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Funny and strange dreams

17:07 / 12.12.03

Last night I dreamt that clubland had alighted upon the ZX Spectrum computer as the source of it's groovy visuals of choice...that was quite weird. Clubs all had big screens showing scenes out of Knight Lore and other games from the 1980s, and I was charged with renovating the platform.

Actually, that sounds so shatteringly geeky that I should be ashamed (I'm not really that geeky, as people who know me will confirm).
Anyone else had odd ones lately?

Warrington Minge

22:48 / 13.12.03

My favourite dream was a virtual remake of King Kong with a slight difference. I'm deep in the jungle and there are tribesmen and wooden huts all around me. The tribesman are chanting. Some kind of ceremony is happening. they're all very scared. there are two big wooden gates in front of me which begin to slowly open. Suddenly, from behind the gates, emerge a 50ft Ken Dodd with a 25ft tickling stick. He begins to wander through the tribesmens village crushing huts and people who come into his path whilst wittering away with Ken Dodd witticisms "what a beautiful day to..." etc etc.

I know it sounds funny but I awoke in a cold sweat and could not get back to sleep.

Warrington Minge

22:52 / 13.12.03

By the way I would actually go to clubs if they showed excerpts from Knight Lore, Underworld, alien 8 etc.

The spectrum still rules...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3060081421&category=11994

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

03:33 / 14.12.03

I have FAR too many videogame related dreams (Deus Ex, usually). Only yesterday I dreamt of an amazing weapon called the "minipalm"- it was a napalm grenade, and boy, did it kick ass!

I had a really weird dream the other night... for some reason, I was in a bar and Coldplay were playing. I was in the middle of explaining to everyone who'd listen why they were a shit band... and then a friend of mine from years ago turned up. But his head was rotting.
And I was apparently having some sort of posh tea party at my mum's house afterwards, and he invited himself along. I was too polite to say no. But his rotting head really didn't go down too well.

I'm pretty sure there was more, but my brain kindly censored it.

12:05 / 14.12.03

I'm still quite proud of my crazy Vietnam conspiracy dream, as described at the bottom of the other dreams thread, which I'm too lazy to look up a link to..

13:13 / 14.12.03

Maddest recent dream I had involved me living in a high rise block of flats listening to late night call-in radio, and becoming obsessed/paranoid that all the people calling the radio station were actually talking about me, but doing it surreptitiously and speaking in a code that I couldn't understand.

I wandered out of the flat to try and investigate and suddenly found that I had eight limbs like a spider, so I climbed up the outside of the building like spider man to get to the roof. On top of the flats I found about 6 insect/robot things made out of something like lego, with tape recorders strapped to their backs, and it was the tape recorders that were broadcasting the voices from the radio.

Also on the roof there was this weird pulsating fleshy membrane. I investigated it and managed to cut through to get into this little chamber with walls made of flesh, but tendrils from the walls strapped me down to an operating table and there was this vast glutinous blob of a doctor approaching, wearing a funny little cap on his head in the shape of a duck, but with a scalpel fitted into the duck's bill.

Riddle me that.

13:51 / 14.12.03

Fear of exposure. Invariably.

I can never remember my dreams for more than a few moments. However much I try, the images just slip away. Does anyone know (or have any theories) why so many dreams fade so quickly? They can be as vivid as real life at the time, seeming unforgettable stuff often happens, and yet as soon as I wake up the memories just melt away like ice cubes in hot coffee. How come? What's going on?

15:28 / 14.12.03

Smoothly Weaving: have you checked out http://www.lucidity.com/ ? I'm pretty sure they've got some articles giving tips for remembering dreams, and much, much more.

As for a theory on why, I'm going along with an evolutionary approach I read somewhere (probably the afformentioned website); dreams are something the brain sees as unnecessary to immediate survival and discards. However, they probably serve some useful function in self-exploration or, if you believe in a Jung-ian collective unconcious, as a gateway to our species sum of thought. Either way, I think it's a pretty good idea to start devolping tools to explore the unconcious.

17:32 / 14.12.03

Isn't nutmeg supposed to help induce lucid dreaming?

Incidentally, I recall having had really off-the-wall dreams about 8 years ago, when I was on anti-depressants for a while. The dreams were just...ultra-vivid. Bright colors, very realistic, and lots of repetition, like a record stuck in a groove. Large groups of people doing a lot of repetitive motion, kind of performance-art-esque, but in a very creepy way. When I went off the meds, the weird dreams stopped.

