Bossa Nova, Traveling Cat

The text alert on my phone woke me up at about 4:15 this morning, and so I struggled awake out of a musical dream. Dancing to a Bossa Nova beat version of the song "I Just Want to Celebrate" (another day of living.) I don't really think the Rare Earth's version was Bossa Nova.

Don't know why the phone went off, I suspect I may have dreamed that. I did notice a text had come in while I was out last night, but that was more than six hours earlier. Going to be annoying if the text alert sound has joined the repertoire of my hypnopompic hallucinations.

After I went back to sleep I almost immediately slipped into a dream where I was at a cosplay convention for animals. I had a little black Moggie with a white muzzle and boots with a thin white stripe on his belly. He was a lot like my old T-Rex, but better at traveling. He was sitting with a bunch of us at lunch when he decided to dive headfirst into the swag bag of the woman sitting next to me. We dug down past the fliers and buttons to find him on his back, piddy-pawing the air and purring up a storm. "Okay," she smiled at me, "I don't even really like cats, but I so much want to take him home."

"We're a set." I said without missing a beat. (Ha, I'm never that smooth in real life.)

"I'm okay with that."

I blushed. (So it's probably a good thing I'm not that smooth in real life.)

Nightmare, Music

Terrifying little dream early this morning, three of us were trapped in an old lumber mill, and somehow we'd been tied up to a rack and sent down the feed chute to a large saw. We were upright and the platform we were tied to was moving about six inches at a time closer to the saw as it ran back and forth.

We figured out we could shift about that amount one way or the other so were able to avoid being filleted and got the saw to break apart the frame for us to escape with only minor injuries. That wasn't the nightmare part, though. When we confronted the person who'd done this to us, he kept getting back up, no matter how many times he was knocked down. None of us wanted to kill him, but it was getting rapidly clear that was going to be the only option if everyone was to escape. Finally I convinced the other two to run away, just take the boat and leave (Apparently we were on an island.)

I was planning on staying behind and just knocking the monster out until I no longer could. I would knock him down and then drag him around the mill, looking for something strong enough to tie him up with so I could eventually escape myself, but there seemed to be nothing available that he couldn't break out of.

I kept getting more and more fatigued and knew I wouldn't be able to keep this up much longer. I disabled the saw just before I blacked out.

In happier mindset, I woke to music playing (in my brain.) "In time the Rockies may Crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, they're only made of clay, but our love is here to stay." Thank you Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald for a performance that resonates stronger than ever.  I don't mind when some music gets stuck in my head.  (I blame J for this.)

Celebrity Time Tour, UFOs, and Random Voice

In the first dream of the evening, I was invited on a Celebrity Time Tour. Something, however, went horribly awry and we were separated from our guide. I spotted a young Mark Hamill along a boardwalk, so pointed him out to the other tourists who were starting to panic. Sadly, the younger ones of the group had no idea who that was. Sigh. I remembered that we were supposed to just hang out and watch, not interact with the future celebrities, or that could alter history. (The guide did tell us that history was pretty resilient, but we'd better behave just in case.) The trip planning had involved a lot of questions about who we might be related to, as that seemed to be the one thing that screwed up history fairly easily.

We went across the boardwalk and started discussing the wooden jacuzzi tubs that were set into the bathing pools. Some folks wondered why they'd been removed. I pointed out that even with careful cleaning, wood tubs could harbor fungus and bacteria better than other materials. I pointed out that it was still a neat style, and that we could easily replicate it with sanitary substitutes given a little investment push. As the discussion progressed, I realized that the young Mark Hamill had joined in the discussion. He seemed to think it was a pretty good idea, actually.

We tried to withdraw from the conversation gracefully, and finally the tour guide had to come up and take me away, "Grandpa, you need to get your meds now, sorry young man."

"That's okay, it was cool to meet you."

We got back to our time tour HQ without further issues, and there was Mark Hamill, "Hey, I remember you!"

"Please tell my you agreed to make a movie called 'Star Wars'?" I asked.

"Star What?" then he broke out into a huge laugh. "I did want to show you this, though."

He had an investment promo for faux-wood pool accessories. "I started this company. Sales are great. Thanks for the idea. I was trying to get a time tour to go back and find your family so I could pass some of the success along... well, we see how that turned out."

It was now my turn to laugh.

