Last night I had one of those exceptionally meta “dream-in-a-dream” ones – I dreamt that I dreamt the winning lottery numbers, played them, and won.
Now, I don’t play the lottery…but I do remember the numbers I dreamed. Tempting…very tempting (especially since my brother once won $30,000 on numbers he dreamed).
A couple weeks ago, I dreamt that Timothy McVeigh had gotten out of jail by cooperating with authorities about his accomplices in the Murrah Building bombing. (I guess I was confusing him with Michael Fortier.) Anyway, afterwards we had somehow become pals. He was in town, so my family and I got in his pick-up and drove around downtown D.C. (where I live in real life), where we showed him the sights. Every once in a while I’d think about how weird it was that I was friends with someone who had murdered 168 people, but mostly it didn’t come up.
–Cliffy
A couple of nights ago I dreamed I totalled my car, and killed two people in another car. I don’t remember having the accident, just all the broken pieces all over the ground. It was night.
Then the scene changed and I was at home, trying to tell my husband and my Dad that I’d totalled the car. They weren’t paying attention, and I started yelling to make them listen. I looked out the window and could see the car in the driveway, as well as another wrecked van of some sort. (Strange that the dead people didn’t seem to have any importance.)
The thing is, I don’t have a window at that angle. I think it was at the house that I grew up in.
First thing after I woke up, I went and looked at my car. 
About a month ago:
I was traveling alone and was staying in a hotel somewhere in Iran, it was by far the tallest building around, except for a Buddhist temple next door which had a giant dancing Buddha on top of it, with long,skeletal arms and fingers. The hotel was modern, the temple was ancient.
The morning after I arrived I ate breakfast and decided to explore the building. I had a bundle of stuff with me in a plastic grocery bag. I ended up onthe roof and a bunch of people were there (the only one I noticed specifically was one guy sunning himself, he had a Tom Selleck-like mustache, sunglasses (aviator style), dingy yellow tight nylons horts (very 70’s) and was lying on his side with his legs spread).
I asked what was going on and someone in the crowd said the Iranian government had decided to tear down the temple because it was sacrilegious. There were a couple guys laying down on at the edge of the roof with their heads hanging over so I laid down next to them. They turned out to be two guys I used to work with in Alaska (used to sepnd summers processing fish), haven’t seen either of them in years (in real life or in the dream). None of us were surprised, we just said hi.
I looked over at the statue,and there were a couple guys climbing it with ropes (which were to be used to pull down the statue, not to stop them if they fell). They looped their ropes around the head and one of the arms, threw the other ends to the ground, and started to climb down. While they were doing that I looked around, it seemed like we were 60 stories up and I started feeling vertigo.
The surrounding area had a small lake but the rest was all 1-2 story stone houses. I kept wanting to leave because of the vertigo but didn’t want to miss the statue coming down, in part because I was excited to tell my wife about it.
The guys on the ground started pulling (we couldn’t see them) and chunks of the statue fell into the lake and onto some of the houses. The roof crowd started making noises that indicated they were worried about the people in the houses, but they came outside and waved at us; somehow we could see them even though we were so high up.
I got up; to get back into the hotel I had to walk through a locker room, there were a couple guys showering there, I figured they must be employees getting ready for work. When I came out of the locker room, for some reason I had taken my shirt off and everything was blurry. I realized my glasses were on (I’m farsighted) so I took them off and was trying to put my shirt back on while standing at the top of some stairs when a housekeeping woman (with one of the big hotel carts) came around a corner. I was embarrassed about being shirtless and kept trying to put my shirt on but was struggling for some reason. She said she didn’t care because she wasn’t Muslim, but I still turned away until I was able to get it on, then we chatted for a few minutes. I realized the stuff I’d been carrying with me was some clothes (three shirts and a pair of jeans) I used to wear when I was in late high school/early college (I thought might be contemporary but I wasn’t sure), that I’d given away long ago and I didn’t know how I got them back and a towel from my house.
I took them out of the bag (they were neatly folded) I asked the woman if she knew of a place I could donate the clothes for the needy; she started stroking the shirt that was on top of the pile said there was nothing like that in Iran.
My mom is into scrapbooking. I dreamt that one day, she called me up and said “I’m doing a scrapbook page from when you were younger. I have a picture with you and a girl named Elaine. Who’s that?”
I reply “Oh, that’s the girl I would skate with whenever Julie couldn’t come.”
Then she gets mad. “What were you skating with her for?! You should always have been skating with Julie!” Continuing on like that.
Anyways, when I wake up, the first thought that comes to mind is “Obviously, I was dreaming, because I KNOW that Mom knows who Elaine was.”
Then about a minute later, I think to myself. “Wait a minute, I don’t know who Elaine is. Come to think of it, I don’t know who Julie is, either. And there’s no skating rink there; McDonald’s is there.”
So, basically, the whole thing was a dream. I just thought that only half of it was a dream.
I recently had a dream that was a caper film set in a hotel (in Las Vegas, I think).
The base plot was a couple trying to fake the woman’s kidnapping; she wanted to marry her boyfriend, but doing so would (for some reason) cause her to lose her (very large) trust fund, and they were planning to “ransom” the money out of the fund first. The complication was a fairly archetypal caper gang that were trying to kidnap her for real–the would-be mastermind, the face, the (laughably inept) sneak, and a couple of goons (who were twins). There was also a bumbling detective who turned out to be smarter than he seemed.
Me, I was the desk clerk. So I got to see at least three attempts to sneak the kidnappee out of the hotel rolled up in a rug…except that one time it was actually a random maid, once it was an inflatable doll, and once it was the mastermind. Why they thought I wouldn’t notice a pair of twins walking through the lobby with someone rolled up in a rug, I couldn’t even guess.
Frustratingly, I can’t remember if the couple ended up getting the money or not.
Let’s see, first I dreamed that I was being chased by a yellow-and-white checked (like gingham) scorpion. Then I woke up to our blond-and-white puggle sitting on the headboard hovering and panting at me.
A couple of nights ago I dreamed that I was playing an archer in a theatrical mashup of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robin Hood, and the Scottish Play. With Timothy Hutton.
Thanks! That was a good jumping off point. It looks like there’s a different name when you have them as you wake rather than fall asleep: hypnopompic hallucinations.
Something to do with a big rally at possibly Lambeau Field in Green Bay. There was an ugly rumor going around about Vince Lombardi, and someone swore that the famous coach wore red and white striped wooly socks, which confirmed the rumor: he was a closet classical music fan.