Often times my dreams are extensions of my waking life, picking up where i left off before i went to sleep. I stayed up late last night writing PHP script for this here blog, and i continued to program longer after i fell asleep...

Remember: this is only a dream...

I'm sitting at a computer desk in a cubicle programming PHP scripts. A coworker comes up to my cubicle and says, "Stay away from the new guy, I hear he's a bastard porcu-"

"You taking shit about ME?!" a voice interrupts. A guy walks straight up to us, turns around and starts to bend over when a volley of quills shoot out of his back.

Instinctively, i cover my face with my arm and duck my head down, but i feel stabbing pains through my right eye and through my left nostril down into mouth. I can taste wood on my tongue, and i HATE the taste of wood. I get the chills just thinking about wooden tongue depressors, spoons, popsicle-sticks, etc.

I open my left eye (i can't open my right eye cuz there's a quill stuck in my eyeball thru the eyelid) and i can see a wooden hors d'oeuvre shish kebab skewer looking thing sticking up through my left nostril (like where people get their noses pierced).

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I grab the quill and start to pull but I can feel the quill going thru the roof of my mouth and sticking into my tongue. The pain is unbearable, but i can't stand to have the taste of wood in my mouth, so i yank to quill out. I breathe a sigh of relief as the taste of blood fills my mouth (At least i can't taste the wood anymore... BLECH).

I then turn my attention to the quill in my eyeball. I yank on the quill, but it doesn't come out. Instead, my eyelid tears and my eyeball pops out, still stuck on the end of the quill. Surprisingly, it doesn't hurt at all, so i take the eyeball-on-a-stick and put it in the mug full of pens on my desk.

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That's when i notice my coworker laying face-up on floor, covered from head to toe with quills sticking out of his body, presumably dead.

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The "new guy" is nowhere to be found. One-eyed with a mouth full of blood, i resume my programming.

Remember: this is only a dream...

I walk into a room filled with blinding white light. I shield my eyes and squint, trying to make out the dark blur in the center of the room. As the blur comes into focus, I see my friend sitting slumped in a chair, leaning on a desk table, with a gun to his head.

I rush towards him as I yell "NO! Don't!" but he sees me and cocks the gun, warning "Don't come any closer!" His eyes are tearful and his lips are quivering and I know he is serious.

I step back and say calmly, "You don't want to do this. You have so much to live for." He shakes his head, and his finger starts to squeeze the trigger. Before he can shoot himself, I pull out a gun of my own and point it at my head.

I say "If you don't care about your own life, then at least consider MY life. If you go, I go."

He relaxes his trigger finger for a moment, but begins to squeeze the trigger again as he says "This is the only way to make it stop."

I turn my gun away from my head and point it at my friend's face. I warn him, "I won't let you do this. I'll shoot you myself, before I sit here and watch you shoot yourself."

He turns his gun away from his head and points it at me. I realize instantly that I've done a brilliantly stupid thing. "Shoot me," he pleads. "Shoot me, or I'll shoot you"

I ask my friend the question that I should've asked from the start, "Why do you want to shoot yourself?"

"I don't want to dream," he screams. "If I don't shoot myself, I will eventually fall asleep, and then I'm going to dream. I hate dreaming. I only have nightmares and I can't take it anymore." He begins to sob.

I reassure my friend, "I will dream for you. You will never have to dream again because I will dream for us both."

I suddenly become aware that I am dreaming and I wake up momentarily. I tell myself, "I must go back to sleep and dream" and so I do. I dream for us both.

I had many different dreams last nite cuz I kept waking up. The dreams were very vivid, but they went by really fast and they always ended rather abruptly. These are a few I remember:

1) I'm leading a team of soldiers in a strike against a compound of evil robots (Ya I know that sounds totally stupid, but that's what my dream was about). We gun down all the guard robots surrounding the compound (which kinda looks like the bunker thing on Endor in Return of the Jedi), and just as we are about to storm the entrance, a giant circuit board flies over us and blasts all of my soldiers. I'm the only one left alive so I blow up the entrance to the compound and storm in alone, where I'm surrounded by robots. I wake up before the robots kill me.

