False Realities

Mostly pleasant tone overall. Still, it seemed like a great, highly disruptive danger was coming. No one would ever live their lives the same way. People were scrambling to make their escape.

Someone I knew (or who knew me, at the very least) appeared. He was a young man (20s? 30s?). He was very agile, quick, and jumped around a lot, like a restless gymnast. Under ordinary circumstances I don’t think I’d have paid much attention to a guy like him — but he seemed to have an interest in conducting me safely through whatever crisis this was.

He guarded me and led me away from the crowd of panicked people I was in, waiting as though he’d been expecting me. I think we passed into a place with a very high wall and iron gate. It felt darker than just outside somehow. There were large dark trees all around us. There were a few other pairs of people, similarly teamed. I had doubts that we were all going to survive to the end of our journey, which, while much quieter than what was going on outside the tall walls, was still potentially deadly. We were in boats, which would proceed down a narrow channel.

I and about 6 other people smoked a joint with Jeff Bezos. He also showed us something he’d made, maybe some writing, and it felt like I could only say it was good even though it was pretty ‘meh.’ (Seems about right, he's probably utterly surrounded by yes-men in real life.)

G---7 and I still lived in the same house but he chose to ignore the restraining order. I beat him up, or tried to. I crushed his fingers repeatedly, twisted his arms into all kinds of weird painful positions, etc. None of that really seemed to be causing any lasting damage, so I then started tearing his large backpack apart. I ripped pieces off and then scattered them in hard to recover places.

I realized a lot of exciting, very well done murals had suddenly appeared on a lot of the buildings I commonly pass by. J++++ and I went into a brewery we frequented, but it had seemingly started to go downhill. It was still very busy. Maybe it was under new ownership? The guy behind the counter seemed almost on the verge of tears because of how helpless he felt in terms of correcting the problems the place had. The most obvious one (to me) was the roaches. Every so often I’d see one scurry past. I suggested changing his trash cans out multiple times per shift.

Then I was outside, and seemingly all the people in the brewery followed, though I kind of wish they hadn’t. There was an area with a few patches of tall trees. It was a cloudy night but the moonlight still came down in isolated beams in a few areas beneath the trees. I ran down to one of the beams as fast as I could. I thought it would look pretty cool to approach and see a person standing silhouetted in the moonlight. I only wanted J++++ to see, but of course everyone ended up coming, and it quickly became chaotically busy. Everyone seemed to be having a good time though — lots of toys and games. I almost seemed buried beneath a pile of them, and a tent formed around me. I wanted to move, and leave, but couldn’t move for a long while. I sat there regretfully watching people I wanted to follow as they left. I remember seeing both my sisters slowly ascend a staircase until they were out of view. I was only able to get up when I was the last person around.

J++++ and I started an impromptu couples counseling session. He had a friend over who was a counselor and she offered. (Still had to pay though.) She pretty quickly saw some of the problems. She said we had no chemistry. He seemed particularly controlling in the dream. I looked down at my torso and arms and somehow almost every space was filled with these tattoos I didn’t even particularly like — I guess he’d talked me into getting them.

I was walking around at night in a downtown area, in my city, whichever that was. There was a poster up for an upcoming art installation, probably pretty expensive. There would be all these color-changing arches of light at night, and they would be synchronized with the same sort of installation over in S====’s city.

A man I was sitting next to showed me this black card with text written on it. I don’t remember what it said, but the text changed each time I looked at it. The act of showing me this card transferred a curse from this man onto myself. As he had, I would have to live with this curse for a year: I would look unchanged to myself, but to everyone else, I would look increasingly homeless and dirty and crazy. There was a montage sequence, of course, an overview of my apparent decline. I ended up losing most of my hair, among other things, and what was left looked stringy and gross. The nice thing is that I had a good support system of friends in this movie, and they didn’t distance themselves from me despite my increasingly bad appearance and its consequences. They did, however, seem frustrated with me, even as I told them I really was trying to get help. I imagine after a year of this, I would have been able to transfer the curse to someone else, and maybe instantly, I’d look to others the same way I did to myself all along. But the dream/movie didn’t progress that far.

