Just remembered last night’s dream in a flash while lying in bed, unsuccessfully trying to get to sleep.

I was some sort of repairman or other maintenance worker, the kind who would be called in to people’s dwellings to fix things.  I was part of a two-man team with another, older guy (probably in his forties, bearded, balding, kind of gruff-but-not-hostile).  We drove our truck out to an out-of-the-way old house in order to do whatever our job was for the old woman who lived there, alone.

The old woman cheerfully invited us in and insisted that we sit down, have some of her fresh-baked cookies, and chat a bit before doing our job.  We agreed. although it was already late at night and we weren’t entirely happy to do so.  Her house looked like a small bookstore – unpainted wooden walls, bookshelves stretching to the ceiling, a ratty staircase leading upstairs.

She was immediately charming in an odd, frayed, slightly too-eager-to-please way; there was a sense of pathos to her that made me want to pity her, living all alone with clearly no one to talk to but the repair guys, when after all she seemed perfectly nice.  It quickly became clear, however, why she was a social outcast.  She was a delusional mystic who had her own religious cosmology, and once we had sat down in her living room she talked our ears off about it incessantly for something like two hours.

Her views somehow centered around the idea that the entirety of existence “was” (in some sense?) a large green egg, around the size of an ostrich egg.  She had a name for this egg, which was a made-up word (can’t remember it now).  Though she could talk on and on, her views had this quality of being so abstract and general, in the way of certain New Agey “everything is connected” outlooks, that it was impossible to get a hold of any of its definite attributes.  Every time we might raise an question or objection, her eyes would light up, she would say “ah, but that’s the thing!”, and would somehow tie it back to the green egg.  The one additional detail that seemed very clear was that the creation of the world as we know it was the result of the egg “turning itself inside out” at some primeval moment, and that, although not exactly a bad thing (it was somehow a necessary thing), this event had had original sin-like consequences, which the old woman wished to undo by “cracking open” the egg, creating a utopia for all.

Finally, losing our patience, my partner and I insisted that we had to leave and get to sleep.  Somehow, our manner of doing so let on that we did not actually believe in any of her theories, and had just been humoring her.  She flew into an intense, pathetic, intensely (I felt) understandable and sad rage, which culminated, absurdly, in her grabbing a rifle and trying to shoot us.  We ran to the truck and sped off as she ran after us, firing wildly.

There is a “jump cut” in time here.  In the following episode, some time later, I was climbing some sort of ordinary-looking stairwell when I came upon a large green egg lying on the steps.  Instantly, it was somehow clear to me that this was the green egg the woman spoke of, and that she had been right about everything.  Following her line of thought, I cracked open the egg, and a lighter-green, glistening slime poured out.  I had changed the world.

The dream ended with me recounting this incident to my partner.  We both responded to the old woman’s vindication with a relaxed, “well, it just goes to show that life is full of surprises!” attitude.

turboshitnerd replied to your post: I had a heavily tumblr-related dream.  I don’t…

It reminds me I’m honestly surprised that symbolic interpretation of dreams seems to have so much legitimacy in the common consciousness since like. It really is just your brain taking a dump

Like how would your brain know to make everything a metaphor for dicks, right?

Yeah, pretty much – although I seem to have avoided running into people who actually think dreams are symbolic, at least in any way beyond “they draw on your actual feelings and anxieties and so forth,” which is probably true.  (Why wouldn’t they?)

I’ve read a bit here and there about what dreams “are” neurologically and what their purpose is and it’s remarkable how little we know.  There’s this whole idea out there that their purpose is consolidating memories, and there’s some evidence for it, but on the other hand there are cases where people start having little or no REM sleep (this is a side effect of MAOI antidepressants, for instance) and their memories don’t seem to get worse (though depression might be a confounding factor there).  OTOH we do think REM sleep is really important somehow because REM-deprived rats eventually die.

The most striking hypothesis I came across when reading about this stuff is that, for non-schizophrenics, dreaming might be like becoming temporarily schizophrenic, because in REM sleep your brain pretty much loses all its monoamine neurotransmitters (serotonin etc.) except for dopamine, and schizophrenic hallucinations are thought to come from excess dopamine, so dreams could be “the sort of hallucinations you get from too much dopamine relative to other stuff.”  Of course this is pretty speculative, among other things because the “too much dopamine” conceptualization of schizophrenia is itself controversial – it may really be more about, say, glutamate, insofar as it’s about any one neurotransmitter?  </amateur Wikipedia neuroscientist>

I had a heavily tumblr-related dream.  I don’t remember much of it, but at one point I discovered that davidsevera was actually my paternal uncle (whose name is also David).  This came as quite a surprise, as the two seem completely dissimilar.

So, in between all of these strange, exciting dreams, last night’s dream was about … studying for some sort of qualifying exam about real analysis.  Booooring!

