Plato's Cave Metaphor? Or an Anger Infused Opium Den? (Part II)

This was one vivid, fucked up dream.

That's Plato's cave up there. I didn't draw it, Plato conceived it, and it's not entirely relevant.

None of you were directly present in this dream, although some of your voices swirled in occasionally. I'm not sure where the dream began or where it ended, but I can remember the middle content and a few particularly confusing themes.

I was up on a barren plateau. It was reminiscent of the flat expanse just above the Columbia River Gorge, where other strange things happened this past summer. Brenda, Andrew and Ben were not there though. I was there with three other individuals, ranging in height from midget size up to Quinn & a 1/2 size. I didn't care about them at all; I had no emotional attachments. We were trying to get somewhere, but I couldn't figure out where.

In our search for somewhere, which became more and more frantic as the dream continued, holes began to reveal themselves in small hillocks all around us. The holes had a diameter of about 3 feet, and led down into small rooms that were roughly the size of the igloo we had outside the green house two winters ago.

I had been cautioned by an anonymous, booming voice not to enter the holes unless I was ready to go insane and cause harm to others. Well, since I didn't give a shit about the other individuals present in the dream, and our search for somewhere or some some sort of understanding was yielding no results above ground, I began to crawl through the holes into the rooms.

In these rooms were doorways to other small rooms, and some of those rooms had various glass and crystal household items in them. Lamps, chandeliers, microwaves, television sets, computer monitors, windows, etc. None of the items were of any use, as the rooms had dirt floors and no electrical outlets. What was stranger is that most of the items have limited glass/crystal materials in real life, but in this dream they were composed entirely of the fragile matter. They were placed there for a reason, and the second I touched them I became confused and consequently angry.

I would pick up a mirror or a glass toaster in a room, crawl through one of the doors, be blinded by a white light, and then be back above ground where the other three individuals were running around. I threw the glass and crystal items at them. Shards of glass would explode all around their targets, and tiny, bright reflections of light would dance around.

The other figures in the barren landscape didn't seem to understand what I was doing, but the booming voice did. I had to keep doing this; I had engaged a cycle that wasn't going to be broken, despite others' objections to my hurtling of glass objects. This was not a "silent" dream either. There were many, many voices coming and going, with no apparent stimulus.

I'm not sure what to make of this dream. It scared me a little bit, and was by no means pleasant. I'm going to be heading to bed for the night in an hour or so and I hope I do not re-enter that particular dreamscape.

Pray for me, my friends. Pray.

- Junior Greeneburg

A light-hearted Post-Script: last night my friend told me there was a girl in her middle school who spelled her name "Le'a", and so all the teachers pronounced it as "Leah" or "Leya". The parents came in one day all pissed off and explained to the teachers that it was pronounced "Ledasha". Haha.

I'm David Bowie, and this is your freaky dream...

Some of the occurrences and characters in this dream are easy to trace back to my actual life. Others, I sincerely hope, were fleeting aberrations of the mind.

ANDY and I decided to go on a road trip. We packed up all the food, and then I had to go to a substitute teaching job before we could leave. I rode my bike to the school, which was actually a shopping area called "Mall 205" near my house. Suddenly I was on my way home again, but somehow got lost. I decided to take a bus, and a hideous CREEPY WOMAN, who I thought to be the driver, sat down next to me and started rubbing my back. The bus drove me farther and farther away from home. I started to panic. I told the actual BUS DRIVER my predicament, and he reassured me that he knew where to drop me off. In my elation at these words I kissed him: the middle aged, salt and pepper haired BUS DRIVER. Then we held hands and walked back to the bus. Rather disturbing in retrospect.

When I finally exited the bus I called ANDY. I was many hours late for our road trip so he had already made new plans with ROBBIE and some other people. There were still 6 available seats, he told me, but I needed to get back in time to go. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to go into a dance club, where I ran into SARA STILL. This was a thrift store/dance club combo, so I started shopping, and found a pink leotard to purchase for only $2.95! What a find! We went outside where we encountered DAN SMITH with a gang of his Portland friends lounging on patio furniture. Everyone was playing charades when suddenly DAVID BOWIE walked into the club. Before I continue, you should know that in this dream, DAVID BOWIE is a WOMAN. As I was saying, MS. BOWIE, dressed in Labyrinth garb, walked into the club and heard me shout some idolatrous words at her. MS. BOWIE came back with a biting remark about annoying fans and stormed off. "You were always like a mother to me!" I cried after her. At this point, DAN SMITH decided it was time for us all to leave and said he would give me a ride home.

