Live from Austin!

I’m a lucid dreamer. I am somewhat conscious during my dreams, I’m aware that they’re dreams, and I can influence their content somewhat. However, there seem to be certain inherent rules or limitations to what I can do.

One limitation is that I can’t make sudden, drastic changes. If I try to make things appear from nowhere, or disappear before my eyes, it breaks the dream and I wake up. So if I’m being chased through a shopping mall by a flesh-eating zombie, I can’t just make the zombie disappear. However, I can remember that there’s a sports shop around the corner with a good supply of baseball bats and a few rifles behind the back counter.

Another rule is that things have to be somewhat realistic. They can be bizarre or surreal, or can obey unusual laws of physics, but they have to be basically believable. So if I try to dream that I meet Jeri Ryan at an SF convention, that’ll work; if I try to dream that she finds me irresistably sexy and invites me back to her room, something in my brain or in the dream world will say ’Uh-uh, no way, ain’t gonna happen’ and I’ll wake up.

I can do things when I’m dreaming that I can’t do in real life. However, another rule of the dream world is that I have to learn new skills—just like real life.

The first thing I learnt was how to become invisible. It helped a lot with nightmares when I was a kid. However, it wasn’t a complete solution, because some monsters have a good sense of hearing, or could smell me. The obvious solution was to learn to fly; it was hard work, though. Initially I couldn’t get far from ground level, unless I was lucky enough to drift higher without realizing it. The breakthrough came when I realized that it didn’t work the way people always portray it as working in films; you don’t fly like a bird. It’s more like swimming through the air. I’ve pretty much got it mastered now.

A more recent skill I’ve developed is the ability to pass through solid objects. I’m still a beginner at it; it’s somewhat uncomfortable, and I have to brace myself, so I tend not to do it very often.

The fact that it takes years of practice to learn a dream skill implies a sense of continuity… and indeed, the dream world does seem to have continuity. I’ll sometimes have several dreams on successive nights that make up a longer dream. Some locations crop up again and again, and remain mostly consistent. Interestingly, even completely imaginary locations have some continuity.

On the other hand, dreams also repeat, so time in the dream world isn’t strictly a linear flow from past to future. The repetitions aren’t complete verbatim ones, though; generally once I realize I’ve encountered the scenario before, I can use information from the previous time to help me. I also get to use any new skills I’ve learnt—sometimes I’ve had a single repeat of a dream many years after the original.

I’m not sure what any of this means, if anything. I just find it interesting.

Other people have dreams of being a rock star.

I have dreams of being a rock star’s studio engineer.

I think this means I don’t want to be a celebrity. Not even subconsciously.

Another incredibly elaborate SF movie dream last night.

The premise: Three friends driving home late one night try to take a shortcut. They take a wrong turning and enter an unmarked tunnel. It seems to be unfinished construction work. They reason that it must come out somewhere, and decide to follow it. After a long while, they are surprised to find some kind of checkpoint, like the US-Canada border station, where they can park their car and enter… where?

Curious, they park and make their way in. They discover an entire underground city, apparently a completely separate civilization. Although the people speak English, they have their own currency, their own peculiar social and political conventions, and so on. These people apparently visit our world from time to time, but mostly live in theirs.

The three friends make their way in, and try to blend in and see what’s going on. They soon discover that while the place is mostly inhabited by humans, it is seemingly run by a race of humanoid, possibly alien, insects. The humans are fully aware of this and apparently comfortable with it; humans and insects work alongside each other in positions of authority, though it seems that the ultimate authority is always insect. Perhaps the aliens do a really good job?

Our friends separate, and one of them discovers that all is not as well as it initially appeared. Unknown to the human population and its insect rulers, a sub-species or cult of the insects is making plans to take over. The cultists are gradually replacing people with insect doppelganger, in the usual sci fi manner. The rest of the plot was interesting but convoluted, involving philosophical questions of whether a duplicate can be a close enough duplicate that it unintentionally begins to pick up the attitudes and values of the original. Rather Philip K. Dick, really, and a cut above the usual way this theme is treated.

Interestingly enough, I dreamed that I was watching all this in a multi-screen cinema. Supposedly the movie was directed by Douglas Trumbull, who was now working with synchronized multi-screen presentation… So there were parts of the movie where I could turn around and see what was happening in a different direction.