-----

In the next dream I was having trouble with my asthma and so we were packing up Little Red so I could get home and get medicated. (The car med-kit was apparently dry.) As we sat in the car a line of UFO's crossed the beach about a hundred yards off shore. I quickly got out the cell phone and started shooting HD video. My passenger complained "why do they always look like god-damned Tupperware?"

Three of the four UFO's turned edge on to the ocean and dove out of sight. The fourth one, which looked more like one of those round hot tubs, bounced down into the waves, where it was obvious that it was, in fact, one of those round vinyl covered hot tubs. There were four very frightened people in the tub. We got out of the car and raced down the beach to help pull them in to shore. I was still having trouble breathing, but didn't want to miss their story because of a little thing like that.

-----

As I lay in bed, trying to ignore the alarm light, I heard a voice (concerned, male, deeper than my own) say "He died this morning, shortly after two a.m." It made me sad.

You'll Slip There.

Apparently. I have no idea where "there" is, unfortunately.The concerned voice was loud and insistent.

Boat Tour, Haunted House Game(?) and the Mad Handset of Vision

I was sitting by a dock in the bay, wasting time, when I overheard a skipper (who sounded like Sean Connery) ask a young couple "sure you could fly to India, if you like being loaded into a cannon and shot to your destination. A boat trip, now that's an adventure from start to finish."

It seems I had just come into a lot of money and needed a way to vanish for a few weeks, so when the young couple accepted the skipper's offer I made my way over to the boat and asked if he'd take an old man on as a crewman. He only asked three questions, "Can you operate a computer? Can you mop?" and "Can you shoot?"

I said "yes" and "I can also cook, read a navigation chart, and I'm not a half bad mechanic, either."

"Yer hired!"

I put my bag on board, my room was a tiny cabin in the bow. I could barely stretch out in the bunk, the light didn't work, but it did have two long narrow portholes. When I made my way back up to the top deck, we were already underway, threading our way in and out of the wide river traffic. The plan was to sail down the nile, across the Mediterranean, through the straights and across the gulf around the horn of India.

-----

I was in a haunted house game of some sort. The chat interface was an odd combination of voice recognition and hundreds of small clicky icons (they might have been Chinese or Japanese). You could type to jump to parts of the list or use the scroll wheel to send them flying by the right hand side of the screen. I couldn't figure the chat interface out, so the game master sighed and ported me into the reality version. There was an evil laugh, and I was actually there in the dust filled, creaking and groaning structure that was the haunted house in the game. The first thing I did was call out to any other players, I got a couple of answering calls, and some whimpering. That didn't bode well. I pumped a round into the shotgun's chamber and checked my ammunition, six in the gun, about twelve in a bag on my belt. I headed for the whimpering, wondering what good a shotgun would be against a ghost.

There was a woman inside of a chandelier. It didn't look comfortable. I moved a couple of couches together under the fixture and then climbed up on the back of one. I cut the thin nylon straps holding the woman down and she indicated that she still couldn't move, so grabbed the edge of the chandelier to tip the woman out. She was in mid tumble inches from my arms when she just vanished.

I spotted movement along a wall and the shadow slunk out the far door. I hopped over the couch, catching my foot on the wooden rail of the back and stumble-hopped headlong into the wall. Fortunately I was wearing some sort of helmet and the blow as cushioned. The impact still left my neck hurting, however. I knelt down and poked my head around the door frame. Gunfire from down the hall, three or four pistol shots. They were way to high over my head, but if I'd been standing? That would have been game over.

"I hope you have a good reason for shooting at me?" I shouted out of the doorway.

"Sorry, I thought something had snuck up behind..." his conversation ended in a scream and more bullets went singing past. Apparently, whatever had snuck out of the room had snuck up in front of him. I rolled across the hallway and into the room across the way, I couldn't see anything in the hall, and started to think that a flashlight would be better than a shotgun. I looked around the room, it was some sort of small sitting room, I opened up the drawer of an end table next to the door.

There were some yellowed postcards from Iceland, the writing in a language I couldn't read, a book of matches with a picture of Iceland and the name of a hotel on the cover, a half dozen gas lamp mantles, and a roll of duct tape. The soft glow flickering from the gas lighting fixture may have caused the postcards to look yellow, they didn't feel old and brittle. I was amazed this house hadn't burned down ages ago. For a moment I contemplated replacing the damaged mantle in the lamp, but then realized I would have to do that in the dark.