END.

Why not sleep until noon?

So last night I had this ridiculously long, drawn-out dream. I can't remember all of it but ...

"You'll have to park your jet in the hangar below."
"Don't you think I'll need it?"
"Unimportant. Has to go below. Hey, have you ever had Ignacio as your fishing guide? He is really great."
"Nope, not once."
As the giant gate ahead of us slowly lowered, I realize that this might be the last time I see this shopping-mall full of people. The slow elevator cut-out into the floor began to lower, when I realized, "We're about to be totally defenseless out there!"
I glanced around to find Major Thunderbolt Ross, there he was sitting in the dark corner of the room smoking a cigar. He gave me a wide grin, and a nod, and I knew that tonight would once again be full of carnage.

As I activated the ship I threw my backpack behind the seat and strapped into my night-vision goggles.
I hovered above our group running mindlessly across the forested grounds, taking out any unforeseen bad-guys and ambushes. It took me a while to fly around and destroy all the badguys with missiles and machine guns but I was finally successful.

Then, out of nowhere, I had been hit. My ship was going down. There was no sign of another aircraft, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure fall to the ground. I angled my descent towards it, and crashed into the side of an apothecary.

When I recovered from the explosion, I noticed a giant hole in the side of the building with its contents spilling out onto the street. In the light of the streetlamp I noticed a great hulking creature, much akin to Eddie Brock, dragging an unconscious body out of the building. He was then followed by three exact replicas pulling three of the same unconscious bodies out of the building. As the blazing realization came to me that those poor, battered, unconscious beings were my clones, the first and greatest of the monsters turned to me with an evil grin and laughed in his alien voice, "I bet you're wondering how I did this?"

Planes and Bomb

Dream took place.  In corvallis.

  It was dark, but there was a fire going.  It lit the night delicately.  Like a burnt out lamp with a splash of orange in all the dark corners and in the windows.  As we hung around, Robbie, Quinn, Brenda and I we noticed something. A plane in the sky as bright as day.  A plane in the sky. A commercial jetliner in the dark moment.
  Our eyes stuck on it we watched it fly high, and turn and dip and turn and nose up, and then quickly move in our direction.  We realized what was happening.  It was terrifying and amazing, a plane coming towards you, an awesome sight.
  It swept towards us, moving deliberately towards the ground.  As it hit, it swept along the ground to the left of us was we watched it crash pushing away the earth and pulling itself into a hole created by its mass.  Then it was gone, behind the master house of the property.
  I ran to tell my neighbors.  A plane crashed, next to us.  Why should they care.  Aumi wondered what was going on and said she would check it out.
  We walked behind the house towards the plane, ripped up and unrecognizable walking inside.  It was a mall, a shopping center with made for tv products and storefronts.

One Foot in Front of the Other

Recently I have not been remembering my dreams, which is unusual because I almost always do. However today the trend has changed.

Obviously, last night I dreamed about school. I was at a practical exam where we all had to go into a room and perform some nominal task and then we would be graded. My roommate and I were waiting to go in with all of our class mates, and he was freaked out because he had brought his pot-pipe to the test, so he just laid it on some paper-towels in the trash can and went in. After the test which I don't remember, we socialized in the foyer outside of the testing hall and I recovered the pipe for him. I remember random social interactions especially one with Jen Chen because she loves cats and always talks about them. The room then of course changed to a dining hall where we were all at dinner, but the end of dinner as they were going to show a video up on the screen. It was at this point the woman with whom I had been talking, Katie Segal, and I decided to get outta this place and go make out. The end.

Seee, I can write about dreams too!

Give this Kid Some Morphine, and I'll Take that Travel Hammock

Last night I had one of the strangest dream sequences I can remember. There were at least five different adventures all melded together, with random changes in the cast. I'll recount the two that seem to make a tiny bit of sense.

