As I was telling my pal Mickey, the other night I had a rather cool dream in which I traveled with the first Doctor and a young Sarah Jane Smith. Shortly after arriving on a crumbling planet (presumably future Earth, though I don't recall the Doctor ever saying precisely where we were) not unlike the setting of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", we determined that the Daleks (DALEKS!) were operating on the planet and were attempting to manufacture a Doomsday Device (TM) to destroy the world and take over the galaxy or effect some similarly grandiose and terrible outcome. In order to stop them, we had to locate the only surviving pretzel vendor in the area, as soft pretzels were apparently the only remaining substance with the proper texture and consistency to serve as wires in the Daleks' invention. It was even more imperative that we locate him before the Daleks did because he was so nice that he would give his sole remaining pretzel to anyone who simply asked for it -- and, if the Daleks themselves did not reach him first, whoever acquired the pretzel would be in grave danger. So after the Doctor informed us of these details from the interior of the black-and-white university building in which the TARDIS had landed, Sarah Jane and I ventured out into a Technicolor world in order to track down the vendor and thwart the Daleks' plans. Just as in many of the Hartnell serials, the Doctor was absent for most of the adventure.

In addition to the interiors of buildings being in black-and-white and the outdoors appearing in color -- which I admittedly did not notice during the dream -- some other quirky things happened that did cause me to take note. At one point, for example, I was hiding underneath a tarpaulin near the unfinished device when a Dalek saucer touched down nearby. As it did so, it first lowered landing gear consisting of a tripod, each leg of which had a wheel on the bottom. Then, after the wheels touched, the ship raised up from the ground again and the wheels rotated so that they were positioned parallel to the ground. After another light brush against the ground, the tripod legs folded inward and in half, such that the spacecraft now balanced on a shorter tripod. Wheels then emerged from the bends of the legs, at which point the Daleks' spacecraft rolled around the corner of a building and out of view. Given the way the tripod legs dangled loosely and the saucer jerked about as if suspended by a string, I was prompted to remark under my breath, "What a cheap and superfluous special effect." I mean really, weren't the Daleks already supposed to be on the planet?

And then there was the end of the dream, in which the Daleks exterminated some janitor guy who was with Sarah Jane before approaching the pretzel vendor and asking for a pretzel. I arrived just as it asked, but because -- apparently -- at some other point in the dream I had done a favor for the pretzel vendor without knowing it was him, the vendor chose to give me the last pretzel. At this point, facing certain extermination, I noticed that a crowd of hungry children had gathered around us... so I ducked into the crowd and began breaking off pieces of the pretzel for each of the children. I felt slightly guilty as I did so, though. While my actions were partly motivated by a desire to help the children, I also remained patently aware of the fact that, with me crouching, the kids effectively formed a shield that would prevent the Dalek from being able to shoot me as I made my way through the crowd and back to the school that housed the TARDIS. But now that I think about it, the Doctor was always endangering people on his adventures, so maybe that was par for the course in a "Doctor Who" adventure.

I woke up shortly afterwards, whereupon I went back to sleep and had a fragmented dream that included skateboarding, exploring an abandoned prison with a bunch of people I haven't seen in over a decades and whose names I'd be hard-pressed to remember in waking life, and drinking coffee in a roadside diner. Anyway, here's hoping that I have the opportunity to travel with the Doctor again in the near future!

Yesterday, the freaky dreams continued with my dream that I intentionally chopped off half of my forefinger to see if using generic Neosporin (that is, not the real thing) would facilitate the reattachment of it. Apparently it worked quite well -- the healing began almost immediately -- prompting me to replicate the action several times. However, on the last time, my severed finger fell on the floor and got slightly dirty. I went to wash it as a result -- but the water was so hot that it effectively cooked my finger, leaving it the flesh the color and consistency of smoked salmon. I grew more and more disheartened with each successive failed attempt to reattach my finger... and when it remained stiff and began to turn purple, I gave up and sadly reconciled myself to the loss. I then resolved to call myself "Wesley of the Nine Fingers" and began singing the corresponding tune from the animated version of The Return of the King with my own name in place of Frodo's. I was still humming it when I woke up with my finger intact.