In last night’s dream, I moved to a new apartment, and learned that in signing the lease, I had unwittingly signed up to transform my life into a video game.  That is, my experiences, at least the ones that took place in or near the apartment complex, would be structured like a video game with a known, semi-linear plot which other people had “played” before.

My apartment was on the 4th floor and to enter it I had to walk along on a balcony with no railing to get to the door.  At first this scared me, but after I learned about the game thing, I decided to test the “game mechanics” by jumping off the balcony.  A HUD temporarily pasted over my visual field informed me that I lost something like 20% of my “health” by doing this.

The game was very violence-oriented.  In the parking lot there was an injured man, and I somehow knew that killing him would trigger one of the game’s plot threads.  There was a trailer in the parking lot, which I somehow knew contained a meth lab operated by my new landlord; entering it would lead me down some other plot thread about becoming entangled in the criminal underworld.  A few friends came by to see the apartment, and it turned out they had played the game before (and were somewhat surprised that I had not), so they advised me on which of several sci-fi “factions” to join later in the game.  (Apparently joining the “good” side was not considered a wise choice, as it could easily lead to the player becoming a member of a elite team of giant robot piloting “knights,” and in order to do this job well one had to buy a lot of giant robot parts, which had to be purchased with real money.)

Don’t remember anything about last night’s dream except that I had somehow become Gabe from Penny Arcade, and was faced with the challenge of behaving in a relatively decent and natural way while still only doing things that were, at least at some standard of plausibility, “things Gabe would do.”

Strange sort-of-lucid dream in which the “plot” was that I had gone back in time to 2007 or so, and in order to return to the present I needed to change history by getting a girl I liked at the time to reciprocate my attraction (or at least I believed that this was the case).  On another level, I realized that I was in fact dreaming, but nonetheless had to hew to the conventions of the (thematically, somewhat embarrassing and ludicrous) “plot” described in the previous sentence, so I just went through the motions of things without really caring since none of it was real.

I was on a bus with the girl and various other people, driving along a road between dense trees on a rainy, gloomy late evening.  At first, I started writing down a sort of “manifesto” describing the situation, while everyone treated me as though I was insane; I realized that this wasn’t a good way to accomplish my goals, but the “plot” demanded it.  Then, the “plot” specified that in fact the bus driver was colluding with me and that he had planted bombs which he could detonate if the girl refused to “love me” (whatever this meant, in the logic of the time travel stuff).  I dramatically declaimed something to this effect to the girl, all the while internally frustrated that the “plot” forced me into playing this romantically possessive villain role.

Somehow this immediately transitioned to a sequence in which I, the girl, the bus driver, and a number of masked, armed men (some on my side, some against me?) were running around in some sort of chase inside a parking garage, where the bus had parked.  As I ran (from someone? chasing someone?) I kept getting calls on my cell phone, informing me that various friends of mine had woken up from comas.  This was disturbing, because when I had first been thrown backwards in time, I found that all of my close friends had fallen into comas, which (I somehow knew) meant that they themselves had not been thrown back in time with me (they would wake up when, if successful, I returned to 2015).  Waking up indicated that they now had been sent back in time, which contradicted the “plot.”  The notion that the “plot” could be contradicted led me to realize that I was responsible for all of my previous actions in a way I had not realized, and the shock of an overturned assumption made me wonder if I was really so sure I was dreaming after all – if my actions weren’t, in fact, affecting actual people.  At this moment of potentially tragic recognition, I woke up.

Dreamed last night that the backyard of my parents’ house was actually, somehow, the entirety of China.  I was arguing with a historian about which parts of the yard the ancient Chinese had explored and known about, at some given point in history.  It was of particular importance to figure out whether they had or hadn’t made it to the edge where the backyard abuts the neighbors’ backyard, since if they had, we’d have to find some way to square that with the fact that they never described exploring any place that sounded like the neighbors’ yard.  The whole process was very frustrating and complicated.

Meanwhile, in the Sad Puppies conversation, Larry Correia had taken to speculating about the psychological motivations of his opponents in great detail on his blog.  His opponents mocked this by using the (in retrospect, awkward and nonsensical) slogan “Psychiatry?  In my Larry Correia?  It’s more likely than you think.”

Dreamed that I was reading a science fiction story written by Nabokov.  There was a point where some character accelerated to a nontrivial fraction of light speed and Nabokov needed to describe the effects, so he actually went through a description of the calculation involved, but being Nabokov, every aspect of the calculation was described with needless and whimsical details – e.g. the reference observer viewing the fast spaceship was a second spaceship piloted by Lenin, who was on his way to establish a repressive regime on another planet and suppress the ungeneralizable individuality of that planet’s artists etc. etc.

(This would never have happened in real life because, among other things, Nabokov didn’t believe in special relativity.)