Sunday 12/27/09 dream.

Wandering out of the darkness of slumber I was on Christmas Island. No idea if it was because I was taking a new job or if circumstances beyond my control had marooned me upon this forsaken lump of rock. Walking along the eastern beach I was watching crabs come ashore for their annual migration. One of the crabs was big and misshapen but unaware of me. Others were tumbling through the surf and scampering over my feets. Soon I was greeted by a character who looked like David Niven.
Tall with a pencil-thin mustache with a military bearing. His right hand was a gnarled stump of bone and flesh which he passed off as a war wound when it was plain to anyone he suffered from a birth defect. Mr. Niven insisted that we had met before but I was uncertain if he was referring to waking life or dreams. Anyway I shook his wrist stump. A dark shape tumbled in the water and quickly revealed to be a corpse which crashed face first on the sand followed by another body. Neither appeared to have been long dead in the water since their skin was merely pale and far from bloated from immersion in the depths. Crabs were beginning to crawl up my legs and over my head paying no heed to the free meals basking in the sun. While walking back to Mr. Niven's station the crabs began their journey in earnest.

His home was a research outpost along the western shore a non-descript tin shack atop a cliff overlooking the western shore. Inside there was a brass plaque on the wall which no one could read since the electricity was out of commission. My flashlight was too weak to read the engraving. I was left with a vague impression the plaque was important and would reveal something about the dream or give me control over the circumstances.
While pacing through the building I saw one wall was lined with mirrors while the west facing wall was a giant window. Many more bodies were tumbling upon this beach. From horizon to horizon the ocean was chaos. This was the first time in a long time where I feared the ocean in a dream. Its surface was churned white, boiling far beyond the horizon. Waves kept crashing closer and closer hoping to grab and drown me in its clutches. So I hid behind Mr. Stiff Upper Lip who was standing behind a cash register. Twice waves came close, hovered menacingly over us then drew back into the Pacific to draw more strength from the storm. Finally waves began flooding the coast. I watched from on high as waves from both shores met in the middle creating a foaming ridge along the spine of the island.

Suddenly I was standing atop a volcanic cone staring down through clear water at the island below with unusual vertigo. David was standing next to me and remarked upon our situation and how the waters continued to rise but a far more peaceful pace. Soon the peak offered no respite from drowning leaving me resigned to my fate whereupon I stepped off into the abyss. I fell towards the island far beneath the waves. When I fell past the island into another, deeper ocean I saw there were galleons, schooners and frigates resting upon the silt as sunlight was filtered through both surfaces. The hulks were unpainted as the salt water had dissolved their paint and finish over the years which had protected the wood from parasites and worms.
I boarded one of the hulks which began to rise and once it broke the surface at the island's level I realized I could breathe and the higher waters had receded during my long immersion. Skeletons scrambled from belowdecks firing cannons into the sea to summon up the rest of their long slumbering fleet from the depths. The skeleton of John Lithgow was there as the pirate admiral.

My playing was interrupted when I visited a corner store in my hometown. The corner store is near the only good pizzeria in my hometown and right next to a notoriously slow stoplight which is the bane of most people who want to visit the municipal pool.
Nowadays the place is long vacant but a couple of years before I visited the Republic's glorious western states it was run by two old people selling pokemon cards. Well I was walking around and saw they were open. Inside I discovered Cerebus Guys: Dio, the unmentioned and unpublished follow-up to Sim's Cerebus novel Guys and continues in the same vein without the stupid relationshit nonsense meant to support the shaky foundation of Sim's butthurt male philosophies. Characters were a shaman who wore aardvark headgear, Droopy Dog from the old MGM cartoons playing another completely different character. Some of the pages were in full color for emphasis during story. I didn't get much of a chance to read the tale and I didn't buy it.

Lastly I found myself wandering around my hometown accompanied by a white german shepherd. I encountered the fat child molester music teacher who was arrested when I was in 9th grade. He was wearing only a towel and was just as disturbing and creepy as I remember when he was a music teacher in seventh and eighth grade. The dog led me away and I ended up spilling cold water over the beast who transformed into Lilah.

Reckon that about covers all the parts of Sunday night/Monday morning's dreams. When I wrote down my brief notes there wasn't much beyond the Jusenkyo Lilah bit and a vague memory of an unpublished Cerebus the Aardvark novel.

On 12/29/09 I dreamt of cubes and hypercubes, how many cubes can make a tesseract? kept adding and multiplying in my sleep during this abstract dream.

While President Barry was touring the ruins of the USA, I was in Seattle sitting upon some marble steps. When he deigned to make an appearance before signing some superficial legislation regarding 'hope' and 'change' and 'gee whiz that would be awful nice' Barry stopped for a photo opportunity which was, fortunately, not on the deck of an aircraft carrier bearing a banner declaring "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED". He shook hands with the mayor of Seattle and I looked up at the strained, awkwardly smiling pair where I noticed the bluest skies I have ever seen are in Seattle!

