A dream I had last night

I had a very vivid dream last night. It was about a group of friends, and I was in that group, staying in a rather delapidated old house. I'm talking holes in floorboards, wallpaper peeling off the wall, doors with old brown paint flaking off and some hanging off their hinges.

We split up to sleep in separate rooms after having had a meal which included a bowl of custard.

I ended up talking to someone who knew the history of the house and the local area. She told me the real horror of the place was the custard. She conjured up the image in my mind of a bowl of custard that tracks one down; a bowl of custard that appears, intact, outside your front door.

In a fearful panic I suggested we rouse everyone and warn them of the danger of the bowl of custard.

As we found the others we discovered most of them having sex with people who hadn't been there originally, and some of them were in quite perverse activities. I filed list away for later processing and told everyone, in their separate locations, about the custard.

I was dreading finding a bowl of custard at the front door and fearfully opened the door. There was no custard there but I knew it was only a matter of time.

At this point I woke up. I felt I need to visit the bathroom but I didn't want to move out from under the duvet. It was cold out there; and dark!

The tragedy is that I love custard. How could it do this to me?

Perverted sex and custard?

This is a dream for anyone who ever wondered what, exactly, they did with the wet lettuce and the egg whisk in 'Allo 'Allo'.

a bowl of custard that tracks one down; a bowl of custard that appears, intact, outside your front door.

A horror story just for you, Peter: Norman Lindsay, The magic pudding

#2 "Allo Allo" is one of my favourite programmes. We have the boxed set.

We also have the "Secret Army" boxed set. This is the serious series that "Allo Allo" was based on; or not, if you're one of the writers of "Allo Allo" trying to deny any enfringements.

#3 Thanks for that, Lola. I don't think I'll ever be able to think of desserts in the same way again. My Christmas could be terrifying.

I had been thinking that this thread could start a discussion on scary dreams people have had, but now it could branch into horror stories in which food features as part of the terror.

Tapioca Terror; The Cucumber Murders; Murder on the Rue Rice Pudding; Bananas at Midnight

I can't remember ever having a scary dream about food; but I had an unpleasant one. Some years back I dreamed about eating a really tough steak - my teeth could hardly make any impression on it. The pain woke me - and, perhaps, the taste of blood. Took weeks for the side of my tongue to heal up.

#5 - I've been trying to think of Gothic tales involving food but the only one I remember is M. R. James's Casting the Prunes.

#6 Ouch!

#7 lol :-)

1

Wow... I've had some bizarre dreams, but... Wow...

I'm glad this group can facilitate this level of sharing. :D

7

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

(Incidentally, why am I such a push-over for the puns?! I refer you all to my god-awful (and yet food-related!) post (45) in the 'interesting editions' thread, heaven help me...)

7 (Further)

Sorry, I just can't help myself:

The Rime of the Ancient Marinara
The Purloined Fritter
The Tell-Tale Tart

(Actually, that last sounds a bit like a dirty movie, come to think of it...)

9 lol I suppose if your request were to be actioned the person concerned would have to use a potato-gun.

(Actually, that last sounds a bit like a dirty movie, come to think of it...)

or a kiss-&-tell feature in the Sunday papers.

From http://www.smartgirl.org/fun-stuff/dreamdictionary.html:

"If you dream of being chased or eaten by food items, you are trying to avoid a situation in real life that involves strong emotions."

From http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/c4.htm:

"To see or eat custard in your dream represents your appreciation for the little things in life. It also indicates that your life is full of richness, sweetness and nurturance."

From http://en.mimi.hu/dreams/custard.html:

"Seeing or eating custard in a dream, foretells that you will meet a stranger, who will in time become a warm friend." (don't see the connection, myself).

YouTube 'Custard Dreams': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yqjAmSbgf0

I've been trying without success to track down a picture - it may have been a satire on the Prince Regent by Gilray or the like - of a fat person dreaming of being haunted by the ghosts of all the stuff he'd eaten. Anyone know what I'm trying to remember?

13

I kept trying to think of a Lovecraft one! That's perfect!

I have to say I've spent more time thinking up Gothic food puns in the last few days than I have on my Hamlet paper due Monday. Oh boy...

Here's to procrastination. (I'll drink to that...)

