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garoteDespite going to bed at 1:00am, I woke up again at 11:30am, after a series of visceral nightmares. First I dreamed that I was infected by a brain parasite. Yes, it was that kind of night.
It was one of those awful existential dreams where it skews your perception of waking life. I was in the control room of a giant spaceship. My friend and I were confronting the captain, because she was acting strangely -- as though everything was fine, even though the ship was being torn apart slowly, a piece at a time, by sinister aliens.
The captain swore the ship was intact. "Look," she said, gesturing to a giant digital map on the wall. "No damage anywhere!" The map was an explosion of red lights and alert symbols. It was a miracle the life support was still operating, but the aliens were crafty that way. They would seal off and remove every useful piece of the ship, slowly confining the crew to a smaller space, leaving the life support for last. Just when we realized what they'd done, the ship would implode around us like an eggshell.
While the captain was turned, I noticed some kind of organic growth sticking out of her neck, like the tail of a lobster. I stepped forward and smacked at it, and it ripped off and stuck to the wall nearby. Instantly it began to squirm, then extruded little insect legs and began scampering up the wall, then across the ceiling. When it was over the captain it began to descend on a line of silk, like a spider, trying to get back onto her head.
"What the hell is that thing!" screamed the captain, ducking away.
My friend threw her clipboard at it. The creature fell to the floor, with the clipboard on top of it. I stepped forward and stomped on the clipboard, and a fatty mess of paste and insect parts squirted out beneath it, but the creature was still moving. It spawned even more legs - thicker ones - and when I stepped back it hissed out from under the clipboard and began to climb the side of my pants.
"Get it off! Get this thing off me!!" I screamed, scrabbling for it as it moved up the center of my back. Then it reached my neck. I felt something pierce my spine.
And I woke up. It was four in the morning. Dark and raining quietly outside.
The trick with these dreams - and I've had more than enough of them to get wise by now - is to calmly but assertively remind yourself that your brain has been fed a constant stream of great science fiction over your lifetime and has become quite clever, and the logical conclusion here is not that your waking life is a delusion created by a brain parasite (or an angry ghost, or a sadistic god, or whatever was in the dream) but that your brain is crunching through some serious emotional and mental business, and the dream is a really amazing byproduct of that -- and should be appreciated as a really great piece of fiction; go you; good job! How interesting. Let's remember that for later. Now, back to sleep...
Then I dreamed that most of my teeth had been shattered in some accident and I was trying to tuck them back into place. Every time I looked in my mouth, more of them were broken. I kept spitting out fragments and trying to collect them in my hand. With some delicate work, all my back teeth could fit comfortably in place and I could close my mouth to keep them there. "I hope I can get to the dentist first thing in the morning," I thought. "Maybe if I can hold them in place like this for now, it will make the job of re-attaching them easier..."
I woke up from that one at 6:30am. I was on my back, and the sleep apnea jaw insert was pulling at my upper teeth uncomfortably. I considered this a good outcome, because without the jaw insert, I would have been choking slowly to death on my back for the last half hour or so, and instead of a disturbing dream that I could feel some clinical distance from, I would have had an outright heart-hammering nightmare and possibly hallucinations as well. As I said a few years ago ... However bad any regular nightmare is, it cannot even approach the horror of the ones created by sleep apnea.
I turned on my side, let my mind wander for a bit, and fell asleep again.
When I woke up at 11:30 it was from a dream that was worse than the other two, but I was in a hurry to get out of bed, so I didn't do the brief mental baggage-collecting that would have preserved it. Just as well.
After a shower and some work correspondence, I tucked the extra large bathrobe into the car and drove to the UPS store to return it. Then I swung back by the house to pick up my hat and camera, so I could take pictures in the park by the old office. The people building the new website wanted backgrounds they could insert behind new people, even the out-of-state workers, and when COVID hit we abruptly stopped doing headshots in the office park because everyone was strictly shelter-in-place.
That errand went poorly because of the lighting, and because I brought the wrong lens, but the cafe was open so I bought some hot chocolate and set up my work chair in a pool of sunlight by the building. Might as well work in a pleasant spot. I got well into some code cleanup, and would have happily worked there for five hours, but after two hours the sunlight went behind the building and the temperature dropped like a rock. All I could do was gather my stuff and drive back to the house.
COVID-19 has deprived me of every coffee shop and sheltered park that I used to work from. I had at least a dozen places on my regular rotation, and many more that I'd visit occasionally. They're all shut down. It's removed one of my major reasons for living in the city. I fully understand the feelings of all the people who have pulled up stakes and left this area, whether they can work remotely or not, because they've been paying hundreds of dollars extra in rent for nothing. I'm lucky that my rent is stable at least.
Back at the house I continued the work for a while, but was distracted by an interesting online discussion about sex separation in sporting leagues. Always something brewing in that politics channel. Fun place. I paused to eat some leftovers, then took the cat on a brief walk. The cold scared her back inside. It was late in the day when I returned to the code, but I managed to check in a complete feature. It wasn't the feature I set out to work on in the morning. Dammit; I'll need to keep my focus better tomorrow.
Bathtime was pleasant. Some nice music, a few LED candles, a little narration into the voice recognition app -- that's how this journal entry exists. Next up: Another night of dreams. It will be windy and rainy. What will the noises conjure as I sleep?
