1625: From the Subconscious Mind

I had a weird dream last night, or possibly this morning, I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I had a truly weird dream, so this one sort of stood out a bit. It wasn’t quite a nightmare, but it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, either. It was vivid, though, and unlike a lot of dreams it appears to have stayed in my memory for longer than five minutes after it happened.

I’m not sure if there was a “setup” to the situation in which I found myself, but I was in a play. I was convinced it was Twelfth Night (which I have both been in and directed on two different occasions) but it clearly wasn’t, because I was playing a character called Lord Parry, who is not in Twelfth Night. I was then half-convinced that it was The Wizard of Oz (which I have also been in) but there is not a character in that called Lord Parry, either. (I played both Uncle Henry and Lord Growlie, both of whom only appear in the stage version and are consequently largely unknown to anyone who has only ever seen the movie.)

Anyway, the point was, I was in some sort of play. And I wasn’t ready for my scene. I wasn’t in costume. For some reason, I found myself putting on a suit, even though I knew somewhere inside me that the suit wasn’t my costume. I did up my tie and was ready, and realised that it was time to get on stage, but that I was at the wrong end of the theatre. I had to run downstairs and get into the backstage area — quite why I wasn’t getting changed in the backstage area is a mystery I guess we’ll never solve — and prepare to go on, but I was suddenly hit with stage fright.

This wasn’t normal stage fright. I realised that I had forgotten my lines and cues — and wasn’t sure that I knew them at all in the first place. I found a copy of the play lying backstage and tried to flip through to where the on-stage actors had got to, but was completely unable to find it, however frantically I searched. In the meantime, I could hear what was clearly a cue — someone calling Lord Parry’s name. It came again, and I still wasn’t ready. Eventually, the actors on stage started improvising — initially with some simple lines that drew giggles from the audience, eventually culminating in what appeared to be a full musical number that they had collectively pulled out of thin air.

Meanwhile, I was still backstage, frantically leafing through the book, hoping to find my scene, when I realised that I was fully visible to the audience. I was standing behind a chest-high wall — possibly a bookcase or something? — and I looked up to see the audience gazing at me, or were they paying more attention to the increasingly elaborate improvisations of my castmates on stage?

Eventually, the on-stage shenanigans had deviated so far from the plot of the play that it had become absolutely impossible for me to make an entrance, so I simply ran. And then I woke up.

How odd. Not the most pleasant thing to experience, but equally a peculiarly fascinating incident. And probably one that has disappeared into my subconscious, never to be seen again.

1156: Dream a Little Dream

Sometimes I like my subconscious. Sometimes it comes up with creative, awesome ideas or simply entertains me with peculiar, fascinating and sometimes grotesquely compelling images that then provide suitable fodder from which to compose a blog post later in the day. I know I have at least one friend for whom the experience he dubbed “the poo dream” is a source of considerable amusement.

Sometimes, though, I don’t like my subconscious. Today is one of those days.

I don’t tend to suffer from nightmares a lot. I don’t have many memories of being woken up suddenly by something unpleasant happening to me in my dreams, and I’ve certainly never done the Hollywoodesque thing of suddenly sitting bolt upright, wide awake and covered in sweat. This morning, though, my brain decided to show me some messed-up crap.

And yes, I said morning. As those of you who remember my previous posts on vivid dreams will remember, I tend to experience my most vivid flashes of weirdness from the subconscious after I’ve sort of kind of woken up once and drifted off back to sleep. In this case, it was shortly after Andie had gone out to work at half-past some ungodly hour in the morning, and I was far too tired to get out of bed at that point. So, without much encouragement required, I fell asleep again, and the peculiar images began.

This time around, I was back at my old secondary school. Specifically, I was in the music department’s main room. This was quite a big room with a stage at one end, though it was relatively rarely used for concerts when I was there — school concerts tended to take place in the large (and extremely reverberant) sports hall. Regardless of that, though, there was a concert going on this time around. I was set to perform. Specifically, I was set to perform Carnival of the Animals on the piano, which the astute and/or classically-trained among you will know is a piece of music that normally requires at least two people and two pianos and possibly some additional instruments too. However, for reasons that were at best unclear over the course of this dream, I was set to perform it solo, and I was extremely nervous about it.

I don’t remember anything else that was going on in the concert, but I remember the audience feeling somewhat rowdy. In fact, it felt more like a performance in front of a class of schoolkids than an actual concert — as I looked around, I remember noticing that the desks were laid out just as they always were — three rows, with another at 90 degrees to the rest of them down the side.

My time came to perform and I psyched myself up. I was going to give a small speech prior to starting my performance to explain why I was going to be performing Carnival of the Animals as a soloist, but as I stepped on stage the noise level from the audience (who, it was clearly evident by now, just were schoolkids) increased and increased and increased. I stood there mutely waiting for them to calm down so I could give my speech, but the hubbub didn’t dissipate. Eventually I gave up, laid my music down on the piano that was on stage and prepared to take a seat.

Suddenly, from out of the audience, out burst a kid who was a fairly notorious bully when I was back at school. His appearance in my dream was just as when I last saw him at the age of about 15. While I was at school, I didn’t have a lot of problems with this particular individual personally, but he was someone that I was wary of and tended to avoid whenever possible — not only because I was afraid of him, but also because I thought he was a bit of a tosser. Anyway, that aside, he leapt at me, and it wasn’t until it was too late that I saw he was wielding a knife. He slashed across me as he leapt at me. I didn’t feel anything, so I figured he missed.

Then I looked down and saw he hadn’t missed. The front of my clothing was stained crimson with blood, and the pain suddenly kicked in.

Then I woke up. That was not a pleasant way to wake up, I can tell you, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that it pretty much put a downer on most of the rest of my day. I’ve been feeling low and depressed all day and while I’m sure not all of it can be attributed to the activities of my subconscious, starting the day in that manner probably didn’t help.

But what does it mean? Well, aside from the apparent long-term damage to my sanity that classroom teaching did… who knows? And I’m not sure I want to know!

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.