September 04: Star Trek Teachers and a Disturbing Dream

The dreams:  In the first dream, I was in a classroom that was empty except for me and the teacher, who happened to be William Shatner.  Class had just ended, and I stayed after to ask Mr. Shatner for some creative writing advice (whether he was a Writing teacher, I'm not sure).  We were chatting for a while when (of course) Leonard Nimoy came in.  I woke from this dream shortly thereafter.

In the next dream, I was in my old neighborhood again, sitting in the grass of the front yard of my old house.  I was holding a revolver in my hands and getting ready to load the cylinder.  For some unknown reason, I intended to use the tips of my fingers as bullets, and so I had cut them off after the last knuckle.  I knew this would ultimately be okay, because they would grow back (??); sure enough, they had healed completely by the time I was loading the gun.  However, as I was trying to load my fingertips into the gun, I realized I had way too many "bullets"; in fact, one of them was actually an entire finger (which clearly couldn't fit in the revolver).  Then I realized that I had somehow also acquired someone else's fingers in addition to my own.  I dropped the excess fingers and moved away.  Later, I saw a man picking up one of the fingers and licking the cut-off end.  I'm just hoping it was his....

When it was time to test out my gun and its interesting ammo, a woman approached me and asked if she could shoot it.  I agreed, and gave her the gun.  She suggested that I be the target; I acquiesced, only slightly concerned and hesitant.  As I took my position standing against a wall, I started having stronger misgivings -- after all, what if she shot me in the head?  That would hurt, even if the bullets were my own fingers.  I shrugged my concerns off, and closed my eyes and waited.  I heard the telltale boom, but nothing happened.  I opened my eyes, only to see the woman laying on the ground, completely obscured and covered from head to toe by her own blood to the point that at first I didn't even recognize her as the same person.  I reasoned that the gun had backfired and injured her.  I, and several other bystanders, ran to help.  I don't remember much after this; I eventually woke up.

***

My thoughts:  Yeah, we're not going to talk about the first dream; there's not much to say there.  Star Trek guys.  Got it.

What the HELL is with the second dream?  I pride myself on understanding the meaning behind most of my dreams, and if they get a little weird -- hey, it happens, and I usually realize it's a dream soon after.  This one was just plain disturbing.  It's not just that it was twisted and somewhat gory: the nonchalance of everything makes it doubly disturbing.  And at no point did I have a problem with any of it, save the slight concern of getting shot in the head "because it might hurt."  Shot in the head by my own fingers, which were being used as bullets!  But the guy picking up a random finger and licking it takes the cake.

Where did this come from?  I don't watch gory movies.  I don't have violent or disturbing thoughts like this while awake.  Who knows....

April 30, 2009: Short Gross Dream

This was a pretty short dream. I don't remember what happened, but I somehow put a huge staple through my thumb. This was painful enough, but pulling it out was somehow worse. After I pulled it out, for some reason the two puncture wounds were exaggeratedly huge, to the point that I could see the bones in my thumb, though there was no blood. I noticed that dust and dirt were getting into the gaping wounds, so I washed them out with water - very painful - and put a bandaid on each hole. I don't remember much after that until the dream ended.

*****

I actually have these kinds of dreams a lot - where I get injured and the wound is ridiculously huge, and I can see all kinds of bones and guts and stuff, but somehow it's not that serious and I'm not bleeding to death. I just get pretty grossed out is all.

-Matthew

April 20, 2009: Numerous Short Dreams

Last night and this morning I had quite a few shorter dreams, probably because I kept waking up due to someone hammering outside my window. Jerks. Anyway, here goes:

In the first dream I was watching some sort of TV crime drama, though when I "watch" things in dreams I'm usually involved at least as a passive but present observer. I only recall the tail end of this particular drama, wherein I witnessed two rather horrific events unfold. About all I recall is that the story ended tragically, and rather gruesomely, with one man being thrown in some sort of giant garbage compactor that operated, of course, by grinding and crushing with giant toothed gears rather than just flattening; and elsewhere, a woman exploded (in slow motion) due to, I'm guessing, a suicide bomb. This was about where the first dream ended.

In the second dream, the guys from Penny Arcade were working with South Park Studios on a movie deal. They were in the recording studio, putting together the soundtrack; however, there was a bit of contention over the direction that the score was taking: the Penny Arcade guys, specifically Gabe (and of course they were portrayed as their cartoon selves), wanted the music to be dark and eerie, whereas the South Park music team kept pitching lively, bouncy music with chorus vocals parodying those campy 50s radio and TV jingles. Gabe attempted to explain the direction he wanted the music to go by describing one of the monsters in the film: a gruesome undead beast. The music director nodded as if he understood, and said "how about this?" And proceeded to play the same kind of campy jingle music. Gabe and Tycho stormed out in a huff, and suddenly I was watching Fox News, where the ticker at the bottom suddenly started bashing on Penny Arcade. Here ended the second dream.

The third dream was one of my usual "school" dreams. I was in class, working on a project with a group, only I had no idea what the class, project, or point in time in the semester was. Later, we were taking a field trip, only my dad was driving and he missed the turn we needed. This is about where the third dream ended.

There were a few other bits and pieces of dreams throughout the night and morning, though I can't recall them right now.

*****
Sometimes my brain can get really creative; sometimes it gets creative in how graphically gruesome it is. I think I've seen enough disturbing scenes of blood and guts in my dreams to desensitize me to any movie or video game violence.

I'm not sure why I would dream about Penny Arcade, let alone a Penny Arcade movie being made by South Park Studios with Fox News taking interest. I suppose I did see an ad for Penny Arcade's video game last night, and someone on Facebook had one of those stupid images with characters in the style of South Park. And everyone loves Fox News...

My school dreams are always about like this, and never lucid unfortunately. These, I'm sure, do have very real psychological significance. I'm always dreaming that I'm failing classes, or completely confused, or taking a test and have no idea what the class is about. The variant of these dreams is that class is over for the day, and for the life of me, I cannot get my stuff organized and put away, so that I can leave and go to my next class within the allocated ten minutes. It's true that school is always on my mind, especially with finals coming up, but I get no reprieve even in sleep. Hopefully after graduation those dreams will become less frequent.

--Matthew