Had an unpleasant, hopeless-feeling dream last night that began with some sort of disaster in my old high school’s library.  Wallace Shawn, covered in blood, was kneeling on the floor near the entrance of the library, and all of the school’s students were thronged around him.  Shawn kept making tortured, insane-looking gestures while several school administrators watched him with concern and confusion.  Everyone seemed transfixed by this spectacle.  I didn’t know what this all meant, except that it was somehow horrible, and that everyone else but me knew.

A later episode involved S. and I hanging out in a damp, dingy abandoned castle.  We had internet access and, for fun, decided to pay money for an online service that provided “video sex chat” with Jeff Goldblum.  (This was Goldblum-specific – no other famous actors worked for the site.)  Goldblum’s face appeared on the screen, and he said “who are you?  what do you want?” and then turned off the camera.

In last night’s dream, I travelled back in time and met Charles Newman, author of the posthumously published In Partial Disgrace (collected from his notes, originally intended to be much longer but death got in the way).

In the dream, unlike in reality, Newman had some sort of hormonal disorder that made him look and sound about 12 years old, even in middle age.  He was very cutely excited that I was reading and enjoying his book (which seems to draw on the real-world fact that he faded into obscurity later in his life).  I praised in it effusive but very general terms, worried that if I said anything too specific about the book’s contents, I would influence its creation and cause a time paradox.

Last night’s dream had a complicated plot, which I can’t now entirely reconstruct, about a depraved employee of a new, “environmentally friendly” gas station in a small town, who for some reason was set on murdering anyone whose gas tank he had filled.

The plot centered around a gruff 40-something man with a near-empty tank pulling into the gas station late at night.  He nearly refused to have his tank filled due to his mistrust of “environmentally friendly” gas – thus nearly saving his life – but had no other options.  The employee then sent a description of this man to his future self, using a device he had to communicate across time, which was a well into which strands of some unspecified stringy white substance could be dropped and retrieved (somehow one could use the strands to communicate).  The trans-time communication aided his serial killing in some way that made sense in dream logic.

My consciousness bounced back and forth between different characters and different points in time, sometimes inhabiting the employee, sometimes the gruff man, sometimes a third character, a time traveller who intended to prevent the killings by modifying the past, while taking care to only modify it subtly so as not to disturb the future.  A prolonged episode centered on this third character watching the employee storm some sort of inhabited, underground sewer-like area armed with a katana; as the time traveller, I tried to sabotage the murder spree by stealing the katana, but realized that my attempted sabotage, by getting the employee’s attention, had only protected him from a sneak attack by some resident of the underground.  The whole thing felt like a dance carried out by the employee’s past and future selves, the time traveller, and the inviolable logic of the time-stream, no party ever quite sure which was leading the other.

Oh and that art conversation just reminded me of a totally different, and much more light-hearted, dream I had last night: I was pacing around and reading the poem from Pale Fire out loud.  The book was printed on some sort of delicious edible paper (it felt and tasted something like some kind of sandwich involving meat), and every time I finished reading a page, I ate it.  The person I was reciting the poem to was enjoying my performance, and yet also seemed frustrated that I was eating the book, because they had wanted to keep it around to read later.

What I can remember of last night’s dream seems continuous with current bleak mood: it was about how I’d somehow been forced to drive one of my uncle’s children (in the dream much younger than she is in reality, maybe 5 or 6) home while drunk, and being unable to avoid doing this despite the worry that, first, I might get into an accident, and second, I was being a terrible role model.

I remember crashing into a stop sign, and the child innocently asking why I had done so, as though it were the sort of thing one might have a justification for, as though by explaining this justification I would be usefully educating her about the adult task of driving.

In last night’s dream, I attended a dinner party, but it turned out to be a dinner party that followed some social convention where people only ate desert and (optionally) drank alcohol.  (It was at a normal dinner time, and I hadn’t eaten dinner.)  Everyone around me just kept ordering more and more courses of desert food.

