Category Archives: Dreams

Not Your Usual Bucket Of Water

Posted by direflail on

I had a long, exhausting, but very exciting dream the other night about being on the run from a dark army led by an evil witch.

I can’t remember many of the details, but at the end of the dream I wasn’t directly involved and I was watching things like a movie. I watched in horror as the witch had cornered my 4 year old son Sam in the ruins of a warehouse. A 7-headed hydra sprouted from her back, and flames swirled all around her, and she yelled something appropriately evil and hubrissy like “MY POWER IS BEYOND YOUR REALITY!”

I expected him to cry, but instead I saw a steely look cross my young son’s eyes. He stood tall and confident with his chest out and shoulders back. A narrator’s voice began to speak: “It was then that the coder’s son did what came naturally to him.”

Then Sam enclosed the witch in <div> tags and set her css style to display:none.

This Opportunity Comes Once In A Lifetime

Posted by direflail on

I’m gonna chalk this dream up to me being super-congested (rendering my CPAP mask useless).

I was in college (I think), and I decided to live out on the quad and left all my stuff (consisting of three sketchbooks I had as a kid) out in the open. I don’t know why I was surprised to find them half buried and all dirty and being stomped on by a horde of beer-swilling fratboys later that night, who were trying to get into a trailer that I think was full of the marijuanas. They yelled at me and were shoving me around as I tried desperately to get my stuff back and I was screaming and crying and eventually shoved some of them back enough to get my things and run.

I found myself in what was half the post office in Pekin, and half the Milwaukee Convention Center, and I was really upset and I went in the restroom there and realized this experience was going to be the basis of my “8 Mile Experience”, so I started rapping like Eminem as hard as I could. Even dream-me realized that freestyling the words “flibida bibida” at the end of a lyric was going to get me thrown off the stage, so I went back into the lobby to be depressed.

Then my mom showed up riding a tricycle that could cover windows in ice crystals, and saying things that were meant to be comforting but were instead extremely sad. I am glad I can’t remember any of them. They were so bad that Elmo appeared and told me “Don’t worry. This is one of the episodes of Sesame Street you didn’t watch back in the 90’s when everything was really depressing”.

Missing Or Corrupt Parking DLL

Posted by direflail on

My first project at my new job has been to take An Existing Site and modify it for Other Purposes, thereby creating Another Site. I have been knee-deep in documentation and reviewing code for nearly two weeks now.

Our office is on the 9th floor of the building, of which the first 6 floors are parking deck. This makes for a great deal of counterclockwise driving anytime you want to go up or down.

Last night, I dreamt of the project I’m working on, which manifested itself as our parking deck. If you went up a level, my new code showed up in light blue. If you went down, the old code was displayed in white. So I drove around in a circle for several hours, ascending and descending as needed, fixing bugs and adjusting things.

I woke up terrified that I was going to go into work and find the changes I’d made were real.

WotC Vampires & Obamachucks

Posted by direflail on

Couple really damn weird dreams this weekend.

The Origin Story

I dreamt I was watching a documentary about Greg Bilsland, one of the producers at Wizards of the Coast.

In it was the story of how he became a vampire. It wasn’t a long story. He was standing in a room next to a powered-down arcade cabinet, and the lights got dim and a disembodied voice asked “do you like games that are relaxing?”. Then black stuff swirled everywhere and it got scary and I knew he’d become a vampire.

I don’t remember much else, but I remember the narrator saying “how strange it is that a member of the damned has taken the game of D&D so far away from its Satanic roots”.

Michelangelo Clearly Voted Blue

This was a long dream, most of which I don’t remember. It was something about renting out my grandmother’s old house and hating the new tenants or something. I was just happy, as usual, to get to hang out in there for a little while again. I wouldn’t exactly call it lucid dreaming because I’m not really aware at the time that’s what’s going on, but I always feel like it’s the latest in a series of me cheating fate and going back in time.

At one point, I don’t know exactly when, aliens took over the Earth and pretty much blew up everything and I was part of the resistance. I found myself on the White House lawn, and President Obama was lying there, unconscious and armless, on the ground. Mitt Romney was also there, gesturing menacingly at everyone. Turns out he had allied himself with the aliens to get revenge for losing the election, they’d given him superpowers. Though Obama had fought valiantly, Mitt ripped his arms off and was preparing to finish him off as I arrived.

