Tag Game!

Thanks to an errant post by @amphibious-pussy, I am temporarily back from my tumblr hiatus to post at least once before a potential end of the world scenario. Anyway, here goes!

Last Song: “Wash My Hands Shorty” by The I.L.Y’s

Last Movie: The Thing (2011) It was okay, but I couldn’t get over the fact that the characters had way too much sunlight and way too little clothing for an antarctic winter.

Currently Watching: Schitt’s Creek, Korra, Kipo, and One Piece

Currently Reading: The complete print run of Transmetropolitan (again, because I gotta stay woke before the election)

Currently Craving: A hug and and a sense of normalcy in a messed up world.

I would like to tag: @gramizar @pollolocouniversity @wildblueyoshi @captainfriendguy @contrivedcondolences @hobbiesovercoffee @160yie @pomegrrrl @elleshellsbells

Dream Journal 2020-04-22: A Cool Shirt, Email Problems, And A Tour Of The Food CourtThere isn’t an overarching plot in this dream, so it’s a perfect candidate for my good friend, THE BULLETED LIST! • First off, I’d like to apologize to Canadian...

Dream Journal 2020-04-22: A Cool Shirt, Email Problems, And A Tour Of The Food Court

There isn’t an overarching plot in this dream, so it’s a perfect candidate for my good friend, THE BULLETED LIST!

  • First off, I’d like to apologize to Canadian artist Curtis Wilson, whose art I have snatched and altered for the header image of this post (for reasons that are about to become clear). I had acquired a t-shirt with a really cool design on it in this dream, and the shirt itself was a joyfully bright neon yellow-green. A black line drawing of an eagle in flight took up the front of the shirt, and it was drawn in the style of First Nations artwork found in the Pacific Northwest. Recoloring one of Curtis Wilson’s pieces was the closest I can get to showing you just how cool this shirt was. It was legit. I literally put that shirt on in the dream multiple times because of how proud and happy it made me feel.
  • In the next dream unit, I’m working in a cubicle at night. But the cubicle is set up in the grass outside the local university’s student union, and the cloudy purple sky is all I can see overhead. My job is to correct issues with email systems, and there’s one coworker who keeps typing her email address incorrectly. Her email address keeps showing up as notmelanie.niece@gmail.com (which I hope is not actually someone’s really email address), and only the “@” sign is correct. Each time the wrong email address pops up, I have to send her an email in response asking her to correct the mistake.
  • The last dream unit takes place in some sort of food court, but everyone is practicing social distancing and the food kiosks have limited menu options that are carry out only. Despite to floor being completely even, I realized that I could do a sort of squatting motion and propel myself around the room like I was a champion slalom skier. The pseudo-skiing was the highlight of the dream for asleep Fish Davidson, but the food options offered for sale were probably the most interesting for an awake Fish Davidson. Here are two of the foods I remember being able to try:

Jalapeno Balls - a cheddar-stuffed jalapeno pepper sits at the center of a fist-sized ball of Spanish rice. The rice has bell peppers, onions, and bits of mushroom in it, and the whole ball is dipped in some sort of corn meal batter/coating and deep fried. I will probably try to make this at some point in real life.

Taco Hat - This was neither taco nor hat. It was instead a cylinder of caramel corn that had a little base made of peanut brittle that made it look sort of like a tiny top hat. So basically my dreams tried to reinvent Cracker Jacks or Crunch n’ Munch, but with some hipster flair. I’m 100% okay with this, though.

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Header image is Eagle Design/Logo by Curtis Wilson, whom you can find at http://curtiswilson.ca

Dream Journal 2020-04-21: A New Meme Appears!So I’m lurking on reddit at the start of this dream, scrolling through pages of dank memes. I navigate to r/gaming and see that someone made cool drawing of Link from the Zelda series of games, but instead...

Dream Journal 2020-04-21: A New Meme Appears!

So I’m lurking on reddit at the start of this dream, scrolling through pages of dank memes. I navigate to r/gaming and see that someone made cool drawing of Link from the Zelda series of games, but instead of Link’s traditional green clothing, he was wearing only shorts made from a coarse cloth.

