drewbear: (White - hate)
I had a couple of different nightmares last night. One involved something called a "popcorn dog" which was something like a cross between a Labrador puppy, a squid and a stinging jellyfish. The second involved being trapped in a maze of a hospital and desperately trying to get out.

As you could imagine, I slept like crap last night.
drewbear: (skycolor)
I don't remember my dreams often, or at least, not for more than a few moments beyond waking. However, occasionally I have one that kinda refuses to go away. Last night I had one of those. Bad enough to wake me up, heart pounding, even!

I was inside a large stone, vaguely medieval-y building which looked something like a combination throne room and cathedral. It was lined with rows of low stone benches with a big dais at one end and a large set of doors at the other, with a portcullis lowered in front of them. The room was sparsely populated: a woman (my wife, I think) sitting on one the first benches sewing/embroidering something, a group of six or eight youngish women (mid teens to mid twenties) dressed all in simple white dresses who told me they were traveling nuns, and an elaborately dressed man who I was talking to. I myself* was older and walked with a limp and was dressed in the kind of finery you see on English kings like Henry III.

Anyway, the man I was talking to mentioned something that made me go over to a hatch in the wall beside the doors and opened it to look through. I saw a HUGE tornado (Cat. 5, easily) in the middle distance, heading directly for the building. I promptly slammed the hatch shut and started yelling for everyone to get underground in the cellar. As people ran for a previously-unnoticed-by-me staircase, I hobbled over and down the stairs, with the sound of the tornado getting louder and louder. On the next floor down, I saw a large, tall, completely open room (think Grand Central Station) whose wall facing the tornado was actually a giant piece of glass with two small doors at either side. I saw the nun-girls running outside and started screaming "NO! I SAID THE CELLAR, NOT THE BASEMENT!", but it was too late, as the base of the tornado appeared outside the building and sucked them up into it. The tornado kinda... bounced off the building and moved sideways out of my sight, but then I saw 4 of the nuns come running back from that direction, screaming. Mini-twisters were following them and latched onto their backs, trying to pull them back, but I was somehow holding the nuns where they were with my mind.

At this point, the adrenaline of the scene woke me up and it took me about 10 minutes to get back to sleep. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me that nuns and tornadoes don't mix.

*My remembered dreams are pretty evenly split between ones where I'm a third-party observer (like watching a movie or TV show) and one where I'm an actual participant. The ones where I'm a participant, I usually phase in and out of the "body" that represents me, so that I have both 1st and 3rd person perspective at the "same time".
drewbear: (Drew comtemplative)
First off, let me say that I know I have a good life. I'm in generally good health, I'm gainfully employed and earning enough to live on, my debts and loans are small and getting smaller. I have a home, a car, a computer and good friends. While there is room for improvement, my life is pretty good.

That being said, I've had a vague sense of foreboding for the last 8-9 months or so. It feels like something very big and very bad is going to happen and relatively soon. I don't know what this "something" is, but it's been slowly impinging on my dreams and subtly affecting how I interact with the world. And it's getting stronger.

I've always been a fan of the (post-)apocalyptic genre, but lately it seems to be the only kind of fiction that can hold my attention past the first chapter or so. I've begun looking into what I would need to do for a food/herb garden for my porch (answer: moot point. I don't get nearly as much sun as most food plants would need). I'm researching camping and survivalist equipment, trying to find stuff that I can afford that also doesn't suck. I'm socking away money into my savings accounts whenever and however I can, not because I feel strongly about building a nest egg or I'm saving up to buy something big (I could use what I already have saved to immediately clear one debt and seriously damage another), but rather because I have the sense that it's going to be a really, REALLY good idea to have a semi-decent emergency fund available sometime in the near future.

What kinda scares me is that, by observing and talking with people, it seems like I'm not the only one who feels this way. At least 1/3 of the people I glancingly mention this topic to are themselves worried about it and most are also preparing for some unknown, worrisome disaster. Planting or expanding edible gardens, stocking up on medicines, stocking up on essential yet one-shot goods, stocking up on dry goods, stocking up on emergency gear out-of-season, stocking up on guns and ammunition. The daughter of one of my coworkers is, according to said coworker, prone to occasional highly-accurate precognizant dreams and has been having nightmares regarding a similar looming disaster.

I'm certain that at least part of this is a subconscious reaction to the current depressing and stressful American situation, but so much of people's reactions is focused on preparing for an IMMINENT danger with long-term consequences that it's kind of hard to totally dismiss it as a stress-reaction. Also, until I bring it to their attention, so many of the people I talk with seem to think that they're the only ones who feel like this; they don't initiate discussions about it and seem reluctant to talk about it for some ill-defined fear of being labeled paranoid or crackpots. But once that barrier has been passed, they're eager to share their preparation plans and tips, acting slightly relieved that they're not alone.

I'm worried. And I'm making contingency plans.
drewbear: (skycolor)
I had an unusually coherent (sorta) dream last night.

A group of people were being constantly moved around by bus, rootless, unwanted and refused by anyplace they tried to stop. So the bus kept on going. Biggo Mortensen was the driver of this bus and was getting as frustrated as the riders, since he wasn't allowed to go home until they had found one of their own.

Then things got hallucinatory. The land they traveled through became barren and lifeless as the sky become cold and clear. Then the ground and sky started to change colors. The land turned mint green, the sky pink; blood red and brown; neon yellow and black; sky blue and gold; etc. The road turned and remained pitch black, like a swath of nothingness laid across the land, twisting and turning through hills and valleys in an endless mandate to journey.

The vehicle began to change as well, taking on aspects of a riverboat and a 747 and a submersible and a truck as it adapted to the terrain. All the people faded into invisibility, leaving their voices to remind the world that they remained, guiding their driver through the lands of desolation and madness. Until.

The road ended at the edge of a cliff, where the world returned to itself, green and blue and stony grey. And those who were not allowed to settle and rest became themselves again, sitting at the edge of the sliff, staring down into the world. And so did the people of the world look up at them, wondering and worrying.

Then the roads down were hacked from the stone and the people were brought down into homes of their own, and the driver was released from his task and went home.

*********

My uncles were part of the dream too, part of the people of the world. And when the movie ended and I returned to my regularly scheduled dream, I joked with my family that although I couldn't remember the movie's name, it would be the only one that I would find if I Googled "Viggo Mortensen" and "Larry Stanley" together.

July 2013

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