Prose and Kaa

I don’t often remember my dreams, and when I do, most often they’re of the ‘surreal’ variety. You know, where you’re walking down the street...in Atlantis...and you turn a corner and you’re on your college campus...only all the trees are purple. And talking to you.

The kind where you know, when you wake up, that you’ve been dreaming because nothing like that could ever happen in the real world.

Last night I dreamed that I was fired. And it was so real that when I partially woke up this morning, I honestly couldn’t work out whether it was a dream or not. It felt unbelievably true.

I woke to that halfway stage where you’re sort of almost kind of still dreaming, but you’re aware that you’re not really dreaming, and I looked at the clock. 6:17 AM. I still had a good two hours left to sleep.

Or did I? Should I bother getting out of bed if I had been fired? (Yes, this is how real it felt.)

What finally tipped me off was that in my dream—and now I knew I was dreaming—I decided to confront my boss and find out why I’d been fired. I seem to recall that the firing took place over the phone or via email. (Gee. No precedent for that in my past. <smirk>)

So I confronted...Tim.

Tim? I don’t work for anyone named Tim. Well, there was this guy back at the steel mill in the 90s that was named Tim, but he was in the metallurgy department, not over me. But no one where I work now.

Tim wouldn’t see me. He was avoiding me.

So, in the dream, I had the brilliant idea of following him around until he was alone so I could talk with him. I ended up following him to the airport, but he was with someone else, so I ended up having to buy a ticket on the same flight he was going on and making sure the seats were adjacent.

No way could he avoid talking to me after all that.

That was when I finally took control and said, "I’m dreaming, and I need to wake up."

Which I did when the alarm blared at me.

But such was the power of the dream that when I got to work, I was overjoyed when my badge operated the security gate in the parking lot. But even then, I thought, "Maybe they’re letting me in just so they can let me go once I get to my desk." (Gee. No precedent for that in my past. <smirk>) So I was happy when my badge worked again inside to let me into the elevators. And then again when my password worked to let me onto my PC.

I loathe dreams like that. I’d much rather have the talking purple trees variety. Or pretty much any other kind than the hyper-realistic 'You got fired' variety.

Ick.

Today's xkcd comic is one that is particularly accurate for me:



And now it's time for another Informal, Unscientific, Self-Selecting, Biased Poll™!

[Poll #1367671]

The last one I remember having was chronicled back in 2004.

By the way, that userpic? It's a blurry image of Morpheus from "The Matrix." Why? Because Morpheus was the Greek god of dreams, of course. :)

Ah, those Greeks. And Romans. They had a god for every occasion. I'm sure there's a god of occasional constipation, a goddess of bad hair days, and at least one god/dess of halitosis. Listerine and Lavoris, perhaps?

I talked to my mother earlier this evening and she just happened to mention in passing that last night, she dreamed that the birds we used to have and which now belong to a co-worker of mine both died. First the male, then the female.

Oddly enough, I had a very similar dream last night as well. What makes this even more odd is that I almost never remember my dreams, but because I shredded my left cornea this morning when I woke up at 5:43 AM, I was up for about 30 minutes letting the tearing (as in water leaking from my eyes, not ripping) stop. I had been having a very odd dream before that, and because it was interrupted, I remembered parts of it. And because it was so very odd (and similar to one I've had before), I sort of mulled it over in my half-asleep phase, and I remember consciously thinking, "Maybe I can finish that dream" when I lay back down.

When I went back to bed with more ointment to help heal the eye, the dream "continued," including the death of both birds (under mysterious circumstances--they were still upright on their perch). And then their return (they weren't actually completely dead--they were just...kind of really scared and they gave every impression of being dead).

Then they turned into large, purple-down-covered parrot-like birds for a few minutes, then turned back into themselves. And at that point, a third bird was in the cage with them. A little finch with a red beak.

Yeah, I don't know, either.

Did I also mention that both ddreslough and ian_smith were in the dream?

Anyway, a very odd dream-element for us both to share. Except, of course, that we both have kind hearts and, even though neither of us could care for the birds in the manner they need, we still like and miss the little things, and since neither of us really knows the woman who got them....

This is the part I almost hate to admit, because some of you will be thinking I've turned into some sort of crazed fanboy or something but....

For a large part of the second half of the dream, I was Harry Potter.

What? You didn't hear that? Well, I said that, for a large part of the second half of the dream, I was Harry Potter.

Yes, dammit, that's what I said! Harry freaking Potter! I don't get it, either. It's not like I alter my life to be like Harry or dress like him or even think about him or the books for even a millisecond every day. And it's not like I lust after Hermione, either. She was in the dream, too. And no, dammit, not in that way. We were running for our lives, she and I, from some demon-looking things...and ended up nearly destroying an underground bazaar (I mean that literally as well as figuratively--it was both subterranean and 'shady') before eluding our pursuers...or so we thought. And then Hermione kicked their asses with some well-aimed wand action just when we thought we'd gotten away from them.

At the end of the dream, though, she ended up having to take a bunch of classes over because either her grades fell or she had incompletes from missing too many classes. I couldn't tell which. But McGonagall seemed very disappointed....

[Random Thought: Does Hogwarts even have Summer classes?]

And no, I didn't eat anything weird before going to bed. Nor did I read anything weird or watch anything weirder than M*A*S*H episodes on DVD.

The frightening part is that I probably have dreams like this all the time, but don't remember them because I don't wake up during the dream.