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I have been so busy with my work and with M-Brane projects that I keep putting off--and then never doing--a lot of entries that I've meant to make in the journal, (especially dream posts since remembering dreams and recording what I recall tends to fertilize my writer mind. Hence, no posts over the last four weeks). I've been trying to sleep a bit more. I have no trouble sleeping, but I get into phases, especially when work is demanding, of staying up too late trying to work on side projects, read, listen to podcasts or just jack around on the web. So I have been making myself most nights get at least seven hours in bed. When I get enough sleep, and get closer to well-rested, I tend to have clearer recall of dream situations and imagery. Unfortunately a lot of what I have been remembering lately is drearily realistic, literal rehashes of events from work or dream extrapolations of what might happen tomorrow at work. But there have been a few oddities worth remembering centered on three very common themes in my dream state.
Food dreams: Most of these lately have been literal and work-related, but a couple notable exceptions: 1) I dreamt that I visited a new restaurant located in a small corner of an ancient colluseum-style building which specialized entirely in egg salad. They had dozens of formulations of egg salad and many different styles of bread. There was an egg salad with copious smoked trout and capers and dill in it, served on a toasted rye bagel. There was another one mixed with pulled pork and chili pepper mayonnaise, wrapped in a thick fresh flour tortilla with avocados. Another one was a mixture containing yogurt, cucumber, mint and "gyro meat" served with wedges of grilled pita. I could go on and on, but you get the point. A total egg salad concept restaurant. I wonder if such a thing exists. As one who loves egg salad, I think it's a brilliant idea; 2) I prepared a cookbook for publication, compiling its text and images on a large device like an iPad, but huge. It was embedded in the steel surface of a work table and was probably at least a meter wide. In a larger version of my home kitchen, Jeff assembled show plates of our new dishes and photographed them. As he took pictures they instantly appeared on my table-sized screen and I slid them into place on pages with my fingers.
Sex dreams: These happen constantly, but are usually unremarkable unless there is an odd juxtaposition of sex and location, or an unexpected partner. 1) One recent dream involved a sex act with a non-human phenomenon which is difficult to describe. In the dream, it was called a "variable state wave," and it took the form of a hazy reddish-orange, luminous field in which I was partially enveloped. It responded to my actions, and me to its, but it was not an item of technology, not some kind of strange sex toy. I understood it to have a sentience though I could not communicate verbally with it. But it was totally interactive: I wanted something from it, but it also wanted something from me, and I intuitively understood its desires. It made sense in the dream context, and even though it seemed like nonsense after I awoke, I kept remembering it with some enthusiasm later in the day. 2) I found on a website a series of black-and-white videos of myself engaged in various auto-erotic activities. It developed that various people that I know in real life were aware of the site containing these videos and had seen them. I felt some anxiety that I did not know how these videos were made nor how they got posted online. But a conversation with a friend allayed any fears I had about it when he assured me that the videos had been up for years and that they were well regarded as examples of my "creativity" by everyone who knew me.
Water dreams: While I generally like the food dreams and the sex dreams, I do not like the water dreams and I do not like that I seem to be in a new phase of them. "Water dreams" is my name for a broad category of dreams in which almost anything can be happening, but they always involve traveling somewhere, usually by car, and finding myself in some kind of swamped terrain where the road gradually becomes covered by water and where bodies of water appear and widen around me and make it constantly more difficult to get anywhere. The mood of these dreams ranges from merely frustrating to truly terrifying. I don't know why these happen, but they have recurred my entire life. I wonder if the water is some kind of archetype that my subconscious employs to illustrate stress or feelings of not being in control of things. Whatever it is, I don't like it. When one of these occurs during early morning sleep, when I am getting closer to wakefulness, I can sometimes wake myself out of it. Yesterday morning, I was stuck in one of these situations, and within the dream itself, I looked at myself as if in a mirror and said, "You're not having this dream anymore. It's not happening. You don't need to find a way around the water. Just wake up." And I woke up.
I'm not sure that I've mined much inspiration out of any recent dream activity, but I may add the egg salad restaurant into my current work-in-progress. And I if I ever had a bunch of extra money and wanted to open a restaurant again, I just might make it real!
Food dreams: Most of these lately have been literal and work-related, but a couple notable exceptions: 1) I dreamt that I visited a new restaurant located in a small corner of an ancient colluseum-style building which specialized entirely in egg salad. They had dozens of formulations of egg salad and many different styles of bread. There was an egg salad with copious smoked trout and capers and dill in it, served on a toasted rye bagel. There was another one mixed with pulled pork and chili pepper mayonnaise, wrapped in a thick fresh flour tortilla with avocados. Another one was a mixture containing yogurt, cucumber, mint and "gyro meat" served with wedges of grilled pita. I could go on and on, but you get the point. A total egg salad concept restaurant. I wonder if such a thing exists. As one who loves egg salad, I think it's a brilliant idea; 2) I prepared a cookbook for publication, compiling its text and images on a large device like an iPad, but huge. It was embedded in the steel surface of a work table and was probably at least a meter wide. In a larger version of my home kitchen, Jeff assembled show plates of our new dishes and photographed them. As he took pictures they instantly appeared on my table-sized screen and I slid them into place on pages with my fingers.
Sex dreams: These happen constantly, but are usually unremarkable unless there is an odd juxtaposition of sex and location, or an unexpected partner. 1) One recent dream involved a sex act with a non-human phenomenon which is difficult to describe. In the dream, it was called a "variable state wave," and it took the form of a hazy reddish-orange, luminous field in which I was partially enveloped. It responded to my actions, and me to its, but it was not an item of technology, not some kind of strange sex toy. I understood it to have a sentience though I could not communicate verbally with it. But it was totally interactive: I wanted something from it, but it also wanted something from me, and I intuitively understood its desires. It made sense in the dream context, and even though it seemed like nonsense after I awoke, I kept remembering it with some enthusiasm later in the day. 2) I found on a website a series of black-and-white videos of myself engaged in various auto-erotic activities. It developed that various people that I know in real life were aware of the site containing these videos and had seen them. I felt some anxiety that I did not know how these videos were made nor how they got posted online. But a conversation with a friend allayed any fears I had about it when he assured me that the videos had been up for years and that they were well regarded as examples of my "creativity" by everyone who knew me.
Water dreams: While I generally like the food dreams and the sex dreams, I do not like the water dreams and I do not like that I seem to be in a new phase of them. "Water dreams" is my name for a broad category of dreams in which almost anything can be happening, but they always involve traveling somewhere, usually by car, and finding myself in some kind of swamped terrain where the road gradually becomes covered by water and where bodies of water appear and widen around me and make it constantly more difficult to get anywhere. The mood of these dreams ranges from merely frustrating to truly terrifying. I don't know why these happen, but they have recurred my entire life. I wonder if the water is some kind of archetype that my subconscious employs to illustrate stress or feelings of not being in control of things. Whatever it is, I don't like it. When one of these occurs during early morning sleep, when I am getting closer to wakefulness, I can sometimes wake myself out of it. Yesterday morning, I was stuck in one of these situations, and within the dream itself, I looked at myself as if in a mirror and said, "You're not having this dream anymore. It's not happening. You don't need to find a way around the water. Just wake up." And I woke up.
I'm not sure that I've mined much inspiration out of any recent dream activity, but I may add the egg salad restaurant into my current work-in-progress. And I if I ever had a bunch of extra money and wanted to open a restaurant again, I just might make it real!
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