First involved Andrew Schwartz at his finest. We were walking through a crowd at a music festival and ran across some guy whose eyes were glazed over, and was repeatedly collapsing to the ground. He was fucked up on drugs and such. Andrew and I decided to help him, and put his arms around our shoulders. We carried him to a general store or something like that.

This is where things got weird. Andrew goes up to the clerk and shouts "This guy needs morphine, right now!" The clerk said something along the lines of "I don't think so; he looks fucked up". Somehow Andrew convinced the clerk to give the guy morphine, and then a few things happened that I can't quite remember. The morphine man disappeared from my dreamscape at some point. The clerk then came back to the counter, and Andrew ordered a bunch of outdoors supplies. His total came out to $96.00. The clerk said "Those travel hammocks are awesome". Andrew took his hammock and other supplies and we left.

Some other dreams flashed in and out, but the final one of the night was pretty vivid. I was climbing up a cliff on some vines, and was holding a piece of rope in my teeth with a chunk of concrete attached to the other end. I made it to the top and my arms gave out. I fell backwards off the cliff, and then I woke up just before hitting the ground. I went downstairs, made some coffee and then turned on my computer. The end.

Today was not Sunny in Philadelphia

Dream 10/10/09

It was wintertime in the bay area of my dreams. In this long rambling dream I had last night, my memory does not serve me well until the part where I, along with the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (mainly Sweet Dee, Dennis, Charlie and Mac), for one reason or another, hiked up into a derelict township up on a hill overlooking the bay. I believe this might have been some sort of weekend retreat.

At first just Dennis, Dee and I trekked up the hill (wow, this almost looks like Yosemite Valley I thought to myself, but it’s more accurately somewhere above Hayward). We walked up several flights of stair of an old hotel where we would be staying for the weekend. The hotel was all bare concrete and lots of dust, like most buildings in this township, and the only beds were raised concrete slabs. There was certainly no glass on the windows. We took off our shoes and got comfortable, though it’s hard to get comfortable when it’s winter and you’re exposed to the elements, and there is really nothing comfortable to sit on.

Shortly Mac and Dennis arrived, though I probably won’t mention them after this because they were in the background of this dream. I remember that Dennis and Dee had some weird sort of incestuous relationship going on. Dennis was very amiable to Sweet Dee, unlike in the show. I’m not sure what the incestuousness was about, I mean, this isn’t a dream with the cast of Arrested Development ;).

We went up on the roof of the hotel, and the smell of war was upon us. A deep growling noise got closer and closer until finally a group of helicopters and fighter jets blasted over the eastern ridge and began circling the township. Printed neatly on the gray bodies of the airborne monsters were three black letters, all caps: DEA.

Although we knew that these fuckers were here to intimidate, we were not immediately thinking that we were in danger. I figured that some friendly pot growers were inhabiting the derelict settlement and the DEA was just trying to instill some fear in their pot-addled minds, showing them who’s in charge, and more importantly, who has Zombie Jesus on their side.

When the bombs began to drop, it was followed by a moment of disbelief, and then close behind the knowledge that our lives were in danger. For some reason we did not flee, but watched the destruction. I have had many dream about bombs dropping from an overead aircraft, and I must say that it is the most terrifying thing I ever see in my dreams. You hear the whistle of the dropping object and are painfully aware of the extreme power that is about to be upon you.

One explosion blasted a building a few blocks away to our east. We could feel the energy wave as it blasted past our location, vibrating the shit out of the building we were perched upon. In fact only two big explosions were seen in this round of attacks, huge and terrifying nonetheless. We were unharmed.

My memory gets real hazy after this. I’m not sure if there was some sort of amnesiactic solution in the bombs, or if it’s just the nature of dreams, but next thing I know I’m back on top of the hotel and Quinn is there. Now the township is somewhat of a tourist destination, like Alcatraz. There are gift shops and shitty restaurant in the alleyways that have appeared on this hotel roof. There is also a beautiful view of the entire bay as you walk out towards the western end of the roof, although it was a bit sullied by the scores of tourists yelling and screaming and running around like a bunch of fucking dumbfounded Nazi bastards. Oh well. They were pleasantly unaware that it was their money, their votes, and their downright selfish idiocy that caused these DEA aircraft to bomb the living life out of a few “hippies” and torch their livelihoods. Let them rest in their ignorance, I thought.