"Are you okay down there?" I asked into the empty hallway.

There was no reply save a wet smacking sound and crunching, like when a dog is chewing on a large bone. I took that as warning not to go that way. Although, if it was chewing, the shotgun would probably work on it.

I looked across the room at the window, it was partly open, the curtains gently blowing, I finished opening it up with an effort, it felt like it had been painted in that partly open state. I climbed out the window and stepped over the dead holly bushes. The dried leaves were even spikier than if they'd been alive. I walked out into the street and took in a view of the house. It was three stories, and there were houses up and down the street as far as I could see that looked very much like it. All of them in the same state of decay, most all of them with at least a few windows glowing faintly from gas-lights within. The house across the street was completely black, a burned out shell, however.

The streetlamps were also gas lights, some of which had their mantles burned out, and just a flickering ball of burning gas at the end of their jets. Some were completely dark. I guessed they were a ball of flaming explosion waiting to happen. I couldn't tell if it was day or night. there was a thick layer of clouds that looked to be just above the height of the tallest building's roof lines. At one end of the street I could see tendrils of fog creeping in (at least I assumed they were fog.) At the other end of the street, was pitch blackness, none of the houses lights reached the road and there were no streetlamps alight. I was deciding whether I should re-enter through the window or try to find the front door when the window sash came crashing down. I saw a hunched figure at the window, and then the gas lamp in the room went out.

------

This morning's wake-up voice told the other voices to hush, "he's got the mad handset of vision."

I rolled over awake, thinking "interesting, what the heck is that?"

I swear I heard the the voice give out a disappointed "awww."

Skuld Says

"The world hangs on a marked thread."

I have the feeling I have dreamed this dream before. (it was more of a hypnopompic hallucination, I was in bed, unable to move and this is what I clearly heard a woman's voice, clear with a Germanic accent, speak from the doorway of the bedroom.)

If it's Six AM, then I'm Already Late!

This time change always takes me quite a bit to get used to. It throws the cats off, too.

In my dream I woke to the pawing of hungry cats. It was pitch black save for the glow of the alarm clock.(Which I found odd, since I knew, even in the dream, that I'd removed the lamp from the clock years ago.) I fumbled around and picked up the clock in one hand and found my glasses with the other. The time was just a moment before six AM. Panic coursed through me, apparently the light on the timer was still off (I shut it off so I can sleep in on the weekends. I know I'm not supposed to, but I think the cats have come to look forward to sleeping in as much as I do.) My heart started racing and I tried to roll out of bed, but found that I couldn't move.

I realized this was a false wakening, and woke myself up, only to discover that I couldn't move my arms and legs at all, the timed light was on, the cats were in the other room singing "The Breakfast Song" and generally knocking things about. I heard a helicopter overhead, the beat of the blades rattling the windows so that it was impossible, from inside the house, to hear anything but the vaguest "wanh, wanh wanh..." of the P.A. system. I hoped it wasn't something serious - like an evacuation notice.

Then everything was blue and yellow swirls around a translucent silvery egg about the size of an armchair, but narrower. I couldn't tell if I was the silvery egg or the swirling tendrils of color. I seemed to be outside of the whole scene but somehow fully contained as well. I was thinking that I didn't have time to figure this out, because, it's... if it's six AM, then I'm already late for work!

I struggled out of the paralysis, checked the headboard clock, and it was indeed a few minutes after six, so I tossed off the covers, scattering the cats, and raced out into the kitchen to feed them. I couldn't find their bowls, however, and there were two new tables each with a set of four matching chairs in the front room that I'd never seen before. That explained all the weird knocking around sounds from earlier.

"Who would break in and leave furniture" I fumed aloud to no one.

It dawned on me that it was Sunday, and somehow that made it all okay, especially since I wouldn't have to drive to work naked.

False Waking Night Terror

I had a false waking dream, and true to the genre, I awoke twice during the dream before waking up for real.

The first time I woke in the dream was because N was standing in the doorway calling my name. She was all dolled up in a sailor suit like outfit, not the school girl sort of thing, but the big buttoned shirt and bell bottom trousers kind. The shirt was cut to show off her trim tummy tuck, and her breast enhancements. She had also had her hair cut and dyed, so it was in a loose curly bob, not quite an Afro.

