Man with a Plan

This purpose of this page is to record those details I can remember about really weird dreams. I have them a lot, but the memories fade so quickly… and mostly for good reason. But here they are, preserved in what gory detail remains after exposure to the cold light of reality.

7/18/2008 – Untitled Masterpiece
I was away on a youth retreat kind of thing, and I think it was in Europe, maybe. I was a teenager, I think, and there were people from both work and church staying in a couple of two-story stone cottages. It wasn’t any kind of thing my mammy would have let me do when I was a teenie, though, because it was – gasp! – coed! Douschebag was in my cottage, and being a real jerk, too, so I went next door to stay in the house that was predominantly girls. My excuse was that Douscher was snoring, but that was a bad move because they were afraid I might do the same. I think I was carrying a yellow security blanket around with me, and I think I was hugging on it while they decided whether to grant me amnesty. Fin.

7/18/2008 – Jaunty Jones, Gentleman Hacker
I was on vacation with Lynn and Adeline and a few other folks who I think were women also. Neither Big nor Little Carter were present, but I didn’t get the sense that there was any negative reason for that. They were just off someplace else. Anyway, we were in Switzerland or Austria or something like that, and I was actually Simon Templar, Val Kilmer’s character in The Saint. I’m pretty sure I was wearing a white suit with matching white fedora the whole time. We were at a combination bank/community center where I was pretty sure I had a couple hundred thousand dollars stashed. I was trying to get a thousand bucks out, but it was a big ordeal and they were asking Lynn who my sponsor was. I guess they thought it was an awful lot of money to give to a thief masquerading as a pimp. I remembered a guy from the town who was well respected enough to be a good character reference for me, and also dead enough not to be able to reveal my true nature. I knew he was a toy maker (I think he made bombs for me too, but that was a different movie), but I couldn’t for the life of me remember his last name. For most of the rest of the dream I was trying to find a computer that I could use to SSH into my home server and look up his name from there. I knew it wouldn’t do to be caught Googling him in plaintext from the combankity center’s own computers. There were systems with weird student operating systems, Macintrashes with little bitty snow-globe-type displays, and a bunch of other strange ones, but none of them ever behaved themselves for me. At the end I still didn’t have my cash, but Addy and Lynn had decided they’d had enough and were taking off on motor scooters with some locals. I must have looked all handsome and stuff standing there in my snow whites and jauntily-perched hat, but they never looked back. Fin.

7/18/2008 – Forcing the Subject
Forcing Little Carter’s foul-tasting medicine on him must be bothering me more fundamentally than I first thought, because in this last segment I was forcing a guy I work with to take a mess of pills. I haven’t really described Homer, I don’t think. He’s a pudgy, foul-mouthed and lovable little fellow who’s about to hit 50, and his mannerisms remind me of Steven Van Zandt’s character on the Sopranos. He’s one of my all-time favorite co-workers, and I’m always cracking up Lynn (who has never actually met him) with my Homer impressions. Anyway, I had Homer in a lawn chair, and I was sitting on him and pushing these pills down his throat. I had to cover his mouth and restrain him to keep him from spitting them out. Between pills I would offer him little bits of BBQ pork, which he would take in his fingers and examine carefully before enthusiastically devouring. At one point I told him there were only two pills left, and then turned the bottle up and dumped a big pile of blue ones into my hand. “What is all that!,” he asked. I think they must have been for his wee wacky woohoo. Fin.

6/4/2008 – Road Radishes
I had a couple of weird ones last night. In the first I was driving with J. Peter Willy in the Jeep. I remember losing control at the corner of Monroe & Pantsford (only it was a bigger intersection with houses all around [?]), sliding across the road and sending a lady in a silver SUV into a pole. I jumped out to see if she was OK, and was told I had sent another person off the road. After that I remember finding a blue car upside down against a house. There was a fat lady crawling out of it, and she screaming at me that I “hit her window” and ran her off the road. I remember hearing that I had “hit her window” three times and asking what she meant by that. Did my mirror hit her? What? She told me that she would see to it I never had a license again, and that got me really freaked out and miserable and wondering if I was dreaming. I remember going to bed after that, but not getting into the Jeep with J. P. Willy again. Then I was lying in my bed worrying and asking my father, who was there in the bedroom, whether I was dreaming. He nodded sadly. Fin.