#14 rankamateur

I love the Brainiac video and I can't argue with any of the quotations.

Last night, a woman I loved very much had a hole in her chest. I don't know if it was from bullet or knife or whatever; and I couldn't remember her name - I kept trying different ones, trying to hit on the right one. I had to press down hard on the wound with both hands to try to stop the bleeding and at the same time struggle to give her mouth to mouth to make her breathe.

Then people came and dragged me up to my feet and, looking down, I could see that she'd been dead a long time and was really dessicated and rotting.

And then I had the chilling, black, absolute conviction that my life was to all intents and purposes over and I was going to spend the rest of my days locked up in a little cell.

Seems a bit of a harsh punishment for reading some Lovecraft and a few Gothic poems yesterday evening. Damn dream woke me up in a cold sweat three-o-clock this morning.

That was nasty. Hope you have a better night tonight.

I rarely have bad dreams, but I remember one from years ago. I was cornered by a black labrador while "CROWLEY CROWLEY CROWLEY" was chanting in the background.

#18 - Oops! - If you say his name three times ...

The Great Beast is coming for you!

> 19
it certainly felt that way at the time!

I had a dream last night, with an extra layer of weirdness.

It involved an old town with winding lanes and an old building - a pub or some such - multistoried, with winding passages, rooms with sloping floors, underground tunnels. This year I visited the prehistoric copper mines on the Great Orme in North Wales, and some of the narrower tunnels there seem to have got into it, and some of the fallen, Gothic masonry on display at Tintern Abbey, also the rickety wrought-iron staircase in The Haunting (1963).

I was struggling to find some friends, first of all - no idea who, then struggling to find my way out, and having all sorts of disturbing adventures and meetings with various people - which I won't go into.

Then I thought it would make the basis of a great Gothic tale and I sketched out a rough outline in my mind.

I eventually got so exhausted by my wanderings that I couldn't stand and ended up lying on a ledge, just a few feet above a floor I was trying to reach. Just as I'd realised I could just roll over and drop to the floor, various little details made it dawn on me that I must be asleep and in my bed here at home, and just about to roll myself into a drop to the floor in reality.

So I woke myself up and immediately wrote the whole thing down. Three closely-lined foolscap pages of small handwriting - it's going to be the devil to transcribe as I had pen and paper beside the bed, but no reading-glasses.

Now then, here's the extra layer of weirdness. Who thought up that story? The basic framework is quite unrelated to the dream, but the dream will fit into it well. Did I partly wake in the night and think it up and then go back to my dream? One quickly forgets a dream in the first short time after waking, but I certainly seem to 'remember remembering' (hope that makes sense) the 'me' in the dream take time out from 'my' wanderings to think about the story. So, did I not only dream a dream, but dream a story based on it as well?

As I said - weird.

I don't often have bad dreams, but I had a distinctly cthulhoid one a few years ago: I was crawling through deserted port facilities trying to avoid a fishman (which seemed a natural enough sort of thing to be doing), while being uncomfortably aware that something - exactly what I knew but dared not think of - lurked down beneath the black harbour water.

Funny thing is, near as I can recall I hadn't read or watched anything Weird or Lovecraftian the evening before.

>21 alaudacorax: & >22 AndreasJ:

At least there was no custard at the front door.

Yesterday, apparently, I managed to get through Friday the 13th without the farting demons getting loose from the cwtch under the stairs. I didn't escape unscathed, though: must have gripped the parrot a bit too tightly in my sleep and now I've got a hole in my thumb, very sore. I've really got to stop falling asleep in front of the telly ...

And no, I can't tell you any more about the farting demons - bloody thumb and pissed-off parrot drove them quite out of my mind at the time and I've now got only the vaguest memory.

>24 alaudacorax:

I've actually worked out where that one came from.

I'd forgotten that a week or so back I spent a lazy evening in front of Netflix - a few episodes of 'Doctor Who', including the 'Aliens of London' one with the farting aliens, and some 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' - always the odd demon there, of course. Add to that my first attempt at making my own hummus ... and the chickpeas looked so innocent ... plus a previous frustrating hour or two spent repairing the folding door on said cwtch under the stairs.

I'd love to know why there was a several days' gap before all that resulted in the dream, though. Presumably the subconscious was churning away at it all, but I definitely wasn't aware of that.

