Dream from last night (as I described it to Esther in chat):

oh man i just remembered my dream from last night and it was about this amazing movie that unfortunately doesn’t exist

it was about this group of (nine?) people who had been mysteriously asked to come to this tech startup

none of them knew why they were there

but they realized that they had all of these surprising things in common

which kept getting more and more pronounced

to the point where eventually everything any of them said or did was related to one or more of the others of them in complex ways

in the dream this was this sort of amazing experience where every line of dialogue was layered with meaning

and the movie was short, like about a half an hour

and there was some amazing resolution where the CEO of the startup explained why they were all there and it put everything in a new light

it was the densest and most complicated 30 minutes imaginable

and i watched it a bunch of times and recommended it to everyone

chamomile-geode:

i had the strangest dream last night, in my dream, bryan fuller’s hannibal show wasn’t based on a series of thomas harris novels, but on like a long tradition of balladry…? in the dream, i had an anthology of those ballads. will graham was always this folk hero holy-madman figure. my subconscious was very punctilious about creating an appearance of accuracy as it translated the story to different places and periods; at one point i was reading a scottish version (by the same dude who wrote the testament of cresseid) and his name was consistently spelled uilleam graeme

(via chamomilegeode-deactivated20221)

oh man this is a really cool dream; can I reblog it?

Sure.

Very intricate nightmare last night, taking place in the universe of what was, in the dream, a popular and widely quoted movie closely analogous to The Big Lebowski (but substantially more disturbing)

Took place mostly in the bookstore that has been a recurring dream location in the last few months.  In this dream, the bookstore was inhabited not only by its usual owner (large, genial older middle eastern man) but also by a creepy old white guy who would follow visitors around, tugging at their sleeves, asking them to take him to “his door” and “unlock it.”  It was never clear what he meant by this; when asked, the owner would look uncomfortable and say something vague like “oh, don’t mind him.”  Whenever anyone the man was following tried to leave the store, he would become increasingly desperate, clinging to them and pleading with them not to leave, because he needed them to “unlock his door.”

In some dream “scenes,” but not others, this man had no eyes, only flat planes of flesh where eyes would ordinarily be.  No one ever brought this up, so I figured I shouldn’t mention it myself (?), but it made him even more frightening.

The dream plot was very complicated and I remember little of it.  It kept changing levels of reality – at some points I was watching the well-known movie about this bookstore, at other points I was living in its reality but still aware of the movie.  In one scene I visited the house at night with a friend, figuring that it was “safe” to do so because we would only be “re-enacting a scene from the movie,” but then something the friend did caused events to deviate from the movie’s plot and I became terrified.  In another scene, a mob of people who had found the movie frightening went to the bookstore and physically destroyed it; this felt very gratifying, and yet the next day the bookstore was still there as if nothing had happened.

At the end, after some sequence of events which made me feel that the creepiness of the bookstore and the old man had been “overcome” and I felt safe once again, someone gave me a book that had, they said, been written by the old man.  My curiosity got the best of me, and I went back to the bookstore to see if the old man would recognize it.  In fact, he did – he seemed happy (for once) to see it, and asked me to read from it to him.  I opened it and began to read.  It was in English, but did not make sense – it felt like old-fashioned, convoluted, maybe 18th century prose, but poised in this unnerving place between “too old to be immediately understood” and “actually nonsensical.”  As I read, the man grabbed my sleeve and led me down a flight of stairs into a well-lit, pleasant, white-carpeted room which I had never seen before.  He began to babble excitedly about how now, finally “his door” would “be unlocked.”  I was terrified.  I wanted to run, but the stairs were blocked by a 20-something woman who was (I somehow knew) “his mistress.”  I was trapped.  I kept reading.  The book’s words felt wrong.  I woke up, writhing and kicking in fear, muttering “no, no, no, no.”

I don’t remember anything about last night’s dream except for the phrase that was in my head when I woke up: “even friends who do not come from the Friendship Orb are important.”  (I immediately recited this to Esther upon waking.)

dagny-hashtaggart:

Dreamt that nostalgebraist was a large, very enthusiastic talking dog (I think a German shepherd, or some sort of shepherd mix). He had very strong and arbitrary opinions about grammar, including that one should only speak of the dead in the future tense, and that the word “stone” ought always to be followed with a comma, “in order to put The Lord’s fence around it.”

Brief dream fragment: in the world of last night’s dream, the phrase “cat flaps” was an idiom for “something bad, especially something useless” – as in “no better than cat flaps,” “like trying to do it with cat flaps,” etc.

91625:

nostalgebraist:

I think in last night’s dream I was in the big bookstore again.  It’s appeared at least three, maybe four times by now?  (On its last appearance it was having a closing sale, but apparently that plot development didn’t stick.)

It seems like my dreams have been developing a shared setting in the last few months, with many if not all dreams taking place in the same set of areas.  This has never happened before.

I have that! Does your setting include distorted versions of real-life places?

Sort of – it includes this persistent urban area containing “the big bookstore” which I believe is supposed to be in New York (though this is kind of vague), and also seems to include bits of my hometown.

The latter tend to appear in the same dreams as the former, indicating that they’re part of the same “setting,” and are represented faithfully in a visual sense but don’t behave as though their larger-scale layout is the one I know IRL – they tend to be associated with dream plots about trying to get home and being lost, so that I’ll be in a familiar place near my parents’ house and yet somehow not know how to get there.

The creation of this “setting” has been accompanied by an increase in the number of dreams related to transportation or getting places.  Lots of long subway rides, getting lost, and that sort of thing.  Maybe this actually caused the creation of the setting?  No clue where the transportation theme itself is coming from.

(via 91625)

I think in last night’s dream I was in the big bookstore again.  It’s appeared at least three, maybe four times by now?  (On its last appearance it was having a closing sale, but apparently that plot development didn’t stick.)

It seems like my dreams have been developing a shared setting in the last few months, with many if not all dreams taking place in the same set of areas.  This has never happened before.

I had a dream that nihilsupernum was the little brother of one of my IRL friends.  I was at a party at that friend’s house and wasn’t really feeling it so I just ended up playing a sort of card game / RPG that nihilsupernum had invented.  It was extremely complicated and the rules never quite made sense and all of the cards had very vividly colored, often kind of disturbing art.