Last night’s dream involved being a member of a group of people held hostage by terrorists in an office building.  There were roughly eight of us.  We had some complicated escape plan, which ended up failing because I failed to remember some sort of code word at a crucial moment.

At some point during the hostage situation, I was taken to a set of empty cubicles and instructed to take a physics exam.  The exam was then immediately graded, while I watched, by Taylor Swift.  I did not do well.  Taylor Swift was very good at physics and described my mistakes with great precision.

Finally, as a consequence of my failure to escape, I ended up imprisoned indefinitely in a large, creepy sort of enclosed backyard behind the office building, surrounded by trees, overgrown with grass, weeds, ferns.  There were many squirrels there.  The place felt suffused with the sinister power of nature, and with a grotesque atmosphere of age and decay.

aprilwitching:

i love reading abt other ppls dreams

i think ur supposed to think thats boring but i dont

i have dreams so seldom, that i remember– i think its bc now im dreaming all the time, sort of. i put my hand through the windowpane. i touch the grass and its too green to be real. etc. i think about things that arent this sky, this floor, this earth. i lose myself in that.

but dreams are great, and hilarious, and it kinda boggles my mind to think how often most people remember theirs, how differently from me other people work

i wanna hear about ur dreams ok

“Hearing about other people’s dreams is boring” is one of those cliches I’ve never personally understood.  People treat it like this universal thing, but I like hearing about other people’s dreams, and people seem to like hearing about mine.

(A similar thing is how it’s widely considered annoying to strike up a conversation with a stranger based on the book they’re reading.  I don’t do this because I know it’s considered annoying, but I personally like it from both directions, and if I had my way it would be normalized.  Good way to quickly meet a new person with a conveniently provided conversation topic that may point to – perhaps quite specific – shared interests)

(via aprilwitching-deactivated201808)

In last night’s dream, I was trying to catch a subway, but ended up in this strange, frightening place made up of nonsensically commingled bits of subway station architecture, in which subways and various other vehicles where constantly starting and stopping and I had to avoid getting run over by them.  Meanwhile, I was pursued by creepy, shadowy figures.

I eventually found my way out, and it was explained to me that I had accidentally wandered into a haunted house.  In fact, it was a really famous haunted house, in part for the fact that – in the dream’s version of history – Ronald Reagan had died there, ostensibly by a fear-induced heart attack.  I went around telling people “I survived the haunted house that killed Reagan!”

Last night’s dream involved shopping for groceries while thinking repetitively about this evo-psych theory of BDSM, which had something to do with some people going into “dominance contest mode” more often which made them more capable but also used extra energy (?), and D/s relationships benefitted both parties because the dominant could find someone who would tolerate/enjoy their constant lapses into “dominance contest mode” even when they weren’t strictly useful otherwise, while the submissive could be effectively protected and aided by the dominant without having to go into “dominance contest mode” themselves (which takes energy?).

This theory doesn’t correspond to reality at all but at least is sort of internally consistent, which is pretty impressive as dream logic goes, I guess

Last night’s dream involved meeting Eliezer Yudkowsky and having some sort of public debate.  It was incredibly awkward.  We were both very rude to one another, and he insisted on speaking only in improvised, rhyming poetry.  Often it didn’t make much sense (possibly for the sake of making the rhymes work), and my inability to understand him frustrated me and made the debate more and more tense and rude.

Last night’s dream was about being trapped in the universe of a particular TV show (one that doesn’t actually exist).  The show was a dark comedy about a seemingly wholesome and ordinary family, where the premise was that everyone in the family was actually doing “bad”/illegal/etc. stuff all the time – both the parents were having affairs, one of the kids was a drug dealer, etc. – and every one of them was a Machiavellian schemer and they were constantly hiding things from each other and deceiving one another in increasingly complicated ways.

There was sort of a standard dynamic that a lot of the scenes were based around, which was sort of like the use of the title cards in It’s Always Sunny – some of the characters would have some very normal, wholesome family interaction, and then there would be some sort of change – like the camera zooming in on something – and it would become clear that one of them was actually doing, or intending to do, something bad.  There was this kind of deviously cheerful melody that would always play on the soundtrack at this point.

(For some reason my mind imported the appearance and superficial personalities of the characters directly from the family in “The United States of Tara”)

Anyway, I was trapped in this reality, and it was almost impossible to do anything, because anything innocuous I would try to do would be twisted by the plot into something non-innocuous.  I wanted to go hang out with one of my friends, but as I left the house the familiar melody played and it turned out I was actually going out with the teenage son to sell drugs, and I was like, no, I don’t actually want to do that!, but the plot insisted.  It was really frustrating.

But the show was kind of cool in the abstract and I sort of wish it really existed

Last night’s dream took place in an extensive, immersive, and strangely dark version of the Harry Potter movies, with overtones provided by last night’s conversation about dangerous cities.

Harry, Ron and Hermione were trying to make their way to Hogwarts for the start of a new school year, but the process was immensely complicated – it had apparently been designed as a sort of obstacle course to test their magical proficiency, which Dumbledore had then botched somehow so that it was more difficult than intended.  They followed a confusing set of instructions which sent them on a wild goose chase across Brooklyn as well as several other cities, which they travelled between using broomsticks / flight on Gryphon-back / teleportation / etc.; superimposed over this was a long, repetitive lecture from some disembodied narrator about how everything south of a certain subway station in one of these cities was dangerous territory and you should never go there (there was what felt like an hour of this, including a subplot in which I was trying to convince my parents of this and they didn’t seem to get the severity of the message).  Harry and co. encountered several castle-like buildings which at first appeared to be Hogwarts, but were not, including “Batman’s castle” (?) and “Gormenghast.”  (In the dream world Gormenghast was in Brooklyn, and Harry remarked that it would have been interesting to live near it for the summer.)

Eventually, in a dingy subway station somewhere, they ran into a harried Dumbledore, pretending that everything was okay when it clearly wasn’t.  He quickly handed them enchanted robes which allowed for some new method of teleportation.  These transported them, at last, to the Hogwarts Express, which was dimly lit and had a sort of gothic, grotesque, foreboding atmosphere; there was a sense that their journey was far from over.

Fragments from last night’s dream:

Learned that some subset of the James Bond novels were not actually written by Ian Fleming, but had in fact been ghostwritten by some esteemed “literary” writer (like, Philip Roth, or something).  Immediately resolved to read them out of curiosity.

A dickish professor was giving a lecture on numerical methods for solving Maxwell’s Equations, and for some reason he did much of it socratically, by asking the class questions.  I was the only one who answered any of his questions.  I ended up giving the most naively obvious answers, and he ended up saying that there was some special reason why the method I had implicitly created wouldn’t work, and that I would have realized this if I had had “a sufficiently broad education.”  He then declared that it was my job to figure out the correct method on my own, and stormed out of the room.

Still kind of emotionally shaken about that dream with the old lady and her green egg tbh

I feel like that last dream was in the same “genre” as the “Toucannous Federation of Toucans” dream, which is still one of my all-time favorites