In this post I have listed some of my dreams, in a random order. I have listed the origins to the best of my memory.
1.
I was in a massive structure that solely consisted of long hallways ‑ as far as I could tell. People were, for the most part, just walking aimlessly about. There were very nasty creatures rolling through the hallways. They never bothered anyone while in transit through the hallways. In fact, people seemed rather used to vile things rolling past them all day.
I noticed several things. At the very start of a hallway, a creature would sometimes talk to a person. That would result in the person running as fast as they could to the end of the hallway. The person would simply stop at the end. The creature rolled to the person and uncurled. (I never got close enough, but they did look extremely scary.) At this point, the creature proceeded to heartily maul the person to death. Heavy cracking and smacking of bone could be heard.
Here were the facts I compiled after wandering the hallways for several days:
1. People only run after a creature has talked to them.
2. After they run to the end of the hallway, they die.
3. Creatures never stop people in hallways, only at ends and beginnings.
I did not want to gamble anymore. I needed to get out of that place. If one of those things talked to me, I would find out why the people run, and consequently, die.
So here's what I did. I ran. I figured that the creatures wouldn't mess with me as long as I ran. They would think I was the meal of some other creature. My strategy paid off. I got out and came upon a vast field ‑ and never stopped running....
(Suspected Origin: The dream occurred after I watched Logan’s Run, so it may be the basis.)
2.
As she stood on the roof, her father was crying in the basement. That was a paradox to me. If he knew it was coming, he would not be worried. But he knew it was coming, therefore he had to be involved. Why would he cry? He was down there with a bottle of Jack Daniels, one knee on the ground.
She stood proud on the roof, eyeing the skies. The farm girl was prepared for this. Her role in the plan was beginning to take shape. A faint rumble in the distance was all she needed. This was it; the culmination of years of training could finally be put to use. It came quickly, crashing into the surrounding woods and fragmenting into thousands of pieces, as an airplane should. There was no fire, no smoke, no bodies. Although she didn't understand what they signified, the symbols "TWA" were still visible on some of the wreckage.
Ah, part of the camouflage, she thought.
Then they came. The rocks rolled out of the wreckage, spinning faster and faster. They knew where to go.
One came by me, as a matter of fact. It was pulsating as it rolled, a truly vile creature.
Somehow I knew it all. That wasn't an airplane ‑ it was an alien vessel in camouflage. It was merely dispatching troops and crashing was meant to cause confusion. No one would figure out where the airplane came from. Even aliens have a sense of humor.
(Suspected Origin: I don’t know. Completely generated by my unconscious mind.)
3.
I awoke suddenly, because something was making a noise. Usually it's the cat, but the noise was slightly different. I was on my right side and looked up to notice a flexible tube hovering near my face. Whatever it was, it probably wouldn't expect an attack, so I grabbed it and pulled hard. It didn't offer much resistance and I had pulled in nearly 15 feet of it until I reached the end. It shrunk quickly, to perhaps 1 foot in length. I picked up the peculiar tube and placed it on my computer desk, turning on the lights in the process. It looked like a cylindrical piece of bubble gum and felt rather pliable; it had ceased moving. I went into my closet to get a small box. When I returned to my desk, the tube was gone.
Confounded, I let my eyes wander for a moment, searching for signs of the tube. I decided to look under my bed and noticed lots of little tubes, perhaps 4 inches long and 1/10 of an inch in diameter. They were squirming. I gathered them all and held them in my hand, squeezed hard, and felt them resist. They didn't like being squeezed. At this time, I was trying to decide if the original had broken into smaller pieces or if the others were already under my bed and the bigger tube was seeking them out. Either scenario was equally strange. But something even stranger happened. As I was squeezing the tubes, they eventually stopped resisting. This was not good. Either they had disappeared or sensed...an exit. They could've shrunk so small to have tunneled within my skin and into other areas. And what if, while inside of me, they decided to expand again? That would be very bad. I panicked and ran outside and stopped cold. The ground was covered with little pink tubes, squirming.
(Suspected Origin: The short story Colony, by Philip K. Dick.)
4.
I had found a special shoe which could also be used as a horn, for the purpose of producing mating calls of killer whales. I never investigated the reason for needing such a thing, but I had one and my friend had one as well. We both decided to blow the shoe horns and see what would happen. A killer whale suddenly rose out of the water and swam towards the shore. It hit the beach and did not slow down; it was slightly different from a standard killer whale and could move like a snake on solid earth. We both froze and watched it moving towards us, mouth open. It realized we were not a mate, but food. Our ability to move was temporarily disabled by fear and I recall feeling the tip of its teeth on my shoulder ‑ it came that close. I lost track of my friend; he dashed in one direction and I darted in another, up a hill. I expected to be safe on high ground, but it was slithering up the hill.
I found a wooden tower and ascended. There was a man on the top, in a small cabin. He was older than I and listened to my wild claims, while phoning the police.
"I've got some nut here. I need someone to ‑" The snake‑whale slithered past the tower as he was reporting me, and he dropped the phone.
