Mud's Journal

Last night I had the first dream I've ever had with a distinctly lovecraftian flavor.

In it I was visiting a friend, who happened to be a sculptor, and staying with him in his apartment. He was showing me some of his work, which was constructed from fleshy, cadaverous bits all sewn together into biomorphic assemblages. They were quite disturbing.

Then the sculptures started moving. We never saw them move at first. They would just have shifted locations when we weren't looking. Then, rather suddenly, the apartment was very warm and the three cats he owned fled. There was a dark stairway that I swear hadn't been there before and a massive sculptural shape oozing down it toward us. I can't describe the way it moved very well. It didn't walk or float or undulate. It just kind of shifted in a way that physics shouldn't allow. I know we had to get out of there!

And then I woke up, sweating.

I woke up this morning and the first thought that ran through my mind was:

"I am not in a position to say I'm in a position to not say I'm in the position that I say that I'm in."

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I'm very curious whether that is the last fleeting remnant of some strange loopy dream logic or if my unconscious mind was stuttering like a skipping record and my language center was blowing fuses trying to make something sensible out of it. Or maybe it was an epiphany that I'm too dim to realize the importance of...

I slept in today which allowed my mind to remember bits of two different dreams. Both are wild enough that I wish I remembered the whole story.

In the first one, Jess and I were making our way on foot through a sprawling suburban southwestern city. We knew the location of buried treasure and were trying to figure out how to get to it. We went down cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac without success. It seemed that our loot must be located in some courtyard or alleyway that was completely sealed off by houses at the ends of streets. In desperation we decided to go through one of the houses, into the backyard to reach our target. It was well into the night at that point so we figured that, if we were quiet, we wouldn't be noticed by the house's sleeping occupants. The front door was unlocked but we had no luck. As soon as we entered into the living room, which was filled with porcelain dolls and antique beds with lacy, ruffly comforters, we heard someone coming down the stairs. We leaped into a bed and pulled the covers over our heads to avoid detection. It was no use though, a middle-aged woman and her elderly mother entered the room and immediately spotted us.The middle-aged woman thought that we must be newly weds who were also homeless drifters just looking for a place to sleep and so she took pity on us instead of calling the cops. The elderly woman was suspicious. Jess and I spend the whole night waiting for the two to fall asleep so we could slip out the back and find our treasure. Everytime we thought we had a chance and would trow back the blankets the middle-aged woman wake up and give us a cup of tea, which she said always helped her sleep. In the morning, we were stilled trapped and discovered that the house was filled with parrots. There were little greens ones, large old blue-gray ones that were loosing their feathers. There was even one peculiar gray bird that had an extra set of claws where his wings should be and ran around on all fours like a bat does (if you've never seen a bat run, you need to check it out).  Eventually we did break into the small, brick-lined alley behind the house and while I remember frantically pulling up bricks, I don't remember ever finding any treasuer.

In the second dream, I was traveling island to island across the world with a marvelous creature that was kind of half alligator and half whale (maybe kinda like this).  On one island I found a king who had bought a young goddess from a traveling merrchant.  The poor goddess had been bought and sold and traded around so much that she now had nasty seperation anxiety and trust issues, much like a dog that's been returned to the pound too many times.  The goddess was needy to the king and still didn't trust him enough too preform any miracles so the king wanted to get rid of her, figuring that his people were better off with no god at all.  I took her with me when my whale and I left the island and she quickly became quite attached to me.  At the next island we stayed for a few months and when it was time to move on the goddess didn't want to leave.  She couldn't bear to tear up her roots again.  I was explaining to her that things were different now, that she could travel around with me and I wouldn't try to sell her, that when I touched her cheek it ment that I cared for her and wanted to keep her, when I woke up.

My friend Meg has been writing about her dreams recently and I thought I would share my most recent dream.

This morning I woke up and realized that I had spent the past 8 hours painting in my dream. Specifically I had been painting a large detailed image, in shades of yellow watercolor, of Hulk Hogan's right eye.

