The Rider Kipler on her Black Mare, by Alfred Dedreux. According to Wikipedia, apparently the etymology of "nightmare" has nothing to do with horses. It still makes a good visual pun, though!

Last night, I dreamt that I was hosting a Halloween party. The party took place in this large, unfamiliar house out in the woods, back in America (probably Kansas). I remember seeing a bunch of my friends piled on the back of a truck for a night hay ride, and it was kind of foggy out. I was running around, doing hostess duties, and then I got tired and decided to take a nap. So I went back in the house and laid down on the couch for a little bit. (This is the first time, by the way, that I can recall actually going to sleep while I am already sleeping).

I was drifting off to sleep-sleep, when I heard voices outside the door. Someone pushed the door open and stepped inside. I recognized the voices as belonging to my friend Doug’s horrible ex-wife, Tiffany, and her stupid friends. The Four Blondes of the Apocalypse entered the room. A little groggy, I think I said something to the effect of “what are YOU doing here?” and I guess Tiffany took offense to that, so she was quite cold and bitchy for the rest of their visit. They kept making snarky comments about the party, and when – surprise – Leonardo DiCaprio just up and dropped by the party, they weren’t even impressed by that, because he had come so late. “It’s like this party is an afterthought.” BITCH.

Once the Four Blondes of the Apocalypse had left, I stormed outside in the woods, looking for Doug so that I could chew him out about leaving me there alone to deal with his ex. Most of the revelers had disappeared, though, leaving behind just a dying bonfire and some beer cans. I walked, barefoot, deeper in the forest, yelling his name at first, but then stopped as it became apparent that nobody else was out there.

I kept going, my feet crunching the leaves and sticks of the forest floor. Then I decided I’d had enough and turned back, and that’s when I saw them – through the arch of a ruined stone door – the two men wearing white face masks. One had long, stringy blonde hair. They both just turned and looked at me. Oh, shit. I turned and ran, my feet bleeding from the sticks, the men in masks gaining ground on me.

When they caught me, cold hands clutching my limbs and dragging me down, I woke up. Good morning!

I’m happy to be dreaming again, grim contents notwithstanding, but I wish my subconscious were a little bit more creative, instead of following a paint-by-numbers cliche horror plot (right down to the non sequitur celebrity cameo). You get 2 1/2 stars this time, subconscious.

I also hate dreaming about spectacular public failure, such as last night’s feature, in which both my sister and I were publicly called out for mawkish columns for the New York Times. I was watching Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, and the guest host (she has been out all week in real life) started tearing into the NYT columns: “In other, completely embarrassing news, just look at this editorial on the front page of the times today.” The camera zoomed in on a screen displaying the NYT website, and fancy touch screen technology circled my sister’s name, and highlighted the awful headline. The camera panned down to another headline beneath it, with my name attached. I don’t recall the headline of the one attributed to me, but the gist of the article was supposedly about Joe Biden’s warm relationship with his son, and apparently I had used the term-of-endearment “Pop-pop” multiple times, to cloying effect.

My sister was just returning from surgery, and groggy, when I had to break the bad news. She protested angrily, of course, but I didn’t tell her that I kind of agreed with that MSNBC talking head – her article was bad (mine, of course, was just fine, if not necessarily deserving of any Pulitzers). We read some of the comments and they were just downright nasty.

Later in the dream, I was standing around eating a plate of apples at an outdoor fair when I ran into my friend Anna and her girlfriend, sitting at a table with their own plate of apples (at a real life fair, these would be deep fried and coated in cheese). The burning indignity still on my mind, I told her about the incident.

“Oh yeah,” said Anna, laughing. “That was you? We cheered when that guy called out those columns; they were so wretched.”

“But did he have to be so mean about it? Rachel Maddow would never do anything so rude. I wish she were back on the air.”

“That’s cause she’s new. In time, she’ll learn.”

“But,” I protested feebly, “it’s the Times! Their regular correspondents actually write out “Heh-heh” in articles!”

Here Anna gave me a withering glance. “We both know that’s not as bad as ‘Pop-pop,’” she said.

Cowed, I timidly bit into an apple. Out came some teeth.