I was in a dark room lying on a bed, with a projector on, watching something. I noticed a long line of spiderweb thread stretching across the room, lit up by the projector. I followed it with my eyes until spotting the spider itself on the opposite wall, a ‘safe’ distance away. But then the thread began to move rapidly, and I found myself ducking to avoid coming in contact with it, like it was a laser in a heist movie. It moved too fast, we collided, and the thread, unusually elastic, sprung backwards, flinging the spider right on me. I started yelling and woke up.

There were people along the street, on the sidewalk. They were ensnared in various horrific traps that were very hard to get out of. As passersby tried to free them, they would themselves become inextricably trapped.

I was driving very late at night. The car's stereo system temporarily died, as it does IRL, and like usual I worried it was the first sign of the car stopping entirely. I slowly crested a hill, and saw that I was approaching red and blue flashing lights. I’d come across a car crash that must have just happened. They still let me pass through no problem. There was a huge pool of blood covering both lanes, and I saw someone laid out on the ground. There were a few people walking around handling the crash. As I passed the scene and looked at the final person walking towards me, I suddenly felt intense terror like I was also about to die in an instant, and I knew the figure I was passing was responsible. I don’t remember anything about them except that they were wearing a suit. Beneath the terror, I felt a small sense of relief.

G---7 moved, and I was able to know his new address because shortly before he left, he’d created a joint email address for us — I think he’d forgotten I had access and then he got an email from some company which listed his new address. I went there, somehow got in and took back two long pole-shaped things of mine that he’d taken. I wanted to sneak out unseen, but several people came home and were talking in a room nearby. Eventually one of them, a woman, found me, and I made a run for the exit before they could all catch on. I ran and tried to hide in the neighborhood but was still found pretty fast.

I entered something like an ‘arena’ to play a sort of game, along with many other people my age. It was cold. We knew something scary was going to happen. We were in a big parking garage-like structure, dark and with no cars. Several levels high. Someone, maybe someone from the last ‘round’ came up to explain; we were fine as long as we all worked together to keep the ‘thing’ from getting the sheet. We all quickly did as suggested and arranged ourselves along the curved edges of the parking structure, many of us hanging off the edge dangerously. The thing and the sheet arrived right after. The thing looked like a person and wanted desperately to wear the sheet. We tossed the sheet, wadded up, from person to person. The thing would pursue it relentlessly, and it was very important that the sheet be tossed to another person before the thing got to it. Frustratingly, it seemed like half the people there were barely paying any attention, just talking among themselves, which made the game so much harder than it had to be.

At some point this ended.

The sheet ended up having one of my usernames written on it in marker. The ‘thing’ said it just wanted to meet me but being very physically weak it had taken it a really long time to even write on the sheet. The ‘thing’ knew everything about me that I’d ever shared under any account with that particular username.

I think everyone in the house was dead and maybe only some of us could tell. I think G---7 already knew. I was weakly trying to let the others know it. We were caught in a sort of time loop, stuck in the house. It definitely felt like I kept doing the same things over and over trying to change the outcome. I think I was scared. It was night in a dark room with almost nothing in it. A table with some chairs. A few windows with sheer curtains — the curtains kept opening up, seemingly by themselves, at regular intervals. It may have been that which I was fighting against over and over. I think the truth of whatever happened to us was gruesome and I was starting to see it.

I stepped out. Just then, cars started to come down the road. They were all coming from a funeral for somebody I vaguely knew. I had a feeling like maybe I should have gone to the funeral and had chosen to play that game instead. But, maybe just to assuage some guilt, I wanted to go to the gathering after the funeral. One of the men closely related to the deceased said if we each put down a rock, that was as good as a ticket in. (It was some way of paying respects.) I tried finding a nice, big, smooth rock.

...At one point I felt my right hand get shoved and stuck into something, and looked down, and it was IN A DOG. The dog had no head or face but it was still alive, walking around. It had two flaps on its back, and my hand had slipped into those. Ew. I think its owner said something conciliatory like “oh he does this all the time to strangers.”

I was a young woman going around my big house at night, killing off all my coworkers one by one. No normal weapons allowed — I had to use what I could find quickly, things like broken chair legs. All of these same people had previously been to the house for a party I’d hosted, and there were occasionally flashbacks/callbacks to that more peaceful, brighter time. You could even still see some of the decorations hanging up from that party. It seemed like I was sort of resentful. Everyone else had some sort of experience related to their fathers — it was like, at whatever workplace we shared, we’d made some device which, when used, brought up some memories or visualizations, only when *I* used it, nothing ever came up. Just a blank, as if the device wasn’t working at all. So I was jealous.

