Thatch, Wattle and Daub...

Mandolin and flute version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" only the lyrics were:
"Thatch, Wattle and Daub,
Woo ooo!
Thatch, Wattle and Daub.
Something something, something,
Gonna patch our doggone home..."

Seriously, my brain sometimes.

(It is over 100 degrees and im in the sixth day of a severe shingles outbreak, so there might be some extenuating circumstances.)

Big, Red, Fluffy

I'm not sure what/who she was (but am reasonably certain it wasn't Little John, who is, in fact, big, red, and fluffy.) All I know is the voice told me, upon waking, that she was mine now and I couldn't give her back.

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.)

"Instead of Rhetorical Hope,"

"...we could offer real hope."

That was the phrase I heard during my waking paralysis this morning. Being paralyzed, I couldn't turn to see who it was standing in my front hall saying it, though. Whoever it was left and closed the door, locking it behind them. I could hear that quite clearly. I know it was a dream because the lock was not locked when I checked this morning.



I dreamed, much earlier in the evening, before the second coughing and not breathing spell woke me, that I was at my old work site, bringing cables to help set up a production. Not the student production that was currently happening, but an "Inspirational Speaker" the district had hired for more than I make in two years. Yep, I was a little bitter about it.

When I got there, the Director told me they were having a bit of a crisis, as on of their minor players decided that he really wasn't needed and therefore quit. The costume, a WWII bomber jacket and boots happened to just be my size. So she thrust a script in my hand, telling me to let the cast lead me through the blocking (since I had no way of knowing it.) "Your character only has six lines, and then you sleep on stage until you're shot, and then the rest of the time you get dragged around."

"Uh, okay..." I figured I might as well help, since I obviously couldn't rig cables in the middle of their closing night.

The show was more of a reader's theatre production than an actual staged play, except for the nosecone of the B-17 the pilot and myself were seated behind. The stage was steeply raked, and there were machine guns and a belly and tail turret also on the set. There were a couple of dozen chairs to either side.

The little makeup girl dyed my beard brown while I read through the script. I then placed the script in the center of the control yoke.

The lights went up, there were flashes of light. the thundering boom of AA fire, bits of shrapnel flew across the stage, pinging against the metal chairs and the other set pieces. The dialogue started. Since my character was suffering from an acute panic attack, it was fairly easy for the actor suffering the same to come off as having an acute panic attack. I got through the first set of lines, five of the six, and a stage hand managed to get my attention and pointed me upstage, where I crawled to where one of the machine gunners lay, it was just a dummy, but the one behind me wasn't.

"Pull the dummy upstage and take his place on the machine gun," he whispered to me.

I wanted to just lay down next to the dummy as I had no idea of what I was supposed to be doing with the machine gun. "Do what I'm doing," the other gunner said.

So I did, I watched him from the corner of my eye and pretended to follow the planes that got by him as they flew over or under us. Whenever I pulled the trigger there were bright flashes of lights and the sound of gunfire. All the effects were electronic, and very cool.  Every so often on of the actors dressed as a German Pilot would buckle and fall out of one of the chairs on the side of the stage, slipping away when the spotlights tracked back across to the other side of the stage. At one point the back of the gun flew off and red powder went everywhere, I guessed that was my queue and dropped to my knees and said my last line, falling face down. "Get back up, you have to drag me and the others back to the exit!"

He gave a loud scream and fell clutching his leg.

"Abandon ship! May day! May Day! Bail out, Bail out!"

I dragged the other gunner back to the plane's "door" and he tumbled out and then danced off stage, pointing to the tail gunner next, who told me to get the belly gunner and then go for the pilot, where I would really get shot.

"Thanks," I whispered as I helped her out of the plane, then did the same for the others. The pilot got out with my help and then I was really "shot" the whole stage was lit by strobes and there was the sound of silence, I fell, the red powder making me look like I was covered in blood. "Oh, shit." I said my line again, using the expletive instead of the euphemism hand written into the script, in my excitement I had forgotten the edit. "Oh well," I thought, "win one for the playwright." There was a stifled giggle from the female stage manager. And I stayed on the stage during the whole rest of the first part of the act, about fifteen minutes, being dragged here and there by the pilot. All the while I was on stage I was thinking that this was the craziest thing I'd ever done, to take the stage in a mature production without know a single thing about what was going on. I also realized that I have dreams like this a lot, but somehow that didn't toss me out of the dream.