>25 alaudacorax: I'd love to know why there was a several days' gap before all that resulted in the dream, though. Presumably the subconscious was churning away at it all, but I definitely wasn't aware of that.

"...subconscious...I definitely wasn't aware of that"

There's a clue in the word, "subconscious".

;-)

>26 pgmcc:

I find it a fascinating subject: can there be things going on in the subconscious during waking hours that one is completely unaware of, or are these things confined to churning round in the dreams night after night, without being remembered unless one is quite fortuitously woken during a particularly appropriate spell of dreaming? I find it difficult to believe that Doctor Who and Buffy can be getting up to who knows what in my subconscious during my waking hours, completely below my radar.

Yet again my mind boggles at what must be going on in my subconscious:

Woke this morning, then drifted back off for a while ... to dream I was skinning one of my feet with my fingers and nails - that brought me wide awake with a bit of a start ...

It seemed a quite ordinary thing to be doing, at first, and only after a few moments slewed over into being quite a weird thing.

ETA - I don't mean scraping the skin off with my nails - I actually dreamt of making incisions with my nails and then sliding my fingers under the skin to pull it off in big, bloody pieces.

>28 alaudacorax: Was there any custard involved?

We had a dinner guest last night who was telling us of a French saying that, as far as I could make out with my broken French and her broken English, is, "He is wrapped up in his own skin." She was referring to her husband.

Perhaps you were simply relaxing inyour dream.

I woke up in my bed early this morning all tangled up with a skeleton with the flesh not quite rotted off it, and with a sheep bleating loudly near by.

Oddly, I didn't panic or leap out of bed or anything, just concentrated on waking myself up (a second time, I suppose). Or I may have dreamed I woke myself up ...

... because then I dreamed that 'I', very bravely, stayed behind to fight back loads of skeletons with a broadsword while 'I' made my getaway. Work that one out ...

I was channel-hopping yesterday evening and caught a few minutes of Bones with a film-prop broadsword in it, and there was a skeleton in the same programme or another channel - cop show, anyway. Don't know where the sheep came from, though. Unless it was an echo of childhood - where I grew up there were hundreds of the things practically running wild.

Anyway, I had to give up trying to sleep and get got up early, because I was just lying there mentally composing LibraryThing posts.

>31 alaudacorax: I blame the sheep. Sheep are never as innocent as they let on.

>33 frahealee:
Guinness and Tiramisu?

Great combo!

Okay - my mind is boggled. Guinness and Tiramisu? I suspect just the thought will give me bad dreams ...

>35 alaudacorax: Bad dreams are better than no dreams.

Did I get that right or is my mind adled by the Brexiteers claim that no deal is better than a bad deal?

>37 frahealee: You have touched on an interesting controversy. The subject of custard being an ingredient of trifle.

I grew up in a house where trifle consisted of jelly, fruit cocktail and trifle sponge. In my insular existence I occasionally came across people who put custard on top of the trifle and even when as far as putting hundreds-and-thousands on top of the set custard. We considered people who did that as either posh or pretentious.

Now, there are people who would declare that trifle is not trifle without the custard and hundreds-and-thousands. I still prefer our poor person's trifle, but I do not refuse a trifle with custard and sprinkles on top.

It was common practice in hospitals in Northern Ireland when I was growing up to give patients who need building up a bottle of Guinness in the evening as a tonic. I recall the practice being ceased at one stage on the basis of serving an alcoholic beverage in state hospitals might be considered inappropriate. You have to remember that Northern Ireland was quite a strict area in relation to alcohol. Pubs used to be forbidden to open on Sundays and I remember all the children's playgrounds being locked up and the swings chained together and padlocked on Sundays. Playing on Sunday was regarded as a sin and was hence forbidden.

Have nice weekend end and enjoy your Guinness soaked tiramisu.

By the way, there is a craft beer chain of pubs in Dublin called The Porterhouse. One of their stouts is chocolate flavoured. Another is strawberry flavoured.

I do not quit understand craft beers. They always strike me as being too sweet.

This has reminded me of an old joke from when I was at primary school:

Q: What is yellow and dangerous?

A: Shark invested custard.