I had just started browsing in a store and a woman came up beside me and started singing in a pretty voice: "White bread, anyway — white bread"

I was taking a Lyft home, trying to hurry because I was just going to be there quickly before taking another Lyft elsewhere. The Lyft driver complimented all the nice flowers in front of the house as we drove by. She dropped off another passenger, one of my neighbors, then turned around to drop me off. We neared, but she didn’t actually stop or seem to want to stop. I opened the door and as she slowed for the stop sign, I jumped out. And as I looked back while walking to the house, I saw she was staring straight at me, chanting something that seemed like a curse, with her eyes kind of bulging and unusually white. Pretty creepy. I kept trying to tell everyone inside the house about it, but there were a lot of people and they were all having animated conversations with each other — I couldn’t really get a word in.

In the dream, I was at work telling A---- about a dream I’d just had: I had been watching her create all these different edible masks of Disney characters. (Nothing actually recognizable, but I somehow knew they were Disney.) The faces were all built on specially made wooden boards with a hole in the center. The boards stood up at maybe a 75° angle. As I was telling her all this, she was engaged in the act of making one of these faces/masks, but her regular ones, not the Disney ones. (Note: IRL, nobody at work makes any faces/masks whatsoever.) I started to tell her another part of the dream but stopped myself because I didn’t think it was interesting enough to bother. (It was this: one of the characters/faces/masks was testifying in court, getting grilled about something they’d eaten on multiple occasions. They answered sheepishly, saying the same thing each time, and it was somehow a really damning and unexpected answer.)

I’m eating one of my several bags of snacks on a couch next to someone. I *repeatedly* spill tiny, tight, delicious pretzels out into a crevice of the couch, confused how it just keeps happening. Then I’m outside at night on a sidewalk. No one else around except the cars passing by. It’s a nice night and up ahead is a huge full moon. (Not duplicated or mirrored for once, just by itself. Also, while very big, not so much as to be suspicious.) I consider just walking in that same direction all night, staring at it.

I was at work and had just poached shrimp. I saw them floating in water in front of me in a big tank. Suddenly long red parasitic worms started emerging from some of the shrimp. They looked way too big to have ever actually fit inside the shrimp and they looked kind of like millipedes. I then felt like I could feel one coming out of my own body through the skin, which was... deeply unpleasant and disturbing.

I saw a spray of bullets coming at me, slow enough to see, but fast enough to barely dodge at all. The one at the end of the line got me in the gut and I started bleeding.

I was eating a big cookie dipped in the last remaining milk I had. At a funeral, where other people were also eating cookies. It was a woman’s funeral, and she wore this white, wet, mostly opaque veil over her head. Also, she was alive at the start. The funeral would conclude with her death.

Alone on the bottom floor of a darkened house. No lights on. Actually the layout of the house is basically the same as the one I’m in. Weather outside is very bad. I’m not looking outside any windows, but can hear the strong wind. There are two little stoves, or maybe one stove and a fireplace, and I’m keeping an eye on them. I’m worried. It seems like the wind is blowing ashes into the house through these stoves, and some of the ashes are still lit, so there’s a risk of fire. In fact there are wisps of flame with each gust that blows in. I think I hear on a radio that 3% of houses north of a certain nearby road are on fire.

Before this, I entered the space to do something intentionally creepy. I had my orange phone plugged into a radio or record player — whichever it was, using the phone as the speaker made the music sound tinny and creepy. I thought it would weird out my roommates. (Note: this was the second in a series of several dreams involving the risk of fire that I had around this period.)

I was part of an early space program, although this was strictly terrestrial it seemed. I was aboard a very small round craft, sort of like an egg, neither spacious nor super cramped. Two men one woman. After a whole, totally unrelated segment of the dream, we entered what at first was just an elevator. Then instead of moving vertically we were shot out of the building horizontally. For quite some time we passed over the surface of the earth, really not all that high up, maintaining the same altitude. Trees weren’t too far beneath us. We moved fast, but seemed to not really change in speed. A voice from the command center confirmed the time and date and asked if we were all present and accounted for. I confirmed. The vessel spun slightly and I worried the spin would increase dramatically and the ride would become horrible and nauseating. Then it seemed like we were watching a video, and the woman’s face filled the screen. Tears were streaming down her face. It seemed like the video was an explanation of the purpose of the mission — we were the first people to do this sort of mission, and the goal was to see what happens to the human body when subjected to these conditions. We were going to die fairly soon. Maybe not within moments, maybe not even for a few weeks, but soon. Trapped in this tight little bubble facing each other as we wasted away from lack of food and water. (Somehow the vessel itself failing seemed so impossible that it wasn’t even a concern.) But the woman in the video said it was worth it, because people would study our deaths and learn from it how to keep other people alive.