I woke up at this point, and seeing a killer whale/snake hybrid was quite interesting.
(Suspected Origin: The novel Maker of Universes, by Philip Jose Farmer.)
5.
The surface they were walking on looked like grass, but was really an advanced polymer. They didn’t know the difference for they’ve never seen real grass. The only obstruction in their view was a huge mountain, with an opening at the bottom. The mountain was to their east and a vast ocean of green invaded their eyes. No one knows if they were real humans, all 150,000 of them or so. The difference between artificial and real has long been forgotten and not a single person is aware the entire planet is artificial, created millennia ago. But such concerns were not on their minds. This was where they needed to be, for this was the entry point. If necessary, they would wait for days.
Sharp cracks and hisses like miniature lightning bolts penetrated their ears and a vast portion of green polymer was pelted with thousands of objects. Some were still kicking, some were still clenching and unclenching. What lay before these wretched, worthless people was a mound of freshly severed human limbs. These were to be saved for later, of course. They had to be gathered up and deposited in the mountain. For the next 50 days they would have food. It has been this way for countless generations.
(Suspected Origin: The “thinny” from the Gunslinger books, written by Stephen King.)
6.
A swimming pool lay in the middle of an infinitely vast sheet of white flexible plastic. The weight of the water was enough to dent the plastic, thus forming sides and making a standard swimming pool. In this isolated pool were many people, none of which were swimming. Rather, they were treading water, as they were engaged in a game of water volleyball. The dent made by the weight of the water was great enough to make the walls unscalable; they were like sheer cliff faces, but completely smooth. So these people had been treading water their whole lives, playing water volleyball. They knew of nothing else.
Suddenly, one man started screaming. His screams became muted as his head was pulled under the water by an unseen force. In an attempt to help him, other people submerged and soon swam away, in terror. A powerful grinding force tore through bone, tendon, and internal organs, mixing them up and distributing the remains throughout slightly ellipsoidal regions, which exuded into smaller passages. A faint outline could be seen through the man’s blood as it made a tube-like path in the water.
Another man was grabbed by the invisible force, and through more entrails, an outline became more apparent. The people writhed, screamed agonies, screamed for help. Help that would never come. A shark, completely invisible, had slipped into their pool.
(Suspected Origin: I have never read in a book of this or seen such a thing happen in any movie. I have also never consciously thought of such a thing happening. This is a fabrication of my unconscious. The infinite white plastic sheet definitely came from the video game Super Mario 64. If you looked “outside” some levels, you could see an unending white surface.)
7.
I was traveling in an RV with a co‑worker, named Tony. He was seated at the dining table and staring daggers into a plate of quesadillas. There were other people in the RV with us and they became panicked; Tony was not Tony. Somehow, we all suddenly knew his brain was empty. While the actual brain was there, his consciousness was gone. It had somehow left and entered the quesadillas. So the quesadillas contained Tony's consciousness; they were him ‑ his personality. Since Tony's body no longer contained a mind, it ran purely on instinct. The smell from the quesadillas was enough to make the body start eating them, which horrified us. He was devouring himself.
(Known Origin: One of my co‑workers went to Jamaica with his girlfriend and he paid $4200 for 6 days, which included airfare and 24 hour room service. One day at work he suddenly started talking about it and told me he kept ordering quesadillas. If he wanted a plate of quesadillas at 3 in the morning, then they had to cook them and provide room service. He kept going on and on about the quesadillas. This naturally became embedded somewhere in my wetware and my unconscious mind decided to play with it.)
8.
There was something wrong with my abdomen. Little white bumps protruded from the skin, like jelly beans. One of them was squirming, and I grabbed it. I pulled out a very large maggot, about as large as a good‑sized shrimp. Another one stuck its head out but slipped back into the safety of my stomach before I could grab it. Rather than going into a wild rage, I drove to the hospital.
By the time I got to the hospital, all of my internal organs were gone. Never mind how I was breathing or pumping blood. It apparently wasn't necessary. It was such a strange sight, to look down and observe one's midsection and chest cavity empty. There was a benefit to this. The maggots were gone.
I walked into the doctor's office and he seemed perfectly content with the fact I was still alive. After some close inspecting, the doctor said to me, "I think you have a chest infection."
(Suspected Origin: The dream felt like I was in a Robert Sheckley short story and I have read nearly a hundred of his stories, so they may be the basis. It’s what I call “humor of the horrible”. My lung surgery and hospital stay had no influence, since I had this dream several years before the surgery.)
9.
I was in class and the teacher walked in and asked if we had our remixes ready. I didn't know what the hell was going on, but the other students had prepared elaborate arrangements of songs from video games. I wanted to slowly disappear into the back of the room, because I had prepared nothing. So I thought. I knew the Dr. Wily theme from Mega Man 2 pretty well, and figured I could whistle it. When my turn came up, my mouth was too dry and it sounded wrong. I knew how the song was supposed to go, so I got pretty frustrated. But I didn't give up. I stood there and whistled the whole thing. I could see a lot of confused faces after whistling, and I had to explain it was Dr. Wily's theme from MM2. One student snapped and said, "Yeah! I remember that!"
