Dreams of R'lyeh

My wife sometimes talks in her sleep. Usually just a few mumbled words, but sometimes long strings of words that don't go together in any coherent fashion. The only time these statements are ever actual sentences, they're almost always some variation on "you need to wake up", even though she's the one whose asleep.  If she seems distressed I will indeed wake her up, and she always says she was having a weird dream, sometimes a nightmare. After a moment we go back to sleep and often have a good laugh about it in the morning. It's been going on for years and it's no big deal.

Last night, she says something or other that wakes me up. I'm not sure what the first statement was, as I was asleep for half of it, and what little I heard sounded like just random words in no particular order. I look over and see she's asleep, with a really serene and peaceful look on her face. I decide I'll just let it go, since she clearly wasn't having a nightmare. About thirty seconds later, still asleep, she speaks a full (but short) sentence. As she intones these words, she continues to look as though the dream that inspired her speech was relaxing and pleasant:

"I am Cthulhu."

I kid you not, that's what she said, with a big sleepy smile on her pale unconscious face. While we did indeed have a good laugh about it this morning, I find that I cannot shake the fear that either she or I might actually be a Lovecraftian protagonist who refuses to draw the obvious but mind-shattering conclusion until it is too late. To nip that fear in the bud, I assure you I'll be checking her very thoroughly for gills, tentacles and mysterious yellow glyphs as soon as she gets home from work.

So if you never hear from me again, assume I've been devoured by my wife.

If you never hear from her again, assume the whole point of us moving to Seattle a few years ago was so that she'd be closer to the Stygian depths of the sea whose sepulchral siren song nightly serenades the secret squamous stirrings of her sinister soul, and that she has gone thither to join the batrachian voices of the mirky deep once her inhuman and indescribable transformation was complete.

Dream Dishes

The dream I just woke up from was horrifying.

I was unable to run the dishwasher in the ancient Sleestack temple, because guest star Bruce Jenner had accidentally spilled cat litter in it. It was at least clean cat litter, but seeing as how there are no repairmen in the Land of the Lost, if the little granules of clay were to jam it up, I'd owe the Sleestack's a new dishwasher.

Dream Comedy

Dream takes place in a college dorm room. I am about to lock up when the dean tries to burst into my room.

Dean: Open up! We've got to find him!

Jake: Listen. I know my rights. Come back when you've got a warrant.

I close the door and am about to lock it again when a portly detective accompanied by a police officer in a flak vest push the door open.

Detective: Here's your warrant.

The detective pushes past me into the room and starts rifling through my things.

Detective: Okay, where's your stash. Every college student's got a stash.

Jake: Um, aren't you supposed to be looking for a missing person?

The detective pauses and looks at me, then resumes search without rifling through my things.

Detective: Right. Sorry. Force of habit.

Rants in My Pants

I love to rant.

Him: Could you please put your pants back on?

Me: No. I pay rent here.

Her: Well we pay our daughter's rent here and think you should put your pants on.

Me: Listen. Don't be looking at me like I'm some piece of loser scum, you yuppie scum bag fuckers. Let me tell you a little story about going crazy.

I used to have a good paying job. I was a graphic arts director. I taught college in the evenings. The jobs were practically handed to me. But I threw it all away and moved out here because I had to know if I could make it on my own where nobody knew who I was. And it just about did me in and I went a little crazy.

But I'm making it as my own person. And might I suggest you give your daughter enough space for her to become her own person rather than hanging around the house trying to dictate how things should be. She's not even here right now.

And I'd appreciate it if you'd get the fuck out of my house because I'm going to be fucking this hot Latina MILF and want to finish up before my wife gets home. Not because I don't want her to find out, because I'm going to tell her all about it, but because it's rude to not be able to welcome her home because you're fucking someone else. Now please GET THE FUCK OUT!

You can learn strange things about yourself in your dreams. I often go into ranting diatribes in the dream state. Probably because I spend most of my life refraining from going off on people in my waking state. Just for clarification, their daughter and my wife are not the same person. Or perhaps they are in some really twisted dream way. Both are students. That was obvious.

This dream contained a gem of a realization. I look at my current living conditions and often wonder what was going through my head to make me give up my previous jobs and my nice house*. All I can think is that I went crazy. There were many factors that lead to that insanity. As Dr. Thompson said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. I should be able to handle insanity.