Link was still wearing green, though. It was just in the form of an intricate full-body tattoo that depicted leaves, vines, and flowers snaking all over his body. Another slight departure from his traditional appearance was that Link was wielding a rough quarterstaff instead of the usual sword. The picture was captioned something like “I drew druid Link!” and the art quality was top-notch… Except for one detail:

The hands were drawn backwards, and the thumbs faced the wrong way.

As is often the case on the internet, people seized on this little detail and started poking fun at it. Not in a malicious way, but in the way that everybody gets to have a laugh and no one feels left out. People started doing their own renditions of druid Link and the floodgates could no longer hold back the river of content.

Someone made a fake screenshot of Link in Breath of the Wild as druid Link. Another person got a baby doll, put the hands on backward, and doodled vines on the plastic body to create Baby Doll Druid Link. Yet another person took it in a different direction and used body paint to recreate all the tattoos on Link’s body.

Of course, the backward hands were the part everyone was interested in. So the guy tried his best but really just ended up holding the staff like an idiot. Self-deprecating humor at its finest!

P.S. I know I implied that it was basically endless druid Link memes, but dreams have a weird way of making 4-5 images seem infinite in the moment. So blame dream logic for that one.

Dream Journal 2020-04-20: The River Of SoulsThis dream took me on a vacation to the Guangxin (pronounced in the dream as (gwahn-SHIN) River somewhere in Asia. The river itself is relatively slow moving and covered in fog. It’s not particularly...

Dream Journal 2020-04-20: The River Of Souls

This dream took me on a vacation to the Guangxin (pronounced in the dream as (gwahn-SHIN) River somewhere in Asia. The river itself is relatively slow moving and covered in fog. It’s not particularly scenic, but it’s got one feature that no other place on earth has:

It can tell you how old your soul is.

According to the reality of this dream, every sentient creature has a soul. Reincarnation of souls is also proven in this reality, thanks to the river. The logic of how exactly this works doesn’t completely agree with the kind of reasoning an awake person would use, but bear with me.

Each person who wants to see the age of their soul climbs aboard a small wooden raft. And it’s only one person per raft, otherwise you don’t see anything. Tourists drift along the lazy waters, hoping to see something that looks like a bio-luminescent display in the fog that shows how old a person’s soul is.

As best I can tell, there are pieces of something that reacts with souls also drifting through the water in the river. There are many different reactive particles, but only one particular particle reacts with each soul. Sort of like antibodies reacting to diseases in the body, only these won’t try to kill you. When a particle and a soul match, the water in front of that person shows the person’s age in their current body, and also the age of the total soul. Since souls have different ages, I can only assume that it means there is also some sort of death/birth process for souls, or at least some sort of recombinant process that mixes pieces of souls together to form new ones.

Most people have souls in the range of 1,000-2,000 years old, but there is a risk associated with learning this information. Occasionally tourists on the river will see massive tentacles writhing in the fog. If you collide with them, you’ll be snatched underwater. No one knows what happens after that.

These eldritch creatures don’t seem to actively attack people. They behave more like giant anemones or jellyfish that feed on whatever the current brings their way. But they command a great deal of respect for another reason, too. These things are OLD.

Each creature I saw was always illuminated by its age display. They had cool names given to them by the people because the creatures were often used as landmarks on the foggy water. Names like “Ancient Destroyer” or “Deep Sister.” The average age of the creatures in its current body was somewhere in the ballpark of 7,000-10,000 years old.

And the age of the soul in total? That part was blank or had an infinity sign. These creatures were here from before the beginning, and they would be here long after we leave.

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Header image from Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure

Dream Journal 2020-04-15: An Interactive Theatrical ExperienceSometimes I think my brain likes to mess with me in dreams. I received word that in a few moments, I (and a crowd of placeholder people) would be treated to a bit of theater. This seems...