Very proud of myself that I've lost twelve pounds in the last six weeks or so - frahealee and pgmcc are NOT helping!

Oddly, my mother used to make what she called 'trifles' which were much nearer what the supermarkets call 'cream slices' these days - the difference being you could pick a slice up in your hand (if you were careful). It had a fairly stiff layer of custard inside. Or perhaps I'm misremembering what she called the stuff - not unlikely.

>44 frahealee: I know how you feel about duct tape. It must be the same way I feel about custard.

I am there for you.

>46 frahealee: Wow! 1999? Wow!
I would never have thought it was that long since The Mummy was released.

OK this isn't a dream but when I visit a new place - and have been around some of it on foot - very often when I go to bed and close my eyes I involuntarily replay the route as a kind of hypnogogic vision. I fully expected this to happen on my visit to Strasbourg.

It didn't, and I don't know why, but one night I found I was experiencing an aural equivalent - disconnected phonemes of French playing in my head.

>50 frahealee:

On the whole, your dream sounds a lot scarier than The Hound of the Baskervilles, but perhaps that's just me.

I'm not sure if this counts as Gothic, or horror; but anyway ...

First the real world: The laptop I'm posting from is loaded with Ubuntu 20.04 (a Linux system). Yesterday evening I created a virtual machine on it and loaded that with Ubuntu 20.04 too, and customised it exactly like my real system, so I can use it for playing around with some other software without risking wrecking the set-up (which I actually did a couple of days ago---such a pain in the ...) When I went to bed last night I left the virtual system downloading and installing updates.

I woke this morning---I thought; obviously I was wrong---seriously worried whether the virtual me in front of the virtual machine had gone to bed properly last night or sat up in front of the screen all night, and if the latter, would that have the real me knackered all day (again). Also yesterday, I put a new filter in my kitchen filter jug: I was seriously worrying whether this would have altered the virtual machine, perhaps harming the virtual me---what if he/I wasn't even me any more?!!!

I said I was waking, but actually seemed in a loop, gnawing away at those two 'problems' around and around and around, and never quite managing to open my eyes and properly wake up.

>53 alaudacorax: Whether it is Gothic or not that is a great scenario. Are you sure you have woken up at this stage? This could be a virtual pgmcc responding to you having been greatly affected by your new filter in the filter jug.

>54 pgmcc:

Er ... that's a thought ...

I've had the odd food dream. No custard though. It was a movie that soured me on that. (Not that I liked custard too much to begin with anyway.)

I had fallen asleep on my sister couch but was still a little bit awake, or so I thought until I was running around in the factory setting below Isengard (The Two Towers movie, I think) when the orcs etc. are pouring metal to mold swords en masse. Then there was this area making some kinda goo, and it looked like a section out of one of the Conan (Arnold) movies where they were making green people soup. Except it wasn't green people soup and the metal pouring out of the crucibles wasn't metal. It was rib sauce. The orcs were making really big ribs on an assembly line. About this time I woke up and realized that yes, I was asleep, and for some reason I was covered in blankets (my friend had declared that I "looked cold" several times while I was asleep) and that my sister was watching the Food Network. Ribs.

Fun fact! It was Peter Jackson that ruined the custard.

Never been stalked by a bowl of custard though. Question; does anyone here game and does that affect dreams? I've read that it does. If I'm suddenly in a Gothic house with rogue and sinister desserts, I'm making battle plans, and possibly looking for golf clubs. This can work quite well at times.

Another fun fact! I had no idea what a "trifle" was until I worked at Tim Horton's and we started selling them. Nobody else knew what a trifle was so they were often sold under a typo "truffle" depending on who was writing the labels that day. I'd describe a trifle as a layer cake in a cup with weak cake.

Not sure what sort of "game" you're referring to, but FWIW I've had computer-game based dreams. In particular, I sort of think the end I dreamt to StarCraft (the first game) was more impressive than the one I eventually found the developers actually had provided.

My mother made trifle quite often - this would be a cheap 1970s/80s version! - sponge fingers in the bottom of a large bowl (sponge fingers not the correctly named Savoyardi biscuits - they are expensive but sponge fingers are cheap! - tinned fruit next, then jelly (jello) over everything. Let it set in the fridge then topped with custard. The traditional top layer of cream was, I think, replaced with "squirty" cream from a can...before that product came on the market, would we have used evaporated milk?? These days, I would hope for some sherry in my trifle, and real cream! (Should mention that individual servings would come out of the big bowl, I didn't have a whole family size trifle to myself).