She was being very pleasant but evasive on the topic of why she was in my house at all. I managed to struggle out of bed, and stepped out into the hall. The hall closet had been replaced with a wall of drawers and small cabinets. I knew immediately that I was dreaming, and I found that I liked that look and wanted to remember it when it comes time I want to remodel the hallway.

I then found myself back in bed, sweating, glad that particular night terror was over when came the crashing and breaking noises from all over the house. Heaps of clothing from on top of the dressers landed on the bed, and the pile was so heavy at the head of the bed that I had to slither down and come out at the foot of the bed instead. I was glad I don't tuck the foot of the sheets in. Once I got out I was greeted by the musty smell of old sweatshirts that had long ago been cat pissed. I flung them off the bed, cursing at the cats, not only for their past transgressions but for the continuing crashing and howling coming from all over the house. 

I crawled across the lumpy bed and turned on the light. The entire contents of the bedroom drawers and closets were dumped on the bed and floor. My camera was broken, the lens assembly at the foot of the bed and the body by the door. It had to have been broken and it's parts tossed into the room. That's when I figured out that it couldn't have been the cats. I began to panic, as the noise was continuing from the rest of the house. I looked out the bedroom door and could see that the floor of my front room and kitchen was in a similar state, all the cabinet doors flung open or ripped off the cabinets completely.

I was sill trapped under the covers and struggled to get out so I could confront whoever was doing this. The noise finally stopped, like power outage quiet, and that was even more terrifying, aside from my wheezing and blood pounding in my ears, there was no noise at all. 

When I awoke for real I was laying in a pool of sweat, no cats in the room, and I had to get up and walk through every room of the house and turn on every light to make sure everything was all right. 

Fly!

Woke up to the shout, "Fly! Fly on insects' wings!" in a deep woman's voice from right outside my bedroom slider. All of the cats were along the floor under the curtains looking up along the edge of the hot tub. I have no idea what that was about.

Virtual Flying, Sobbing Apparition

          In what was a very detailed dream, I was playing Axlepyre, running through an instance in World of Warcraft with nine other folks from the guild. We were ducking through a glowing green maze, trying not to touch the sides, the whole thing was rotating, making it fairly difficult. In the fashion of this sort of dream it wasn't long before I was not playing the game, but living the game. Apparently the others in the group had the same feeling. We finished up the current group of creeps we were fighting and decided to mount up and fly out of the area. Soon we were darting over the jungle of Stranglethorne, racing between the tops of the trees and diving down to skim the surface of the rivers. We stopped at the diving platforms and made a camp fire.
          It didn't take long for us to change into far more colorful attire. (Or in the case of the elves in the group, less attire.) I put on my chef's hat and prepared a couple of feasts for the group. In one of my bags I had a chest that was essentially a refrigerator and some sort of magical grill. I set up on the other side of the path and was chopping vegetables and carving fillets, grilling same, and then brewing up some sauces and finally mixing them all together in a large wok. I remember having to stand on a fallen log to get to the top of the grill to turn the meat.
Since half the group were Gnomes there weren't a lot of short jokes, though I did notice that I was the shortest of the entire group, so when there were jokes, I was typically the subject.
          Soon we were all taking turns diving off the platforms, though some of us who could levitate or slow fall cheated so we could do a couple of dozen flips or turns before splashing down in the brackish water of the cove far below.

          I woke up thinking, "that there was worthy zip-line inspired dream."

          In the morning, while laying in bed unable to move, feeling fully awake, I could hear the cats moving around, knocking stuff over in the kitchen. Then, from N's old office I could hear a woman's high pitched wail and long broken sobs. The despair was palpable and I wanted nothing more than to go and comfort the poor woman, all the while concerned that the house was somewhat insecure if she could have just walked in. I could not, however, make myself get up and go to her. The sobbing stopped, and a few moments later the woman passed through the hallway, past the front entry where the light caught her from behind, revealing reddish brown hair just past her shoulders, a cap sleeved blouse almost the same shade brown with cream colored lace collar and trim. It seemed she was wearing a skirt of the same material (brown corduroy, I think.) But I could not tell whether the skirt was long or short as the skirt turned into a dark roiling mist just about mid thigh and going to within about a foot of the ground.
          I heard the cats scrabbling around, knocking into the toaster and flowers on the kitchen counter, then tearing through the living room, frantic claws on paraquat tiles. When they bounded in across the bed they bounced over my hips and across my chest, and that finally woke me up.