It’s a little hard to say for sure since it’s not like I’ve experienced someone else’s dreams. I don’t really see in my dreams if that’s what you’re asking, but I will have more of an awareness of what’s around me and I’ll intuitively know whatever I would ordinarily be able to sense. For example if I’m standing next to a building in a dream, I’ll know where all the entrances are, how to get to them from my location, the types of doors, if people are around them, etc. but I don’t scan the building with my eyes and pick up the information as I go.

As one who has extremely vivid dreams, the idea of dreaming without vision is absolutely fascinating to me. So I mentioned how inconceivable I find it to dream with no imagery, no visual information whatsoever, and E said, “It’s not that hard to imagine. It’s not like you actually see things when you think of them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Can you? Like, if I tell you to think of a pie, can you actually see a pie? With your eyes closed?”

“Of course I can. Wait, you mean you can’t?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, I think of a pie, but I don’t really see anything.”

“No colors, nothing?

“Nope.”

This proceeded to blow my mind on multiple levels. “You don’t see anything? What’s in there then? What happens in your brain when you try to conceive of ‘pie-ness*’?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…blank.”

We then spent the next hour trying to communicate what the other ‘sees’ mentally when trying to evoke various images, images that haven’t necessarily been ‘perceived’ by the eyes but nevertheless are within the realm of the familiar. For instance, the pie I ‘saw’ is not a pie that has ever existed, at least to my knowledge, but rather a composite pie, incorporating elements of both pies I have seen and what I tend to associate with pies. The pie has a golden flaky crust, scalloped edges and is sitting on top of a blue gingham tablecloth. A cliché pie, two parts Betty Crocker and one part Country Time. It looks delicious.

Elijah can see the cliché pie, especially after I describe it, but it doesn’t appear that he does so spontaneously at the mention of a pie, nor can he ‘see’ it very clearly. “I can see what you’re saying, but from far away, like I’m looking through a blurry lens.” A blurry lens that blocks out color information.

Now, the cliché pie isn’t perfect in my mind, despite borrowing from the uber-hausfrau Betty Crocker’s aesthetic. The image changes as I cycle through my memories and concepts of ‘pie-ness’ and update the image. When I first visualized it the pie was in a blue tin, then the tin was modified to an aluminum one. But the pie still exists for me. It doesn’t for Elijah. He has to really concentrate in order to visualize that pie, and even afterwards, it sounds as though it is a much dimmer version of what I get.

Should Elijah get himself to a neurologist, stat? Am I the one who is strange? Do androids dream of electric sheep, and if so, are they black or white? I know some of you (three) who read my blog are cognitive scientists; please chime in with your ideas!

* Edited to make this look less like another word.

Last night I had a dream about trying to save Kafka’s life. Only Kafka was a middle aged, prunish looking woman instead of a German man. There were about three or four of us living in a ramshackle Victorian house. I was puttering around downstairs, minding some business, when I heard from upstairs a commotion, and someone shouting “needles.” The shout evoked some sort of prescient memory (like in Dune, where the guy “remembers” events from the future (nerd alert!)) – everyone who lived in the house knew what that shout signified, and it meant that Franz Kafka was about to die.

“It’s inevitable!” shouted one of the others, a woman (Dora Diamant, perhaps?). The other two were a middle aged man and a teenage boy. Kafka hobbled down the stairs, dressed in school matron garb, blood pouring down the sides of her face. At some point, in spite of said inevitability, we decided it was our duty to put our best efforts into saving his / her life anyways, Kafka being such an important figure in history (dream Kafka also had political clout of a murky nature).

I had the only means of transport, so I loaded the bloodied Kafka into my trusty Toyota Corolla, and headed off towards Lawrence Memorial Hospital. Kafka was losing consciousness, and I had to work fast – I labored against time and history. As I drove, the streets shifted and changed positions. Upon approaching the hospital, the street would change and the car would end up driving in a different direction, or on the other side of town.

Frustrated, I turned the car around in a parking lot and, speeding, attempted to exit the wrong way. The headlight beams of a monstrous SUV were the last thing I saw before I awoke.

I dreamt that I was standing in a strange bedroom, chatting with two other people. One was one of my girl friends (though I don’t remember which one); the other was Max, a friend-of-a-friend. I was tidying up the dresser space, sorting gaudy jewelry and other items in front of a huge oval mirror trimmed in oak. The topic of conversation I don’t recall either. I did grow increasingly uncomfortable as the two continued to chat.