On the subject of dreams, I've seen footage online where AI has been used to enhance very old film footage - street scenes from the 1890s and such like. Some of it is very sharp while other areas fade off into a kind of fog. It's eerily reminiscent of - not dreams, exactly - I'd guess more like the images retained on just coming back to full consciousness after sleep.

I'm not a gamer but I have noticed that, if I'm in a new environment like a strange town, the streets and architecture are in my head, cetainly when trying to get to sleep even if I can't remember my dreams. It must be the brain processing the new information and it seems reasonable for the game's virtual environment to need processing in the same way.

>57 AndreasJ: Not a specific game, no, but gaming in general. Just an article I happened upon in a doctor's office about dreams and gamers. People who spent more than 2 hours a day playing video games were often able to sleep through nightmares and showed fewer signs of distress, the idea supposedly being that we could take on some agency and sort of work around the challenges. Like smashing the bowl of evil custard with something.

Not too familiar with StarCraft. Is that the one with the zerg? Find a way to launch custards into their territory.

>59 WeeTurtle: smashing the bowl of evil custard

Why do you assume the custard was evil? Just because it had sharks swimming around in it does not mean it was evil.

>59 WeeTurtle:

Yes, the one with the Zerg.

Everybody had to go to a political meeting in some market hall in the early hours this morning. There was to be an Important Announcement. I went with Penny from The Big Bang Theory. Lesley Winkle was on the next table and she payed a lot of attention to me; which made Penny jealous—very good for my ego! There was a steak dinner; but they only gave us a tiny bit of boiled potato with it and no veggies at all. And the Important Announcement never materialised. Everybody got very angry about it all—and being kept up all night—and twelve people were killed. It was only afterwards that it dawned on me that the twelve people were the source of the steaks. Which explained why the steaks were so pale—more like pork than beef. Bloody Boris Johnson!

>62 alaudacorax:

Be the ultimate recycler ... Go cannibal today!!!

I take it that Bloody Boris Johnson was one of the entries on the menu?

>64 AndreasJ:

Heh-heh! Or the butcher ...

>62 alaudacorax:
I love it.

I take it you had shark-invested custard for dessert.

I've been suffering from incredibly TEDIOUS dreams recently. I'd rather have horror than this, seriously. Example no. 1: the beginning is actually fantastic, a real sexy dream! (never enough of those), where a siren has got me onto a bed and I'm practically purring in anticipation... when it flashes through my mind "but what is her Covid status". And while a bit of my lucid mind about to awake is howling NOOOOOOO, who cares, it's a DREEEEAM!!!, the remains of the dreaming dissipate into a different scene where she's rummaging looking for the papers etc.

Never been so furious with myself.

And this very morning! Tedious setup at some type of castle where, through our own stupidity/nefarious dealings, we ended up with 10kgs of TNT needing deactivation. And then a long, boring, neverending section of repeating the same action over and over, where it felt like 10kgs were disposed of in units of gram. And I just couldn't snap out of it until the WHOLE thing was done away with.

grrrr

>67 LolaWalser: - Wow! Twice ...

>62 alaudacorax: - Just realised that reference to Boris Johnson looks quite random. In fact, I was really furious at him in the dream because of having to go to that meeting.

>67 LolaWalser: Gosh that is boring! I occasionally had recurring dreams of doing boring clerical work, waking up, then falling asleep into the same dream. I used to wake in the morning feeling like I'd already done a day's work.
Last night, I had a disturbing dream that I was in a supermarket with extremely narrow aisles and I kept on getting in everyone's way and saying I was sorry. Every person responded by angrily shouting at me to 'F*** off'. Weird.

>68 alaudacorax: Everyone with a moral compass is furious with Boris Johnson at the moment.

>69 Rembetis: - Everyone with a moral compass ...

Yes, but ...

... 'partygate' was probably responsible for the political meeting and being miffed about it; I did catch part of an episode of Big Bang Theory the day before; I had walked over to town and bought a nice steak the day before ... but where the hell did the cannibalism come from?