6/24/2008 – The Kraut Lobby
In this one I was playing Virtua Tennis with my German Twitter buddy, whom I’ve never met, and with whom I’ve never spoken directly. Before long I realized there were 3 – 5 Germans staying at my house with me. I heard them discuss “Miriam’s” wedding – a friend of my German buddy, who I think is one of the folks staying with me, and another person I’ve never met or even investigated on Twitter. I opened Miriam’s wedding announcement and, finding an interactive DVD inside, threw it into the player of the weird rig I had set up in the kitchen where the pantry should have been and craned my neck to see the display above me. It wasn’t worth it, either: just a bad CGI movie depicting Miriam’s and ???’s undying love for one another. At that point I remember getting a frantic email from my German buddy in the next room because his outgoing email address was screwed up. Fin.

4/24/2008 – Living Vicariously
I think I was my son in last night’s dream. My wife and parents in law and I were in a restaurant, but I had the sense that they were actually my mom and grandparents. Hmm… where was dear old dad? Anyway, the restaurant had lots of brick half-walls and steps and columns and whatnot, and I was riding around it on a bicycle. I was a teeneager, I think, and I had long-ish hair, and my grandmother (Mimi!) hated that I was jumping off the little “ramps” and bothering everybody. This dream was semi-lucid, which kind of spoiled things, and at the end I was trying to figure out why I was dreaming about such a thing. Fin.

4/7/2008 – Where, Oh Where Could Obama Be?
Truly bizarre. Last night I was scheduled to perform some improv comedy (from which I’m at least semi-permanently retired at the moment) in font of a crowd of at least 10,000 people. It was in an arena I’ve seen before… maybe the arena in Chattanooga, TN (on the UTC campus, I think), and I think there were just a few of us from the old group performing. I know Bob Peck and I were up, but that may have been it. We were introduced by the announcer, as was our special performance guest, Barack Obama. Bob and I were there, of course, but of Obama there was no sign. I ran out into the hall and tried to call him up, but didn’t know his number. I finally got a Nashville, TN (???) listing for him from directory assistance, but the same automated voice that gave the number to me also suggested that 2am might be a better time to call. After I had been running around for several minutes trying to locate some arena staff who might know what was going on, my phone rang. It was Barack the Magic You-Know-What. He was friendly enough, but non-committal. He pretended he had gotten his dates mixed up (kind of like his votes, I guess), and when I pegged him on whether he was actually coming, he never responded. I think my dream ended prematurely, because God didn’t cast Change upon me when I hung up on Obama. Fin.

4/3/2008 – Flying Solo
This time Lynn and I were on a flying bus full of American Idol contestants, and I guess we were all finalists. Apparently the bar had been lowered a few notches, though, because some of us were quite old and many of us (me included) couldn’t even sing. The hostess/stewardess, who was actually the resident “companion” on Firefly, was walking around having everybody sing parts to a song I had never heard before. I always thought that girl was sort of gross, probably given the profession her character played on my current-favorite-but-long-dead-all-the-same television show, but in my dream she could SAING. And that made everything okay. I don’t remember much else except that we were about to land on some kind of floating spaceport/city thing, and the hostess was hurrying folks up with their parts and getting me all nervous-like. Needless to say, I pooched my lines and ended the song badly. Fin.

3/??/2008 – Kurds and No Way!
I hesitated to post this one, and so I’ve forgotten most of the details. I do remember I was part of some sort of government agency, and that I had gotten some intel that my Kurdish neighbors were warehousing a homemade nuclear weapon. My “crew” drove me home and shot a big hole into my neighbors’ garage with a minigun or something, and I ran through the hole to start my search of the place. The wife was sleeping on the couch, and I think I started yelling at her in Arabic. Don’t remember what about… probably something important. The husband came home, which freaked me out, because I wanted to maintain a good neighborly relationship. The only thing I could do was hide my face behind the enormous rifle/grenade launcher/whatever that I was carrying around. He was obviously scared of it, so I kept threating him with it and asking questions in gibberish. The only problem with hiding behind my gun was that it was invisible. Finally he admitted that he had been bullied into storing something, but was shocked to find out what it was. Turned out to be a tiny little nothing strapped to a kid’s R/C truck. Continuing my charade and planning to double back later, I walked out the front door and headed away from my house to maintain my identity. Fin.

2/20/2008 – Potties and Pancakes
I had a couple quick vignettes about work and work people. I know there was another one about Danny, too, but I can’t remember it. Anyway, in one of them Burt, our network guy, was making pancakes in the kitchen of the house my grandparents sold about 16 years ago. He was extolling the virtues of this ready-mix and that, and complaining about yet others. Apparently he had gotten into the habit of eating pancakes at every meal, and was accustomed to driving 200 miles to whip them up at the old family house. The other segment was about the building where I work. It wasn’t our current building, though, and from what I could see it was somewhat fancier than what we have now. Of course, all I actually saw was a small bathroom. I was holed up in there with my laptop, and our marketing/sales director and his wife, who is the manager of the implementation department, kept walking back and forth with a small baby and staring at me. Really, it seems like some people have never seen anybody work from a potty. Fin.

