Holy crap has my dream life been intense today.

I had one dream where I was moving out of the place I lived. I was glad we were moving because the room I had in this rather enormous house was literally a closet, and very cramped, and I was really tired of it.

In an interesting twist on one of the usual schema for my dream life, instead of looking for something, as we packed up to move I kept thinking of things we had forgotten to pack.

There was no danger in leaving things behind, I think. Actually my dream couldn’t seem to make up its mind on that. In some places, I was sure we had the whole day to come back and grab anything we missed, and in other parts I was positive that once we left, that was it, we would never see the place again, and so we better get everything.

Oh, and when I say “we”, I mean me and the other identity-free ambient people who were around me. I have a lot of those in my dreams. They are not even real people. They are more of a sense of their being people around in whatever roles my dream requires, like in this case, the people I shared the big house with.

At one point, it was my computer that I was worried about leaving behind. My computer is often in peril in my dreams, which strikes me as a little sad, though apropos for someone who lives like I do. Often these computers are nothing like my real computer and more like a hodgepodge of anachronistic bits and pieces, like a modern keyboard plugged into an old T100 terminal which then, for some reason, plugs into a TV to play old TRS-80 games.

My dream machine is quite the tinkerer, it seems.

Anyhow, I was worried that we would leave my computer behind, so I went to my room (imagine a walk-in closet, that’s what it was like” and started picking up the components. I was like, “Okay, I need my monitor… and the CPU tower… and oh, I have to grab the keyboard and mouse… “.

None of these are what you would call normal. The tower was a squat ugly matte black thing with a strange red light in the upper right corner of the face. The monitor was like something from the “the monitor and computer all in the same box” age of computer. The keyboard was black and had a strange translucent black plastic dust cover over the keys. And the mouse had a similar design, and was shaped kind of like a rat. (Mouse? Rat? Was my brain going for a stupid pun?)

Eventually I got my stuff together, and then the dream shifted to me actually taking advantage of all the chaos and material confusion to go around stealing things from the residents of the other rooms. I mostly stole candy, leading to one of those times when I think I have totally doomed myself by eating a lot of bad stuff and I am relieved to wake up and find it was just a dream and I am not gonna die of hypoglycemic shock.

It freaks me out a little how comfortable I was with theft in the dream. In the dream, it just seemed like fun and I felt entirely morally justified in doing it because of how little I got from life.

Heck, it felt downright magical, like… let’s see what I can find for myself in people’s rooms. What have they left for me? It’s strange to have memories of behaving unlike yourself, even if it was a dream.

That was one dream. After that, things started getting weird.

I was in an amphitheater of some sort, listening to some kind of speech, when I somehow became infected with an alien parasite that turned the fat in my lower right abdomen into a malevolent demonic yellow face.

I shittest thou not.

And I wasn’t particularly upset by it. It was more like, oh dear, this is a spot of trouble. Eventually, there were two such heads, plus another in red over my heart, and it was beginning to really attract attention. I began to feel very embarrassed about the whole thing, and was just starting to worry that the demons would get to something vital soon (besides my heart??) when two aliens, one who was more or less a Predator and another that was like the classic Grey if they were human sized and wearing a Men In Black type shirt (irony?), showed up and began fumigating the area.

I thought “Oh good, someone is on the case. I’m sure this will be cleared up in a minute. ” Apparently in the universe of that dream, this sort of thing happens all the time.

Sure enough, they got to me, there was a brief confusing period of fragmented memories of being taken to the kitchen of the cafeteria of the building and Having Things Done To Me, things I was glad not to remember, and then I was all better without even a scar on my abdomen.

The dream ended with me announcing to more Ambient People that I thought I had even lost weight from the whole idea. But I was quick to assure people that as a weight loss program, I would not recommend it.

That’s the dream that just amazes me now that I am awake. I don’t often have dreams like that, with something so utterly fantastical. My dreams tend to be more mundane than that. Even if the occasional bit is a little off, like the dream I had where getting to the other side of the mall required cutting through the steam tunnels underneath, for the most part the dreams are quite ordinary.

But very occasionally, I have the kind of messed up weird surreal dreams that I have always wanted to have and that other people seem to have.

I treasure those times. It’s so much more fun!

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!