paralogue.org

I slept for like ten hours last night. I ended up dreaming, which is sort of rare for me.

It was a really long and in-depth dream about being back in school. I was my age now, though. I remember it was about seventh grade and I had to essentially do a new game plus but with an emphasis on science and math. I remember even recapitulating the plan to myself: I was doing the entire thing over again, even university, just to fill out my STEM skills.

I think at some point it fast forwarded and I ended up in high school. At some point I started to wonder what I was going to do at the end of all this -- I would be in my 40s -- and I remember having all these thought associations play out about people I knew who did two Bachelors and whatnot. But then I woke up. Uneventful.

The other week I had a dream where my phone screen broke. It had this enormous crack across it, like a bullet hit it. It's a flip phone -- a foldable, I mean -- and I peeled off the screen, crack and all, like a sheet of paper. The screen still worked. It was pure light and colour. I would poke at it and feel nothing but warmth.

i've been keeping a dream journal for years now, and i've found doing so to be fulfilling. though whenever i've heard other people describe their dreams, i've always felt like my own are more fragmented in comparison. mine usually feel more like vignettes, broken into three or so separate parts. but if i can get at least one of those written down then i'm happy.

i feel like these dreams are important to me though. the environments, the desires, the scenarios… they've all stuck with me and some of them filter through into my writing in time.
one of them, where i visited a polycule house and found the experience really idyllic, is probably the reason why i ended up where i am right now.

for a bit during college i tried to condition myself to lucid dream. i got to the point where i could make it happen every so often, but once i recognized i was in a dream i'd usually just decide i wanted to be flying instead. which was enjoyable, but also kinda boring, so i stopped the habit. maybe i decided that my conscious mind is uninteresting and shouldn't be the one calling the shots.

here's a recent dream that i'm struck by the feeling of, circa april 18th:

tried to escape someone who planned to kill me.
i almost did it when i told this lady to lock the gate to the park as she left, but out of courtesy she saw him coming and let him through first before she locked it.
but, since there were now a few other people around, he decided to invite them all to his house.
once we got there, he started to shower – which was my chance to escape – but the others saw me being antsy and encouraged me to relax.
a couple guys were bringing in drinks and i offered to go out to help them, but they said they've just brought the last of them in.
one of the food items was cocktail weenies or similar and they needed toothpicks, but instead they decided to break down some of the furniture inside and whittle down the wood to make those. i made a couple for my own use and then picked up a book.
i turned to a page with a poem that had a lot of parentheticals within it. i remembered reading it in college (?).
a lady walked up to me:
her: "What are you doing?"
me: "reading this book while we wait"
her: "[some polite comment about how if i get bored, there are still more toothpicks that need made]"
me: "i know, but i just found this poem interesting because i had to read it for school and it ended up influencing my writing later on without me realizing it. it made me remember that poetry is cool and i should read more of it. will i get to read more poetry in the future?"
she didn't respond. the water running in the distance shut off.

my dreams are either scary shotgun blasts of thematically related fragments all night or one long narrative that keeps twisting. i have these half nightmares of waking up 10x fatter and that being the whole focus or a series of little vignettes where im being chased, by different things each time.

this one time i had a dream where there was drama on Wikipedia talk pages and malicious edits between a bunch of twitter porn artists writing vanity articles for themselves and getting mad they keep getting asked to cite for accuracy or biased information abt drama they were involved in.

it is very rare real people that i know are in any of my dreams but sometimes they show up.

Another dream last night. Someone I knew was stalking me. I kept running away down a dark road and hid in a low gutter that led to the sewers -- I had a pillow above my head? But they stabbed through it and pulled me up. They shot me once. I shot them seven times back -- with a gun that kind of looked like a lipstick tube-- and they laughed and shot me seven times again. They seemed unfazed. I felt weak and started stumbling through the streets. I called 911 but felt unsure if that worked in Montreal. The preamble on the line went for ages. I concluded it was hopeless to even get help and collapsed.

It's neat to see that other people have similar formats of dreams in being kind of scatterd shot connected vignettes. I use to dream journal regularly which encouraged it, stopped when a friend wanted to do a regular dream journal exchange because it became an obligation.

Last dream I had was because I took too much Melatonin I think, it actually woke me up:

Some sort of abyss demon (with a shadow-y/fluid form) had possessed a child's teddy bear and was slowly corrupting them and encouraging them to hurt their siblings in this like extra large suburban house. First the POV was sort of focused on the teddy bear, and then it switched to a grim reaper type figure in the first person who was like, co-possessed by another abyss demon, but this demon wanted to be the sole inheritor of the abyss so it struck out an understanding with heaven that gave it light powers, and it could should out light lances that would line, accelerate in the gravity field of the other abyss demons sin. Some sort of fight scene played out but I jolted up when the possessed teddy bear tried to score out my eyes with rusty nails.

