In my dream last night, there was a tabloid magazine that could be found basically anywhere titled “SHIT YOURSELF?!” with a smugly grinning Hilary Clinton on the cover and the inside was filled with unflattering nudes of Richard Nixon and it became a source of a major media controversy. Major conservatives were conflicted as to whether or not it should be censored because if they censored it then that would be “PC Culture”. but if they didn’t they would have to see Nixon’s dick everywhere,
The scandal became known as “Shityourselfgate” and it basically lead to the end of the Republican Party as we know it
this is a prophetic dream and you need to make it your new purpose in life
I dreamed about an underground library, that used to be run by an organization whose name didn’t make it out of the dream; call them Librarians for a Sane Future. They were a sort of hippy VFD, or hacker culture predating computers.
The library was old and run-down; the main walkway (which led from our communal house to a greenhouse on the edge of downtown) in particular, its windowframes rusting and looking out on a weedy riverbank (as the tunnel itself was built into the deep channel of the river) and in some cases nearly overgrown themselves. LSF was basically gone. A few volunteers still kept the shelves from spilling over; even added new books occasionally, but barely kept ahead of the tide of disorder. The floor of the main walkway still recorded the last, knowingly ironic attempt at a revival in the late 80s: the list of Promised Restorations. They were painted in ornate letters on the floor, a self-aware historical monument at the time it was made. “PROMISED RESTORATIONS (the glorious future of LSF) 1. fix the windows, they’re really rusty. at least, like, trim back the weeds. 2. organize the realm of the fantastic. 3. expand and grow—new members, new safehouses, new knowledge to spread.” Then, as if in humorous admission of defeat, “4. so much for the Promised Restorations! 5. LSF.” They were arranged such that anyone coming from the kitchen would see “so much for the Promised Restorations” first. The 80s volunteers had actually organized the sci-fi/fantasy section a bit. Not much else.
I pulled down one book from a shelf piled high with paperbacks. It had been written in the late 80s, by an author who had been granted a brief peek at 201x Silicon Valley and mistakenly (?) conflated it with the dotcom boom. The book was one in a long, kind of trashy series about an Elon Musk / Bill Gates character who constantly saved the world by the power of his isolation-tank-trained supercomputing brain. The opening chapter had his assistant piping through a call from the president.
“I told him that if you don’t get enough isolation, the meat we call the brain won’t flash and bubble with the genius we all know and love!” Zolon blinked slowly in agreement. A bubble drifted by his foot. “But you know how these government types are. And it does sound a bit serious this time. Something about… Mars.”
What else about the library… the bookshelves and book carts were old, brown metal and formica. The floor was bare concrete, with a few rugs to break it up. There were no open spaces, just a labyrinth of teetering shelves. There were a few old beige computers in one corner, relics of the 80s revival, now as outdated as card catalogs but lovingly preserved for just that reason.
Had a dream that McDonald’s had a big ad campaign that just said “WE HAVE IT” in black cryptic writing. So I went to a drive thru and said “I saw the sign. Can I have it” and the speaker was silent for a solid ten seconds before saying “do you think you’re ready” in my voice and I screamed and drove away
Last night, shortly after she’d fallen asleep and while I was still up, Esther woke up with a jolt while shouting
“crime!”
in a sort of accusatory, “there it is! It can’t hide from us any longer!” tone.
She then fell asleep again, after muttering that she couldn’t remember why she had said it and that she’d presumably been having some sort of dream involving crime.
note: these are the ones i ACTUALLY DID dream/imagine; they did not really happen:
- hillary clinton and bernie sanders made out in front of a huge crowd, and publicly announced their intention to marry
- donald trump threw his fake hair like a frisbee into an applauding, cheering throng of supporters, revealing an intricately tattooed bald scalp
- donald trump started badmouthing the polish people and telling (very outdated, but real) “polack jokes” during a campaign speech
- someone threw a bucket of water on ted cruz during a debate and he melted like the wicked witch of the west
- jeb bush sheepishly revealed that he was the person behind “chuck tingle”, amazon gay porn superstar, this entire time
- ted cruz was assassinated by poisoning
- bernie sanders appeared before a crowd of supporters dressed in REALLY tacky, sufjan stevens-esque bird/angel wings and spoke a few empty platitudes + some lines from william blake’s “proverbs of hell” before being hoisted into the air by a cleverly concealed pulley system and disappearing behind a plywood backdrop of a desert landscape; every bernie supporter treated this as a super impressive political smackdown/victory
- as part of some sort of “fairness pact”, hillary clinton and donald trump both had their heads shaved. at the same time. on live television. by professional barbers from opposing camps (ie, the person shaving clinton’s head was a staunch republican; the person shaving trump’s head was a staunch democrat).