Never before had I considered the need for self actualization. Because I was a student at the Arts High I got a job there as a security guard and worked a summer as a receptionist there where I got noticed and offered a job as an administrative assistant where it was discovered I had graphic design skills and then the graphic designer quit and they gave me the job. Because I was a student at Academy College when the program director quit he recommended me to teach his game design class. They call that networking. I call it cronyism. It's lazy. And apparently unrewarding for my psyche. Good to know.

And the Latina MILF** was super hot. Unfortunately I only got a blow job and a condom put on before waking up. Yes, I practice safe sex in my sleep.

* I don't miss Minnesota or my jobs. I just miss having a house and money.

** Here is a perfect opportunity to use the NSFW tag and include some pics. So I do a search for Latina MILF knowing it will pull up loads of material. After clicking through ten pages of image search I gave up. The internet may be for porn, but most of it sucks.

Dream

I walked up to the auditorium wearing my leather cowboy hat. It was a Tool show. As I approach the doors Maynard James Keenan booms out across the loudspeakers like the voice of God. "Jake. You've seemed depressed lately. I don't think we can have you working on the show."

"I'm not depressed. I'm angry. And I like angry."

"No, you're in a dark space. We don't want that kind of energy in the booth. Sorry. You can still see the show."

I felt honored that he acknowledged me over the PA for all to hear but wandered away as Pushit played. I tipped my hat back. If I hadn't been depressed before, having Maynard tell me I was too depressed to work the effects booth certainly made me depressed.

Dream Come True

Last night I dreamed that in the mail came two passports, one for myself and one for my wife, wrapped in shiny gold foil. Also in the mail came two gold bars slightly larger in size than a checkbook box each.

When I got home from work and opened the door, there in front of me were two red, white and blue priority mail envelopes containing our passports. They were not wrapped in gold foil, but the site of them still excited me. Unfortunately the two gold bars were also absent. This didn't surprise me since sending gold bars through the mail would be all too great of a target for a 'lost package' opportunity.

Now at first to dream about receiving passports and that very day receiving them might seem uncanny, miraculous even. The only miracle here was that government did something quickly and efficiently. Probably because we were in no hurry. It would have been more miraculous had we not applied for our passports on January 2nd. So yes, while I had not thought about them for at least a week, passports were on my mind recently. As such, having a dream about them (the first since we applied) is not at all unusual. Given the waiting period, there was perhaps a 1 in 93 chance for the passports to arrive on a given day. So nobody get any ideas about denouncing me as a witch with second sight and tying me to a stake for a good old fashioned burning. Besides, I drink so much I'd go up all too quickly and be no fun at all. Might even explode and take a few of you with me. And it would be your own damn fault. Let that weigh heavy on your conscience.

And I was wrong about the gold bars, damn it! Perhaps the gold bars elude to the crock of gold in Irish myth. Fucking symbolic references.

Addendum:

In further synchronicities, that night I went to the strip club to see my favorite dancer perform (the one who has had actual dance training and is fucking amazing to watch move). Her first song of the evening was the same one that was playing in the truck as I parked; Jesus and Mary Chain/Just Like Honey. With these two synchronicities yesterday I am a little concerned this morning after waking up from a dream where both of my parents suddenly died. My first thought both in the dream and immediately upon waking, "Take care of the herd."

Hanukkah is Coming!

While still a week and a half away, I had my first Hanukkah dream of the season.

I was in a drafty cabin in the wilderness. It was night. The winds blew and I watched as my lamp light flickered. There was only enough olive oil in my lamp to last maybe half a night.

Without a strong presence of light in the cabin, a bear came wandering in. As I jumped from my loft bed towards the lamp and my rifle, I shouted noises to try and scare the bear away, but it remained.

And the noises were enough to wake me up. The cabin is no doubt a metaphor for the ramshackle State of Affairs this country finds itself in with an invading bear market that is not going to be dealt with by anything as silly as shouting a lot of words. But we have to do something because we don't have a whole lot of oil left.

Have I ever mentioned the dream where I was Moses?

Kolpashevo Dreaming

I just awoke from a dream that I had just gotten a job in a small town in Russia. My apartment was old and run down but the food supplies were streaming in, the internet connection was fast and extremely reliable, people were friendly, and the economy was just going into a big boom. The only reason it was cold in the apartment was because somebody had left a window open with a fan placed in it.