2/10/2008 – Roller Boyz
This one was about Danny and me. We were “inside” a video game, in an all-stone building with an open floor plan: lots of long halls, flying bridges, tall atriums and broad stairs. I think it was supposed to be a shooter of some sort, but we weren’t shooting anything. Instead we were pushing each other like idiots down the long stone hallways in office chairs and other kinds of wheeled devices that were like wheelchairs but not quite. We quickly learned how to ride down steps without taking a spill, and to control momentum and direction by shifting our weight and spinning around, etc. It kind of evolved into a roller-derby-type thing eventually, and we were giggling like little girls all the way to the end. Fin.

2/10/2008 – Julius Skeezer
This was a really short one about Judge Julius, and was the second major thread I remembered from last night. JJ was running for some kind of political office — a local one, I think — and had invited me to either a fundraising or just general networking dinner before the elections. He never talked about the campaign or his strategies or anything, but instead kept grousing that every time he ran for office, somebody stole or otherwise screwed him out of a particular garment. I can’t remember if he was calling it a Roman cushion or a brace or what, but apparently it has a broad leather strap that wraps around the torso and secures a thick pillow to the wearer’s back. Sure enough, near the end of the dinner a guy JJ works with (who I know but won’t ever talk about enough to assign a fake name) came by and asked to borrow it. Lots of folks were watching, and after a bit of polite verbal jousting Judge Julius was finally pressured into giving it up. After that, my dream turned into a weird fashion shoot for the other guy in his Roman garb. I have to say the camera angles were creative and very pleasing, at least. Fin.

1/27/2008 – Return of the Son of the Cleaning Lady of Mothra
I’ve forgotten a lot about this one, which is kind of a shame because it terrified me. There was this man-sized bug with moth’s wings and a guy’s legs chasing me around. Actually, there were several of them originally, but I had some bubbas in a car–don’t really know who because I didn’t recognize anybody–and we were standing up through the sunroof and shooting the critters down in perfect Duck Hunt form. Except there was no happy pixelated dog running after the carcasses. For whatever reason we stopped being able to get a bead on them (maybe because we were driving and our Nintendo gun’s cord wasn’t long enough) and the main moth guy started up after me. I don’t think he could have hurt me too badly himself, but he had some crazy telekenetic voodoo going and was arranging big trees and boulders and stuff to spell out words. I’m not sure why he didn’t just drop a rock on me. And also, he was making little flagpoles pop out of the ground, and they were all waving holographic flags (Israel’s, Japan’s and, I think, Great Britain’s national flags were all present, and there was a campaign one for that nut Ron Paul). That really freaked people out, and I knew then I had to go find some heavy duty backup – and quick! I was in a lodge kind of place, but I think lots of people lived there like it was one family. There were several bedrooms, but none of the doors were locked. And there was a big screening room in there. There were lots of people in there watching a movie when I went in to hide, and some of them started to lean on my knees like recliners. My feet smelled really bad, too, but none of them noticed. At the very end of my dream, I finally found the person that could take care of bug boy. It was some little high school girl having a let’s-all-wear-white-pajamas slumber party in a room that was actually the bedroom of Jimmy Nugget, a friend I had from the 5th until the 11th grade, when he went weird on me. I don’t know what she was going to do about my problem, but she was plenty pissed at me for bothering her. Fin.

1/24/2008 – Intervention
Last night I was trying desperately to get Carter out of a sex cult. I remember that it was a group of people that lived in something that looked like a store display. A big one that had enough room for some beachfront and ocean. I wandered in to see what was going on, and everybody was so friendly that I thought I would stay a while. But then the activities coordinator announced that it was time to “get to know somebody,” and one girl (might have been the lady doctor from Stargate: Atlantis) and I booked it out of there. After that I realized Carter was still in there, even though I didn’t remember seeing him before. He had a tablet-style laptop, and I stole it and was pleading with it (I guess it was a fancy laptop that knew to automatically record anything screamed at it without the screamer actually having to press any buttons or whatever). When I went to put it back there were naked folks everywhere (fortunately I did NOT see Carter), and I bailed out in a hurry. Fin.