          I didn't really look for the woman, but I did find the kitchen to be quite the mess; toaster crumbs, coupons, plastic flowers and a couple of zebra-striped place mats were strewn across the counters and onto the floor.
          I love how fast and how detailed your brain can fill in a scene with very little real information. In this case the cats were probably racing through the house and the wailing was likely Little John's "I'm a mighty hunter!" call (or perhaps his "where the heck is breakfast?" call.)

I Want to Go Home! and One of Us!

    This morning's hypnopompic hallucination featured a child's voice saying, in the way one might say "I want to go to Disneyland!" when asked where to go next, "I want to go home!"
    If I hadn't been paralyzed I probably would have been beaming ear to ear; the voice was just that happy.

    The dream I had before that was pretty much a standard "Escape from Zombie Invasion" dream in which several people I don't know were trapped in the center of a small town. The undead citizens were closing in on us and we had to pick a direction to try to fight our way out of it. In the process one of us was bitten, and since he knew he was going to turn he chose to stay and fight off the zombies. Only thing was, he ran at them shouting "Soon I will be one of you!"
    "One of us!" the zombies started mumbling and shuffling around like they were dancing. They completely forgot to chase us. It was enough of a distraction for the rest of us to make it out to where people's cars were parked, and presumably to get away.

New Job, Hypnopompic Hallucination

              The dream started, or at least my memory of the dream started, with me meeting a new technician. He stood on the other side of the cube wall from me. We shook hands and introduced ourselves, and then I added him into the work order tracking system, not by sitting down at a computer and typing anything in, but by dialing up an input vector on a phone like device with a red tube display panel (like on an old HP calculator.) I spoke his name into the device and then spelled it when prompted.
              After we got all his details situated, I stood up and found a smaller version of the device, plugged it into my console, and then dialed up another function. After pressing a button, a couple of whirring noises and a loud ding, his device was programmed. I unplugged it and handed it to him. “Welcome aboard,”
              I showed him how I had the remote headset configured on my personal system. “Let's go meet the rest of the team.”
              “Okay, sir.”
              “You don't have to call me sir, I'm the same job as you, just in a different location.”
              “Yes , sir.”
              I just smiled and took the new tech into the meeting room.
              The room was wood panel on the lower third, below a brass chair rail with imbedded red tube displays. The upper two thirds of the walls were a dark charcoal gray that shimmered when we stepped into the room and then cleared, making it look like we were in a large meeting hall, standing on a railed platform. There were about sixty or seventy other technicians in the room all standing or sitting facing our platform.
              “Good morning, Boss”
              “Hey, Captain.”
              “Mister coordinator, sir.”
              And a couple of “Hi! D” were tossed about as we logged into the meeting.
              “Not the boss, eh?”
              “Just filling in until we hire someone.”
              “It's been six months now,” one of the techs in front said. “I think they've hired someone.”
              And then the complaints about my not being paid for the job started and I raised my hand to bring them back to order. In what was almost a complete surprise to me, the room fell silent immediately.
              “We have a new technician,” I introduced the new guy to the crowd, a pretty good mix of young and old, genders and races.
              “Which brings us to the first item on the agenda, this job will be filled next, so get your applications in.”
              There was some discussion again, but I brought them back to order and zoomed through the rest of the agenda, reminding them that we were in the business of helping people, not helping computers.
              I then stepped aside so the boss could address the group. He then told them what I had just told them, but instead of fifteen seconds it took half an hour.
              When the meeting dismissed we stayed and chatted a bit. He was concerned that if he hired a new coordinator that the team would still look to me for leadership (which let me know that he'd all ready chosen someone else.) He made some vague promise of having my regular job (which I'd still been doing in addition to coordinating the team) re-classified and the pay assigned retroactively. I knew that would only happen if I pushed very hard for it, so just smiled and said “that would be nice.”
              In my heart I realized that I would probably have to retire and then come back to work at my old job half time to actually get a raise out of the deal. This made me a little sad, and a lot tired.

              This morning, I had a hypnopompic hallucination, started with the classic paralysis, sweating, the feeling of presences holding me down (cats most likely) and then the clear as day woman's voice, “Wake up and find your Wife, Douglas.”
              This could be difficult seeing as how N left six months ago.