I rarely remember my dreams. The other night I had a dream about serving a cake with lime frosting. I used to remember the type of cake, but it’s apparently not as important as the frosting.
I give this one a 9.3 score, good effort!
Ok, here’s the most recent one I remember in detail:
Location is Port of Spain, Trinidad on a gray, overcast day. I’m outside a pyramid-shaped hotel, about thirty stories tall. A blacktopped road runs up one side; this is billed as Trinidad’s steepest street, and in fact is far too steep for a vehicle to negotiate. Somehow I’m very near the top, clinging to the side of the hotel; I ask someone to pull me up to the rooftop but no one shows up, and without being clear as to how this happens, I find myself back down at street level. It turns out the ‘steepest road’ bit is just something for the tourists, and access to the roof is by elevator inside the hotel. Of course.
I get a room (decorated in faux-Egyptian style with a lot of gold leaf) and head up to the rooftop, which is just big enough for about five people and has a tiny bar covered by a canvas awning. There I encounter the cast of the UK version of ‘Top Gear’, who are having some sort of contest as to who can drive a radio-controlled toy car the furthest. Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond deviously suspend their cars from parachutes and toss them over the side, where the wind currents carry them off over the city. This is apparently supposed to save on battery power. James May decides to wait until his opponents’ cars land and then drive a just little beyond that for the win, which, admittedly, does not seem like much of a strategy. The scene ends with the cars, on their parachutes, morphing into silhouettes of Santa Claus’ sleigh and reindeer, as they disappear into the distance.
The Egyptian theme reminded me of the time I fell asleep watching a documentary on Ancient Egypt and I dreamed of an evil Zahi Hawass resurrecting mummies around a museum, me and some sidekick were trying to stop him, but I forgot all the details.
The other night I dreamed my high school principal & vice-principal showed up at my apartment and began searching it over my protest. Then they turned in into a class room and moved it to the school.
Back in my twenties, I was a huge partier. Nowadays I’m an old fart. I had a dream that my friend James invaded my house with a van full of other partiers, just like he did in the old days. He was one of those people who turned my life upside down whenever he visited, but he was always fun to have around. I don’t have the energy or health for that these days.
So, in my dream, I told him to go away, but James always had that ability to turn the tide and make me look like the bad guy. Realizing I was in a situation I couldn’t win, I tried to escape, but it became one of those dreams where I was trapped no matter where I ran. I somehow wound up in a fully-packed stadium with a football game in progress. There was only one exit, and I had to jump over people and football players to get to it.
Then I wound up in a courtyard entirely sealed in by university buildings. The only way out was through one of the buildings. I wound up in a classroom. I sometimes have this trope, where I’m trapped in a classroom taking an exam which I’m completely unprepared for, and the questions on the test move around and change shape like worms. I ran out of there, tried to find the exit, and wound up in the boiler room. Each door led to a smaller chamber packed with obsolete HVAC equipment, and I stepped into a dark closet with a ladder leading down to the subterranean world. Then the alarm went off.
I have a mind to call James and tell him to get the fuck out of my head.
That is an exceptionally large-scale back-in-school dream. Perhaps your apartment never showed up for a class its freshman year, invalidating its graduation. It had to go back to complete “Introduction to Occupying Space” or “Excluding Weather 1”.
I had another weird dream list night. This was an episode of Veep where Selina Meyer was prepping for a colonoscopy. She was crouching in the corner of her home gym while arguing with her ex-husband, Richard Campbell. She was also naked & completely oblivious to how uncomfortable this was making her staff. Maybe Beefaroni washed down with green tea flavoured wine wasn’t the best choice for a bedtime snack.
A large space is being decorated for Christmas and another celebration (wedding, anniversary?) to coincide with Yule. A series of mishaps occur, each caused by a young man with mild mental retardation. Each of these setbacks is recovered by the main character (me, though I seemed to be watching all of this unfold, as if I were simultaneously an actor in and observer of a movie), with solutions that provide a wry twist that have the effect of not only exonerating the perpetrator, but also making it appear as though the young man had caught and corrected the situation himself, and always shining a positive light on him.
(During all of the above, I recall thinking, I’ve seen this movie before, and I really enjoyed it.)
Just as the preparations for the dual events are coming to a head, the main character espies the mentally challenged man purposely setting up one final disaster to ruin everything. The main character, finally realizing that the near disasters were not accidents, apprehends the culprit, prevents the disaster, and saves the day, just in time for the planned celebrations.
At that point, I woke up, thinking, I really love that movie! I need to look it up on IMDB so I can make a point of watching it again. What was it called again? I need to ask the Café Society; they’ll know.
As I slowly came fully awake, I began to realize that I had never seen any such movie, that it didn’t exist. Regardless, I would still like to see that movie or read the story. Maybe I’ll write it instead.
I once dreamed I was at this old church that had statues of gargoyle heads all around beneath the roof looking down. When I walked in there were no people but 6ft praying mantises sitting in all the pews. They all turned to look at me and I screamed " Get me the fk outta here. " I woke up covered in sweat and my heart was beating a mile a minute.
I can’t really imagine any time, bedtime or not, when this would be the best choice.
WTF, brain?
No fair ambushing me with this while I’m trying to read on the couch. Okay, I know you’ve been pummelled with dentistry, computer problems, and cheap Tex-Mex, all in one day, but still. It was another of my “caper film” dreams, but even weirder than the one about the half-dozen groups trying ineptly to kidnap the same person. It was sort of like being The Saint, only in reverse.
Dream-me woke up in a chair in a hotel lounge with a slight headache. Taking it as a sign that I should go to bed, I headed for the elevators. (Spoiler: I never got to the elevators.) In quick succession, I was mistaken for a Russian hairdresser giving a seminar, the Big Bad of a larp being run in one of the convention rooms, and a (real, non-larp) vampire. For dream-logic reasons, I was compelled to play along with all of these, or…something bad would happen. I think someone was stalking me, probably having mistaken me for yet another person. No one seemed to notice that I had not the foggiest notion what I was doing or talking about, even when I invented a “traditional Russian hairstyle” on the spot to cover the frizzy mess I’d made of a man’s hair. I woke up as I was concluding negotiations with an international crime ring to orchestrate a heist. I had no idea what was to be stolen, from where, but I demanded, with utmost gravity and steepled fingers, “ten million, expenses, and…certain files. I want all files you have depicting world leaders doing silly things. There is a folder waiting for them just below my LOLcats.”
Oh, and a woman stopped me in a hallway, apologized for drugging me and landing me “in bed with the undead”, and handed me a key to a different hotel room. So I had that to look forward to.
Raising this thread from page two, rather than starting a new dream thread, because someone mistook me for a necromancer and I have to play along.