And for the fun of it (and because I apparently cannot sleep), I went and recorded two short mp3s from said animation for you. The first, "Frodo of the Nine Fingers", is the song that I was singing in the dream. There is a much longer version of the song at the beginning of the film that recounts Bilbo's adventures before the story joins Frodo and Samwise en route to Mount Doom, but this is the shorter and more lowering version that I have a tendency to sing at times (I haven't got the other one memorized). And then here is the extended version of "The Bearer of the Ring", though a shorter version that only includes up to "shrink with hate" plays at several points in the cartoon in various tempos. Anyway, enjoy! 😐

Hi all! Once again, apologies about the lack of posting and communication from me as of late -- I hope that your new year is going well so far. 2007 has kicked off for me with some very, very strange dreams, the four most recent of which I will describe briefly below. Prepare to be confounded.

Yesterday, I dreamed that I was battling aliens masquerading as college coeds. My mission: to retrieve a mermaid keychain (which I now recognize as being a happy meal toy of Ariel from The Little Mermaid, except that offering wasn't a keychain) that purportedly possessed technological abilities so advanced that Earthlings throughout the centuries had regarded it as a magical artifact. After a very lengthy and frenzied race through a muddy, crumbling Japanese rural town, we arrived at a desolate school building and I managed to wrest the artifact from one of the aliens' hands. I awoke as I scrambled through the mud as the rain poured down above me, wondering if I should attempt to hide the artifact for the time being or keep it in my possession and continue to run.

Last night, I dreamed that I was playing UNO with four schoolmates from my high school/college days -- at least until my father showed up in the room and gave this lengthy speech about how our playing UNO could somehow cost him his job and reputation. Nobody thought he made any sense, but after he left I suggested that we switch to playing Tonk in accordance with his wishes. What made the dream even weirder, though, was that the people with whom I was playing kept changing into other former classmates and even some people that I have never met. Of course, I didn't take notice any of this as the dream progressed -- I continued to treat them as consistent entities, though only at the end did I explicitly recognize any of them as being specific persons. Even then, I have not thought about this girl for years (she was a senior when I was a freshman, so I only knew her for a year before she graduated) and truthfully didn't even think about her much when I attended school with her. I'm certain that if I walked past her on an empty street and she were the only other person there, I wouldn't recognize her because I remember pretty much nothing about her appearance except that she had blonde hair and wore a leather coat with metal studs, and I'm not even too certain about that last part. Anyway, the only reason that she got singled out was because some stuttering guy at the table -- whom I am pretty sure I've never met -- addressed her by name and asked if she had recently lost weight, because she had a soft figure that, while he approved, suggested to him that she had been much heavier at one point. The last thought I had before I woke up was that that was a really weird and potentially offensive thing to say.

The third and fourth dreams both took place during a nap from which I very recently awoke. In the first, I was watching a Christmas/Halloween special in which three children were supposed to be on their way to a winter wonderland, whereupon they accidentally fell into a snow-covered volcano and were kidnapped by witches who meant to have them for dinner. Then somehow, without recognizing any of this, I traded places with one of those children -- which is to say that I found myself captive with two other people in the witches' lair. Apparently we were bound with frost or something equally weak, though, since I broke my bonds incredibly easily, roughly shoved the witches out of the way, and escaped into the narrow tunnels beneath the volcano. They were pretty tight fit even for me, but eventually I managed to emerge from a trash bag in the foyer of my high school building, whereupon I somehow realized that I had come there to attend a haunted attraction or something that had been closed. (By the way, I think that the retconning of events in a dream is an extremely interesting phenomenon.) Then I ran into a college classmate who told me that if I didn't hurry I was going to be late for our high school graduation -- which doesn't make sense, I know. Since I was wearing the same exact clothes in the dream that I had worn to bed, he offered to loan me one of his ties.