2) I'm watching a play at UCLA with my friends and our girlfriends. The play is "The Wizard of Oz", but all of the musical numbers have been replaced by U2 songs. During the first song, which is "Mysterious Ways" instead of "Somewhere over the Rainbow", my friends and most of the audience start complaining out loud about how horrible this play is. Before the song is over, most of the people in the theater have left. My guy friends say that they're leaving too, but my girlfriend wants to stay cuz one of her friends is in the play, so I tell my friends that I'm gonna stay and watch the rest with my girlfriend, but I'll walk them out of the theater. When we reach the lobby, there's a huge riotous food fight cuz the disgruntled theatergoers who decided to leave have stampeded the tables of food for the reception after the show. My friends and I push our way through the crowd out the theater, where I say goodbye and then push my way back inside. By the time I sit back down next to girlfriend, I'm covered in food. My girlfriend and her friends start picking the food off of my and eating while they watch the play, which just gets worse and worse. Some frat-type guy in the row behind me yells "This sucks!!!" so I turn around to tell him to sit down and shut up, but as I make eye contact with him, I wake up.

3) I'm in a news helicopter flying outside the balcony of a celebrity, who has just been found mutilated in her suite in a highrise complex. For some reason King Kong is climbing the building. He has nothing to do with the crime inside and people actually seem to be ignoring the giant ape. The reporter and camera man in the helicopter are shouting at Kong to get out of the way of their shot into the celebrity's apartment. I jump out of the helicopter onto King Kong, and ride on his back to the top of the building. I look out over Los Angeles in all directions. The helicopter whizzes by me, points its spotlight in my face and I wake up.

4) I'm being chased on foot by biker skinheads who are trying to kill me. I don't know why they're chasing me cuz this dream just starts with me running away from them in some unfamiliar neighborhood. I jump over a fence into some stranger's backyard. The skinheads are too fat to follow me over the fence so they try to break down the fence. I crawl through the doggie-door into the stranger's house. I don't see anyone inside the house, but there's a dog (some kind of nauseatingly cute white curly-haired terrier looking little shit). The dog doesn't bark or make any noise. It seems to like me and wants to play, but I'm too busy trying to find the front door so I can get the hell out of there before the homeowner or the psycho bikers find me. I run from room to room, the little dog in tow, but the house is a seemingly never ending maze of bedrooms. After much running around, I stop dead in my tracks when I enter a bedroom where a middle-aged woman is sleeping on an enormous bed. Neither the dog nor I make any sound, but the woman suddenly wakes, as if she can sense that I am in the room. The woman starts yelling at me to get out of her house and I try to explain that I've taken refuge in her house from psycho biker skinheads who are trying to kill me. She doesn't care why I'm in her house, she just wants me out. She grabs the lamp by her bed and charges at me swinging the lamp. I run. The dog runs ahead of me, and each time I have to choose between more than one door, the dog stands in one of the doorways and barks, as if he's calling me thru the right door. I follow the dog thru the house as the woman chases me throwing whatever she can grab. I just keep saying "I'm sorry!" to the woman and finally the dog leads me into a long hallway with an open door at the end. I run towards the door, but I wake up before I go thru it.

In my dream, i'm some independent live-action film director who's finally had a breakthru movie that's gotten me enough praise to fund a semi-big-budget film about a small midwestern town that gets flooded.

I'm sitting atop a large camera crane ready to direct a climactic tear-jerking scene where the endearing old man, who said he'd stay with his house til the bitter end, is lying on his back on the roof of his house delivering his final lines as the muddy floodwaters rise up over his quivering lips.

