So things looked hopeless and I spent the night on a binge of drinking and certain drugs, and in the morning was in no state to give any presentations, but I did it anyway (one does often rise to the occasion, at least in dreams).

Then I got a call from my teacher thanking me for the beautiful Native American art history project and telling me it was the best she had ever seen.

No, I had not done the work in my drunken stupor. My father had realized I was not up to the work and had done it for me.

Here’s a weird one that I just woke up from.

Dreamed I showed up at an old girlfriend’s house, someone I haven’t seen in many years. She was having a party with guests mingling everywhere, so while I could sense right away she still carried a flame for me, we had to play it cool until the right moment when the guests had mingled elsewhere and we were alone in the living room. (The house looked exactly like her parents’ beach house, more or less, except for some reason it was up in the mountains overlooking the ocean, not right next to it.)

We started going at it, when suddenly, she began coughing and choking, and THREW UP all over the floor and the furniture! Naturally, I was freaked out, and also noticed for the first time she was “getting on in years” and looked extremely frail and unhealthy – but not so much physically sick, as if something about her recent life had been sucking away at her soul. Well, being a gentleman and a horndog, I waited for her as she cleaned herself up in the bathroom, while I concentrated on gathering my belongings (and by now I was becoming paranoid about the mysterious party guests and worried they might steal my keys or wallet if I didn’t pay close attention.) She did look much better when she was finished with the bathroom, and offered to pick up where we’d just left off.

I started going down on her, despite feeling paranoid and still a little grossed out – and then, I heard silence, and saw a pair of skinny, hairy MAN LEGS from the corner of my eye. Turns out, all the party guests had stopped to watch us, and they were taking all notes. Oddly, they looked for all the world like stereotypical Men In Black, except they were wearing tank tops, beach shorts & flip-flops. One of them said in a cold robotic voice, “Please continue.” I started to freak out again, started coughing and choking – and woke up.

Geez, hadn’t thought of that girl in years, and THIS is how I dream about her??? Oh well…maybe she’ll pay another visit tonight, without the party guests this time…I hope.

Most of my dreams are clearly inspired by real life events. And frequently I am aware in my dreams that something that sounds false is likely not true. I took a nap today and dreamed that that Malaysian plane was found. Then in my dream I realized that was not true.

But I think the weirdest/funniest dream I ever had was about Kate Middleton. I dreamed that we were making Thanksgiving dinner together and needed to get some missing ingredient and she said, “Oh don’t worry, William and Harry will take care of it.” I have no idea what prompted that dream although it was close to Thanksgiving and I must have read something about the royal family in the news.

Last dream this morning.

I went to work. Only it was in some Navy office (:confused:). A guy who was my supervisor came up, angry at me for being late, lazy, too casual and too mouthy grabbed me and took me into a conference room, where I was to be put up on charges for all of this. After a bit of movement and waiting, some superiors came in and asked him to go with them. A couple stayed behind and informed me that not only were any charges being dropped, but they will have never existed, and my supervisor was basically disappearing from my life.

What a nice dream; my nasty superiors in life have tended to hang around.

Last night I dreamt I was sleeping in an igloo. Not much happened though except a couple times I got up to relieve my bladder and had to battle the Arctic wind.

Interesting; one time I dreamed I was the Duchess of Cambridge and Queen Elizabeth was showing me around the castle.