The attention to detail was amazing. All of the vehicles in the underground city had a slightly alien quality to them, the buildings were futuristic—even the houses—and there was a hexagonal, insectoid quality to the layout of the streets.

Last night I dreamt of Gilbert and Sullivan. That I went to see a performance of The Mikado, and really enjoyed it.

The thing is, I’m not a big G&S fan. I’m not really a G&S fan at all. I haven’t endured an entire performance of anything of theirs. But I’ve always had the vague feeling, perhaps due to peer pressure, that it’s the kind of thing I ought to like.

When I read lyrics, it’s certainly very witty. So I rented Topsy-Turvy, and by the end of that I felt like I’d experienced enough G&S to last a lifetime. I had that definite feeling of faint aesthetic nausea, the musical equivalent of having eaten an entire box of chocolates.

So why do I dream of G&S? Why do I wake up thinking maybe I should give it another try?

Maybe for the same reason I listen to Shout by DEVO on occasion, even though it has the same faintly nauseating quality caused by excessive similarity to itself. (Is this even making any sense?)

Maybe I could get over it. I remember overdosing on TELEX and actually feeling sick, but over time my stomach learnt to deal with it. Perhaps G&S is just a taste I’d need to acquire the same way.

But still, why would I want to acquire it? For that matter, what kept me listening to TELEX?

Last night I dreamed about Jeri Ryan. I have no idea why. I should make it clear that it wasn’t a dream about Seven of Nine; it was a dream about Jeri Ryan. It wasn’t really sexual, except in a kind of playful way. In the dream she turned out to have a really interesting personality, with quite a warped sense of humor that I liked a lot.

I’ve no idea what she’s like in reality. I’ve never met her. All very perplexing.

We went to Jillian’s in Boston again. This time, as well as the pool tables and bar and the video games, they had added a petting zoo.

We felt sorry for the animals, being in such a noisy environment and exposed to cigarette smoke and alcohol. So we decided to liberate them into the pastoral surroundings of downtown Boston, in the hope that they would make their way to the Fenway.

It went pretty well once I found a feed bag that had been left behind a slot machine. The sheep were a bit reluctant, and when they finally emerged into the sunlight we saw that they weren’t real prize sheep—they were cheap plastic prize sheep. Instead of wool they had shiny PVC.

I was talking to the llama, trying to persuade it to have a word with the guinea pigs about making a break for it, when I woke up.

I dreamt I was a pilot in the F9000 anti-gravity racing federation… A Wip3out racer. The races themselves were tense and exciting, but eventually our team won. Champagne was opened, and we headed for the stands to meet the adoring crowd.

DEVO were there. It turned out Mark Mothersbaugh was a big A-G Systems fan. We (the team) celebrated by performing a karaoke version of “Mongoloid” in their honor.

With hand puppets.

Then I woke up.

I had the most amazing dream last night. It was like an SF movie.

I was part of the team on a mission to Mars. After an accident while touching down in the middle of a sandstorm, our communications with Earth were wiped out. Because of the orbits of the two planets, we couldn\x92t begin the return journey for at least 18 months.

Stranded on Mars, alone in a claustrophobic spacecraft, and under intense stress, we gradually started to go insane—some faster than others. I began anthropomorphizing the Mars crawler that was programmed to explore the surrounding area; when it passed by, I\x92d talk to it. Meanwhile, one of my crewmates went off the deep end, and started hallucinating that members of the ground control team were here as part of a rescue mission. He decided that the captain was preventing us from launching for no good reason, raided the weapons locker, and tried to take over. The captain, meanwhile, was seeing Martians. They seemed friendly, and warned him about the mutiny. Towards the end, the captain managed to convince me that the Martians were there. We left the ship, running to what we thought was a Martian ship that would take us back to Earth. It wasn\x92t clear whether it was real, or just a delusion. We were saved—or were we just finally retreating into a happy fantasy world, like Sam Lowry does at the end of Brazil?

Last night I dreamed that Shimrit had got a bit part in a movie as a result of her sexy sci-fi porn star photoshoot, and I was in Newbury Comics or some similar Harvard Square store browsing around, when I discovered they had a kashka action figure. It didn’t look anything like her.

Last night I had this dream that we found an obscure CD by some guy who, when he was 44, was convinced that the early Depeche Mode had stolen his sound. He had then spent 20 years in the studio trying to finish his one unfinished pop single. Eventually a disgusted studio engineer had released it as a bootleg CD. And we bought it, and played it, and it was crap.