Normally my dreams are a lot more vignette but sometimes they are kinda high concept genre stuff.

Was the first child of a mother who got together with another father twelve years later, getting two more kids. Became a sort of surrogate parent to the kids. All I remember is trying to raise these kids who sort of looked like me but didn't.

Even though it is not a dream, its in the realm of sleep: lately when I wake up, i see constricting eyes or little stars that scare me so much when they start appearing i try to hide from them or swat them away.

I dreamt I was trying to find an old crypto wallet. So I typed in different seeds to generate private keys and then inadvertently stumbled onto a wallet with $3 million of Ethereum on it. I began to wonder how to actually make use of this without getting caught before starting to realise the wallet was indeed in use and it would be super hard. I would need to offload it into Monero. Eventually I just gave up.

I had a dream my boobs had gotten really big overnight and that none of my clothes fit correctly and it stressed me out a lot. It was like my whole wardrobe had shrunk three sizes and i remember feeling constricted and uncomfortable and upset i couldnt wear my favorite shirt anymore.

All I remember about my dream last night was that there was this enormous gymnasium full of people — maybe watching a concert or a conference or something — and some people were blasting our song Thanatropism and I was like weirded out that they knew it at all. I'm astonished my brain has the whole thing buffered in there.

so for context, as a kid we had this family who we were friends with, and we went on family vacations with them and sometimes i'd have sleepovers there or some of their kids would sleep over at our house. one of the kids was about the same age as me and i considered him to be my best friend – i don't know if he felt the same way, since he was a lot busier than i was and so i didn't see him very often, but i know he still thought very fondly of me. he was kind of a soft boy: artsy, a bit of a wimp, emotionally effusive and usually had a smile on his face. he tended to get teased and bullied for it though, and whenever i saw this i tended to step in and stop it… even if it was all in good fun, it still rubbed me the wrong way. but he didn't let it get him down, and he kept that same cheery demeanor throughout the time i knew him.

after high school, we didn't see each other much; even though we went to the same university, he was in the graphic design program and i was being shuttled around the liberal arts, and once we both graduated we more-or-less lost contact. the last time we talked was in 2021, when i was leaving the area and i wanted to make sure i saw him again before i left. i drove two hours out to meet him for coffee, we hung out for an hour, and then i drove two hours back. even after all this time, i found it really easy to talk to him, and we both wished that we had more time…

anyway, the dream:

---

i was in an amusement park, though i apparently must've went by myself. as i was walking around trying to find something to do, i ran into that family. i exclaimed "fuck." (affectionate) but we were happy to see each other. the parents and their two oldest kids were there, though i didn't see my friend. we walked together and chatted for a bit, which was nice, though i felt self-conscious that the first thing that came out of my mouth was fuck.

i then was back at the hotel and cuddling in bed with that friend. we were really happy to see each other. i thought about telling him that, perhaps if things went differently then i would've dated him, but couldn't figure out when to say it. he then said "by the way, i got divorced. :)"

this shocked me, because he wasn't even seeing anybody the last time we met, three years ago, but apparently in that time he had found someone to both marry and divorce. i said "oh no, what happened?" but he seemed nonchalant about it. he told me that they divorced because he broke her WAZ, which is a kind of third-party pro gamepad for the wii u. it was apparently expensive and rare to find now (so effectively irreplaceable), and when he was trying to reseat it on its dock the corner broke off. he pulled it out to show me for good measure (half of one handle had snapped off), and then he turned on mario kart 8 and started playing by himself. i said that this was a pretty small thing for her to divorce him over, and he thought so too, but apparently she was complaining "as women do" about a laundry list of other issues she had with the relationship, with him imitating her (or just a) nagging voice. i started to think that more serious factors were involved that he was either omitting or failed to notice himself – either that, or they both followed the christian tradition of marrying a poor fit just to be able to have someone to boink.

he was very bad at mario kart and couldn't seem to get above 8th.

I had a dream that a friend of mine and me were going on a trip, and as part of the trip we were doing like, amateur 2 on 2 hockey game. I distinctly remember that while it wasn't an official thing or something I professionally did, it was sort of quasi official -- like having teachers from different schools play basketball as an official goodwill connection thing. It was in like a ski lodge in the middle of a plain in an snowy place.