It's an expensive and dangerous shot so i want to get it right the first time. I've already rehearsed the scene extensively with the actor playing the old man. The actor is kind of a cross between M. Emmet Walsh and Sydney Greenstreet. There are divers and safety personnel in the water as we prepare to shoot the scene.

I call "ACTION" and the scene begins. The actor delivers a heart-wrenching performance that has the whole crew in tears as his face is submerged in the flood water, which is carefully controlled by the special effects team.

Just as I yell "CUT", there's a violent and enormous spray of bloody water where the actor's face had been blowing bubbles only moments before. This is not in the script. Some crew member yells "ALLIGATOR!!!" and my otherwise pleasant dream suddenly turns into a nightmare.

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I had a dream last nite that i can't really explain in detail cuz of what happens in the dream. It wasn't X-rated or anything (probably PG at most), but it was the kind of dream that anyone familiar with the name "Freud" would be able to read between the lines of the dream (and anyone with an actual understanding of psychoanalysis would probably find reasons for concern about my mental health).

Since i can't really give details, i'll just list the key ingredients of my dream (in no particular order so as to avoid any suggestion of a causal relationship between things):

Setting: My apartment

Participants: 2 male friends, 1 female friend, Me

Props: couch, TV, stove, bed, fire, oven, door peephole, fire extinguisher, beverages, some sort of applesuace-like substance

Actions: waking from a nap, losing motor skills, panicking, cooking, laughing, forgetting

In my dream, all that adds up to a recipe for disaster/embarrassment/acrimony/death

I haven't been dreaming much recently, and when I do, it usually involves people I'm not comfortable posting about. I did however, have a dream last nite that didn't feature anyone I know in my waking life so I'm finally gonna post a new dreamblog. It was another dream involving planes.

I am on a large passenger plane, sitting at a window seat so i could watch as we are flying over the ocean. Suddenly the plane drops altitude and large hole rips open in the side of the cabin opposite mine. Several passengers sitting near the hole are sucked out of the plane.

Panic ensues among the passengers, including me, and the dream immediately becomes a cycle of events, like so very many of my dreams.

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Another nite of episodic dreams, but they were all borderline nitemares and just kinda ended when they got too weird:

Remember: this is only a dream...

1) A friend of mine i've known since middle school is visiting my parents house, and as i give him a tour of the house, i'm asking him questions about married life (he recently married in real life). When we reach my parents' room, my friend jumps up on the bed and there's a crunching sound of breaking glass. My friend screams in pain. I look and he's landed on a pile of lightbulbs that were lying on the bed. My dad rushes in and is pissed that my friend broke his lightbulbs, which range from softball size to teeny tiny little bulbs the size of BBs. I start yelling at my dad and demand to know "What kind of idiot keeps lightbulbs on a bed?" Neither of us pay any attention to my friend, who keeps screaming and rolling around as he bleeds.

2) I'm in bed and i wake up (in my dream, not from my dream). The pillow by my face is wet. I sit up and see that water is seeping from the pillow. The water is brown and smells bad. I pull the sheets to my face, but the sheets start seeping water too. I throw off the sheets and try to get off the bed, but the mattress is so sopping wet that it sloshes me around like a water bed. My clothes start seeping the brown, stank water. I scream.

3) I gather my family around and show them a projected animated film that i've made. The characters are all obviously based on my family members, and though i think the animation is funny, my family is insulted and they all start yelling at me. The film catches fire and my family keeps yelling at me.

4) I'm at the dorms in UCLA and the local radio station has staged a competition between the dorms. The game is a deathmatch in helicopters. Each dorm gets to pick a pilot and a gunner, and while everyone else gathers in a quad (which doesn't really exist like it did in my dream), the helicopters shoot each other down in teh sky above us. When i realize what's going on, i run around trying to warn everyone how crazy and dangerous this whole thing is, but before anyone listens to me, helicopters start exploding in the sky and crashing down on the audience below. Basically, it's just panic as shrapnel and bodies fly. The radio station that's organized the event is broadcasting thru speakers that can be heard over the explosions and screaming, and the DJ's are just laughing at how "funny college life is".