At the end of the act we met back stage with the director and the students wanted me to stay and do the rest of the show, but the director and I talked them into re-dressing the dummy and allowing me to get on with my work. Which I would have to wait for intermission to accomplish so was looking forward to seeing the rest of the play.

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.)

The World Hangs by a Marked Thread

              And the dream in which this line occured was all sorts of cartoon maroon and deep purple with shiny particle effects whose purpose and interactions were the result of a crafting attempt in an RPG I was testing out. This is one of the whispers a player's character can hear when they look into the crystal ball. I will have to include this if I ever get to make my Spare Parts MMO.

Mom Yelling, and Time Slip

       About 3:06 I woke in a sweat. I heard my mother shouting “She is dying.” Since my mother doesn't have the habit of talking about herself in the third person, I don't really know who mom was talking about. It was still unnerving.
       Falling back to sleep I dreamed that a short, as in Tom Thumb short, man was in the house trying to explain in a barely audible high-pitched voice that there was someone after him. He pointed out the ripped out screen in the living room slider. I started to tell him that that was caused by our cats, when I realized that the cats were not any where around. I whistled for them and a couple came running out from under the futon, and I heard other noises from outside. The man sat on the door handle while I rounded up the cats, and tried to convince the kittens, who'd gotten themselves outside, to come in. A loud rustling in the ivy did a better job of convincing them to come in than I was doing.
       N came out to see what was going on. We stepped out on the patio, now only about 4 foot wide. The people we'd hired to add benches to the retaining wall had removed a large part of it, and extended it further into our yard, rather than into the hill as we'd requested. There were benches up on the now gentler slope of the hillside, but still not what we really wanted. Again there was the noise from the bushes. N and the man hollered “They're coming,” and raced into the front of the house.
       There was now a tunnel in the hillside, a time slip of sorts. I'm not sure how I knew that, but I knew it went to sometime in the late 80's. I tossed a couple of things through from this time, locking it into that direction of travel. I don't know how I knew that, either. But I could see people jump into a car and drive off down an alley way. I debated going back after them to protect the little man and N from further harassment. N stopped me, as I would have to ride the time out and would have to come back to her after about 20 years. I pointed out that I would be about as much older than her as she was me, then, so it wouldn't be so bad. Still, she didn't like that idea, and while we were discussing it, the time tunnel grew unstable and collapsed.

Two Hours Of Sleep, Neither Happy

       I dreamed, over and over again, for the short time I was asleep last night, that I was climbing on some large pointy rocks. I kept slipping and piercing my hands and feet. I had shoes back down at the campsite, but I didn't want to go all the way back down to the campsite for some reason.
       There was no overtly frightening portion of the dream, but I still woke up sweating and anxious. Time to switch to the summer linens, I think.
       While I was drifting off from the previous dream I kept hearing people calling my name and shrieking in my ear, I would jerk awake and roll over, but not even the cats were around. Some mornings, I believe, my brain hates me. By the time I fell back to sleep, my mind was playing the same couple of lines of a song over and over again. "...I wanna know, Have you ever seen the rain?..coming down...in purple harmony?" I don't believe those are the actual lyrics of the song, but the music was accurate, and loud.
       The tune is still stuck in my head.

Not Sleeping, so, No Dreams

       Really,what little sleep I have gotten the last couple of nights has been so broken up I haven't dreamed. I did hallucinate a little while ago at the computer keyboard while I was emailing some items for work. I heard little whispering voices coming from inside the computer. I couldn't really make out what they were saying, only that there were at least four distinct voices. I put the cats out of the office and closed the door, just in case they were playing a trick on me. The voices didn't stop for another twenty minutes or so. It wasn't the cats.
       Unless the computer has suddenly started picking up radio stations, I think I really need a good solid 10 hours of sleep. I've shut down and restarted. The noise is gone.
       I just realized, what an evil little trick to play with a web site, embed an almost subliminal soundtrack, like something recorded at the food court of the local mall, it just plays quietly while the browser is open to the site. Quietly making your customer crazy, crazy enough to buy all your stuff.Bwaah! Ha! Ha!

OK, that's never happened before. I just spell checked and the editor dumped in line breaks everywhere! Oh, and the HTML tags didn't work, either. Not sure the new system is all that yet.