Then Bacardi started barking, which woke me up for a bit. When I returned to sleep, I was in a different dream. I was staying at an inn on some docks in Spokane, WA (I have never been there and have no idea why this place was explicitly named in the dream), and during a morning walk along the area I and another person happened to spot an orca in the water. The guy then fell in, whereupon the orca proceeded to grab him by the leg with its mouth, drag him into a shadowy area underneath the docks, and begin to eat him as he flailed and screamed. Horrified and awed, I watched for a few moments before rushing into a diner to tell them that an orca was eating some guy and to call 911 -- but naturally, they didn't believe me and burst out laughing. And I burst out laughing too because laughter is infectious, but even as I did so I insisted that I was serious and that they should call. After a look out of the window confirmed that an orca was indeed eating a guy, they complied. Then I returned to the scene, where the orca had finished eating that guy and was now eating another guy and his son as a woman dove into the water after them -- and then, somehow, I could see inside the orca's closed mouth, where the man, the woman, and the son had pressed themselves against the interior and were fighting not to go down its throat (apparently, like the TARDIS, this orca was bigger on the inside). Then the orca somehow telepathically communicated with the boy and told him to let it eat him, whereupon the boy complied and, in a trancelike state, stopped struggling and allowed himself to slide down the orca's gullet. The father of the boy began raging at the orca to spit him back up -- and then, after a moment of silence, the orca regurgitated (without opening its mouth, so everyone was still trapped). Instead of tossing up the boy, however, Gilbert Gottfried emerged wearing a red bathrobe and proceeded to complain about how humid it was in the whale's mouth. Then I woke up.

I sure do like strange dreams. 🙂

P.S. Wesoteric is now running WordPress 2.06. As always, let me know if you encounter any problems!

Do you ever think that perhaps our dreams take place in some legitimate reality separate from our waking lives? Certainly not all of them, mind you, as some dreams pretty clearly issue from the subconscious thoughts of the user, but then there are others (at least with me) that seem too real and "normal" to stem from the dreamer's unconscious mind -- for example, dreams in which the dreamer explores distant locales or experiences things for which he/she has no extensive frame of reference, or dreams in which the dreamer meets with people he/she has never met in real life and who do not have appropriate waking counterparts. I'm fairly sure that Omni has written about this at some point or another. (And if you happen to read this, Omni, do link us to those specific posts. Thanks!)

I think about this often, but I was thinking about it again because I just woke up from another dream featuring three characters that -- I think -- have appeared several times in my recent dreams. I write "I think" because they may just as well have only appeared in this one dream (though I semi-distinctly remember dreaming about them on one other occasion), but upon meeting them I recalled multiple instances during which I had encountered them before. I have memories of events in my dreams that elude me in real life.

In these particular dreams, I encounter three characters. All of the dreams begin with me visiting Mark (also known as Marco/Marke/Mael) in his home. I do not know Mark in real life, nor can I think of anyone for whom Mark might be an analogue, but he appears to be a good friend in my dreams -- or at least a good enough friend for me to visit him on a regular basis. However, I hardly ever speak to Mark, as most of my dialogue is carried out with his personal "physician", who is always present and answers my questions to Mark in greater detail. For example, if I ask how Mark is feeling, he might respond, "Much better," whereupon the woman tending to him will launch into a detailed explanation of his physical progress over the past week. (more...)

...click here for my best attempt to reproduce a song I overheard in a dream last night, or at least what I can remember of it. (The recording is less than 20 seconds long, so hopefully you won't find it to be too painful.) I'm thinking of trying to flesh it out and turn it into something for Crayon Poetry Corner.

Other things that happened in the dream -- I was in one of my old high school classrooms at the end of the day with two fellow students, neither of whom I have thought about in years and one of whom I couldn't and can't even remember by name (so to make up for it in the dream, I constantly referred to the other one by name). The nameless one was trying to give me these two heaping styrofoam containers of french fries and marinated shrimp and egg fried rice she said she'd acquired for me from fancy restaurants, but seeing as how the fries had the words "Burger King" written on them (which is weird, because I've never seen a fry from Burger King or anywhere else that had the restaurant name somehow burned onto its surface) I had my doubts about their origin. In any case, I couldn't carry both containers, so I was trying to get out of there with only one -- the fried rice container -- which made her incredibly sad because she wanted me to have both so I had to try to convince her that I wasn't trying to insult her by taking only one of them. (more...)