Well, I couldn’t let that stand. So I did what any rational red-blooded American would do:

I shrunk the President down to 2′ long, and I started using him as a pair of nunchaku.

I’m not sure how effective this was against Romney. I deftly evaded his rage-filled swings and struck him repeatedly with the President right on the Reed Richards grey part of his head, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down much. It must have done something, because he soon changed to what I recognized as his “secret Mexican attack” — waving a Southwestern-themed throw rug at me, possibly trying to flop it on my head.

I woke up before the final outcome of the battle, but I know I felt like I was losing. I may have voted for Obama as President, but I would definitely not vote for him again as a melee weapon.

 

Money Boo Boo and the Tree Of Salami

Posted by direflail on

My dreams last night were plagued with Obama and Romney, as they were at the debate at the moment when Romney got all up in Obama’s face. No matter where I went, no matter what I was doing, there they were staring each other down and making their points. I couldn’t understand the words coming out of their mouths, I could just hear their voices. This went on all damned night. I think I might have had a fever or something, because I get dreams that don’t change topic for the entire night, drive me insane, and leave me exhausted the next day when I have a fever.

I’m still not sure it was better than what I’d dreamed the night before.

In that dream, I walked into my house and there was Neil Gaiman, sawing a salami-sized log on a dinner plate with a tiny hacksaw. He smiled at me. Then a bunch of people came over. He’d invited them all for individual tutoring on how to write erotic fanfiction.

I think the worst part of that dream was waking up and realizing that if Neil Gaiman offered to teach me how to write erotic fanfiction, I’d definitely take him up on it.

Commemorative Theatre Mouthwash

Posted by direflail on

I don’t remember everything from my dream last night, but what remained is pretty clear evidence to me that my fall allergies are kicking my sinus-butt enough that my CPAP machine can’t work well.

I went to a play at some theatre in northern Wisconsin. Each season, they would release a commemorative bottle of mouthwash featuring art from that play. The one I was at featured green mouthwash and what may have been the face of a smiling leprechaun. I’m mostly sure Steven Townshend was attached to this project somehow, but I never actually saw him. When I looked at the bottle, I had a revelation that I had two more of these bottles from previous seasons (one gold, one purple) at home and wondered how they got into my house.

I had either created or was about to create something, and I’d enlisted the help of a woman  to do it. I went to the restroom, and as I was washing my hands, I realized I needed my friend Jake to do the guitars and bass for whatever project this was, and the music I had in my head was pretty sweet. I wish I could remember it.

When I came out, the woman simultaneously was making out with a random dude and signing over the rights to my creation to him. At that point, an actual physical label began floating in front of her that said “The Whore That Betrayed Me”. Subtle, brain. I clearly felt bad about calling a woman a whore, even subconsciously, because there was a brief flashback scene where it showed how she got her start as a prostitute and lived a life of misery and poverty eventually leading to her stealing people’s stuff for a living. It made me briefly empathize with her, then I resumed hating her guts again.

The Great Dream Layoff Of 2010

Posted by direflail on

One of my favorite parts about my old blog was posting lots of weird dreams. Sadly, I have since discovered that a sizeable portion of their majesty and splendor was due to me having a moderately severe case of sleep apnea. Since wearing a mask and allowing myself to go deeper than REM sleep ever, my visits to dreamland are much less frequent and less vivid – but they’re still weird.

Last night, unfortunately, wasn’t so much weird as it was awful. I was once again employed by MultiAd. I find myself dreaming about that every now and then, but this dream in particular found me in an unusual circumstance – getting laid off again. My co-worker James and I were walking to a meeting and then a new, evil HR manager called us into an office and made us start talking about the giant project a bunch of us worked a ton of overtime during the summer of 2010. Actually, it was more like demanding we justify our every action in the feeble hope of saving our jobs.

Evil HR guy was being really snide and condescending, and making frequent references to how he’s not surprised a first year employee would be this bad, and I countered that I had worked there five years and that was pretty effective for some reason. I had him on the ropes. OK not really he was still going to fire us both. The most interesting part of the whole dream for me was listening to dream-James tell of his version of the events of that summer.

I woke up before I lost my dream-job. Still a hell of a way to start the morning.