Two not-especially-interesting dreams from last night:

Two rival movie studios were making oddly similar films, kind of like Antz / A Bug’s Life.  One was released before the other and gave a surprisingly large role to one secondary character’s dog, to the point that the dog stole the show in my opinion.  This inspired me to audition, successfully, for the role of the dog in the other studio’s movie.  (I don’t think the dream clearly filled in what it meant, here, to “play” a dog in a live action movie.)  But unfortunately their script barely featured the dog at all, and in editing they cut out the character entirely, so none of my work appeared.

A 30-something, professional-looking couple are preparing to take a “advanced SQL” exam, which for some reason can only be taken in space.  The woman arrives at the testing space capsule, but her boyfriend doesn’t show up, so she rockets into space on her own to take the test.  The first few questions are ordinary real-world SQL stuff, but the later ones feature dream-only, mathematical-sounding terminology (stuff like “find the stable intergral envelope of this query”).  She despairs, because she was relying on her boyfriend to answer those questions.  Later, on the phone with her while gazing out from his fancy house toward a picturesque dusk, he apologizes profusely for oversleeping, sounding worried that this might spell the end of the relationship.

In last night’s dream, I was back in high school, as I often am in dreams – not in a bad, humiliating way, just, like, visiting for a day or something.  I was trying to remember the class schedule they’d given me, which was on my phone, but when I tried to do anything on my phone, it showed me a scary-looking message, saying something to the effect of

“This functionality has been locked because of an alert that has been raised about your drug use.  We are concerned about your use of WELLBUTRIN XL®.”

which was weird because I’ve been on Wellbutrin for about two years, and haven’t changed my dose or anything?  I’ve just been taking it like I normally do?  Anyway, I went around asking people about this, and was directed to the school principal, who knew what was going on.  It was a legal thing – I’d been assigned some sort of special “possible drug abuser” status by some obscure law, possibly by some automated data mining process?

The principal knew all about this law, which had been drafted and advocated for by some eccentric rich guy, who was also a major donor to the school, I think.  The principal’s office in fact had a big gold plate engraved with the text of the law, bolted to the table, presumably as a condition of the donation.

I read the part about what I’d have to do to get the status removed so I could use my phone again.  It was disheartening: I would need to get a “personal, private audience with the President of the United States.”  In case I was somehow unable to do so, the law helpfully provided an alternative: I could also write some sort of extensive formal appeal/essay and present it to “a suitably noble and dignified man,” after traveling to “his quarters.”  I had no idea what this meant

I had this really intense and fascinating dream last night and alas I just can’t remember enough concrete elements from it to describe it in a way that does it justice

What I remember is that it started out when I noticed that my web browsers had all been replaced by some sort of gaudy malware browser full of unavoidable ads.  And somehow this malware got transferred to any device I physically touched, and even devices owned by anyone I talked to, I think?  And then I noticed that the malware was also changing the content of websites more and more, and gradually the elements of each web page were replaced by videos containing strange, stilted dialogue analyzing the page elements they had replaced from some very alien perspective, along with nonsensical “comedy routines” (identifiable as such bc they had laugh tracks, I think?).  The dialogue was in this very restricted subset of English, almost a pidgin?  And this alien perspective infected more and more of my life as the malware spread everywhere, so that all media I experienced was made up of these alien skits, and I resigned myself to trying to understand them, but it was very difficult

In last night’s dream, I was an undergrad again and met an exuberant, good-looking new freshman who was offering to give away some sort of fake/toy weapon he owned (club? mace?).

“I only needed it as a prop when I was modeling the pewter minatures of myself,” he said.  “I don’t actually want it.”  By way of explanation he showed me a shelf with a bunch of little metal figurines that were recognizable as him, holding the weapon in a dynamic pose.  He had made a lot of them and was planning to sell them (or possibly give them away?) on campus.

Dreamed last night that I was taking some English class and was planning to write a term paper drawing parallels between The Northern Caves and A Confederacy of Dunces.

Last night’s dream involved a scene from the uneven early days of Star Trek: TNG in which Picard had, while alone in his quarters, recited some lines from the Shakespeare play Coriolanus for no apparent reason.  The scene was apparently meant to convey that Picard was “cultured,” but was widely mocked, largely due to Patrick Stewart’s overly pompous delivery and egregious mispronunciation of the name “Coriolanus.”  There were memes about it and stuff.  A somewhat popular contrarian theory claimed that Stewart’s pronunciation was in fact the pronunciation that would have been originally used on the 17th-century stage, but this seemed to have no solid basis in fact.

I had an awful dream last night in which Esther had a manic episode and her personality became unrecognizable, and then after being given an antipsychotic she became less agitated but still behaved like a totally different person and I was told by the psych professional present that “her old self might never come back” and I would just “have to get used to it”

It was wonderful to wake up from this and realize not only that it had not happened, but that I was in the real Esther’s room and she’d be home from work in two hours

As usual for my bad dreams, it was hilarious in retrospect: Esther’s altered personality manifested as “she seemed to find me boring” and “although I just wanted to have a quiet evening, she immediately threw a wild party which was depicted, via the usual bad-dream-hyperreality, as being the Platonic Form of the wild party – guzzling of whiskey, lines of cocaine, constant blaring bad electronic dance-pop, threesomes involving multiple porn stars taking place where everyone could see them, etc.”