It was one of those awful existential dreams where it skews your perception of waking life. I was in the control room of a giant spaceship. My friend and I were confronting the captain, because she was acting strangely -- as though everything was fine, even though the ship was being torn apart slowly, a piece at a time, by sinister aliens.
The captain swore the ship was intact. "Look," she said, gesturing to a giant digital map on the wall. "No damage anywhere!" The map was an explosion of red lights and alert symbols. It was a miracle the life support was still operating, but the aliens were crafty that way. They would seal off and remove every useful piece of the ship, slowly confining the crew to a smaller space, leaving the life support for last. Just when we realized what they'd done, the ship would implode around us like an eggshell.
While the captain was turned, I noticed some kind of organic growth sticking out of her neck, like the tail of a lobster. I stepped forward and smacked at it, and it ripped off and stuck to the wall nearby. Instantly it began to squirm, then extruded little insect legs and began scampering up the wall, then across the ceiling. When it was over the captain it began to descend on a line of silk, like a spider, trying to get back onto her head.
"What the hell is that thing!" screamed the captain, ducking away.
My friend threw her clipboard at it. The creature fell to the floor, with the clipboard on top of it. I stepped forward and stomped on the clipboard, and a fatty mess of paste and insect parts squirted out beneath it, but the creature was still moving. It spawned even more legs - thicker ones - and when I stepped back it hissed out from under the clipboard and began to climb the side of my pants.
"Get it off! Get this thing off me!!" I screamed, scrabbling for it as it moved up the center of my back. Then it reached my neck. I felt something pierce my spine.
And I woke up. It was four in the morning. Dark and raining quietly outside.
The trick with these dreams - and I've had more than enough of them to get wise by now - is to calmly but assertively remind yourself that your brain has been fed a constant stream of great science fiction over your lifetime and has become quite clever, and the logical conclusion here is not that your waking life is a delusion created by a brain parasite (or an angry ghost, or a sadistic god, or whatever was in the dream) but that your brain is crunching through some serious emotional and mental business, and the dream is a really amazing byproduct of that -- and should be appreciated as a really great piece of fiction; go you; good job! How interesting. Let's remember that for later. Now, back to sleep...
Then I dreamed that most of my teeth had been shattered in some accident and I was trying to tuck them back into place. Every time I looked in my mouth, more of them were broken. I kept spitting out fragments and trying to collect them in my hand. With some delicate work, all my back teeth could fit comfortably in place and I could close my mouth to keep them there. "I hope I can get to the dentist first thing in the morning," I thought. "Maybe if I can hold them in place like this for now, it will make the job of re-attaching them easier..."
I woke up from that one at 6:30am. I was on my back, and the sleep apnea jaw insert was pulling at my upper teeth uncomfortably. I considered this a good outcome, because without the jaw insert, I would have been choking slowly to death on my back for the last half hour or so, and instead of a disturbing dream that I could feel some clinical distance from, I would have had an outright heart-hammering nightmare and possibly hallucinations as well. As I said a few years ago ... However bad any regular nightmare is, it cannot even approach the horror of the ones created by sleep apnea.
I turned on my side, let my mind wander for a bit, and fell asleep again.
When I woke up at 11:30 it was from a dream that was worse than the other two, but I was in a hurry to get out of bed, so I didn't do the brief mental baggage-collecting that would have preserved it. Just as well.
After a shower and some work correspondence, I tucked the extra large bathrobe into the car and drove to the UPS store to return it. Then I swung back by the house to pick up my hat and camera, so I could take pictures in the park by the old office. The people building the new website wanted backgrounds they could insert behind new people, even the out-of-state workers, and when COVID hit we abruptly stopped doing headshots in the office park because everyone was strictly shelter-in-place.
That errand went poorly because of the lighting, and because I brought the wrong lens, but the cafe was open so I bought some hot chocolate and set up my work chair in a pool of sunlight by the building. Might as well work in a pleasant spot. I got well into some code cleanup, and would have happily worked there for five hours, but after two hours the sunlight went behind the building and the temperature dropped like a rock. All I could do was gather my stuff and drive back to the house.
COVID-19 has deprived me of every coffee shop and sheltered park that I used to work from. I had at least a dozen places on my regular rotation, and many more that I'd visit occasionally. They're all shut down. It's removed one of my major reasons for living in the city. I fully understand the feelings of all the people who have pulled up stakes and left this area, whether they can work remotely or not, because they've been paying hundreds of dollars extra in rent for nothing. I'm lucky that my rent is stable at least.
Back at the house I continued the work for a while, but was distracted by an interesting online discussion about sex separation in sporting leagues. Always something brewing in that politics channel. Fun place. I paused to eat some leftovers, then took the cat on a brief walk. The cold scared her back inside. It was late in the day when I returned to the code, but I managed to check in a complete feature. It wasn't the feature I set out to work on in the morning. Dammit; I'll need to keep my focus better tomorrow.
Bathtime was pleasant. Some nice music, a few LED candles, a little narration into the voice recognition app -- that's how this journal entry exists. Next up: Another night of dreams. It will be windy and rainy. What will the noises conjure as I sleep?
no subject
Date: 2021-01-27 04:01 pm (UTC)OMG... now I'm afraid to see this nightmare next time I fall asleep.