The head hockey person (?) on the other team was very pretty, and after I showed up my friend had sort of disappeared, and the other person I was going to play with (who really only showed up to drop this note?) put down a note saying up that the opponent hockey head used to be an actor, I think as a way of warning that she was manipulative. The woman who left the note felt like a mashup of a girl I knew in university and Taiga from Toradora.

We ended up playing the game by myself versus the 3 other people, and I think we were tied and there was a foul were the opponent lead fell on me anime style, and I think I had enough goodwill/was starstruck by her that I ended up basically conceding the foul in her favor, which gave them the win.

And I got the impression doing this was almost a sort of professional disappointment even if it's a Doesn't Matter thing (school rivalry?). The woman who left the note warning about the opponent was furious at me, whereas the friend I went with just kinda smiled sadly at me and said something like "the pretty girl with the thumbs up got you, didn't she?", and I said yeah and then we moved on.

I don't remember if I had any final interaction with the opponent hockey team member or she just sort of curtly stopped acknowledging my existence. I like to imagine she waves politely and then turns away.

I dreamed me and my CTO decided we would go to university together and it was this elite school for something hard like something like ML or whatever. The first day of class the prof picked on me specifically first for asking a question weird, and then for just wanting to get up to throw out a cup and I got so tilted I took off.

Another prof at the school saw me nap on a chair and was like "You seem relaxed. most students are panicking about like, how to get papers done." and I was like, "idk why ppl stress about papers. they make literally zero difference to the world. there are so many more important things in life".

Later on he was like, "? we're doing this right? my mom said this course is the best, we gotta do it" and I pulled in my cofounder from my video game days who had 3 more new names and they were like explaining why I was unlikely to do it. Another prof entered asking if we had feedback for the course bc it's a weed course and they're considering a more Inclusive TCL100 and I was like, uhhh, not sure I would change anything.

Had a dream about discovering the work of an artist and tracing it, he had lived with and documented the work of several sex workers who lived/worked together in the same building floor (and that he saw?) before part of the dream shifted back into a limited third person perspective around him

A lot of his work was kind of horny and violent cartoon shlock that wouldn't work well today but apparently did ok in it's underground comic book scene. He was sort of ambivalent about he documented and described the women around him, in his work. I think he was in Italy?

Eventually the scene dies and most of the women moves out and most don't keep up contact or move onto a new scene and don't include him, and he is sort of in denial, working in increasing squalor inside the old floor until he eventually moves out into the sunlight and wanders like another lost soul. His comic book wander about and filter around and are read at cafes and bars but don't make a huge impression until they grab my attention and I try and make sense of this, jumping back to the start.

The whole time the dream had this strong feeling that I'd learned about this cartoonist before, either in a previous or real life -- the precedence could be Paying for It? Especially with how the cartoonist is sort of weirdly ambivalent about how to portray the women.

I dreamt last night that I signed up for some donation membership with rateyourmusic, and they had a "estimate how much you should donate" or whatever, and in the process I accidentally hit my credit card with a bill for $157,000. I looked at my credit card and panicked because they just let it happen, and anything above a specific amount had a 1% per day interest rate (similar to cash advances). So I was figuring out how to undo this stupid transaction, this meaningless donation that seemed like it would bankrupt me for one stupid mistake.

I emailed them, thought about talking to my credit card directly, and then when I woke up I immediately remembered that credit limits exist and that a transaction of this size would almost certainly be flagged and it wouldn't happen.

I talked to Seraphine about this and she said it might represent a loss of control over finances, or of being in situations where I am no longer as safe as I would like to be, and it made me think a lot about how scary immigration would be in this respect, and maybe a lot of the fear is just financial, like — if you lose your job, you're thrown to the winds financially, and even moving house to Canada is a big bill just to secure a new place and furnish it, or to stay with my parents, or something.

Dreamt that there was a vampire/human hybrid found and they were just sorta living their life. Everyone seemingly had an opinion about them; there were supporters and detractors but they functioned like this nonstop papparazzi. I had a friend on the special ops who were focused on killing the thing and I was trying to talk them out of it or at least be careful. At some point we were in some underground cavern, and it got tense, and the special forces person just fired an RPG inside the cavern killing nearly everybody. I remember radioing from topside saying "don't you know what a ghoul is? This thing isn't over" and making my way down the escalators into this cavern looking for anyone still breathing. But it was totally clean, like nothing had occurred, not like there were 16 people skulking along this cryptid thing. The vampire kid wasn't even harmed. Just in a hoodie and jeans started making his way back upstairs.