I've been having some very strange dreams lately.
The dreams I've been having lean more on the darker side of things. I don't have nightmares. Not once in my life have I had a dream so unnerving, so hair-raising, that it caused me to wake up in a cold sweat and feel grateful for escaping it. Nothing so dramatic. I have had dreams, though, that have had a sense of creeping menace through out, as though all of it was just the preshow for some oncoming nameless horror. The dreams I have been having lately have definitely been slightly menacing, but also so fucking surreal that making sense of them is beyond me.
An example: last night I dreamt of "Operation: Millard Fillmore". What I remember of the dream was visiting Disneyland, only Disneyland had been converted into the world's most cheerful prison camp. I recall seeing Mickey dressed up in a smart warden's suit, holding a HUGE cigar. The thing I recall most from the dream was that I wasn't a prisoner; rather, it seemed like I was a guest touring Prison Disney, as all the guards were talking to me and really trying to sell the place. We were going through "It's A Small World" and all the little animatronic robots were dressed up in old school striped chaingang costumes. Their environment was modified so instead of singing and dancing, they were singing and swinging pickaxes on big ol' honking rocks. They still sang the same insufferable song, though.
The strangest thing about the dream was that all the guards kept referring to what they were doing in Prison Disney as "Operation: Millard Fillmore", and they would say it in a very hush-hush kind of way. They kept saying it all the time. I'm fairly sure that by the end of the dream, they started acronyming the motherfucker, as I dimly recall walking by Beauty and the Beast and hearing them mutter something about OMF.
Usually I have a hell of a time remembering my dreams, but I could remember that dream so vividly because of that phrase. No matter what I've done so far today, the phrase "Operation: Millard Fillmore" is lodged in my brain. It's there when I pour myself a bowl of Honey Nut Clusters. It's there when I'm sprawled on the couch, reading Irvine Welsh's Acid House (quite good). I'm certain that no matter what I do on this particular day, OMF will be in my thoughts.
As for the other dreams:
-One involved a friend of mine buying a house. The house was a million dollar house, real opulent, real fancy. The friend in question is an old friend of mine, who fancies himself to be quite the radical (everytime we hang out, conversations about music and games and what not quickly degenerate into talking about revolution, him in favor of it, and me arguing that while I'm sympathetic to the idea, I don't think armed insurrection would succeed in this country). He shows me around the place, and so far the dream is totally mundane, totally normal. Then we get to his backyard, which has the biggest pool in the history of mankind in it. Its bigger than Lake Roosevelt. Fuck, it could probably give the Mediterreanean a run for its money. AND IT HAS SHARKS. Lots of them. Swimming around the chlorine. So I start asking him what he feeds the sharks and how much it costs to do so, and he doesn't respond, he just gets excited and tells me that he can't wait once the kraken he ordered arrives. I can see an old tugboat in the distance, floating on my friend's pool/ocean, and that is pretty much when I stopped remembering the rest of the dream. The funny thing about this dream is that I know a bunch of stuff happened before I got to the house, but I just can't remember what happened.
-Another dream involved the house I grew up in, the one I moved out of when I was 18. I'm living there, and my mom is there, and my dad is out on a business trip, and my uncle John is staying with us (I do not have an uncle John, nor have any immediate family members named John). I remember washing our dogs (golden retrievers), picking oranges off trees, and walking inside the house. There's a knock on the door and a big guy in a rumpled, wrinkled suit comes in wearing a fedora hat. He says he's a salesman and goes right over to John (the funny thing is that "Uncle John" doesn't look like anyone I've ever met in my life). They talk for what seems like forever, John asking him what he's selling, and Big Guy just answering with variations of "it'll change your life"/"answer to your prayers"/"the one thing you needed to have but didn't know you need". Typical salesman schpiel. I got outside and walk around the back of the house. Our old house had lots of windows and small glass windows on the doors opening up from the living room into the backyard. As I walk past the living room, I can see Big Guy leaning over John and stabbing him in the neck with a screwdriver. I grab my mom, who's in her room watching soap operas, and run to the car. Big Guy tries to chase after us, but we get away. And then we end up in Vegas, where my mom plays slot machines and I start walking around the Strip, looking for something that I can't remember. Big Guy nowhere in sight. And that is all I can remember of that dream.
-The last real odd dream of the bunch is I dreamt I was working at the bookstore. While I was on the reg, three guys walk in. They're dressed in real nice clothes, but their faces are pockmarked and their skin is sallow, and they're obviously tweakers. They rob the store, but they rob it mute. They point a gun at me and gesture towards the register and we go back and forth and complete the robber-robbee transaction without exchanging a word. What takes the dream into Weirdsville is that later I'm at a Superpumper gas station I used to visit a lot a couple of years ago, mostly because 1) the employees were all a little crazy and 2) one of the graveyard shifters was really cute and I was trying to get my foot in the door, so to speak (no luck there). I'm there but the mute trio of wannabe men-in-black tweakers are there, and the four of us are talking to each other jovially as though we're old friends, eating blueberry muffians and occasionally exchanging looks with one of the workers, a guy who wears a big Masonic necklace around his neck. He asks if we're interested in seeing his lodge and we're all like "fuck yeah" and we pile into his car, which was green but I have no idea what the make of it was, and we head off, presumably to his lodge. Dream over (or as is usually the case with my dreaming, my memory of the dream is over, as I always get the impression that a lot more happens than what I can recall from my adventures in the Land Of Nod).
Aside from the crazy dreams, life is fairly good. May have to see a doctor, because I still have coughing fits, but I function normally apart from them. A part of me is anxious for tonight: I wonder what I'll see in my sleep.
