1714: Arachnid Dentistry

I had an enjoyably bizarre dream last night, or possibly early this morning — I’m not quite sure. It doesn’t really matter when it occurred; what does matter, however, is that it was most peculiar, and has somehow stayed in my memory for most of the day rather than, as dreams are often wont to do, dissipating in a puff of imagination shortly after getting up.

I will preface this by saying there was no poo involved in this dream. I’m sure you’re devastated.

Anyway. The main premise of the dream was that Andie and I were living somewhere that was not the house we now own between us. Instead, we were the proud owners of what appeared to be a rather house-like flat that was actually inside another building. In other words, the flat itself was multi-level, like a house, but its “front door” actually opened into a corridor of the building which contained it rather than onto the street. I recall commenting on this to dream-Andie, noting that she had been adamant about getting a house rather than a flat (she had; it was one of our few “musts” when looking for a new place) and that we’d somehow ended up with a flat instead.

For whatever reason, I elected to step outside what was seemingly our newly acquired flat to go and explore the rest of the building. I followed the corridor from our front door through another set of doors, and discovered that just a little way down from where we now lived was a dental surgery. This struck me as a little odd at the time, but I just shrugged it off. We lived next door to a dentist, and that was just how it was.

I’m not sure how long I walked for, but the building itself appeared to be rather large, with different areas fitted out in noticeably different manners. Lower down — apparently our flat was quite high up in it — the building appeared like a classy hotel, with ostentatious decor and lush carpets; higher up, meanwhile, the drab walls, endless fire doors and strangely arranged staircases called to mind some form of student accommodation I’d spent time in in the past. It wasn’t the halls of residence I lived in; I have a feeling it was either some friends’ halls, or possibly a sixth form college where I stayed for a residential music course while I was a teen. Either way, it was somewhat out of place when compared to the richly decorated lower levels.

At some point, I got lost. I found myself somewhere on the lower floors in what appeared to be the headquarters of an affluent, successful company — all leather sofas, marble-effect (or possibly just marble) tabletops and shiny floors. Whichever way I turned, I couldn’t seem to find the way back where I came from, and eventually ended up on the street. Apparently this building was in Toronto, somewhere near where my friends Mark and Lynette used to live, as I recognised the street corner on which I found myself.

I went back into the building and found that this time I was able to successfully navigate my way back into the hotel lobby-like area, up the stairs into the dorm-like area, and eventually past the dentist back to our flat.

When I came back in, I’m not sure if the arrangement was different or if I just hadn’t noticed it before, but bizarrely, there was a shower room right by the living room. Even more strangely, there was a hole in its wall where bricks had seemingly just been removed, leaving an open “window” between the shower and the living room.

For some reason, I opened the door of the shower room and lay down on the floor. There was a computer keyboard in front of me. I started typing, and as I did so, hundreds of small spiders started emerging from the shower’s plughole, then crawling into the corner of the room and disappearing. As I continued to type, the spiders kept coming, but they always seemed to be going the same way. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I didn’t really want to know. All I knew was that I needed to keep typing and typing and typing and typing… you know, much like I’m doing right now.

Then I woke up in a state of some confusion that was swiftly followed by disappointment that I was probably too late to go out and get a McDonald’s breakfast.

Explain that one, then.

1121: Dreamscape

I had a “game dream” last night. As any longtime gamer will tell you, these happen with increasing frequency the more you like or have spent time playing a particular game, are often extremely vivid and are usually quite memorable, too.

In my case — and disappointingly for this blog post, which is about to get a whole lot of padding — I can’t remember the specific details about said dream. What I can remember, however, is the peculiar combination of games that formed the basis of said dream. First up were Ar Tonelico, which is my new RPG jam having finished Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2; and Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 itself — hey, I really, really liked it, okay? These two aren’t especially weird to put together, since Ar Tonelico’s developer Gust also contributed to Hyperdimension Neptunia and was even personified in the game as the character called, err, Gust.

Combining with Ar Tonelico and Hyperdimension Neptunia was the visual novel Kira Kira, which I was reading shortly before I went to sleep last night, so it’s perhaps unsurprising it put in an appearance. Kira Kira doesn’t really fit with the other two, though — it may also be Japanese, but it’s 1) not an RPG 2) not in a fantasy setting and 3) not quite as “crazy” as the other two.

This isn’t as bizarre an inclusion as the presence of CD Projekt Red’s dark fantasy opus The Witcher, however, which also put in an appearance courtesy of its white-haired protagonist Geralt, who looked very much out of place alongside the colourful characters from the other games.

As I say, I can’t remember what actually happened in the dream, so this story is mostly a waste of time, but I thought it was an interesting combination of things that my subconscious chose to put together — particularly since I haven’t played The Witcher for quite some time.

