Sunday, August 29, 2010

Medical Cadaver

MORNING OF AUGUST 29, 2010

This one's disturbing. Oh boy...

I was at work and someone had brought a cadaver to work that we were supposed to film for one of our shows! It was supposedly a medical student's practice cadaver, and it was really unsettling.

More unsettling still was the fact that, at some point, I needed to cut off one of the cadaver's hands. I can't remember the exact circumstances, I just remember coming to that realization. And for some reason, I was able to summon the fortitude to do it! Really gross, and, again, unsettling. I can't use that work enough here.

The worst part of all is, when all was said and done (it's all just a vague lump of blur in my mind), it was left to me to dispose of the corpse. I wrapped it in a tarp and unceremoniously tossed it in the dumpster outside.

I went to my parents' house for something after this and apparently stayed the night. I apparently had my own room at their house, and it looked similar to one of the rooms I really had during my teenage years.

I was rearranging things in the room. I had a large, glass-fronted display frame hanging on one wall. In real life I do not follow any sport in any way, shape or form, but in this dream I filled this display case with Alabama football memorabilia. Most notable a jersey and a baseball cap with the team logo on it.

My mom came home and asked if I'd left anything in my car, because there was a strong odor coming from it. I suddenly "realized" that I must not have really ever put the cadaver in the dumpster--I must have forgotten and left it in my trunk!

Now I was terrified that someone would find it and not believe me that it was a medical cadaver that I had been asked to dispose of. Even if I could prove that, did laws against abusing a corpse apply to medical cadavers? I was trying to scheme how to get it to a dumpster discreetly.

I'll be fine if I don't ever have this dream again. Really.

*I once, years ago, very briefly dated a medical student who would enthusiastically describe the cadavers she got to work on. I'm thinking those stories might have churned up in my subconscious and played a part in this. Mixed with whatever terrifying psychology.

Friday, August 27, 2010

The Malfunctioning Door

MORNING OF AUGUST 27, 2010

I was staying at a hotel with my parents. I remember the three of us driving up to the parking deck after being out-and-about with whatever activities. The entrance to the parking deck was blocked with a huge, iron door featuring a yellow and black striped "warning/danger" pattern in chipped paint.

You had to swipe your hotel card in order to make the iron door slowly rise to permit entrance. For some reason the swipe was on the passenger side, and my mom was trying to make it work. Upon some swipes the door would not respond at all, and on other swipes it might make some sort of lurching, half-response, but it never opened.

Eventually we swiped the card so many times that the door began to malfunction. It would raise halfway up, then go back down, then halfway up, and so on and so forth. All the while it was making a hideous grinding noise. It seemed as though it would fall to pieces, if not explode, at any moment.

To have apparently broken/malfunctioned this huge door mortified my parents, but for some reason I thought it was so funny. I laughed and laughed as they drove away and parked in some other, distant location. As we walked the long trek back towards the hotel, I saw a crowd--including the fire department--gathering around the malfunctioning door.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Sheriff Woody and the Mall

MORNING OF AUGUST 22, 2010

I was designing artwork to submit to a "Create A Toy Story T-Shirt" contest. My design was a simple drawing of Woody, standing there with his arms crossed. Next to the picture there was text in a block-letter font that read, "Sheriff Woody". That's all there was to it. And I somehow felt confident it might actually win the contest!

The desk I drew this at was the old desk I had as a child and teenager. On that real desk there used to be a little fluorescent desk lamp, and I can specifically remember looking at it in the dream. I was also arranging little items on the desk, some of which really used to be on it, and others were random dream items.

Finally I was in a huge mall. It was all indoors, but it looked like a small town. All the storefronts were fully realized, with sidewalks and benches and everything outside them. Truly, only the roof over all of this kept it from feeling like anything less than an outdoor shopping experience in a city.

Lisa and I walked and walked and walked in this mall setting, and it never seemed to end. Eventually a fictional gay guy joined us. He was nice, but really talkative an annoying. He hung out with us for the rest of the dream, offering his opinion of everything in the mall.

Eventually we reached a place where all the stores were off-white in color and just drab and featureless. I saw an Old Navy sign above one of this colorless, featureless stores. The gay guy explained that this was the part of the mall that wasn't finished yet. It had only been "conceptualized".

Sunday, August 15, 2010

War Games

MORNING OF AUGUST 15, 2010

I was at some sort of large park or outdoor area with friends. There was a nearby body of water with piers and boats and the like. For some reason, we and several other people had engaged in a war game of some sort. We had been assigned teams, and were going around trying to "shoot" each other to see who the last man/team standing was.

It was much like a child's game in that "shooting" someone was just done by making a gun with your fingers and saying you'd shot them without them somehow making a case for having blocked it.