Something was decidedly wrong in the state of Washington. Everyone ^[who?] knows it rains constantly for years on end with the sun known only as a cold gray disk behind the ceiling of clouds. In fact Ray Bradbury's famous 'All in a Summer's Day' was not written about the planet Venus ^{[citation needed]} but the Gateway to the Pacific! A sunny day in Seattle is far more frightening than the Mayan calendar heralding a new baktun cycle!! More exclamation marks!!!
When I brought it to the attention of both politicians they incredulously stared at me as if two, uncut, gigantic penises erupted from my eye sockets then set about spurting hot chocolate with marshmallows all over their expensive Italian shoes and sullying the cuffs of their pin-stripey pants.

Pardon me, 'eye-talian'.

The ravings of a madman are easily dismissed so the Greatest President of the 21^st Century linked arms with Greg Nickels (I had to Wikipedia that fact, gentle reader. Apologies all around. I have dutifully vandalized the page to make Jerry Colonna the mayor and Jerry Lewis the Mayor-Elect.) and exited stage right, cue the orchestra to play Happy Days are Here Again.
My fellow step-warmers were artists and when I glanced at my mitts I saw that I had been industriously engaged in the pursuit of Art, note capitalization, wielding naught but a fat, cocklike magic marker. Everyone was busily bestowing zebra stripes upon the foot-worn stone but feeling like a maverick in the vein of John 'Grampa' McCain and Sarah 'Math is Hard' Palin I touched my inner angsty teenager for inspiration while drawing a skull. The bony portrait's style harkened to that of Australian aborigones. Squiggly serpent lines kissed and curled about those dark orbits while exciting glowing lines of thick magic marker radiated from the skull putting Keith Haring to ignominious shame. In a pique of inspiration my jolly roger was gifted with thorny brow ridges which lent a devilish and horny flair to the scene. When I die this sidewalk sketch will be worth millions! MILLIONS, I TELL YOU!
Upon completion I wandered elsewhere to begin sketching a caricature of a mongol warrior from the Golden Horde. Far less abstract and more realistic my interpretation had the eyes nearly closed to accentuate Asian features without being completely racist. Should one casually glance upon it then one would think the eyes were simply dark pits which are actually the lower eyelid rather than the true eyes which slittedly menace close to the eyebrows.

Looking up again I discovered the scene had changed and instead of languishing outside in the fresh air of the pacific northwest I was safely imprisoned within an abandoned airport. Look at this fucking airport. The walls are painted black, only natural lighting and even that is muted because it's cloudy outside and nobody's washed the glass since the last ice age. Everywhere is gray-green carpeting which smells more of dust than musty bare feet. Spilled coffee from uncounted aeons past are the only reliable landmarks for travellers in this complex. My current location was in a downstairs cafeteria full of disgruntled science fiction authors, not writers, who are largely unknown in waking life to the point they don't actually exist in waking life. At hand was a roundtable discussion of the current state of affairs.

Since I am a talentless hack I found a spot and sat at their table which had another empty seat that was quickly filled by a co-worker from Usury, Inc.. Let's call her Beanpole. If one believes in a god then they would believe that deity tried their hardest to create a nordic goddess but decided to go with the first draft instead of making a few more before declaring it done. Such a work ethic in the arts or writing is largely unheard of especially here at heptapod.org which is carefully written, drafted three times, scrupulously proofed and then submitted for approval from the star chamber. Disregard that, I suck cocks. I just bang this out until I say it's good enough.
Oh delicious irony!
Beanpole is six feet tall but thin with a tomboyish body. Thin blonde hair reaches only to her shoulders with her shoulders hunched forward just a little bit in a self-conscious fashion to draw less attention to her rack. My best guesstimation is she was packing B-cups or C-cups at the very most. By no means of the imagination would someone require a pair of catcher's mitts to handle those puppies. Her preferred mode of dress was trailer park casual, track suits and flip flops even in winter giving the impression to an admirer that she would have the bumper sticker of "I'd rather be barefoot" on her vehicle. Considering the amount of sexual adventures ^[liar] I have had in my life I am an expert when it comes to the gentler gender having had my share of erotic escapades ^{[stop it already]} that I would only need one beer to deign intimacy with the young woman.

Her beef was with being in dire financial straits having been laid off from Usury, Inc., the unemployment has run out and she needs the bare necessities in order to muddle through her life. Being a gentlemen I kept thinking about propositioning her for money for several one night of coitus apologizing for not being able to get it up. Oh the things I'd pay her to do with me. Like nag me about showering, how it's my turn to clean the litterboxes and if I dare share any of my other fantasies then heptapod.org would be accused of purveying pornography. Either way, I'd hit that.

Everyone at the table was silent, some whispered encouragement to her along with half-hearted promises of support in these tough times. My mouth was muted as I argued with myself about how the film Defending Your Life is a guideline for my life in the same measure that Fight Club is earnest but essentially hollow in its sentiments. Also Palahniuk keeps writing the same story with different titles. More power to him, at least he doesn't rely upon a vanity site for personal satisifaction. A portly author started to put the moves on Beanpole much to my dismay. Now was the time to put the money where her mouth was, also her vagina.

About this time I realized that I was sleeping in a bed at the home of my parents. The realization of my dreaming broke the spell like Snow White at midnight but instead of turning into a pumpkin I found myself being drawn back through a tunnel of technicolor tints before snapping awake underneath a spinning ceiling fan. Most times when I am forcibly awakened by myself the sensation is more akin to a drowning man finally reaching the surface of the water and gasping for that vital lungful of air. Quite a violent affair. Still the dream was gone.