Then things just fade to black and I wake up in my boring life where shit doesn’t get bombed all the time. Happy Saturday, and remember that Columbus day is Monday. Without his dumb ass, none of us would be here to witness the destruction of all that is holy.

the motherland

Last night I dreamed that I had to move back to Alaska... I dream this all the time. Im always near the ocean or a glacier when I realize I am back, in my homeland.

Whale Dream

About a year ago I had one of the most amazing dreams of my life. Since it was so long ago some of the details have become less vivid, although I believe I can remember most of it.

I'm swimming, swimming in an ocean. At some point I realize I'm not quite myself, and I'm actually a baby whale. The feeling is spectacular, brilliant. My parent whale is with me and it's teaching me how to swim, this way and that, and really super fast, I'm soooo fast. We are just swimming along seeing all the under the ocean sites when we decide to swim towards this island. Now I don't know if all of you have read "The Life of Pi", but there is a part with this creepy island that eats people and has fresh water. The island of my dream reminds me of this. We swim over to it, swim under and come up into fresh water.

The next thing my mind flashes to is not being a whale at all. I'm just my regular old self. I'm swimming in a pool with a bunch of people and we decide to race. This is when I remember that I used to be a whale and I actually know how to swim rather well and rather fast.

And..they're off! I'm lagging behind but then those old whale feelings just kick right in! I'm taking the lead, and it's miraculous it's as though I'm a whale in human clothing.

Damn I wish I was a fucking whale.

NAKEY TIME!

Its funny we should start this blog right at the time when I have had for the first time a variation of a very common dream. The elusive, naked dream. In my dream I was not all the way naked, no, I was wearing underwear albeit small underwear and I was walking around town to go meet my family. On the way to meet them I stopped in a store where I was alerted to the fact that being almost naked was not normal and certainly not acceptable. At this point in time I became overly embarrassed and panicked, I didn’t know what to do next. I then realized I was in a clothing store so I started to buy some clothes, after I tried on these clothes I realized that they were obscenely expensive and even though this was a desperate situation, I was late and could not leave the store without new clothes, I could not purchase clothes this expensive, I simply did not have the means. So at this point I tried to make a deal with the shop keeper, just let me wear these clothes across the street to another shop and buy clothes there and I will bring them right back, for collateral you can have my purse. Well this was a dumb idea because she agreed and I went across the street where I realized I again would not be able to buy new clothes because I had left my money in my purse at the other shop. At this point in total frustration I gave up, stole the expensive clothes and left my purse. What this means I couldn’t tell you but no one even knew I was late.

My dreams have been vivid of late and I have remembered a substantial amount from many of them, which is unusual for me. Here is a recent favorite:

In a dream, I saw the Eastern sky grow dark. But in the West, a pale light lingered. A voice was crying, "Doom is near at hand, Isildur's Bane is found." Just kidding, that's Boromir's dream. Mine went like this: I met Andrew Bird! I was at his house and so was Tami. But she didn't pay much attention to him, and when she left he confessed his attraction to her. "Damn!" I thought. "I must try to impress him somehow..." For some bizarre reason he left me in charge of his house, and suddenly, large wild animals started trashing everything. I am pretty sure Sara's dogs were there too. They ripped furniture, broke lamps and shattered something large and full of water. I was super stressed because I thought, "Now he will never like me!" And I frantically tried to restore order to the house, knowing I didn't have enough time.

Maybe my next post will be about the dream where I let some crazy kid hold a baby and she left it on the stove and burned off two of it's limbs.

MILK

Milk is what our boobs produce. So why am I always sneaking 4 fl.oz. or so at a time from my roommates? Because I am a MAN. I don't need to squeeze milk out of my boobs; I've got Holstein Cows to do that for me. They have huge boobs with multiple nipples on their underside.

Regardless, over the past couple weeks I've had this unprecedented desire to sprinkle a little milk into my morning coffee or tea. I don't buy milk; as I mentioned before I am a MAN. So I steal a little bit from my roommates. The less I steal, the less guilty I feel.