The dreams I've been having lean more on the darker side of things. I don't have nightmares. Not once in my life have I had a dream so unnerving, so hair-raising, that it caused me to wake up in a cold sweat and feel grateful for escaping it. Nothing so dramatic. I have had dreams, though, that have had a sense of creeping menace through out, as though all of it was just the preshow for some oncoming nameless horror. The dreams I have been having lately have definitely been slightly menacing, but also so fucking surreal that making sense of them is beyond me.
An example: last night I dreamt of "Operation: Millard Fillmore". What I remember of the dream was visiting Disneyland, only Disneyland had been converted into the world's most cheerful prison camp. I recall seeing Mickey dressed up in a smart warden's suit, holding a HUGE cigar. The thing I recall most from the dream was that I wasn't a prisoner; rather, it seemed like I was a guest touring Prison Disney, as all the guards were talking to me and really trying to sell the place. We were going through "It's A Small World" and all the little animatronic robots were dressed up in old school striped chaingang costumes. Their environment was modified so instead of singing and dancing, they were singing and swinging pickaxes on big ol' honking rocks. They still sang the same insufferable song, though.
The strangest thing about the dream was that all the guards kept referring to what they were doing in Prison Disney as "Operation: Millard Fillmore", and they would say it in a very hush-hush kind of way. They kept saying it all the time. I'm fairly sure that by the end of the dream, they started acronyming the motherfucker, as I dimly recall walking by Beauty and the Beast and hearing them mutter something about OMF.
Usually I have a hell of a time remembering my dreams, but I could remember that dream so vividly because of that phrase. No matter what I've done so far today, the phrase "Operation: Millard Fillmore" is lodged in my brain. It's there when I pour myself a bowl of Honey Nut Clusters. It's there when I'm sprawled on the couch, reading Irvine Welsh's Acid House (quite good). I'm certain that no matter what I do on this particular day, OMF will be in my thoughts.
As for the other dreams:
-One involved a friend of mine buying a house. The house was a million dollar house, real opulent, real fancy. The friend in question is an old friend of mine, who fancies himself to be quite the radical (everytime we hang out, conversations about music and games and what not quickly degenerate into talking about revolution, him in favor of it, and me arguing that while I'm sympathetic to the idea, I don't think armed insurrection would succeed in this country). He shows me around the place, and so far the dream is totally mundane, totally normal. Then we get to his backyard, which has the biggest pool in the history of mankind in it. Its bigger than Lake Roosevelt. Fuck, it could probably give the Mediterreanean a run for its money. AND IT HAS SHARKS. Lots of them. Swimming around the chlorine. So I start asking him what he feeds the sharks and how much it costs to do so, and he doesn't respond, he just gets excited and tells me that he can't wait once the kraken he ordered arrives. I can see an old tugboat in the distance, floating on my friend's pool/ocean, and that is pretty much when I stopped remembering the rest of the dream. The funny thing about this dream is that I know a bunch of stuff happened before I got to the house, but I just can't remember what happened.
-Another dream involved the house I grew up in, the one I moved out of when I was 18. I'm living there, and my mom is there, and my dad is out on a business trip, and my uncle John is staying with us (I do not have an uncle John, nor have any immediate family members named John). I remember washing our dogs (golden retrievers), picking oranges off trees, and walking inside the house. There's a knock on the door and a big guy in a rumpled, wrinkled suit comes in wearing a fedora hat. He says he's a salesman and goes right over to John (the funny thing is that "Uncle John" doesn't look like anyone I've ever met in my life). They talk for what seems like forever, John asking him what he's selling, and Big Guy just answering with variations of "it'll change your life"/"answer to your prayers"/"the one thing you needed to have but didn't know you need". Typical salesman schpiel. I got outside and walk around the back of the house. Our old house had lots of windows and small glass windows on the doors opening up from the living room into the backyard. As I walk past the living room, I can see Big Guy leaning over John and stabbing him in the neck with a screwdriver. I grab my mom, who's in her room watching soap operas, and run to the car. Big Guy tries to chase after us, but we get away. And then we end up in Vegas, where my mom plays slot machines and I start walking around the Strip, looking for something that I can't remember. Big Guy nowhere in sight. And that is all I can remember of that dream.
-The last real odd dream of the bunch is I dreamt I was working at the bookstore. While I was on the reg, three guys walk in. They're dressed in real nice clothes, but their faces are pockmarked and their skin is sallow, and they're obviously tweakers. They rob the store, but they rob it mute. They point a gun at me and gesture towards the register and we go back and forth and complete the robber-robbee transaction without exchanging a word. What takes the dream into Weirdsville is that later I'm at a Superpumper gas station I used to visit a lot a couple of years ago, mostly because 1) the employees were all a little crazy and 2) one of the graveyard shifters was really cute and I was trying to get my foot in the door, so to speak (no luck there). I'm there but the mute trio of wannabe men-in-black tweakers are there, and the four of us are talking to each other jovially as though we're old friends, eating blueberry muffians and occasionally exchanging looks with one of the workers, a guy who wears a big Masonic necklace around his neck. He asks if we're interested in seeing his lodge and we're all like "fuck yeah" and we pile into his car, which was green but I have no idea what the make of it was, and we head off, presumably to his lodge. Dream over (or as is usually the case with my dreaming, my memory of the dream is over, as I always get the impression that a lot more happens than what I can recall from my adventures in the Land Of Nod).
Aside from the crazy dreams, life is fairly good. May have to see a doctor, because I still have coughing fits, but I function normally apart from them. A part of me is anxious for tonight: I wonder what I'll see in my sleep.