(Suspected Origin: My unconscious desire to remix game music coupled with my fear of failing before a crowd.)
10.
Every human on the planet (not necessarily Earth) lived inside a giant covered building. The building was technologically asymmetrical, as one end was more advanced than the other end. When construction started, they used wood. But nothing was ever torn down. If one was really inspired, they could walk back to the oldest wood sections. The building was hundreds of miles in length and the newest sections were made of material we do not have; something more advanced than our metals, concrete and synthetic materials.
Very few people wanted to live in the older sections, so in order to cope with the bursting population, new sections were always being added. The population density was so high that groups of 4 people were required to occupy a single bedroom. I was in a room with another man and two women, both of which were attractive. I could have had either woman, but there was some other woman I wanted. Unfortunately, she had committed suicide.
I had hired a guide to take me back to the old wood sections and we found her hanging from a crossbeam. It was possible to bring the dead back to life, but with a caveat. They could not be rejuvenated into a biological body; it had to be plastic. I really wanted her, so I decided to go with the plastic.
(Suspected Origin: I’ve read so much science fiction, that I’m not entirely sure. I remember reading a story about a structure that was never demolished. Workers just kept adding new sections. It is probably a Robert Sheckley story.)
11.
Unusual looking crickets were getting stuck in the glue traps in my parent’s house on Pinecone Trails. Warm shafts of sunlight penetrated the curtains in the front room, as I noticed the little critters eating the glue and becoming larger. However, as they increased in size, they did not become more insect-like in appearance, but feline. A full grown cat/insect hybrid began walking around the house, in the usual way that cats stalk their territory, so it seemed completely normal. However, when I petted the creature, I could clearly feel the exoskeleton. It had an ersatz fur covering. This didn’t seem all that strange, so I went outside for a walk and noticed tall weeds between my parent’s house and the Glasper’s house. Amongst those weeds were many dead people that were clearly quite dead, as is typical of dead people. They died in the oddest of positions, choosing to bend their arms and legs at uncomfortable looking angles.
I called the police and told them about the dead people. Within minutes, a coroner’s truck and several police cars drove down Pinecone Trails, carefully going around the island, rather than driving directly to my house. The coroners started to unload the black body bags and gurneys, when the dead people began stirring. As it turned out, they were quite OK, and began talking amiably amongst themselves. The coroners were rather upset and started to put away the black bags. A police officer exited his car and slammed the door. He walked towards me, shaking his finger in the direction of the people in the weeds, while giving me a venomous glare. He shouted in my face, “THOSE PEOPLE AREN’T DEAD!”
(Suspected Origin: The novel The Right Hand of Dextra, by David J. Lake. This was probably the most humorous dream I’ve ever had. One would expect the police to be relieved that the people weren’t dead, but in my dream they expected to see some dead people and were quite upset to find them alive. My dream came from the novel because it happened shortly after reading it and I suspect that the insect/cat hybrids were meant to imitate cats and infiltrate our households, while the people in the weeds were newly formed imitations of humans.)
12.
I was standing outside of Hazelwood West, my high school. Someone had painted the exterior in a chaotic striped pattern of solid white and black. Nothing stirred, no one was visible. There were no sounds outside and the only weather seemed to be sunlight. I slowly approached the building and used the entrance that led to the junior high math rooms and main office. No lights were on inside; the electricity had apparently been disconnected. However, there was a deep humming noise, indicating heavy machinery. I entered the hallway and saw a person being skinned by a machine resembling a printing press. But it was far more sophisticated. The machine ran the length of the hallway and was designed to deorganize humans, starting with the skin. Morbidly intrigued, I followed the hapless individual as he passed through the machine, watching his intestines collect onto a spool and his other organs collect onto appropriately shaped surfaces. I didn’t quite make it to the end of the process, since by that time I had noticed what was operating the machine. It was a group of those creatures from the movie “Alien”.
(Suspected Origin: The operators of the machine clearly came from that classic movie. However, my unconscious generated the machine. This is an old, old dream. I had this one probably before age 15. I’m able to write about it because I remember it vividly. I invented the word “deorganize”, which has a double meaning. It’s an interesting and appropriate pun.)
13.
A physics experiment had gone awry; we had somehow screwed up the Fine Structure constant. It no longer approximated 1/137. This caused perturbations in the quantum foam that pervades the seething, completely full, ill-named “vacuum” of space. It became thicker because virtual particles (electron-positron pairs) were no longer annihilating. This halted the orbits of stars around the cores of galaxies, halted the orbits of planets around stars, etc. It halted everything. We never saw it coming, since space itself became thicker. The entire Universe had come to a full stop.
(Suspected Origin: Simply having knowledge of quantum foam and the fine structure constant. It also behooves me to point out I had this dream before reading Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan. Those of you that have read Schild’s Ladder will understand why it behooved me to mention that.)