>70 alaudacorax: Possibly the cannibalism might reflect the frequent reporting over the weekend of 'Operation red meat' and 'operation dead meat'?

>71 Rembetis:

Possible. One of the problems of living in the IT Age, of course, is 'information overload'. Every day I pick up a multiplicity of snippets most of which I don't even half-remember. I've belatedly remembered that, over the last few days, I've read about someone having an unhealthy obsession with the Donner Party. But do you think I can remember who or where?

>72 alaudacorax: You and me both! It is indeed because of the multiplicity of snippets from so many sources.

>69 Rembetis:

I had a disturbing dream that I was in a supermarket with extremely narrow aisles and I kept on getting in everyone's way

Exactly the sort of thing I'm complaining about! Where do these dreams come from?! Nightmares; Angst & Anguish; Booty; Winning Lottery--all are practically self-evident. But Petty Frustration or Boredom--how mean of our psyches to waste our precious dream-time on that.

>74 LolaWalser: I certainly would prefer dreams about swirling clouds, luxurious divans and Conrad Veidt :-) !

>75 Rembetis:

Hahaha! You know it's funny, for all the fangirling I do about Veidt, I can't remember dreaming about him EVER. Or any of my star favourites! So unfair...

>76 LolaWalser:

Not particularly interested in Jennifer Lawrence one way or the other—just not someone I give much thought to. So why the hell I once had a dream about her paying some (unknown to me) girl's university fees ... it baffled me for days and I never got to the bottom of it. So I suppose Penny (>62 alaudacorax:) is a step up—at least I'd been watching her.

Off hand, I can't remember ever having a dream about one of my favourite actors or actresses (or screen characters).

>76 LolaWalser: >77 alaudacorax: I can't recall dreaming of any of my favourite stars either. It would be nice, for a change!

(Doesn't know who Conrad Veidt is).

My staple lately has been dreams of vacations and things I miss because I'm spending all my time chasing after logistical issues like missing luggage, not enough pills, botched room arrangements, etc. It's kind of depressing, actually. Sprinkle in the occasional university nightmare, because apparently that one just never stops.

I don't seem to have issues with bad dreams stemming from scary media anymore. Not sure if that's a desensitization or that I have more pressing things on my brain. I was a little worried about bad dreams last night as I watched the new Color out of Space movie with Nicholas Cage and wasn't especially keen on potentially living it again (I haven't been that unsettled by a horror movie since Hereditary or Dagon.)

I could blame the lack of interesting dreams on my not immersing myself in the arts much lately. I find that dreams get the most "out there" when I've been in creative mode, usually writing or reading a lot, but sometimes visual arts as well. That's when things get really vivid

There was this time stream/universe hopping adventure like something out of Sliders but with a 7 minute 'safe-zone' with kiosks that resembled the play surface of a pinball machine. Another one was secret species role reversal conspiracy that the dogs knew about but didn't explain to us that was happening at the same time as this artificial alien android was murdering every human it came across and was avoidable only by retreating into nature and away from anything manmade that was metal or electric. There was a nature cult centered around goddess worship that was helping the city refugees and whatever spawned/sent the android could only be stopped by understanding the nature of feminine sacrifice. Or something like that. This was what the dog's actually knew about.

I think I'm into a late night ramble again.

>79 WeeTurtle: - ... but sometimes visual arts as well. That's when things get really vivid.

That's intriguing. Now you've got me wondering whether I can 'fine-tune' my dreams.

The problem is, of course (and this assumes that we dream every night—which I have read somewhere or other), that there doesn't seem to be any fast rule about if you remember them. I used to think that you remembered your dreams if you were woken by something, like an alarm, but not if you awoke naturally in your own good time. Lately, though, I've not been noticing this as true and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

Usually I only remember dreams if I'm ill, which raises the question of whether they're really dreams or weird hypnogogic states. Sometimes there are (or I can only remember) one or two key images. Just occasionally they are very sharp and very architectural. I remember running through a hyper-real London of old office buildings, crashing through interconnecting doors from one building to the next, all the brickwork, masonry, moulding incredibly detailed and sharp. All the more odd because fully conscious my visual memory (especially for architectural details) is nowhere near as good.