- donald trump was made of legos, but nobody treated this as weird or remarkable
@nostalgebraist was in my dream just now. The part involving him wasn’tsuper duper interesting, but he seems to enjoy hearing about this sort of thing, so why not describe it
I was in some sort of hippy-ish hostel, where there was a male side and a female side. My female friend invited me over to the female side in order to drink some beverage made of coffee, milk, and peas (?). In this hostel, all the beds had names for some reason. On the male side, all the beds had vaguely masculine, stately names like “Dennett” or “Hartworth”, but on the female side they all had obnoxious grrl-power names like “Sparkle Fairy” and “Cupcake Bitch”, and mixed in were also few to prove that you like, don’t need to be a girl to be on the girl side like “Gender Fuck” and “Armpit Hair”. Needless to say I found this humorously counterproductive
While I was waiting for the water to boil, I sat down on the couch and looked at a variety of incense sticks they had laid out still in their original packaging which, based on the text on the bag, seemed to be from a company who was trying to market flower-girl type products to a cynical conspiracy-bro sort of demographic, like “GMOs in the food and flouride in the water got you feeling all jacked up? Girlfriend is bitching at you again? Why not light up some incense and relax, man?” There was one variety of incense called “Marlboro Reds” which had packaging text arguing to the effect that cigarettes were unfairly maligned by the government because they were “spiritually” good for you.
There was also a variety called “Nostalgebraist” which had the familiar green-horse picture underneath the name on the packaging. I realized that NB had based his internet presence off of the marketing for this stupid obscure brand of bro-incense and not told anyone, waiting for people to discover it, which I thought was hilarious. Furthermore I realized that the green horse picture was not actually a green horse, but an field of corn which inadvertently looked like a horse from afar via pareidolia. I thought it was hilarious that NB had noticed this weird effect and realized that if he made it an avatar-sized image no one would even notice that it had been a field of corn in the first place, again letting people discover it.
Anyway I went back to my room and a few hours later noticed that NB had uploaded a 12 minute video to his blog sitting on a couch ranting about this brand of incense - I guess the secret was out. He became very upset about the bizarre marketing in a tumblr-y identity politics way like “corporations are telling me that just because my body is a blah blah blah”, eventually screaming at the camera like “you know what? this shit really PISSES ME THE FUCK OFF”. But it seemed like after recording this rant, he had realized the absurdity of his unhinged anger, so he chose to humorously exaggerate it in order to project an ironic-self-awareness. Therefore the ending of this video was full of YouTube-poop style edits that distorted his face and voice gradually transforming him into some sort of terrifying entity in what was a pretty impressive work of lo-fi digital psychedelica.
A few minutes after watching this video, I realized that the couch he had been sitting on looked very similar to the couch I had just been sitting on looking at the incense, and hey, something needed to call to mind this incense and prompt this rant, so maybe he was by coincidence staying at this same hostel right now, and I should go over and say hello? But then I realized that there was no reason he would be staying in the female side, so that wouldn’t make any sense.
I dreamed I was reading a new @nostalgebraist story, which was based in a strange parallelism/allegory. The main story followed a particular family whose lives somehow mirrored recent (future) European history (a war, groups migrating in or out). Everyone would always speak in parables, often centering around or taking place in or near Eden, which seemed to represent Europe, and retold parts of the same history again in a way prophetic for the main story.
The same story was mirrored yet again in a series of interludes, which were usually a character’s dream, about two people who would be attacked by ravens. Each time (and I felt very clever for noticing this pattern) the two people would be talking, the raven would swoop down and do something portentous —usually harassing one character, who would then shoo it away. The raven would then kill or curse the other person before flying away (one time, by literally stabbing its beak into his heart).
I was discussing this with my brother, and then that night I myself had the raven dream. The other character was a man who was harassing me, and I was scared of him – but when the raven first swooped down to attack me (meaning it would eventually kill him), I grabbed it and broke its neck and threw it to the floor. This scared the man off anyway.
I woke up and related this dream to nostalgebraist. When I confessed to feeling guilty for having broken the pattern in the dreams, and thus possibly having accidentally ruined the story, he gave me a knowing look.