Well, apparently I have kept all those little increments of guilt built up inside my conscious, and last night they gathered together and had a party during my rapid eye movement. I don't remember too much about this dream, but I do remember a 3/4ths empty milk jug being poured in and around my mouth. I wasn't even putting milk in coffee; I was just chugging it and spitting it out all over the kitchen. It was the ultimate display of lactose intolerance, but I'm not an intolerant person. Nope, I'm just wasteful.

So don't waste milk. After that dream I've decided to give up cow's milk for good. I'll stick to drinking yogurt; that's what MEN drink!

A Robotic Dream is a Spicy Thing to Taste

A Recollection of last night:

Feeling somewhat sick and exhausted from a weekend of self-inflicted abuse, I had decided to retire early and watch The Science of Sleep as I myself drifted to sleep. If you have seen this movie, you know (besides the fact that Michel Gondry is a creative genius) that the main character is a person who cannot easily draw the line between wakefulness and sleep, a trait that causes him great pains in pursuing true love. Basically the whole movie drifts freely between dream and waking consciousness and a line cannot easily be found dividing the two states.

So it was with this movie playing that I drifted off to sleep, as I said above. The dreams I had that night seemed to flow seamlessly into one another, and as is nearly always the case, I have no hope of recording or even remembering all of the in their entirety. What I do remember is a hillside.

It may more deftly be described as a mountainside due to the sheer size of it, but it is on its most basic level a big steeply sloped area of land. It is a recurring setting in my dreams, though many different dream locations have been plastered onto it, from Querétaro, México to the ruggedness of Yosemite (Half Dome in particular). There is always either a river or some other border at the foot of the slope that separates two different lands, two nations perhaps.

Last night the Mountainside was forested and rocky. We were all there (although I may not remember each of you individually, it is only right that you would all be there). We were wandering the land much like we would wander the Painted Desert, Fossil Creek or any other such absurd place. Our home was the land and we were its thoughtful custodians. Each of us hovered just above the ground and were incredibly powerful, and each had a handheld electronic device that connected us to each other. I guess it was kind of like an iphone or a blackberry of sorts. It was no run-of-the-mill device, for, you see, these possessed some sort of supernatural power. They bound each of us together. We were truly happy.

At some point, though, my happiness was put in check by my supernatural iphone. Much as Stephan in The Science of Sleep, my idealized vision of my reality was broken. The girl I loved left a message on my voicemail, and I was elated. My love was requited! And then I realized it was all a mistake. The message was not for me; rather it was for a close friend of mine. She had the wrong number.

Not to end on such a sad note, somehow things recovered. I lost the child-like innocence that I had begun with and perhaps so had all of us. Happy we were though, and we still levitated just above the ground and floated along with our supernatural iphones and blackberries. We were together on that forested, rocky mountainside. I do not recall if we ever traveled to the bottom of the slope and crossed the boundary into the unknown, but it seems only fitting that we would have.

In dreams we can tap our undiscovered power. Everything that resides in the shadows of our minds, in the realm of the impossible, can be brought to light in our dream experiences and amended to our awakened selves. I mean, how were we all levitating? Was it the supernatural handheld electronic devices? Perchance even those are a part of us. Please enlighten…

Vamp orgy/"Lost" Island

Hello friends. Brett and I thought it would be cool to start cataloging our dreams on this here page. Please don't hold back. Dan just because you have creepy dreams doesn't mean you shouldn't share. I'll share a very brief recent dream that I had involving vampires, sex and the cast of ABC's "Lost":
I woke up a what appeared to be the inside of a coffin perched high above a rainforest floor. When I exited the coffin onto a small platform i looked around to see that my little nest was part of a much larger series of coffins all covered in rainforest plant life. Then i don't really remember what happened but flashed to a scene inside of one of the "dharma" stations from lost. Lots of flashes of blood on walls/ceiling, not scary more like modern art. annnnd vamp orgy. I don't remember much about the specifics of the orgy only that it was awesome and involved many many vampires. The dream again flashed and had a brief vamp montage involving hunting humans in the jungle and a pretty great death of Jack Shepherd, M.D. by one of my co-vamps. That's pretty much all i remember for now.
So guys post your dreams on here and have some fun. I think it will be cool to read about Andrew's forays into the subconscious.