I have no idea what this means. I have never been a fan of wrestling or of Hulk Hogan so I don't know why I was painting him. I didn't even realize what his name was till a week ago. I always thought it was Caul Culkin, like that kid from Home Alone or something.

However, this dream was very vivid and the image has haunted me all day. I just now sketched out his eye, referenced from a large photo I found on Google, in my sketchbook so that maybe Hogan will leave my psyche alone now.

Buff, wrinkly people creep me out.

I haven't posted about any dreams in a while because, what with my work schedule or something over the summer, I wasn't remembering any of them. But I've had two recently that have stuck with me.

One involved a girl I knew in high school, Ashley Brooks. I was helping her paint a dresser pink and purple and we kept running into all kinds of problems with where to stop one color and start the next and how to keep the paint from peeling off. While I'm not sure what this really means, I gotta say that it was nice to see her again even if I didn't really see her.

Last night I dreamed that I was jealous of the guitar amp given to my brother Chris by my parents. He decided to help me get my own so we saved up a couple of pocketfuls of crispy m&ms and were going to sell them to this giant Walmart thrift store in order to get enough money to buy me one. While we were there, unfortunately, my sculpture teacher, who was shopping there with her infant son, confiscated my precious sack of second hand m&ms so my brother and I settled for browsing the store's selection of old-timey deep sea diving suits. This was unmistakeably the greatest store ever! Of course, my brother really has no use for a guitar amp, nor do I for that matter, and my sculpture teacher doesn't have any children. But it was still I suprisingly vivid dream. I guess that's what comes of eating four cups of broccoli right before bed.

I've continued to have creepy dreams recently. Two nights ago I dremt about the sculpture I've been finishing up. It's a 5 1/2 foot tall egg that looks like a big round quilt. In the dream I was inside the egg trying to put back together seams that kept popping. Then the steel rods that form the skeleton of the egg started crumbling. So there I was inside my sculpture trying to hold the whole thing together while it's dissolving around me. A classic stress dream. Conciquently, I think this sculpture is the cause of my recent dreams.

Last night I had another dream. I was on a trip with my father and my two brothers. We were about ten years younger than we actually are. We stopped into a super market to buy some supplies. I excused myself from the shopping for a moment to use the restroom. When I got back from the filthyest toilet I've ever seen I discovered that my dad had become a vampire and was trying to get at my brothers. Fortunately I knew how to fend off fiends and was able to keep my father at bay. We continued the trip but every evening, when we stopped at a motel, I would usher my brothers into our room and lock the door. Then I would stand guard at the door all night while my father went on a killing spree outside, devouring everyone he found. I was sure that he most wanted to eat my younger brothers so I had to be constantly vigilant. It may sound silly now but this was one of those dreams where, after you wake up sweating and shivering, you can't shake the knot in your stomache for a while.

That stupid sculpture is due tomorrow. I hope my dreams return to their normal pleasantness after that.

My schedule has been such this semester that I haven't been sleeping enough to either dream or remember my dreams. But last night I had a doozy.

It started off with me jumping a fence and going in a door in the side of an abandoned warehouse. I'm not quite sure why, I just have some vague recollection of some rumors of odd stuff inside. Once inside I repelled down into a huge hole. It was a couple hundred feet deep. At the bottom I found a series of rooms full (and I mean packed full) of pipes and gauges and other bits of machinery. Some were leaking steam making the place impossibly hot and humid.

Eventually I ran into another person as I pulled myself over the top of a big pipe with probably a four foot diameter. He welcomed me and said he'd show me to my rooms. Suddenly the place seemed alive with activity. People were everywhere, moving through halls and appearing out of doors I hadn't noticed. All of them, including my guide, moved in a way that gave me the willies. Something wasn't quite right.

The guy led me up a number of flights of stairs and into a boiler room that had been retrofitted with a couple of beds. He said that the posters on the wall showed that the other bed was already claimed and I'd probably meet my roommate soon. Eventually my roommate did come in. He wasn't very talkative, just said hi and laid down to sleep.