In yesterday's late night episode, someone suggested that I go see Ten Ton Hammer, a pagan industrial band. I can't find any band by that name. There should be a pagan industrial band named Ten Ton Hammer. They should probably be from Finland.

Luck O' the Irish, HAIL ERIS!

Due to the posting here, just hours before now...I'll post something real quick in lieu of working on my paper...

But so Jake can have his rant and eat it too...

My professor and I (as her ever loverly assistant) won the Leslie O. Fulton Grant last night.

Unfortunately, I do not have time to go into the chaotic, gory details of how this came about and the superstitious nature of the days leading up to the awards ceremony last night involving purple diamonds, red ale, yellow moons, etc.

But the end result is a paid trip to Ireland and 3-4 weeks of research and writing at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

Oh, and a few nights in Dublin for ethnographic studies involving copious amounts of Guinness.

Rant on about the !@$%^#$%&*s Jake!

Oh and.. we'll be here Saturday night celebrating...

Praise Be To SXM and Dreams

I started posting this elsewhere, then realized it fits in better with the crazy shit on repeated expletives. Here's what I put on transitive gaming:

Praise Be To Zweihander

A tangent I wandered off on while looking for a good link to Marx Brothers for a post elsewhere.

The Marx Brothers, by the way, is also the name of a German fencing school also known as The brotherhood of Our dear lady and pure Virgin Mary and the Holy and warlike heavenly prince Saint Mark. They taught Zweihänder, rapier, lonsword, spear, quarterstaff, and dussak. I note that they seem to have inspired the Drexel Swordsman School in the RPG 7th Sea.

And here's some tangentially-related thoughts that would be way off-topic there, but fit in great here...

I'm the sort of guy who puts a lot of credence in his dreams. Some are just "the cataloging of the days events" whereas others fit the benchmarks to qualify as a genuine "Vision" in the words of Major Briggs. I've had several dreams, documented over the years, that proved to be prophetic, and not all in a self-fulfilling way. The majority, however, are my subconscious trying to send an important message to my conscious mind. So when a thought process begun by a dream sends me to a place, I make note of it, and try to honor what the place and the journey are telling me. In this case, the six-degrees connection to a German fencing school, combined with the uncertain metaphorical name-dropping of Italy, has lead me to a waking revelation.

I have a new camera, and really want to start making CameraMan episodes and other cool little art films. I have three computers, and I know which one I want to use for editing. However, that computer has far too little space on it's hard-drive to start using it for video projects.

One of the things filling it's hard-drive is huge quark files from my old 7th Sea campaigns. Files I could convert, host to transitivegaming and/or burn to CD and thereby free up probably a gig of space or more. (7th Sea is an RPG about Restoration-Era Europe, Italian Witches, and Swashbuckling Swordsmen, hence the tenuous connection that lead to this revelation.)

In other words, there's really nothing holding me back from spending all this ridiculous free time creating films to unleash upon the world (or at least unleash here), and all the barriers I've imagined are purely psychosomatic and/or imaginary. It's time to get creative. It's time to clean out some of the trash and cobwebs. It's just time.

Thank you Saint Xander Marx for showing me the error of my ways.

Made In America

If there were ever any doubts about the culture that spawned me, my post yesterday settled the matter. I was whiny (about the half-imagined threat to my precious little scraps of entitlement) in the way that only a Caucasian American Male Blogger can be - in fact, to come off any more ludicrously self-centered and pathetically childish, I'd have to also be Upper Class, own a house, and have a Master's Degree on top of it all. I can't believe I actually lost sleep last night over a 5-hour-a-week "job".

Speaking of which: Last night I dreamt I was in Italy, waiting for my wife and Xander Harris to get back from the-errand-that-will-save-the-world. I got bored while waiting for them in the passenger seat, so I got out my keys, reached over and started the music playing. Or so I thought. Instead, apparently, I actually started the engine. The car rolled backwards, executed a 90 degree turn into traffic, rolled uphill, and off the end of a pier. Sarah and Xander rushed to my aid just a little too late. Zeppo that I was, I found myself powerless to do anything worthwhile. Changing gears and putting on the parking brake didn't do anything. Climbing into the drivers seat and stepping on the brake was likewise ineffective. The one smart thing I could have done - jump out of the car before it fell into the dark depths of the ocean - did not occur to my slumbering self. The metaphor was pretty freaking obvious - except for the Italy angle, which still puzzles me.