Dream Journal 2020-04-15: An Interactive Theatrical Experience

Sometimes I think my brain likes to mess with me in dreams. I received word that in a few moments, I (and a crowd of placeholder people) would be treated to a bit of theater. This seems fine and dandy. The program we would be seeing was a famous performance called “The Last Sun,” which I had never heard of. So I discreetly tried to google information about the plot of the play but couldn’t find any information about it.

That’s because this was a play based on a short film, in turn based on a photograph, which was in turn based on an album inspired by a field of wheat. The wheat album was the actual famous part (though that was a fact I picked up from the excited onlookers).

When the theater troupe arrives, they tell us that this is a performance unlike anything else we have experienced. The primary performers have costumes, but don’t know the whole plot of the play. Randomly selected members of the audience are given costumes and asked to collaboratively improvise with the other performers. But the uncostumed audience has a role to play as well, because that’s who decides how the ending plays out.

To be honest, I don’t remember much of anything about the first ¾ of the play, though the costumes prominently featured Spanish conquistadors. I was a member of the audience who decided the ending, though, and that’s the part I have the best memory of. There was an ancient artifact from a thousand years ago in Mesoamerica. It was called the Obsidian Bottle, because it was made of obsidian and looked like a wine bottle.

As an audience member, our role was to decide what happened to the Obsidian Bottle. But according to dream logic, it was a one-of-a-kind artifact that held great power in the real world. If the conquistadors got it, our history would be altered and the Mesoamerican people would be completely erased. But if the performers who represented the Mesoamericans got it, they would summon a deity that would purge the world of everyone who didn’t worship this god.

Neither of those options sat well with us as an audience, so naturally we just destroyed the Obsidian Bottle so nobody ended up getting murdered by a powerful artifact. Sounds like a solid move to me. :)

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Header image is of the Hamilton play, taken by Joan Marcus

Dream Journal 2020-04-14: Vampires, Nachos, and Ethereal LibrariesHappy quarantine, friends! Hope you all are doing as well as you can, given the circumstances. I have some tales for you this evening to help lighten your hearts and spark your...

Dream Journal 2020-04-14: Vampires, Nachos, and Ethereal Libraries

Happy quarantine, friends! Hope you all are doing as well as you can, given the circumstances. I have some tales for you this evening to help lighten your hearts and spark your imaginations.

Dream Fragments

  • I was participating in what I think may have been a world record attempt for creating the longest platter of nachos. Fully-loaded nachos covered the sidewalk as far as the eye could see, and I was toting a 5-gallon pot full of melted cheese. A placeholder friend was walking alongside me, and I gestured to them with my pot of cheese and said “I think this is what it feels like to fly business blass.” I have never flown business class before, so I can only assume that you get a floor full of nachos instead of a sad sack of salted peanuts for a snack.
  • My friend Bart and I met up for a discussion over dinner at a foggy boardwalk after dark. Leafless trees jutted through the fog, and we talked about how cool our friendship was and also about stuff like balancing encounter difficulty in Dungeons and Dragons. After finishing our meal, Bart confessed that he was actually a vampire and planned to avoid spreading the curse by living at the bottom of the ocean for the rest of his days. All I could think about was how awkward it would be to explain this situation to the police when I had to fill out a witness statement for the missing persons report.

The Main Dream: A Special Library

Somewhere way off in a dream version of the campus where my favorite high school was, there was a library. The library itself was an old building with a glass front and only a handful of books. It was ugly and just one step away from being declared a condemned/blighted property and torn down. The book selection was purposefully awful so that people wouldn’t want to check out books from there. And when coupled with the library’s eyesore appearance, it was a popular topic of discussion for demolition. There was even a musical number where people held a protest and tried to damage the inside of the library in order to get it replaced with a newer, better library.

But there was a reason this library only got the bare minimum of attention to stay open. The founder of the library was incredibly excited about books and the library was like his baby. He had emigrated from Sweden in the 1950s and served as the head librarian for decades until he died in the late 1980s. But after his death is where our story really gets juicy.

The librarian’s bones were placed in a burial vault, and an ethereal library sprang up around his bones. As long as the original library existed, the spirit of the librarian felt compelled to exist in this world. But the mortal world was much more excited by the ethereal library that existed around the librarian’s bones.

