Five Dreams
2013-03-04
I've been pretty lazy about recording dreams lately, I'll admit. The reason for this is that they've been mostly insignificant, so I really don't feel the motivation to bang these out on a keyboard immediately after having them. That being said, over the past week or two I've had more dreams than usual; five in fact, four of which occurred last week in a three-day period.
The frequency itself was noteworthy, but given how generally uninteresting they've (mostly) been, I still wasn't going to bother writing them out until I finally had a fifth dream a couple of days ago. "Well," I said to myself, "five is more than four, which is the number of the dreams I reported on last time, so I now have to write about these." And so it is.
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The first dream involves me shopping with my parents. There I stood in the grocery store, watching the cart somewhere near the dairy aisle after whoever I was there with had wandered off, when I was approached by a girl. I can't recall her age very well, but I imagine that she could not have been older than 13 or 14, and in all likelihood she was younger than that. Her eyes were sort of a dark hazel or brown, and her hair was brown dyed blonde. She sort of reminded me a bit of the 'dragon' chick from Game of Thrones.
Anyway, she was trying to sell me magic water. Actually, she was selling it to everyone in the area; she was almost a sort of 'magic water' girlscout who had set up shop near to where I was standing. She kept trying to strike up a conversation with me, but being generally asocial, I wasn't as receptive as I could have been. Nonetheless, she kept sending 'meaningful' glances my way, as if we knew each other and I just didn't remember.
I was simultaneously relieved and disheartened when whichever parent (or parents) I had gone to the store with returned and gave me all the excuse I needed to leave. I left with the feeling that I'd run into this girl again.
Here, the dream ended.
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The next dream involved my nephew, who's currently busy being an infant. This dream involved most of my immediate family: Mother, father, sister and nephew. No niece and no older brother to be seen in this one.
I'm not quite sure what the setup for this dream was, but all of us were desperate to leave the city for whatever reason. It seemed like something important -- maybe a plague or a war or something. Whatever the reason, we needed to be gone and the sooner the better.
The airport (or bus terminal, whatever it was) seemed to have increased the price of tickets, however, to one live infant. In order for us to board a plane (or a bus or whatever), my sister had to give up her son as a sacrifice to the airport, who then gave us a ticket for transport the following day.
The disturbing part of this dream was how willingly she gave him up, and how supportive my parents were of the decision. I was horrified but couldn't think of a way to react during the transaction, not to mention completely baffled by how easily he was given over to the airport. She had a smile on her face when she handed him over, like she was getting the better end of the bargain by far.
After being given our family ticket, we were told to return the next day while they ushered my nephew off to a room somewhere, presumably to be murdered at their leisure.
In this dream, I was a bit stealthier than I am in real life, so I stole into into the airport later that night and rescued my nephew out from under the noses of airport security. I had taken to this task of my own volition, but still returned to the house expecting a hero's welcome for snatching him back from the (apparently evil) folks at the airport.
To my surprise, I received anything but. I was scolded for being so foolish and short-sighted, and the entire family returned to the airport at once to give him back. My sister confessed my 'crime' to the airport staff and apologized to them profusely for my actions; they graciously allowed us to keep our ticket. The staff and my family all turned their gazes toward me, glaring, before I finally woke up from this dream.
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The next dream is among the nerdiest type of dream: Me in a video game. Specifically, I was living in the Vvardenfell district of the Elder Scrolls universe, as part of the game 'Morrowind'.
The cause for this is pretty obvious: I've spent dozens (perhaps hundreds) of hours playing Morrowind, and have recently spent an additional 60 hours or so playing Skyrim -- I'm at 210 hours in Skyrim total so far, and I'm shooting for 240 before the next entry in the Elder Scrolls series comes out.
Anyway, as happens every time I play Skyrim, I usually sit and ruminate about what the game would be like if it had combined all of Morrowind's strengths with Skyrim's strengths, which turns into a walk down nostalgia lane. This almost always results in me reinstalling Morrowind and playing it for ten minutes before realizing that after 40+ hours of Elder Scrolls, I'm sick and fucking tired of Elder Scrolls for the next six months or so (give or take) and not touching it.
This is a cycle that has repeated itself many times. I am not a wise man.
Anyway, the dream.
The dream itself was that I had a house in Balmora, and was a mage who would moonlight as a Skooma dealer on the side, operating out of my basement. There wasn't much to the dream, really, other than haggling over the price and quality of my product with a Khajiit and an Argonian who had come over to buy. Once I realized how soul-crushingly nerdy the dream was, I woke up feeling ashamed of myself with a desperate urge to rush out and get laid or something.
Interestingly, or perhaps not to most people, this dream led to me reinstalling Morrowind and I ended up seeing a meme on Reddit about a Skooma dealer in Skyrim a few days later. GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE (more or less), MOTHERFUCKER.
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The next one is very similar, except it was a Skyrim dream instead of a Morrowind dream. There wasn't much to it; it wasn't even really me 'in' the game so much as me playing it. It was a mod that gave me a revolver and took place on an unfamiliar icy landmass. I spent the entire dream running around shooting NPCs.
I wish I could say it was more interesting than that, but it really wasn't. I think they were bandits. That's about all I got.
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The last one happened only a day or two ago. I was in a... plane... thing with my father. The plane started off floating around on the river, though it seemed very high off the water, as if its 'wheels' (or whatever was keeping us afloat in the current) were about 20 feet below the fuselage of the aircraft. We could see wildlife and people along the riverbanks as we passed, hurrying to get out of the way.
Pretty soon, we had taken off and were flying around for no particularly good reason. We were both marginally proficient with piloting the craft, but neither of us could rightly be called a 'pilot' if you get what I'm saying. Anyway, long story short, before long the plane was doing aileron rolls as it plummeted toward the ground at breakneck speeds. Actually, I don't know that it was plummeting for sure, but I can only assume so since we were both panicking and had no idea as to which direction the plane was headed.
The G-Forces were such that, even though it was the middle of the day, everything was becoming dark in the plane. I guess this was the dream version of 'blacking out,' only I could actually function perfectly fine in every way that didn't involve the use of my eyeballs. So... whatever, close enough, right?
It soon became my responsibility to determine which way was up while my dad wrestled with the controls. We were spinning, of course, so my brilliant plan was to catch the chair I was previously sitting in with my hands; whichever direction it was when I caught it was 'down.' Sounds stupid, and it is, but it worked in the dream and we managed to right the plane.
Not long after this, we crashed into a mountain anyway. I'm not sure how, but I guess that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. Turns out the entire experience was virtualized -- our brains had been running in a Virtual Machine (as in, we were using VirtualBox) that contained a different reality from our own, one in which we were flying a plane very poorly. When we died, we were disconnected from the virtual machine and laughed about it.
The software was being run on a laptop, that was inside a silver briefcase, that was sitting on a cheap TV-Dinner tray thing, that stood in the middle of a parking lot. Neither of us was wearing pants, nor was the weird 80s car salesman guy whose laptop we were using (we still had boxers on, don't worry). The guy's trunk was open and filled with other silver briefcases.
I woke up at about this point, before we could experience any other realities. This is probably for the best, given the direction the dream might have been heading.