Matthew Barney, creator of the Cremaster Cycle, was there, because apparently my subconscious thinks that Michael Barney would be present at the Platonic Form of the wild party

After I had gotten the guests to leave and was trying to calm down and get to sleep, I had trouble turning off the annoying dance music, which was because it was coming from a giant machine (somewhere between a boombox and a DJ setup) in the hallway outside the apartment.  Having found it, I could not figure out how to turn it off, and resigned myself to moving it somewhere further away.  I carried it into a bathroom and (in a sudden burst of frustration) hurled it across the room and over the stall doors, and a guy using the stall responded by saying “hey, please stop enacting violence”

Strange anxiety dream last night: I was a middle-aged married man and my wife and I were having a dinner party in our mansion.  (Neither my wife nor the guests resembled people I know IRL, and I felt no strong feelings about any of them.)  The overall atmosphere could be described as “Gothic” in the old-fashioned sense: the evening was overcast and gloomy, the mansion was perched on a rocky hill and surrounded by dense bramble and trees, the look and layout of the interior felt archaic, etc.

I had secluded myself away from the guests, at least for a time, in a spacious room with a fireplace.  In part I think I was frustrated with the social scene and wanted to be away from it all, but I also wanted to open a present that a young woman had given me when she arrived at the party.  (I think I was attracted to her, although again all of the emotions here weren’t experienced directly – it was more that “I am attracted to this younger woman because I am a generic protagonist having a midlife crisis” was simply established as “part of the story.”)

I had been expecting the box to contain a book I had been wanting, and indeed it did.  But the book was partially covered in some sort of fungus or mold or other disgusting organic material.  Scattered around it in the large box were bits of unidentifiable stuff that at first glance looked like food – slices of cake, say – but which in various ways looked disgusting upon further inspection, like they were either clumps of brightly colored fungus, or moldy food, or possibly some third or fourth possibility (the ambiguity was part of the disgustingness).

Stephen Colbert – clearly himself though not exactly in character – appeared suddenly like Q from Star Trek and went on to play a Q-like role, commenting archly on my confusion and distress.  He said something like “well, you did get the book, didn’t you?” (with obvious note of irony).  Overcome with disgust, I threw the whole package into the lit fireplace.  It started to burn, and an odd odor rose up from the fire, which of course disgusted me further, to Colbert’s amusement.  Nonetheless, I wanted to burn the whole package down to ash and be done with it – but the fire had fizzled out long before this had happened, and I couldn’t bring myself to approach the fireplace and start a new one.

I left the room and returned to my gathering, where, inevitably, my wife had noticed the strange odor and the sound of the flames.  She confronted me and asked what I had been burning in the fireplace.  I could find no way to give even an honest answer, so I muttered something and slunk off to lock myself in the bathroom, where I could at least avoid further confrontation.  Or so I thought – but the bathroom window was unlocked, and the woman who’d given me the present now appeared at the window – having apparently scaled the steep outside walls – and climbed in through it.

My memories of what followed are scattered and incomplete – the young woman had assumed a sort of feral quality and I found her physically threatening; she seemed to want me to do a set of actions involving injecting myself with unfamiliar fluids, perhaps related to the fungus-or-whatever seen earlier; Colbert watched over all this and made more of his quips.

At last I was suddenly jolted out of it to find that the entire experience had been a sort of highly niche, art-house virtual reality “porn movie” with horror elements, which I had just “paused” partway through.  Apparently all of the foregoing was plot setup for the sex (with the young woman? with some sort of alien? it was not clear), which I had not yet reached.  This fact explained the emotional distance I had experienced earlier, since the VR couldn’t fully make me experience life as the protagonist would.

I found myself in several chat conversations with tumblr mutuals, all of whom were about to “jack in” to the same “movie,” which was apparently seen simply as amusingly odd porn, like one of those super-niche deviantart accounts that gets circulated around tumblr sometimes.  They seemed very unconcerned about its potential to be truly disturbing, and I tried to warn them, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.  At this point I woke up.

nostalgebraist:

nuclearspaceheater:

nostalgebraist:

Snippet from an otherwise unremembered dream a few nights ago:

I was reading a Shakespeare play, and at one point a character praised another character by listing a bad quality and a good quality and saying that the “limit” of their “ratio” was zero – it was something like “the ratio of his cowardice to his forbearance” – and this bit of dialogue was written in the text using actual mathematical notation, with a numerator and a denominator and “lim”

I don’t remember what variable the limit was being taken on, but it seemed to make sense in context.  And it was regarded as yet another example of Shakespeare’s innovative and expressive use of language.  At first I was like “whoa, cool” but then I started wondering how Shakespeare could had written this centuries before the concept of a limit was formalized

Same way Newton and Leibniz did, presumably.

Yeah I shouldn’t have said “formalized” – I meant “before that notation was invented.”  The “line of dialogue” on the page looked something like

and that wouldn’t have meant anything to people in Shakespeare’s time

@nuclearspaceheater​ clarified to me that he meant Shakespeare could have written this before anyone knew what it meant, and then it could have gotten adopted as standard like so much of Shakespeare’s other linguistic innovations (much as Newton and Leibniz were “making shit up” w/o formal proof but ended up as standard), which is a really cool interpretation

(via nostalgebraist)

nuclearspaceheater:

nostalgebraist:

Snippet from an otherwise unremembered dream a few nights ago:

I was reading a Shakespeare play, and at one point a character praised another character by listing a bad quality and a good quality and saying that the “limit” of their “ratio” was zero – it was something like “the ratio of his cowardice to his forbearance” – and this bit of dialogue was written in the text using actual mathematical notation, with a numerator and a denominator and “lim”

I don’t remember what variable the limit was being taken on, but it seemed to make sense in context.  And it was regarded as yet another example of Shakespeare’s innovative and expressive use of language.  At first I was like “whoa, cool” but then I started wondering how Shakespeare could had written this centuries before the concept of a limit was formalized

Same way Newton and Leibniz did, presumably.

Yeah I shouldn’t have said “formalized” – I meant “before that notation was invented.”  The “line of dialogue” on the page looked something like

and that wouldn’t have meant anything to people in Shakespeare’s time

(via nuclearspaceheater)