12:00 / 15.12.03

Thanks for that link, Trebor. Manipulating dreams sounds very appealing, but I'd be pleased if I could just remember the slippery little fuckers. Like panchinko, I found that anti-dep medication induced huge, sprawling, unforgettable dream epics, and I've missed them ever since.
I might try some of the techniques suggested there though. Cheers.

15:42 / 15.12.03

Yup. Totally insane dreams lately. The miost recent one featured a trip to my parent's house on a really snowy day. The woods behind the house had been cleared out to make room for a group of wild horses (who could spaek with humans, i think) that the size of small dogs. Also in the woods was a giant silver pod filled with humanoid aliens who had pumpkins for genetalia and their leader kept asking me to breed with him.

Freud would have a frickin feild day with that one, eh?

Red Cross Iodized Salt

17:18 / 15.12.03

Had a very weird, very vivid dream last night...at least, I remember that it was very weird and vivid. The only part of it that I can clearly recall is the bit where I got into an elevator at work and accidentally hit a button for three levels below the ground floor (there is of course no such button in the elevators at my work). When the doors opened it was onto a small stone cell with a dead body in it. I quickly hit the close doors button and returned to the ground floor, hoping that nobody could tell I had been there.

18:52 / 15.12.03

I had multiple long, strange dreams last night, all seeming to involve houses, rooms, doorways, windows, etc. For instance in one I entered a room with a bunch of people and shut the door, and the room started a motion like being on a rollercoaster - but how could it, we were inside a house?!, we thought. In another I crawled out "my" bedroom window onto a rickety rotting balcony, and when I climbed back in through the window I was in a coffee house in WWII England.

22:23 / 15.12.03

the other night i dreampt that i was teaching my cat how to count. i would hold up one finger and say "one" then another finger at the same time and say "two"

the cat picked up on the numbers very quickly. i was amazed at how fast she was able to anticipate and apply the concept of numbers. as my cat began to count various items in the room, i expressed to her how impressed i was.

my cat was hurt. she percieved that i was not treating her the same as other people. i was congratulating her way too much for such a simple task. i was taken aback. i tried to explain the she was, after all, a cat.

further attempt to teach my cat to count while waking have been met with blank stares and some purring.

22:38 / 15.12.03

I've been having a couple of dreams recently that are radically Freudian. I mean, the symbolism is dripping off the walls, which is kinda strange, since the idea of the symbolism is to work as a filter for things that you can't deal with consciously. My point is that the symbolism is so obvious that it defies the purpose of it.

Which is strange...

14:09 / 17.12.03

Last night I dreamt of all the books I haven't read. Unusually simplistic for me...

The night before I dreamt (short version) that I was staying in a cold isolated northern village in which the Antichrist (or Pre-Christian equivalent) had been born some time before. Bodies of murdered young alternative/gothy types kept being found. I was staying in a darkened house with friends when the television came to life showing a group of children who were looking at me. The child at the centre was very calm - physically very similar to the Milky Bar kid (very blonde, very neat, very perfect) except for his eyes, which looked like the sort of eyes an albino rabbit might end up with after extensive cosmetic testing, they were weeping a red liquid. He seemed mentally ancient; very aware, very intelligent. He knew and hated me and he gave off a fearsome aura of menace. The other children were mentally transposed with images of rotting food, flies, maggots etc and were very scared of me. I was trying to reassure them because I could sense that they were just kids, that it wasn't their fault, when the child at the centre said to me:

"You should fear me."

And I said to him "I do".

Then I woke up. It was frankly terrifying. The night before that I dreamt that I'd had a stroke and that my top lip had a hole rotted through it by a malignant tumour. Not fun.

16:27 / 17.12.03

topical b: I enjoyed reading about your dream teaching the cat to count. Don't be fooled while waking, though; the cat understands all right, it's just keeping up the status quo. I seem to recall a book in which it was stated that monkeys can understand us all right, but don't let on because they know we would put them to work. Perhaps it's the same with cats.

Early last week I dreamt that I was travelling across the US with Saddaam Hussein and his be-veiled companion. As we reached a sweeping vista in Pennsylvania overlooking the great plains of Kansas, Saddaam, who was pretty grumpy but not frightening, and his companion took his leave. When they returned he gave me a pith helmet with can holders and straws on either side so I could put beer cans in there and drink from the hat.

17:02 / 17.12.03

last night Papa Posters dreamed i had got married, to a Barbeloid, no less, and he was so distressed he e-mailed me as soon as he awoke to make me swear it wasn't true. (It's not, btw, just in case anyone was wondering. Although of course, it might be a precog dream...)