I had a dream last year which involved characters in long robes and curved, polished chrome headpieces ending in sharp points. These headpieces were too narrow for human heads to fit into, in real life. Somehow I knew these characters were connected to the Egyptian god Thoth.

The source of the dream is easy to pin down, by the way. I was listening to a podcast series about Western Esotericism. What I find interesting is that the aesthetic was a sort of '70's advertiser's surrealism and looked nothing like genuine Egyptian statuary or wallpaintings. Where did that come from?

>81 housefulofpaper: "Somehow I knew..."

I call that dream logic. Things you know as fact in the dreams without knowing how or why you know. It was that way for me with the dogs.

I find my dream 'camera' will vary a lot. It might be crisp, or foggy, or tunneled, etc. I think it has more to do with how drowsy I might be at the time. If I'm sort of in and out of sleep, extra groggy or something, it tends to be more blurry. If I'm actually asleep, it's more crisp. This is what I've noticed when I compare the style of the dream I had to the state I wake up in.

It was recently pointed out to me that I probably dissociate a lot, so I'm thinking that clarity in my dreams happens when I'm totally asleep, with the flip side being awake and alert. Things get blurry as we move to the edges or in-between the sleep/awake/spacey/alert moment.

>82 WeeTurtle:

By 'dissociate', do you mean in the medical sense or simply that you 'zone out' from the people around you? Actually, either way I'm not grasping the sentence—can you explain a bit more? I find this stuff really fascinating; not less so because the scientists and psychologists don't seem to have much of an understanding of it either!

>81 housefulofpaper:

... my visual memory ...

I often find myself wondering if I really saw things as clearly and detailed as I (half) believe or did I dream the belief that I was seeing things clearly, sort of analogous to being sure I had something worked out in detail in a dream but being quite unable to remember the working out once awake.

>83 alaudacorax: "Zoning out" is a small dissociative thing, apparently, going by textbook stuff. The main thing appears to be memory loss for the time in question. I would routinely be doing something like reading a book, but then "read" 10 pages and not remember a single thing I've read. In my case it's small, and certainly not "medical grade" I would say. I took to the habit of daydreaming to the point that I could clue out of everything around me for some time and have no idea what had happened in the interim. I talk to a shrink now and then because I have focus issues (among other things) of the sort that's similar to ADD.

I was likening it to a drowsy state, as of being between sleep and wakefulness, but in this case it's more alert and aware vs. "huh?"

For some reason I dreamt this morning that there was to be a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson today. Topical enough, of course, but for someone who so rarely remember my dreams it seems a waste to remember such a boringly mundane one.

It’s not even the case I care all that much about Johnson’s political future. If he gets toppled well he deserves it, but if he doesn’t I’m not going to lose any sleep over that either.

I was attacked by ghosts from outer space last night. Or they may have been from somewhere even more remote—somewhere in the back of my mind I was feeling there was a Lovecraftian air about the whole thing. I knew they wanted to eat me and I knew I wouldn't be dead as they were doing it.

There was a flimsy-looking sliding door beside my bed, one of those single, translucent, corrugated, plastic pane things, fashionable in the 'sixties. I felt I'd be safe if I could get out of bed and throw myself through that. But I couldn't get my arms and legs to work—no life in them at all—while, at the very same time, I was striking out with my hand and arm but it was passing right through them with no effect. Also, it seemed very important that I shout out 'I will encompass your deaths!' but I couldn't get my tongue and jaw to work and only inarticulate yells were coming out. I'm pretty sure I was yelling out loud in real life. Then I fell out of bed and backhanded my bedroom chair really hard. Which pretty thoroughly woke me up between them—painful! Oddly, I have no soreness or bruising on either hand this morning, or wherever I hit the floor. My mouth and tongue were bone-dry, though.

The most scary thing is that, as I was getting back into bed, I realised I'd been intending to throw myself through the bedroom window.

It wasn't finished. I went back to sleep and dreamt I'd been arrested by corrupt police in Northern Ireland. I got angry and arrested them right back, for corruption in public office. Then I woke up again.

It still wasn't finished! I went back to sleep and dreamt a chunk of In the Heat of the Night, the bit where Rod Steiger is interrogating Virgil and finds out he is a policeman and shouts at his deputy. That woke me up again.