At one point, Max laughed at something I said; probably something naive or hopelessly dumb, as I am wont to do in waking life. Then he came up to me and, almost gently, held my face with his hands. “Hold still for a sec,” and he had the knife in his hands. He didn’t so much as slash my face, per se, but rather, swiftly traced quick lines up and down my cheeks.

As you can imagine, I was quite put off by this. I looked in the mirror and saw two deep, vertical red trenches cut into my face. Raised pinkling bumps surrounded the trenches on either side. I screamed, and he and the other companion laughed. “God, calm down a bit,” he said nonchalantly, as if I had been screaming about a paper cut.

“But my face!” I protested.

“It’ll heal,” he said. And, by the end of the dream, it did.

Had a dream that I was at a fancy-ish dinner party last night. A bunch of hot shot professors in tweedy leather-patches-at the elbows jackets, dress suits and scowls on their faces. The first course was che, a usually very tasty Vietnamese dessert drink with beans and jelly (trust me, it’s better than it sounds). The che was oddly swampy like, yet edible enough and a big hit.

After that was mostly finished, we sat around and chatted, and began eating our wine glasses. People would casually snap some glass off with their fingers, pop it into their mouths, and crunch it like candy. I ate quite a bit of my glass, and when I was just about to the stem, I looked up and saw the host glaring at me. Oh, dear! I had committed a social gaffe, eating all of his good expensive stemware.

My English advisor walked in at that point, looked at my glass and looked at me; I had crystal crumblets stuck to my lips. She shook her head, as if to say, “why did you just eat glass you idiot,” and I wanted to point out that everyone else at the table had been eating theirs – yet, when I turned back to look at the others, their glasses were in pristine condition, except for a few shards broken off here and there. At this point I realized that I would commit another social gaffe if I couldn’t eat any more actual food because my stomach was full of glass. I excused myself to the powder room and tried, as gently as possible, to coax all of the glass back out. I vomited a constant stream of diamonds, and occasionally, rubies.

I must have slept very poorly last night, because I had another dream, this time involving tarantulas that had taken over my house. The first one I noticed as I was standing in my living room with a bunch of people. It dangled over our heads, like the Sword of Damacles (I guess it had eight of its own little swords). It was LARGE, bulky like a tarantula, but without the fur, pale brown with a dull sheen. It had markings like a fiddleback, only larger and more pronounced. Its cluster of eyes blinked at us.

“We have to get rid of that thing,” I said, and suddenly everybody remembered they had pressing business elsewhere, and vanished. The boy, who was there, looked askance at the spider, then shrugged: “I ain’t touching that thing.” I called my management in a desperate bid to see if the maintenance people took care of grotesque arachnid removal. Luckily, they did, and they came over wielding those grabby-stick things that people use to pick up litter. The spider hissed as it was relocated.

More and more spiders popped up after the maintenance people left. The boy and I were canoodling on the couch, when I happened to touch the back of my head and find a slimy, squirmy mass. Screeching, I pulled whatever it was out – in my hand was a blackened, curled up tarantula, smeared with blood (the tarantula’s or mine, I wasn’t sure), and matted hair (mine). I stared at it, horrified, for minutes, until I had the presence of mind to fling it away from me across the room, where it landed with a sickly splat.

“Where are all of these coming from?!” I yelled. “Tarantulas aren’t native to Kansas!” *

Sheepishly, the boy informed me that he had, unbeknownst to me, released them into the house as part of a science experiment. He proceeded to explain that these spiders were harmless, that they were beneficial to the ecosystem (of my apartment!), and that I would just have to get used to them.

I woke up before I had a chance to throttle the dream-him! My hair was spider-free, though I did have a bit of a sore throat.

* – As it turns out, there are tarantulas running around Southwest Kansas. Another region on my list of places NEVER TO VISIT, EVER.

I looked up and noticed that there was a cluster of bears in the middle of the road. The Bus Driving Ogre showed no signs of slowing down. “Hey, stop, you’re gonna hit those bears!” I yelled. She ignored me and continued on, eventually hitting the group of bears. Immediately all the bears in the park got mad and surrounded the bus, shaking it and rocking it and pounding on the sides with their paws. Some of them peeled open the tops and the sides and started mauling the passengers. Somehow I got out of the bus and ran, but one of the bears spotted me and chased me out of the park.

The potential genesis for this dream? Maybe a stray line in The Winter’s Tale, a mere stage direction: Exit, pursued by bear.