I was in a restaurant (?) and started to notice these little brown translucent elongated ovals drifting through the air — I’m pretty sure they were somehow shed from the wings of some sort of fly. In other words, they were really nasty and not something I wanted near me or my food. But as I looked closer, I saw more and more of them, until the air was FULL of them, at which point I decided I had to leave.

A relatively small group of people has been taken over by parasites. I’m one. We’re in a factory, passing a notebook around (it is also, somehow, a T-shirt we’re designing). I keep attempting to write the word ‘indefensible,’ but it’s a dream so writing and spelling are hard. Likely the surprising difficulty prompts a degree of lucidity. So I write “not sure why it’s so hard to write indefensible”. I realize I have slightly better luck writing in cursive, but even that requires a lot of focus. e.g. when writing the word ‘write’, I found myself making the ‘i’ the same height as the ‘t’. What does this have to do with parasites? I don't know.

I found myself in a darkened store that must have just closed. I was surprised to even be able to get in and out of the store. I saw the dark silhouette of a person, presumably an employee of the store, passing by. They didn’t seem to know I was there. I left the store and entered the main mall.

I didn’t enter any other stores. I just walked around. It was Christmas. There were some decorations out, and I think I passed by some people dressed as elves and such. At one point I passed by a gym. I could look in through the windows to see that it was relatively small for a gym and all the equipment was closely bunched together — not a whole lot of negative space going on. For some reason maybe half of the gym’s total equipment spilled outside the apparent boundaries of the business, out to where people who weren’t at the gym were walking. And it seemed like these were the machines getting the most use by the gym patrons. Again, it was all closely pushed together. (Not the most cramped gym equipment I’ve seen in a dream, but close.)

I'm in the mountains. I can see more beautiful mountains in the distance, all a blue color that's not too different from the color of the sky. I'm on a tall structure with a clear view in all directions. There are multiple moons, each at the same elevation and phase and opacity, but in all directions, almost like I'm at the center of a clock and these moons are hour markers. (Obviously I've had this same kind of many-moons dream repeatedly, but this is the first time I remember it being in daytime.) I believe I'm with J++++. I’m excitedly telling him that this is just like the dreams I keep having, only this time it’s actually happening! I think I have a camera with me and I'm trying to take pictures.

We’re staying on this property with multiple airbnbs, and I assume we've rented one of them. Near the big tower, there was a huge clock outside. I noticed something seemed off about it, specifically the motion of the hands, but I just assumed it was more decorative than actually functional. Only one of the hands was actually capable of moving, and it moved clockwise, but at a strange pace.

I was one of 4 or 5 prisoners on a brief expedition. We were supposed to return to the castle on the mainland within the hour or they'd come looking for us. A guard came with us, but secretly he was sympathetic to us and put himself at great personal risk to help us escape. He took us to a very small island not far at all from the castle. The island had no vegetation of any kind, barely any structures. There was a tall barbed wire fence along the perimeter and maybe an aerial in the center. The Chinese owned and operated it, but we were using it as a place to hide briefly. Most of the walls were just fencing, and you could have easily spotted us from the castle, but there was a small opaque section where we intended to hide. Somehow cellentani pasta was involved. We each had a bowl and it took a moment, but this pasta somehow turned into a pile just big enough that we could hide beneath the pile and they wouldn't see us. During this, I was talking with the guy helping us, sort of coaching him on what he would need to say and how he would need to act to be convincing. He'd have to pretend we got/fought away from him in a way that wouldn't lead to him getting killed for incompetence or betrayal.

