I have always had dreams so strange they border on hallucigenic. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a dream that, upon awakening, I don’t think: you got problems. BIG, cracked out, seek help, kind of problems. If I do have normal dreams, they must be so unbelievably boring that my awake-brain just discards them on principle.
To illustrate the Lewis Carol-like ridiculousness of my REM cycles, (and also to introduce the point of this post) I will share a few of my more ridiculous dreams…
The first dream I remember was from when I was very young, perhaps four or five? A giant, floating, purple head (clearly evil from this description) stole all the clothes and all the parents in the world. My job: to find them and restore order. This involved me making a loin cloth out of a tea towel and duct tape (necessary at this time, as nakedness in the face of danger is threat number one,) and searching out the evil leader of the floating heads in an attempt to reclaim the grown-ups. No conclusion to this dream, but really, does it need it?
As previously mentioned in detail I heart the band Hanson, (see Hanson 2008 post), and at the level that I love Hanson, I’m surprised I don’t have near-constant waking dreams about them. As it is, I believe I’m only at a total of seven Hanson dreams spanning from 1997 until now, most of which are spectacular in both the crazy and the teen-girl kind of way. One of these dreams in particular, really stands out. I had this dream in the midst of all my teeny bopper craziness in 1997, a time when my other crazy Hanson friend and I lived and breathed Hanson.
Taylor Hanson and I are on a date at the Royal Theatre in Trail BC, front row balcony (prime seats in this theater folks) his arm is around me and there is no one else there. Dream-Me, being far cooler than real-life-me, is very non-chalant about the whole situation…until suddenly Ryan, my high school band friend comes up behind us, interrupting my glorious date with Taylor, and tries to sit between us. Let it be known that the Trail movie theatre has since been “re-modeled” (quotation marks indicate the caliber of this reno), but at the time of my dream had seats from the ‘50s that had giant gaping holes punched through the red vinyl cover, padding, and springs; imagine a ragged, red pleather, padded, toilet seat. Some of the chairs had busted off their mountings altogether and were stacked at the very back of the balcony section. As I am reaching the end of my rope with Ryan and his interrupting of my date I jump up, grab one of the aforementioned busted chairs and start maniacally beating the piss out of this poor geeky band friend…I have no idea what happened after that because I woke up.
I had a dream once that Fred Savage and I went on a covert mission to Kellerman’s (the resort from Dirty Dancing) in the off season because some unknown nefarious activity was going on there…I guess we were secret agents? Commandos? In any case, the Kellerman’s high tech security outfit started chasing us, and to escape, Fred Savage and I decided to climb a tree. It’s the off season so it’s fucking winter. Have you ever tried to climb a tree in the wintertime? It sucks! The branches and pretty much everything is saturated with water, so the bark comes off in your hands and turns into brown poop-like mush. Anyway, Fred and I fall out of the tree and are taken prisoner. I woke up before they put Baby in the corner.
My best friend Mallory, often has dreams about bathrooms in disrepair: the stalls only cover from the ceiling to four feet off the ground, the commode is inappropriately placed in the middle of the living room, it’s overflowing with endless amounts of green jello, anything is possible in the broken toilet dream. Apparently this type of dream is significant in the dream deciphering world and it means that one might be dealing with all sorts of emotions that one might be having trouble “releasing”. I’ve never successfully deciphered one of my crack dreams; there’s just too much going on, I don’t think I can ever find one theme prevalent enough to look up in Dream Directory. Also, it’s just more fun assuming my subconscious is psychotic.
In any case, after this long and hopefully amusing introduction, I started writing about dreams because I’ve been having a lot about the Van Plan recently. Normally I have dreams about everything else BUT what I’m excited about in life. NOT SO with the Van Plan apparently!
The first I actually just had last night and chronologically comes after the one I will henceforth entitle “The Sperm Whale Dream”, but is worth noting for it’s ridiculousness all the same.
TJ and I are having coffee with Robert Pattinson. We tell him about the Van Plan. We invite him on the Van Plan. He comes on the Van Plan. All is good and right in the world. The end. So much shit-eating-grin stupid, I can’t even say anything.
So! *enter the dancing clown* my latest (not including the vampire tag-along dream mentioned above) Van Plan dream has TJ and I in some imaginary city that could be in either the United States or Canada…or both! It has aspects of Vancouver, but also parts of it are comprised of choice locations from my home town, namely one particular block on the main street. This block has a multitude of random boring shops: a dentist’s office, an expensive local art & crafts gift shop, a consignment clothing store, a convenience store, a creepy empty lot…and what used to be Video 9 (it is now a snowboarding outfitters store). Video 9 was the only movie store in my hometown when I was growing up and was owned by this Iranian man my father, for some reason, used to call “Hulanuts”.
In this marvelous dream, TJ and I are walking along this block, exciting yes? (I recall this namely because somehow the gift shop has become a new age store with red beads in the window and all the other stores that are actually on this block in reality are now gone leaving only New Age Hippy Town and Video 9 sitting next to each other.) TJ and I duck into the movie store under the pretense of looking at VHS tapes. Why else would one go into a video store?
Apparently for CRIME! Whilst browsing the titles, suddenly the man behind the counter (who is Cuban for some reason) pulls out a very large and dangerous looking gun and starts yelling at us! I’ve got a copy of Super Mario Bros The Movie (which I just recently watched) in my hands and, with the ninja moves I am sure to possess in real life should a gun ever be pulled on me, I expertly chuck the tape at Cuban Man’s forehead and knock him down!
Victory is short lived however, as this man apparently does not work alone. It’s a Cuban Crime Ring!!! I have no idea what a crime ring actually is, but it was very apparent in the split second after I unleashed the fury of the Mario Bros, that more inexplicably furious Cubans were coming and that these men were part of a “crime ring”. Bullets start flying, bursting through an old school television with bad reception that was playing The Cosby Show, and the Ninja Moves are back in action.
Scrambling to get out of the line of fire of the new Cubans with machine guns, TJ and I duck out the side door that has magically appeared into a hallway that is illuminated with weird Matrix-style green light. We attempt to escape into the New Age Hippy Shop, while bullets are chasing us and taking chunks out of the wall above our heads. Success! A brief whiff of patchouli oils and beeswax candles as we dash through the shop and we are out onto the street.
At this point, we are now clearly in Vancouver, on the Sea Wall to be exact. However the problems begin to arise when suddenly we are in the ocean. We did not fall in the ocean…we are just suddenly there.
For some reason there is a wall of ice keeping us from getting out of the water, and though we are not cold in this apparently glacial ocean, there doesn’t seem to be a huge rush to get out. I briefly recall there being some sort of grasslands on the other side of our frozen wall. The significance of this is lost on me…
While chillin’ in the ocean, presumably to hide from the Cuban Crime Ring we’ve just busted wide open, something bumps my leg. I have a fear of things under the water that stems from watching the movie “Jaws” when I was far too young to appreciate its cheesiness, so this bump should be freaking me right out. Dream-me, however, kept her cool and merely looked intrigued. Even more so when the bump…turned out to be from a fucking Sperm Whale! Two gigantic water beasts are keen to play with Ol’ TJ and I, and for some reason, we feel that these nice friendly whales are the perfect getaway vehicle.
Yes…we escaped the Cuban Crime Ring that ran itself out of my childhood Video store…on Sperm Whales.
I pointed out that my brain chose Sperm Whales, as opposed to Orca’s, or Beluga’s or…any other kind of whale, which must be some sort of metaphor…
I can’t wait for the Van Plan to begin. Bring on the Cubans!
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