#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.

#oneaday, Day 23: OMG So Dreamy

Dreams are weird. Don’t try and pretend you’ve never had a weird one. We’ve all been there, however disturbed, slightly sick or moderately turned-on we might feel the morning after. I described some past experiences and childhood recurring dreams some time ago after a particularly vivid and surreal one that faded quickly. I have never been asked to “obey the grapefruit” as part of a dream, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility, surely. (Phillipe must be stinging a bit, though, I imagine.)

This morning, I woke up after another especially “real-feeling” one wondering what on Earth had just happened. Your behaviour in a dream often makes you wonder exactly how you’d react if you genuinely found yourself in the situation you’d just been dreaming about. But then if you think about it a bit harder, it’s probably fairly unlikely that something like that would actually happen. And if it did, you’d probably just collapse into a corner and start crying until the ambulance arrived.

In last night’s dream, I was in a hotel. Fair enough. I was also naked. As you tend to be in many dreams. Banish the thought of my Adonis-like body from your mind for a moment and let’s continue. (I hasten to add at this point that it wasn’t a “dirty” dream, despite what I’m about to describe next.)

In this hotel was a pornography convention. I’m not even certain that hotels allow you to hold pornography conventions in them, but this hotel certainly was holding a pornography convention. Most people in attendance were also naked, but because of the sheer amount of material around the place which depicted naked people engaging in various fun activities (you know, like playing in a ball pool, enjoying a delicious hot dog, sucking on a lollipop or, well, fucking) the amount of naked bodies around the place didn’t feel at all peculiar.

I wandered out of the main convention hall; I’d obviously joined my dream self at a time when he needed a bit of a break from watching people enjoying delicious hot dogs. I walked around the lobby area and into a corridor and almost immediately found myself lost, with no sign of anyone else around, no sign of a way back to the convention hall and no sign of the lobby. It was getting a bit dark, too. Having played Silent Hill 2, I knew that hotels getting dark is rarely a good sign, so I picked up the pace a bit.

I passed through a door and found myself in a room with a selection of non-specific objects on a table, and a small bag. There was also a large window looking out onto another room that was physically impossible to be in the place it appeared to be in, judging by the shape of the corridor outside. There was someone in the room fumbling around with equipment on a table. I knew that I had to put all the objects on the table in the little bag without the person in the room seeing that I was doing so. It didn’t matter if he saw me, I just knew it was important he didn’t see what I was putting into the bag.

I successfully put the things in the bag without the other person noticing, and I then inexplicably left the bag behind on the table and ran out into the corridor. The corridor was still darker than “normal”, but just light enough to see by. I continued exploring the labyrinth of passageways which seemed to get more and more complex by the moment until I came, finally, to what looked like the end of the passageways.

There was a door in one side of the corridor. An old lady opened the door just as I was gazing at it, and I realised that this wing of the hotel was actually an old people’s home. The old lady was about to speak, then I woke up feeling more than a little bewildered and surprisingly exhausted by the whole situation.

I think I may have “issues”.

#oneaday, Day 10: Wordplay

[Before we start and descend headlong into depravity, let me give those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter a bit of context. I asked for a word to blog about. I was immediately bombarded with lots of them. So I’ve decided to attempt to insert all of them into a piece of creative writing that makes at least some degree of sense.

I have hyperlinked each word used to the original tweet that mentioned it.

Given the nature of the words that have been incoming while I’m writing this, the following piece of prose may not be suitable for anyone those under the age of the age of majority in the region where you are reading this. Also, hearty apologies to any Jamaican readers and ting.]

Feena awoke, sat up groggily, brushed the hair out of her face and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She blinked a few times and looked around her, mouth hanging slightly open, as she tried to recall exactly what had transpired.

Last night had been filled with silliness, for sure. There had been copious drinking and outrageous dancing at the pub, much to the delight of the elderly regulars. The girls had picked the pub specifically because it was a place that wouldn’t be filled with the sort of Ben Sherman-wearing, aftershave-drenched creep that tended to latch on to a group of pretty girls and proceed to harass then throughout the course of the evening. The old men had come out with a few cheeky wolf-whistles and saucy comments, but it was all good-natured and the girls had enjoyed themselves.

She swung her legs down off the bed and let her bare feet drop to the wooden floor, wincing slightly at how cold it was. Evidently she’d forgotten to put the heating on when she’d got in, which wasn’t surprising. She shivered a little, but stood up, intending to make for the kitchen and make herself a nice hot pot of coffee.

The pub hadn’t been the end of the night, of course. Feena couldn’t remember who had suggested moving on to the nightclub, but she sincerely hoped it wasn’t her, considering the things that were flooding back into her mind, faster and faster now.

The club, Jokers, was a regular student haunt and seemed to constantly have a background scent of stale flatulence. This was partly due to the fact that the toilets were pretty much constantly out of order, though that didn’t stop people pissing, shitting and vomiting into them, the fragrant effluvia occasionally spilling out of the toilet block into the laughably-named “beer garden” and, on one memorable occasion, onto the dance floor.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Jokers served normal drinks, thought Feena. Jokers was the only place in the city you could get a can of Clamweiser, though. And by the time people were drunk enough to end up in Jokers, they were drunk enough to consume a beverage made of a mixture of gassy American beer and clam juice. She shuddered as she remembered the last memory she had of the night: the fetid stench of the drink being poured into the glass in front of her.

She retched slightly at the thought. It was markedly worse than the previous Most Disgusting Experience of her life, the time where as a teen she had caught her brother at the tail-end of an apparently-epic masturbation session, his computer screen filled with boobies, dripping cock clenched in his hand while their mother’s bra’s clasp pinged open and fell off his chest. She shivered; it was an image which would have been enormously amusing had it not been quite so horrifying.

She rummaged around in the fridge blindly, the light stinging her hungover eyes, and finally withdrew two slices of bread. A piece of toast will sort me right out, she thought. She popped the two slices into the toaster and pressed the lever down.

Suddenly, there was a noise. It sounded like a toilet flushing. Feena froze in her tracks. Was there someone else here?

The answer to her question came in short measure, as a Jamaican man with long dreadlocks wandered into her kitchen, naked as the day he was born, and gave her a polite nod.

“I use de last of ye bumbaclot,” he said, gesturing towards her bathroom and scratching his testicles nonchalantly. “Hoap ye don’ mind.”

Feena blinked, but said nothing. All was silent for a moment. Then, as if finding the silence unbearable, the toaster flung the two hot, crisp pieces of bread high into the air. They seemed to spin in slow motion, rising to the zenith of their flight before gravity took hold and they accelerated inexorably towards the floor, where they plopped unceremoniously, immediately forgotten.

“Did you…” Feena stammered, not sure what she wanted to ask this strange naked man who was now looking at her quizzically. “Did you… Did we…?”

“What?” he asked, smiling slightly.

“Did you… Did you invade my coochie snorcher?” she babbled. She didn’t know why her brain had chosen that particular moment to resurrect a euphemism she hadn’t uttered aloud for at least ten years, but she figured this situation couldn’t get any more embarrassing.

The man chuckled.

“No,” he said. “Some ras-clart try to start dis ting in de club. Saw him off too, noat before me mandible were dislocated, though. Ye help me oot, done fix me up good and ting, Miss Nursey, an’ ye let me sleep here.”

“Oh,” said Feena, still a little bewildered by the whole situation.

“Ye want ye’ toast?” asked the man, picking up the discarded slices from the floor, a thin dusting of brown crumbs remaining on the tiles.

“No,” said Feena absently. “No, I think I just want to go back to bed.”