Last nite's dreams were a series of many unrelated vignettes. Most of the dreams happened very quickly, with events passing so fast that i rarely had time to figure out what was going on. Here are some of the episodes from my dream that i remember:

1) I'm driving my mom's minivan and I'm stopped at a light when the driver of the old school VW bug in front of me gets distracted by something and he accidentally rolls back into my van with a loud CRASH. An argument, a fist fight, and an exploding gas station ensue.

2) My roommate, Kurt, grows a crazy beard that makes him look like a bum. The beard itself is very well kept, but since it's so long, and his clothes aren't the nicest, people on the street are constantly mistaking him for a bum. Fed up, he keeps the beard, but tries dressing differently. When he buys himself a snazzy blue suit, he is mistaken for some crazy artist celebrity and somehow marries into the British Royal Family, all cuz of his beard.

3) I return home to discover that my landlord has repainted my apartment without warning me ahead of time. The color is a horrible vomit hue, and the paint job itself is laughable. The painters didn't even bother to move or cover anything in my apt. They just painted around the furniture, posters, etc, so there are huge spots left unpainted on the walls, and paint splattered all over my stuff. (I was so mad i actually woke up from this dream and fumed for a bit before going back to sleep).

4) I am on a hiking trip with a beautiful women (who's not my girlfriend... sorry babe, it happens). We want to hike to the top of a volcano, but the park ranger at the bottom of the mountain won't let us on the trail cuz he says it's too dangerous. While i try to convince the ranger that we're both experienced hikers, my lady friend performs a hypnotic striptease that lulls the park ranger into a stupor. The girl suggests that we bring the ranger with us on our hike to the top of the volcano and use him as a human sacrifice. I agree and so we head up the mountain trail, her, half-naked, and me, carrying a park ranger. (Too bad this dream shifted into something else before we made it to the top of the volcano... i really liked where it was going)

Remember: this is only a dream...

In my dream, i hear the sound of jets roaring overheard, and when i look up, the sky of Los Angeles is full of hundreds full-scale red, white & blue paper airplanes. They fly around with the maneuverability of F-14s, and they look like tomcats fighters, only they're giant folded paper airplane versions of the F14. The sky is so full of the paper jets that the planes can't help but crash into each other, into bulidings and into the ground. Each one of the hundreds of big paper airplanes crashes into something, it explodes into thousands of smaller paper airplanes, about half the size of the original plane. These smaller planes fly around faster and more frenzied, but since there are exponentially more of them, they crash more frequently than the larger planes. When the smaller planes crash, they explode into even smaller planes. This cycle of crashing and spawning smaller paper airplanes continues until the sky is red, white, and blue, with tiny paper jets about and inch long.

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I took a train ride with my girlfriend, Sam, in my dream last nite. The landscade is very hilly and curvy, so it feels more like a rollercoaster ride than a train ride. Each time the train takes a sharp turn or peaks over a steep hill, all the passengers, including Sam and i, go flying around the train cuz there aren't seatbeats. Some people, like Sam, get nauseous from the twisting and turning. People are pleading with the conductor to slow down, and when a group of passengers storm the engine, they find that there's no one there so the train continues to speed out of control.

When the train reaches the station, it doesn't slow down. It jumps the tracks and flies up onto the city street. The train cars detach from one another and each separate car becomes its own driverless bus. All of the tossing around has sent Sam and I flying into different train cars, so when the cars separate, we are split up into different buses. The buses each drive off out of control in different directions thru the busy city traffic. I don't remember how, but i end up at some rodeo / kungfu stunt show with Sam sitting next to me. Neither of us talk about the crazy train / bus ride or how we got there. We just watch the show, which is cowboys on horses doing the wire stunts like in kungfu movies.