Once more, I spent most of a day a-slumbering, and I might spend more once I am done writing. Sleep is a wonderful thing, but losing a whole day to the Sandman is just plain depressing.

Once more, this also means that I spent time deep, deep down the Well of Dreaming, drowning in my own subconscious mind and having strange, deep, intense, multifaceted dreams that compel me to write about them in order to deal with them upon awakening.

So guess what happens now, kidderlings? Yup, you got it. Today’s episode is brought to you by What Happens In My Mind When The Lights Are Out, Inc.

As always, logic and sense are entirely optional and you should not take anything that emerges from the violently frothing cauldron too seriously. It’s just my brain working some shit out, with no more deep meaning than the doodles in the margin of a calculus text.

Alright, deep breath, here we go.

Today’s dreaming began with something particularly disturbing because it involves my friends. I don’t remember what happened before this in the dream, but I know that somehow, I had made my friends Joe and Felicity angry with me, in a sort of prankish not too serious way, or at least, that is what I thought at the time.

But then, they tricked me into getting into a car, on the passenger side, in which they had already deactivated the emergency brake, and then gave the car a shove from behind, leaving me in a car that was coasting downhill and onto the highway.

A bit more potentially homicidal than wacky, one would think, but in the dream, it all made sense and I was no more annoyed than if they had propped a bucket of water over a door and left me to get a good dousing.

Seriously. I just sort of rolled my eyes and lazily reached over to grab the steering wheel and steer. I am not sure why I didn’t just slide into the driver’s seat to do that instead of sitting there in the passenger seat. And even in the dream, I remember thinking the same thing. Wouldn’t it be easier to just slide into the driver’s seat? But either I didn’t think I had the time (being in a careening out of control car on the highway, after all) or I was somehow stuck in my passenger street. So there I stayed.

I am positive that has massive, deep symbolic meaning regarding my lack of taking control of my life except in dire situations and even then, not entirely, but I don’t feel like going into that now.

I will just let it sort itself out. I am sure that’s for the best.

So there I am, careering and careening down the dream highway in a runaway car, and doing pretty good at the whole not crashing thing, actually. But I know that I have to find someplace I can safely emergency-stop, because I can’t reach the brakes and so if I want to get out of this alive, I have to kill my momentum via aggressive driving and/or crashing as gently as I can into something soft.

So I am looking around for a suitable location, and I see this offramp to this sort of barren looking area, kind of like an abandoned quarry, and outside it, at some mysterious task, are some traditional Chinese farmers straight out of Central Casting.

I (somehow) ask them if I can stop there, and all I remember of that conversation is one of them managing to stammer out in broken English “We are… independent. ” I can only guess that I had asked them if they were working for the government of China?

So they let me in (the car aspect of the whole thing seems to have disappeared at this point, because dreams don’t give a fuck about closure, apparently) and hide me in this sort of trippy cavern underground, with big colorful mosses and lots of other Chinese peasant types lying around and hanging out.

By this point, I understood that somehow, the whole world was looking for me, in a benevlent way like I was a missing person of some importance, but for some reason, I still did not want to be found. I have a feeling that I was dodging responsibility, somehow.

Suddenly, the whole cavern system began to shudder, like someone was pounding on the roof with a hammer the size of a tractor trailer. Boom, boom, boom. Then these generic soldier types (berets, camo, sub-machine guns) storm in, followed by this huge fucked up Giger-type conglomeration of eyeballs and teeth and robot parts lumbers in on its claw-feet.

It’s at this point that it occurs to me that the shit is seriously going down, and I feel bad for bringing all this down on the nice, peaceful Chinese people who were kind enough to take me in.

The creature lumbers out of the room again, and the entrance is suddenly blocked by this gigantic yellow Eye of Sauron type eye, which pulses with different colors of light and rolls around and opens and closes. Everyone around me is screaming and freaking out, but I reach down and break a piece off rock off the floor of the cavern, and, carefully timing it for the moment in the eye’s cycle when it is totally open, I throw the rock at it… and it hits! It’s all very video game. There is even a brief “12 percent” hanging in the air, like that’s the amount of damage I did to the eye.

Encouraged by this, I try to get the rest of the people around me to join in, but I can’t seem to make them understand that you have to wait for the right moment.

The last thing I remember in the dream is yelling to people “No, you have to wait… just throw when I throw, OK?”

So I don’t know if we won, or anything. My memory of the dream just ends. Fin. Credits.

So what’s it all mean? Hell if I know. I have no idea what the secret cavern of the Chinese peasants represents. I am intrigued by the fact that, in the latter part of my dream, I was somehow so important that the whole world was looking for me. That’s positive, compared to my usual lack of self-esteem.

Do I feel, on some level, like I am hiding out from the responsibility implied by my own potential? If so… that’s kind of sad. 🙁 But illuminating.

Like all really good dreams, this one has really given me a lot to think about. Maybe it was Joe and Felicity who started me on this journey because I secretly wish someone close to me would give me the push I need to get going in life… and that after that, I would be spared having to generate my own momentum.

Or perhaps, of course, I’m just fucked up in the head.

Always a possibility.

Well, that’s it for now folks. Tune in next time my brain decides it’s time to mess me up!