It was getting darker, and unfortunately we realized that there were extremely sensitive motion-activated sodium vapor lights all around. The lights went off fairly fast after being activated, but that was still going to draw a lot of attention our way. Before we could really worry about that, we realized many new people had just arrived on the island for some reason. It seemed like they were just there for fun, not to find us, but because they would give us away, our guard immediately went about gunning them all down. He made quick work of it, mostly. There was a young woman who was very vicious, and avoided the bullets. I watched her pick up a bucket of red paint and dump it over herself, kind of like war-paint. The guard had an intense moment of hand-to-hand fighting with this woman, who was very good and had killed a lot of people in the past. (Maybe she had even brought this group of people out to the island just to kill them.) They both carried daggers. I think she was trying to carve some word onto his face.

I think around this time I was a little disappointed because for so long in this dream I was surrounded by interesting people and then all of a sudden I seemed to be alone. I returned to an area I'd been before and there was a janitor vacuuming. While I was in this room, I noticed one of my back teeth was loose, so I pulled it. Doing so didn't hurt at all. I examined the tooth and it had a large open section full of surreal shit that doesn't belong in a tooth. I am familiar enough with that scenario that I recognized at this point that I was dreaming, and I was fairly lucid for a while...

Went to a college party. The hosts were all 'people' who were giant rats wearing masks of attractive people, mostly women. The other guests were people who looked almost like zombies. Parts of their bodies were missing or appeared to have been chewed away. I came in with a group of guests; I think I was the only one who hadn't been there before, and therefore was the only one with a complete body still. The hosts were as nice as they could be, but I still felt threatened and knew that their kindness would evaporate if I tried to escape (which I desperately wanted to do). At one point the hosts asked the group of guests, "Do you know who we really are?" and I thought, "Duh, you're very obviously rats who are wearing masks with attractive human faces on them. It's not exactly an airtight disguise." I went along with the check-in process, got paired with a girl, all the while hoping for some opening in the activities where I could make a break for it.

I was sitting at a diner with the door held open. Drawing or something at a table with mom and possibly a few other family members. Two suspicious looking people were in the parking lot just outside. Suddenly a very loud gunshot occurs. It seems to contain all the drama of the next few moments: rushing to the door to keep out whoever just fired a gun, running to the back of the building to escape, etc. But the dream doesn't show any of that, it ends with the gunshot resounding in my ears. It's so loud that when I wake up I almost wonder if I heard it in real life and was awoken by it.

I was a passenger in my grandmother's car and she just lost control completely. She was swerving and driving off the road and we were only spared a collision by the other drivers’ actions. She stopped for a moment and I fled the car. She wasn’t herself. She was shouting a lot. She ended up driving through the doors of a grocery store and parking there. I tried to get cops to come out of the office there to restrain her, but they wouldn’t open the door. I also tried calling mom, and I think she was on her way. Then my grandmother got out of the car and came after me... She was trying to beat me with a belt. I woke up by biting myself in the hand, leaving teeth marks. I thought I was biting my grandmother’s hand in the dream.

My family visits an old friend's family in the city. Their apartment is incredibly modern and minimalist. They have a large robotic dog. One of the girls of this family is hesitant to even let me in and I argue with her incredulously because a) I was already in there once years before, nothing bad happened and, b) what am I going to do? draw on the walls? There are many highly awkward conversations in this dream about people's emotions and how my mother and I kind of want to die. At one point, my mom (somehow, a thinner, taller, younger version of herself) begins climbing up support cables (not unlike a bridge). I'm afraid she'll fall, and equally afraid that's what she wants.

I lent my X-acto knife to somebody in an auditorium. Later on, I think in the same ultra modern complex, there was a contest, and whoever flushed the toilet on its 50th (or some #) flush since the contest began would win. I seemed to be the only one who cared and I even burst into a used stall to make sure I got to flush it. I won! Not sure what the prize was even. But I knew when they announced the winner I'd have to talk about gay rights.

A====a is piercing her ear. She sticks a gnarly looking needle through it, asks me to lean forward, and then also pokes it through my eyelid. I can sort of tell what she was about to do, but it's worse than I imagined. There's not much pain or discomfort at first. Mom walks in and she finds out what happened and is very displeased, and suddenly I am too. It happened so fast I don't know how much I could have done to prevent it. There's now a big hole in my eyelid, much bigger than that needle point. It's about half the diameter of a hole-punch, which is still pretty damn huge for a missing spot on your eyelid. When I close my eyes, I can see light coming through the spot a little. The hole is slightly scratchy now.