Game dreams don’t always blend together experiences like this. Sometimes they’re a focused experience based on a single game. Puzzle games used to be particularly bad for this — I remember shortly after getting my very own Lynx (Atari’s ill-fated 16-bit handheld which was absolutely enormous) and playing a whole bunch of Klax that I had a number of Klax-related dreams, which mostly centred their attention on my mental image of the female voice that whispered such sweet nothings as “Klax Wave!” and “Yeah!” and “Oooh!” while you were playing. (I think it was the latter that made me go weak at the knees. It was quite a sexy “Oooh!”. I have tried to find it on YouTube but instead found nothing but Flight Simulator videos. Apparently “KLAX” is the abbreviation for Los Angeles International Airport. What was I talking about again?)

Um, anyway… Yeah.

Dreams are a strange thing. I am fairly convinced that you can influence your own dreams strongly by what you’re doing immediately before you go to sleep (wash your mind out, pervert) but it seems that the most vivid dreams tend to show themselves when you’re not specifically trying to think really hard about something, and instead have a mind full of things that have stimulated it. In my case last night, the rather wordy prose of Kira Kira obviously kept my mind active as I drifted off to sleep, and then other influences that I felt strongly about drifted in there, too.

That still doesn’t really explain the presence of The Witcher, but eh, I’m tired, so I’m off to read a bit of Kira Kira and then go to sleep for hopefully some more subconscious happy fun times. See you on the other side.

#oneaday Day 788: From the Depths of the Subconscious

Analysing your dreams can probably tell you a lot about yourself. If that’s the case, though, I’m not sure I want to know what my most recent vivid imaginings say.

I dream best in the morning after I’ve woken up once. At least, those are the dreams I remember. If I wake up when Andie leaves for work and promptly fall back asleep again (which, to be perfectly honest, I usually do) then I’ll often have incredibly vivid dreams which, more to the point, I tend to remember pretty clearly. They’re certainly not conscious imaginings, because there’s no way I’d choose to think of a lot of the things that flit through my mind. Rather, it appears to be a completely automatic process, presumably based on anxieties or thoughts already stuck in my head.

This morning, these bizarre “snooze dreams” were — and I apologise for what I’m about to recount — rather lavatorial in nature. To begin with, I found myself sitting on a toilet in an upstairs hallway of a house. It wasn’t my real-life house, though I think it might have been my own house in the dream. Quite why there was a toilet in the upstairs hallway was anyone’s guess. And quite why I was sitting on it when the house was clearly playing host to a large party is an even bigger mystery.

Despite the fact I had clearly just had a dump in front of all the passing partygoers — most of whom seemed oblivious to my presence and activities — for some reason (and again, I apologise) I found myself unable to… uhh… “clean up”, as it were. I found myself panicking and wishing all these people weren’t in my house, screaming at them to get out of the way, but still no-one paid me any heed.

I ran downstairs and found myself in the house I lived in for my fourth year of university. I knew there was a nice, quiet toilet in the back where I could complete my business, so I opened the door. I found a toilet all right, but it wasn’t the one I was expecting. Rather, it was in a large, L-shaped room whose walls and floor were all made of ceramic tiles. There was no ceiling to the room, and outside I could see that we appeared to be floating in space. Worse, there was no bog roll here, either, only three circular red buttons next to the toilet.

I left, and the subsequent journey was a blur, but I ended up in what appeared to be an aeroplane bathroom, albeit one with a sloping roof that met the wall behind the toilet, and a large skylight in it. When standing in front of the toilet, I could look out through the skylight, and I saw that we were in some sort of rural area. Outside the skylight, men in peculiar costumes were being shepherded away by strange figures I can’t remember any details about. For some reason, I thought nothing of this strange and slightly sinister behaviour, because I had more pressing matters on my mind.

There was a toilet paper dispenser on the wall, so I pulled the handle to dispense some, but the string of sheets went down a small hole underneath the dispenser. When I retrieved the paper from the hole, it was completely covered in a weird black sludge which was then all over my hand. After going “urgh” for a little while, I simply washed it off, finally wiped my arse (noting with some surprise that my underpants had not been soiled despite all the running around) and then woke up slightly worried that I might have shat myself in my sleep. (I hadn’t.)

This particular incident follows a long stream of other bizarre “snooze dreams” I’ve had which include being unable to go through with a sexual encounter because I didn’t have the sheet music for it; starting to read the TV Tropes page for my own life and being literally unable to look away from it; and a particularly unpleasant one where I lived in a big house with all my friends and we all suddenly started hating each other for no apparent reason.

My subconscious is fucked, basically. Oh well, at least it keeps things interesting. And the fact I can remember all this nonsense gives me good fodder for when I actually do want to do something creative and imaginative… though I can’t see a novel about someone who might have shat himself catching on, really.