Anyway, when I have the worst sleep is when I begin having the strange dreams. Last Friday night, I dreamt that I sat in Shakespeare class. The walls were eggshell blue and made of the same material as high-school lockers (aluminum?). The windows were maybe 8″ by 12″, not terribly wide. We were taking an exam. My professor, who I’ll call Mr. Drothers, is a big bear of a man. Not quite obese, but definitely Santa Clausian in shape. In the middle of the exam he pulled out a tiny colorful umbrella, roughly the size of an average bowl, and puts it over his head. He tiptoed over to a window and looked as though he might be trying to escape through the tiny opening. Then he turned to us, giggled and said, “I don’t think I’ll quite fit! Hee hee!”

Two nights ago, I dreamt that the boy and I had somehow gotten a Stovetop stuffing-canister full of pot for really cheap. I’d hidden it in a closet in my room, and left to run errands. I returned to be berated by my father: “how could you smoke” and “that’s so bad for your health” and whatnot. I retorted by saying that a few days earlier, I had found smoke coming from his closet – not pot, just smoke wisps. He kind of shrugged, said something to the effect of “that’s not relevant,” and left hastily.

Later, I somehow wandered into a room, inside which was some sort of wild grass preserve. Huge, tall grasses, no doubt containing some of what had been in the Stovetop container, grew in profusion. I was walking through these grasses when all of a sudden, two big labradors ran in, attempting to eat each other. One was black and the other brownish gold; they kept biting at one another, running away, biting again, and didn’t appear to be play fighting. In terror, I jumped up onto the surface of a table, raised slightly above the grasses, and hoped not to get eaten.

Please don’t psychoanalyze me. :twisted:

The night before, I was really exhausted. The boy and I had made the mistake of drinking lots of tasty chai that night, which we’d made with assam (a nice potent black tea). When I finally fell asleep, I found myself being escorted into prison. As if it were mid-dream and not the start of one, I already had some plan in mind of how to escape. I was ushered into a room by two guards, and abandoned there to talk to the head jailer. I guess the head jailer was going to help me escape. My arms were tied with some rope, but I was able to drop onto the floor two ceramic chickens (which didn’t shatter in the process). I guess this was my bribe for the head jailer, but somehow I understood that these chickens were going to be instrumental in my escape. The head jailer collected them, thanked me, and ushered me into another room. I would escape! but I did have to stay awhile until I could be let free.

Then another prison guard untied me and showed me my transcript. He was enrolling me in prison school. I looked at the transcript and it showed my high school courses, but nothing about college. “But I’m in the honors program!” I protested. “Yeah, like that makes a bit of difference,” the guard sneered (quite an astute guard there). Simmering in the unfairness of having to go to regular prison school, I sulked until he pushed me into another room, which resembled a bare bones, concrete version of Emeril’s kitchen. Another prison guard (who, now that I think of it, did rather resemble Emeril), was instructing the audience (of prisoners) on how to grate fresh parmesan cheese. My alarm woke me up before we got to the marinara sauce lesson.

Suddenly, the bus stops. The bus driver calls to me. “Here’s your stop,” she says, “but I’m not letting you off. I thought I saw a bear wandering around here. Best stay on.” I stand up and look out the window, and indeed, there is a bear. It’s dressed in hunter garb, a vest and hat and everything, but also happens to be wearing golf-patterned knickers. The bear stretches and yawns, and now I see that it is also wielding a rifle. The bus pulls away, and the bear disappears into the distance. “I’ll just drive you around a few more rounds, and wait for the bear to go away.” Okay, driver lady, thanks for looking out for me.

A few rounds later, the lady pulls into my neighborhood again, and slows the bus to a crawl, because all of my (dream) neighbors have massed outside. They have formed a mob to confront the bear. I decide to stay on the bus. The head guy, who in real life would probably be the neighborhood association president or something, lead the other neighbors up to the bear, who no longer has his outfit on, and who doesn’t appear to have the rifle either.

The head neighborhood guy shouts some things at the bear, and the bear lumbers forward and backhands him with a huge swipe. The guy falls unconscious to the ground, and the other neighbors start attacking the bear and get mauled, individually, in turn. I take this opportunity to get my groceries and run, while the bear is distracted killing my neighbors, to the safety of my house. I kill the lights and the TV and radio, and hide out in the basement, waiting for the killer bear to move on to other neighborhoods.