One of my friends and I got "shot" early on. I remember lying there for a while, dutifully playing the "dead" part, and listening to and watching the other players carry on the game from my vantage point.

Later, when I assumed the game was almost over, I got up. Suddenly an enemy team member who looked like Ana Lucia" from "Lost" sprang on me with her finger-gun at the aim. I tried to explain that my friend and I were already out, but she wouldn't hear it and marched us as war prisoners down to one of the piers.

I was tired of the game, so I decided to end it with a big cop-out move. I suddenly declared I was wearing a bomb and if anyone moved, I'd blow the whole park sky high. No one knew just how to react to this, or if it was allowed. I just went ahead and "pulled the pin", then made a huge explosion sound and declared the game over for everyone.

As we walked away from the park, I looked back and could see actual explosions and fire as though it had been real.

We (meaning my friends as well as all the park patrons) had to pass through a building to get back to the parking lot. At this point I specifically remember being with Lisa and Dean. We suddenly realized the building we were passing through was supposedly the White House.

The carpet had ornate designs of old cartoon characters on it. It had supposedly been there since the earliest days of the White House, though many of the characters had a similar appearance to classic Disney, Warner Bros., and Hanna Barbera cartoons.

I pointed out these similarities to my friends and we talked about. I overheard someone in the crowd shout, "Oh, it's Harley!" and I noticed one of the cartoon characters in the carpet was Harley Quinn, from the Batman universe.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Touring the Theme Park

MORNING OF AUGUST 14, 2010

I was with friends at an amusement park that seemed to be a cross between Six Flags and Disney World. There was one ride that was similar to a roller coaster in that it ran on tracks high over the park, but it went at a slow, even pace and simply toured the entire park from a bird's-eye view.

One evening we all rode this ride and enjoyed it very much. It seemed especially nice at night when everything was lit up. We were all staying in a hotel nearby, and agreed to come back and ride this ride again the next day.

At the hotel, we all split up and went to our different rooms. I was sharing a room with a girl who looked like Mary Elizabeth Winstead's "Ramona Flowers" character from the Scott Pilgrim movie. (I had just seen this movie the previous evening, as well as having read all six volumes of the graphic novels throughout the week.)

She was wearing the generic hotel white bathrobe as she was preparing for a shower, and we were talking. We began to get flirtatious, and soon we expressed our desire for each other.

Next we're all back at the park and "Ramona" and I are trying to keep our new-found attraction secret from the others for some reason. We all wanted to ride the roller-coaster-tour ride again, but they told us it was closed.

"Ramona" and I went looking for something else to do, when a man who looked like the guy who teaches the improv comedy class I'm currently taking approached us and said he gave ground-level tours of the park as an alternative to the other ride. We agreed to go on one of his tours.

He began looking for his assistant to help him get one of his tour buses ready (these buses looked like the red double-deckers in London.) His assistant looked like another member of the improv comedy troupe, and for some reason the two of them seemed to be very eager to help us with this tour, but somehow unable to get themselves promptly organized. It became very much a Three-Stoogish kind of display of incompetence.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Pilgrim Girl and the Scary Movie Trailer

MORNING OF AUGUST 12, 2010

I was going to some kind of event with some friends. One of them was a girl. I was thinking of her in my head like a girl i briefly dated several years ago, but she looked different. In fact, in hindsight, she looked like a human version of a character from the Scott Pilgrim comics which I've been reading (specifically the comics, not the movie adaptation, which hasn't quite come out at this time). She didn't so much look like a specific character as just having the general appearance of a character Bryan Lee O'Malley would draw.

I remember we were seated in an old, classic-looking theater waiting for a show to start. I remember her showing me some recent pictures of herself while we waited. They were really pretty. Finally, pre-movie trailers started. We saw one for a supposedly suspenseful/scary movie about a couple that had a car wreck on an isolated road, and then for the rest of the movie apparently the husband goes crazy and chases the wife all over the countryside. Sort of a version of The Shining, I guess.

So next, the girl and I apparently visited someone's big house. It was late at night, and at some point we came to realize the crazy husband from the movie trailer was actually in the house stalking us. It was a little scary, though I can't really remember anything else about it.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Being Rude to a Classmate and Launchpad McQuack

MORNING OF AUGUST 10, 2010

In real life I've been taking an eight week improv comedy course at a nearby University, just for fun. This dream was from a night following one of the classes.

The improv class and I were on what appeared to be some sort of camping trip, or similar outing in nature. I believe we had just been eating at picnic tables when one girl from the class and I went to go retrieve something for the others.

I recall the two of us walking a fair distance and talking. I got a text message and read it and responded to it, and then I saw someone had "tweeted" something specifically at me and I responded to it. Obviously, dream-me was being pretty rude by doing all of this instead of communicating with my companion on this walk, and she suddenly let me know it in no uncertain terms.