Could not get back off and finally gave up and got up at six-o-clock—and I hadn't gone to bed until one. Quite zombified this morning ...

>88 alaudacorax:

Haven't read any Lovecraft in months; haven't seen In the Heat of the Night in decades; haven't gone out of my way to follow the protocol story in Northern Ireland. So where the hell these dreams were coming from ...

A reminder you should read Lovecraft, watch the movie, and follow the news?

And maybe move the bed further from the window.

>90 AndreasJ:

... or further from those exercise weights on the floor. When I got up from this chair after writing those posts I remembered exactly what hit where as I fell out of bed ...

>88 alaudacorax: Wow, I'd be in a puddle on the floor. I can barely handle reading Clark Ashton Smith...the thought of any type of nightmare or even daymare about anything Lovecraftian...

>88 alaudacorax:

It's been years since I've had a genuine nightmare but I still remember waking up from it quite shaken, and half-convinced I'd been under some sort of psychic attack.

I've had some anxiety dreams recently, and they seem to be based around office life. Just last night I was involved in a scenario where kind of slip-up was going to be revealed by a screwed up memo that had sat on a file since the 1980s.

Curiously mirroring your dream I got bolder as I got closer to waking up and ended up in a meeting which I declared over until my union representative turned up. I also declared to all present that "I expect to be able to look back on this as a positive experience" - not the sort of behaviour I indulge in when I'm fully awake!

What is rather intriguing about this business is whether I had sleep paralysis or not. I was definitely completely paralysed, unable to move a muscle. At the same time, I was equally definitely lashing out with one arm. The illogicality of dreams, I suppose ... I have no idea whether I was physically lashing out or not; though I definitely did, once, after I'd fallen out of bed. I searched online to find out if sleep paralysis is an actual, physical thing or something dreamed but, surprisingly, I didn't find anything that's absolutely clear on it, as I remember. The NHS web page, for example, at one point uses the words, "During sleep paralysis you may feel:" (my italics) and then the list of symptoms.

Last night, Vincent Price couldn't find a bed for the night. I only have the one, and, anyway, it was not anywhere near long enough for him, but I still felt quite guilty about him wandering around Hollywood all night looking for a place to sleep. He was very nice about it, though ... very gentlemanly. Also, I couldn't, for the life of me, remember that dream I had a few nights ago about Bela Lugosi; I'd wanted to tell him all about it.

>95 alaudacorax:

Weird thing is, I'm sure I haven't given a thought to Price or Lugosi for weeks, or even months. So where the dream came from ...

>96 alaudacorax:
Your subconscious was feeling guilty about not giving them any attention for so long.

>97 pgmcc:

I watched a YT vid of Price performing Poe's 'The Raven', just to make up for it. Couldn't find Lugosi reading poetry, though. Pity ... he had a beautiful speaking voice on occasions.

>98 alaudacorax:

Luogsi recites a few lines of the poem in Universal's 1935 The Raven.

Yeah, I found that one. But I've seen at least one interview with him where he is beautifully well-spoken with the accent still there but much less strong than in his films. It would have been a voice tailor-made for 'My Last Duchess', for instance.

Umm ... here's a really weird experience from yesterday morning. I'm not sure it belongs here, or that it was really a dream, but I just want to tell people.

Fairly early supper the night before, then settled down to watch a documentary, immediately fell fast asleep. I woke at five-o-clock yesterday morning, with the bird on my shoulder, snuggled against my neck (funny story about that, I'll come back to it). So, four things happened in rapid succesion succession, in just a few seconds: I walked towards Minnie's cage to put her back in; I wondered why the door was closed; I realised Minnie was inside, coming towards the front to see what I was up to; the 'Minnie' on my shoulder just faded away—sort of popped out of existence. While 'she' was there, I could almost swear I could have put my hand up and touched 'her'—like I said, a really odd experience.

About the parenthesis: She really prefers lying on top of my stomach with my hand over her. Trouble is, since I had my heart attack I've lost twenty-five pounds—apparently, Minnie can't find her favourite perch!

Those "lucid dreams" can be extraordinarily vivid.

Sad about Minnie losing her "perch" (but the main thing is, she has her dad still!)... maybe you could oblige with a stuffed hose around the middle? :)