Not wanting to eat more desert, I decided to order a drink instead.  After I asked for “whiskey,” the waiter brought me a gigantic tub (probably several gallons?) filled with a soupy, opaque liquid the approximate color of whiskey.  It tasted sort of like a very watered-down version of bourbon.  As the party approached its end – finally! – I suddenly felt a social pressure to drink as much of the unappealing “whiskey” as possible, as I realized that I was socially expected to take the gigantic tub home with me, and the more liquid still remained in it, the heavier it would be.

nostalgebraist:

Just woke up from one those hypnagogic-type half-asleep states that I often go through before falling asleep.  I came out of it with the concept

“I want to write the phrase ‘blades push in’ without anyone knowing.  I know!  I should find a transcript of something Jon Stewart has said, then select a set of letters, in sequence, with my computer cursor, so that one by one they spell out the phrase ‘blades push in.’  No one will know I’ve done this!  It’ll be the perfect crime.”

I figured this was sui generis enough to be worth writing down

These things, whatever they are, are always kinda interesting because they’re like pure dream logic, without any of the quasi-realistic connecting glue that dreams have.  Dreams will work on dream logic but still have a kind of narrative with certain elements that obey real logic, and a sensorium that does as well (insofar as the dream world generally just sits there and doesn’t dissolve into glowing glitches or start floating etc.)  But stuff like this doesn’t have any of that, it’s just dream logic speaking its own language.

Just woke up from one those hypnagogic-type half-asleep states that I often go through before falling asleep.  I came out of it with the concept

“I want to write the phrase ‘blades push in’ without anyone knowing.  I know!  I should find a transcript of something Jon Stewart has said, then select a set of letters, in sequence, with my computer cursor, so that one by one they spell out the phrase 'blades push in.’  No one will know I’ve done this!  It’ll be the perfect crime.”

I figured this was sui generis enough to be worth writing down

Two memorable dreams for the price of one last night, thanks to medication-induced awakening at 3 AM!

Dream #1: I went to some kind of Less Wrong meetup (apparently the obsession is spreading to my dreams now).  Everyone there was really nice.  At the end someone gave me the keys to their house so I could go by and drop something off there, because they were going to sleep somewhere else (by dream logic, this was all completely normal behavior and not unusually trusting).

What was not normal was their house: it was this giant, opulent mansion that looked more like the White House or some other important public building than a private residence.  There was a courtyard filled with carefully cultivated gardens and fountains (the kind with statues) which was so large that it took me a while to find my way to the actual entrance of the house, which was up a long set of steps.  I had the thought, “wait, are all these Less Wrong people super-rich?  That would certainly change my view of them!”

Inside the house, I ran into a cat, who said “hello” to me in a very realistic meow-based approximation of speech.  I went on to have a stilted conversation with it, in which it appeared to be relying on a set of broadly applicable phrases (although it never actually repeated itself verbatim).  I concluded that its owner had elaborately trained it to follow a set of rules similar to a chatterbot program.  I muttered “you’re just a Markov chain!” and it vigorously denied this.

Dream #2: I was at my parents’ house, and I went to the bathroom.  After washing my hands, I turned and saw a person, frozen in place near the doorway in an awkward, “inhuman-looking” posture.  It looked like the kind of shot you’d get in movies to show that someone had just seen a ghost or other scary supernatural being.  I was freaked out for a while, but after a minute or so of standing still, the guy cheerfully introduced himself to me.  He turned out to be a really nice guy, and ended up having dinner with me and my family.  His appearance in my house, and the “perfectly still contorted posture” thing, were never explained.

Another one from the teenage lucid dream misadventure files: I became aware I was dreaming while in the process of running away from a hideous demon based loosely on a teacher I hated.   I thought “great, I’ll just fly away.”  But I couldn’t manage to fly, or otherwise do anything unphysical.

So I was reduced to escaping by climbing a nearby tree in a kind of shimmying manner, which – to my horror – I began to find intensely erotically stimulating.

It was like my brain had said, “oh, you think you’re so great?  You think you can rewrite my dream plots at will?  Well, to punish you for your hubris, I’m going to make you fuck a tree, and I’m going to make you enjoy it”

Owned, brain.  Owned