Now, I keep saying “ethereal library” like it’s some sort of translucent ghostly apparition, but it was as solid as any regular building would be. It was indistinguishable from a normal structure, other than the fact that you had to go to a graveyard to visit the library. The librarian’s bones were hidden in an office on the second floor down a long “staff only” hallway that you had to be really looking for, and the only clue was a memorial plaque stuck to one wall that mentioned a quote by the librarian.

The library itself was decorated in an unusual modern/abstract way. It permanently looked like it was decorated in the 1980s or early 1990s by Tim Burton. In fact, the Delia’s sculptures from the movie Beetlejuice in the header image of this post are a pretty close indicator of what the art style of the library was. Except with more books, of course.

For living folks, the ethereal library had one amazing benefit. Because it was constructed by a spirit, it contained a rotating catalog of books and other media that described things beyond our mortal comprehension. And there was a good chance that you might find a book with information from the future in there, too. But presumably because the librarian died during the height of the Cold War, there were a few big quirks about the library:

  • Propaganda posters hung on almost every wall that depicted the fall of the Soviet Union
  • Any non-book media in the library only appeared on technology from the late 1980s. So you could get videos about stuff from 2020 on VHS tapes, or hear future news casts on cassette tapes, or load up unpublished magazine articles on microfiche readers.
  • No one who visited the library could remove anything from building because of the whole knowledge of the future/supernatural thing

So university researchers would spend hours poring over stuff they could find in the ethereal library, but only put in the bare minimum of effort into keeping the original library standing in order to keep the ghost of the librarian around. Though if I were in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing.


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Header image of Beetlejuice props taken from PropBay

Dream Journal 2020-04-07: Subpoena, The Musical!

Legal jargon time! For those who don’t know, a subpoena is a document that the government gives people or organizations that orders a person to attend court. And because spelling words is completely divorced from their actual pronunciation, “subpoena“ is pronounced “suh-PEEN-uh” because there is no god and all language is a construct designed to endlessly torture humanity. I know this is a weird way to start a dream journal, but the pronunciation of the word “subpoena” is relevant to this story.

So I’m wading through the firehose that is the internet in this dream. It is unclear if I am sitting at a computer using the internet or actually INSIDE the internet like a character from Wreck-It Ralph 2. Either way, I come across a video titled “Subpoena: The Musical.” And since I am precisely the kind of person internet marketers target for weird and esoteric content, I slap the play button to see what sort of legalese abomination I will be granted the chance to witness.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this video was about a legal document, or maybe a musical court case. This is not at all what the video is about. It was produced by two men who are best described as a Lebanese version of comedy duo Key and Peele. These guys looked exactly like Key and Peele, except they were of Lebanese descent. In the interest of brevity, they shall henceforth be known as LKP.

The music video starts in a dark void, but a light slowly reveals the silhouette of a statue. LKP appear in the shot and start chanting the word “subpoena” while they are riding to the top of a rollercoaster’s first big hill at night. Electronic dance music and neon lights burst out of the darkness. The cinematography reminds me a lot of the night-time forest bits of the music video for Ylvis’s “What Does The Fox Say,” which is why I included it as the header to this post.

Nary a legal document shows up in this video. Instead, LKP start saying only the “-poena” part of the word. Which is pronounced “peena.” And then the video just becomes a psychedelic turbo journey that features every penis (or “peena” in LKP’s parlance) that has ever appeared in famous works of art. All of this happens against a backdrop that looks like a green wormhole from the winamp music visualizer.

This is not a drill. There are marble dicks, painted dicks, block-print dicks, charcoal sketch dicks. More dicks than you can shake a dick at. And yet, I end up watching the whole thing. But hey, at least the music was good.

Dream Journal 2020-04-06: Kitty Snuggles!Disclosure time! This dream made me cry both in the dream and upon waking, but I still consider it to be a good dream. The dream comes into focus in my parents’ house and I’m walking through the dining room....

Dream Journal 2020-04-06: Kitty Snuggles!