I apologized and we finished our walk, somehow ending up back with the group having never actually obtained any kind of obvious goal on our journey. I still felt embarrassed for having been rude.

There was some other dream where I lived in a very tiny, fictional apartment. One of my friends stopped by. They showed me a statuette they'd found of the "Luanchpad McQuack" character from the old Duck Tales cartoon. He was possibly my favorite character on the show as a kid, and so this foot-tall figure really piqued my interest, nerdy collector that I can be.

I don't think the friend gave me the statue, but they left it with me. I began looking for a place where I could display it.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Barely Lucid in a Desert

MORNING OF AUGUST 8, 2010

This dream ended up being mildly lucid as I was lying in bed this weekend morning, enjoying the opportunity to sleep in.

I was a fictional girl and we were walking through the downtown area of a small town. We were trying to get "home", or to some specific location, but we kept getting lost.

Though it was daylight, the town seemed deserted, as there was no traffic and no visible people. We cut through an alley and over some train tracks. The girl repeatedly wanted to turn back but I kept urging her that we'd find our way if we just kept going.

We did run into some people near the train tracks. I vaguely remember having a very tense interaction with them, but we were able to continue on our way unharmed. After walking down the train tracks for a certain distance, we came into what looked like a vast, desolate desert.

My last memory is sitting with this girl at a small-but-fancy table for two in the middle of this desert. Suddenly, the DeLorean from Back to the Future sped by across the sand, right past our table, and off over the dunes into the distance.

This seemed to be the last straw for the girl, and she started to freak out and really wanted to leave. I calmly told her it was a movie, and I knew what Doc and Marty had been running from. She asked what, and I nodded to indicate she look back over her shoulder.

At that exact moment, the sky lit up as a mushroom cloud rose up and filled the horizon. The cloud for some reason was vibrant purple. I explained to the girl that Marty and Doc had simply time traveled to the testing of the A-bomb. For some reason, this didn't do anything to calm her nerves.

It didn't matter, because my ability to have predicted the exact moment of the A-bomb blast without knowing it, combined with all the time travel and Back to the Future references, finally snapped me out of sleep.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Swarming Baby Chipmunks & A Few Cameos

MORNING OF AUGUST 7, 2010

I was with Lisa. She kept several pet chipmunks in her garage. There were two adult ones, a male and a female, and very many little baby ones. The parents lived in some sort of habitat, but all the babies stayed in an old shoe rack Lisa had set up against a wall. It was filled with old shoes, and the babies would just crowd into them to sleep.

The most surreal thing is, the babies, which were each only about the size of a quarter, were trained to run into and out of the shoes at the clap of your hand. I remember Lisa first taking me into the garage to show them to me. She clapped her hands, and this super-fast swarm of little baby chipmunks just flowed out. We fed them, let them play a while, and then another clap of the hands sent them swarming back into the shoes. It was surreal.

We went back into Lisa's house, but it was really big, but at some point it became a movie theater instead. We walked down one empty hallway and bumped into Steve Carell as he came out of a door. He was very affable, and kept referring to the situation as if he was "making a cameo". Then Paul Rudd came out and spoke to us, and we talked about his "cameo". (These Carell and Rudd are in a current movie together, so I guess that explains this, though I haven't seen it).

I said something to the effect of, "Well, now all we need is a cameo by 'The Rock'!" And at that time, "The Rock" came out of the door, but he walked on by without speaking. This is the last I remember of this dream, as I began to wake up. I think all these "cameo" references was a light form of the dream becoming lucid, finally being broken when the third cameo made it too surreal.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Jumping Like the HULK

MORNING OF AUGUST 5, 2010

It was as if I was taking my morning walk at the track, only the "track" here consisted of a circular dirt trail in a clearing in the woods.

At one point, it began to lightly rain. I decided I should hurry and finish the lap I was on, as not to potentially caught in a downpour. So I began to lightly jog. Then I decided to try jumping forward...

I discovered I could leap like the Hulk! With next to no effort, my bound sprang me high into the air and propelled me forward a few yards. This felt exhilarating! The remainder of the dream consisted of just running and leaping, and the feeling of almost "flying" around the track as it rained on me.

In another dream I was walking down what was supposed to be a different local walking track that also doubles as a "nature trail". For some reason I saw my mom there, and for some reason we each had our cars on the trail (it's only a foot trail in reality). So we got in our respective cars to leave, but soon came to a point on the trail where several sea turtles were trying to cross the road.

We each got out of our vehicles and herded the sea turtles across into the water to make sure no other cars would come by and hit them. I also saw some ducks and geese.