I crept out to investigate the neighboring rooms and in one of them I found a cluster of three people laughing. One of them was missing his hands, sparks shooting out of his wrist stumps. I suddenly realized that this whole place was a factory building crude doppelgangers to replace real people. I quickly fled the complex and ran for home.

At home I was resting in the living room, trying to tell me family what I had seen when suddenly there were five dogs, identical to my dog except that their eyes were missing, snuggling up to my dog for warmth. I ran to the kitchen to find something to beat the strange dogs with.

In the kitchen I found my brother Tom being attacked by a clone of himself missing a face entirely. As I dug through a drawer of knives, trying to decide whether a chief's knife or a paring knife would be best for defending my brother I was assaulted by a version of my other brother, Chris, which had a large deformed head.

I was screaming and throwing knives at it when I woke up.

I haven't been sleeping enough to be remembering my dream recently, but one stuck to me a bit last night.

I remember me and my two brothers playing with a giant pet talking shark in a pool in our backyard. It was all well and good until I realized that the shark was trying to trick us into playing in the pool till we were too exhausted to climb the ladder out, at which point he would eat us. I also realized that the reason why he wanted to eat us was to get ahold of my wallet. So Chris distracted him while I climbed out of the pool, and discreetly got rid of everything in my wallet that was worth keeping, including more cash than I think I have ever had in my possession. I threw the emptied wallet to the shark, who promptly exploded.

Following the explosion these anemone-ish creatures started rooting themselves in all the nooks and crannies of the house. I think they came, some how, from the gut of the shark. They were about three feet long and orange, covered with little red fingers. They stretched out into the air, grabbed ahold of a piece of dust, and retracted into the wall, presumably to eat it. I was pondering whether an filter feeder could possibly live on land and whether it could prove harmful for us when I woke up.

Last night I had a dream in which my family went to a garden store for a social event of some kind. I remember that the garden place was owned by a jewish family because I got in trouble for mistaking a little wooden garden sculpture that was some how related to the jewish religion (kind of like those tiny buddhas people put in their potted plants) for a hour douvre. It tasted about like you might expect a wooden knick-knack too.

Anyway, just like at real social functions, Tom Chris and I (mostly I) were excedingly bored until we met someone who had brought their pet miniature hippopotamuses. They had three of them and they were about the size of a fat frog, filling two cupped hands, and had a similar texture. They were truly the most adorable things ever.

Everything was well and good until we accidentally dropped them and discovered that mini hippos blend in almost perfectly with the river rocks that made up the pathways through the garden store. I'm not sure whether we were more afraid of getting in trouble for loosing them or the hippos being stepped on but I spent the rest of the dream trying to chase down mini hippos that proved to be surprisingly nimble for how fat they were.

So the other night I had another dream. This one took place in some sort of alien research lab that had collected a large group of elmo-creatures. They were performing horrible experiments on them but the elmos escaped and cut the labs power. I watched in this darkened scifi tower as one of the aliens hunted down the elmos and blasted them to pieces with it's raygun. Just as I was waking up the last elmo found a defunct raygun and was trying to repare it in order to defend himself before the alien finishes it's soliloquy and eliminated the elmos forever.

I had the strangest dream last night. Actually, I guess compared to alot my other dreams it was not too strange since its close enough to reality to be communicated with words. But still. Pretty weird.
I was having a debate with president Clinton (he was either still president or he was president again. I donno). He thought he had come up with a brilliant bit of political reform to make politicians care more about the environment and there fore, work harder to protect it. He wanted to move every state capitol from it's normal city to a national park. California was going to be moved from Sacramento to the middle of the red wood forest, New York was going to be moved from Albany to Niagra Falls (is niagra falls even in NY?), and Florda was going to be moved to the Everglades. The worst part of the dream was that I couldn't seem to find any logical reason why this was a bad idea. I knew it was but I couldn't explain why and so I couldn't talk him out of it.
And no, I don't remember where he planned to move Santa Fe to.