Disclosure time! This dream made me cry both in the dream and upon waking, but I still consider it to be a good dream. The dream comes into focus in my parents’ house and I’m walking through the dining room. Underneath one of the chairs is a cat.

But not just any cat!

This is one of my childhood cats who died a few years back from stomach cancer. But in the dream she was still healthy and at a comfortable weight. She was sleeping, but I knew this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

I flopped down on the floor next to her and petted her fur as she rolled around lazily in that apathetic half-sleep that cats have weaponized into adorable perfection. The rational part of my brain knew that she had passed away in the waking world and that this was just a fleeting approximation of her, but even so, my entire brain screamed “GET SNUGGLES!”

And I did. It was wonderful, and I wept tears of joy the entire brief time we spent together. I miss you, Lucy.

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Header image from AnimalWised.com

Dream Journal 2020-04-04: Unusual Chair And Doggy BehaviorsOne of the things that’s great about quarantine is that I’m channeling all of my general anxiety into daily runs and it’s making me sleep like a log. It doesn’t prevent the cats from being...

Dream Journal 2020-04-04: Unusual Chair And Doggy Behaviors

One of the things that’s great about quarantine is that I’m channeling all of my general anxiety into daily runs and it’s making me sleep like a log. It doesn’t prevent the cats from being annoying little monsters, but I managed to have some interesting dreams in spite of a certain cat slapping me in the face repeatedly.

Dream Fragments

  • Have you ever tried to move a rolling office chair across thick plush carpet while still sitting in it? If so, you’ll know that it takes a lot of effort to scooch it just a little bit back. But at the start of this dream, I was sitting at my desk typing something when my thighs bumped into the underside of my desk drawer. I scooted the chair back a bit and started typing again. Seconds later, my chair slid back to where it just was. This is not expected behavior from the chair that my butt has spent several years sitting in, so I move the chair halfway across the room and sit down again. Sure enough, the chair picks up speed and slams me into the desk. Dream logic dictated that either my floor had suddenly developed a slope or that someone had replaced the rollers on my chair with the office equivalent of off-road tires. I had plans to further investigate which one of these had taken place, but one of the cats managed to hook a paw into my nostril and ended my little experiment.

The Main Dream: Fetching The Police Report

I’m either a police officer or a journalist at the start of this dream, though context favors the journalist option a bit more. Either way, it’s time to find out what sort of crimes have been happening in my neck of the woods. A sensible journalist might ask the police dispatcher or something for all the reported crimes, but that’s not how things work here in dreamland.

I have a special dog biscuit in the shape of a bone, and it’s about as long as my index finger. The main part of the bone is covered in whatever the doggy equivalent of blue cookie icing is. I sing a little ditty about how it’s time to check the police report as I saunter over to a red dog house with tasteful wood siding.

There’s a dog poking his head out of the house, and he looks exactly like the dog from the Benji movies. He’s not chained up or anything, because he’s a Good Boy ™. I toss him the special dog biscuit. He gives it a good crunch and swallows the whole thing before his mouth can start to chew it.

He leaps to his feet. “SOMEBODY JUST GOT F*CKIN’ STABBED!” he says with human words. His voice sounds like that of a wheezy old man, but with the excitement and energy of an old man who wins first place in his age group in every 5K race he enters. Sort of like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, if, you know… Carl was actually in shape.

Dream logic dumps some context about the situation here. This is just a regular dog that has been trained to sniff out crime by the police. Under normal circumstances, he can’t talk. That’s what the dog biscuit is for. Upon eating this tasty, bone-shaped treat, the dog gains the ability to talk like a human for a little while. It also gives the dog some sort of omniscience, where the doggo instantly knows where and when the nearest crime occurred.

The dog shoots out from his little house and races ahead. “WE GONNA SOLVE A F*CKIN’ CRIME!” the dog wheezes. The dog looks back at me as I try to keep up. “WHAT THE F*CK ARE YOU WAITING FOR? A GUY JUST GOT F*CKING STABBED, LIKE WITH A F*CKING KNIFE!”

It is clear that this dog likes profanity, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. We take off toward the scene of the crime.

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Header image taken from the set of the 2003 Benji movie.