Sleeping and Brick Gollums

I think I've been sleeping too much.  I know, if you sleep, then it's probably not too much, but it's considerably more than pre-covid.  Doom scrolling and other behaviors seem to have an impact on my hours of shut eye.  I noticed the difference this week when I got up at my old commute time for several days and had several hours of pre-work time to myself to...well, work, and read, and watch some television, and walk...I definitely felt more productive.

This morning I overslept - imo - but I got to enjoy a weird dream on the tail end of those hours.  In some run down factory that had been semi-gentrified, I was hosting a D and D game.  But I'd lost all my notes from previous games and had fifteen players participating I couldn't remember a thing about.  So I looked out the window, took note of all the broken brick and trash in the neighborhood where they/we were trying to repurpose an old factory, and decided I'd have to do a hack and slash that was challenging regardless of the number of players and/or their level.  The result...a brick and garbage gollum the size of a factory that had fists, hands, mouth, but could also form tree sized pseudo appendages that would slam into a player, enveloping them, suffusing their lungs and stomach - unless they made their save - and possessing them as a gollum zombie under the gollum's control that would start to ooze and collect trash, ala the Japanese movie Tetsuo, the Iron Man.  I remember thinking in my dream that it was clever to have a gollum, traditionally under control, be the one controlling.  It's less clever when I'm awake because gollums don't work that way, so it was likely more of an elemental, or the zombie players were under the control of the gollum's owner.

I suspect all that is related to helping E with D and D lately, as well as playing it myself with my old crew.  When E and I were talking I pointed out I have a few standard scenarios I pull out when I need to buy some time for future ideation, or want the party to enjoy a bit more hack and slash than usual.  Crippled beholder with fewer stalks, weird spells, and a tribe off worshippers, like bullywugs or kobalds, plus associated pets [maybe the beholder has a tame spell it uses on behalf of it's worshippers, so anything is fair game].  I also like rando nemesis.  Maybe you trespass, maybe you find a small abandoned temple and loot it, maybe you ruin something that seems innocuous like a nest or a colony of bugs, and the local wood demon/deity decides to make an example out of you and keeps upping the challenge until something "works".

The inevitable annoying post about a dream I had

Amusingly, if Pooteewheet vacates the bedroom, I dream.  I've been trying to correlate why, and I haven't gotten a good look at the Fitbit-type activity/sleep tracker she got for Mother's Day, but I suspect it has to do with how often my sleep is disturbed if she's thrashing around in bed.  Now, it could be that the thrashing is a result of my restless sleep.  After all, I don't have a Fitbit to watch for counter thrashing.  But given I sleep more deeply when she's not there - last night because my snoring potential was high due to grass cutting in the neighborhood - I'm going to blame her.

End result?  I don't dream much - at least nothing I remember - 99.5% of the time.  Last night, however, I had a dream I was in a castle.  It looked like something out of Spirited Away.  And like Spirited Away, it was full of lots of spirits, each of them in charge of something like the garden, the doorway, small animals, the wind, a graveyard, a garden.  Each of them was bemoaning the fact that human beliefs were changing and they no longer believed in animal spirits and spirits associated with non-human things.  Humans only believed in the ghosts of dead relatives.  After bumping into a number of them who were slowly changing into human ghosts, one of them approached me excitedly and said, "We figured it out!"  It explained to me that in addition to believing in the ghosts of dead people, which was incredibly boring to embody, modern people also believed in dire warnings.  That is, you could be sort of a ghost/oracular warning hybrid, ala Hamlet, if you made the warning part seem like they were having a premonition that fit with their belief that they "knew it was going to happen!" e.g. if there was just a small aspect of the haunting that made it seem light it might be arising from their own mind, leaving them an element of doubt about whether they were really seeing a ghost.  After that, all the spirits I'd bumped into became incredibly annoying ghosts warning me about how I might trip, I might take the wrong turn at the end of the hallway, I might eat the wrong food, I might open the wrong window (I was opening the wrong window), I shouldn't touch that lamp...thousands of inconsequential things.  And once they realized I could see them giving me advice, they would pop up more frequently, until I couldn't walk more than a few steps without getting a warning.  Spirits of the wood and walls and gardens who minded their own business for the most part.

That part was interesting.  The part where there was a computerized, automated wood lathing shop three stories tall powered by what looked like a few 286 computers, and Godzilla showing up to attack my castle so I had to move into a hotel room where the only access was through the kitchen. More confusing, less cohesive.

Feel free to psychoanalyze.  It's not about getting back to nature.  It's not about switching jobs.  Could be because I'm reading short stories based on Cthulu mythos, but there weren't any tentacled creatures haunting the edges prepared to turn it into a nightmare.

Hallucinations

Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations is an excellent read.  The gist of the book is that hallucinations are much more common than reported or suspected and that people have them for all sorts of reasons including migraines, inadvertent drug use, purposeful drug use,  Parkinson's, sleep, epilepsy, old age, death.  And in all manners: images of self, images of others, smells, landscapes, shapes, sounds.  Sacks feels that what these hallucinations reveal about the structure of the brain is important and shows that our minds have specialized structures to handle facial recognition, pattern recognition, language, and more.  That might seem obvious, but hallucinations gave an insight into the way the brain handles these constructs even pre-MRI.  There's a spot in the book which I can't find where he posits that our brains may be doing something a computer does not which is taking all the various data it receives and running semi-random/semi-structured loops constantly, restructuring what it has available to make up new information.  Sacks goes so far as to say the brain may just be playing.  That's a fascinating idea for AI, that a sentient machine might need ongoing loops of background noise in order to make sense of the world.

As with other Sacks books, he offers examples at every turn.  For me, a few of them hit close to home from around my accident.  I'm glad I wasn't in a coma for five weeks and out of action for seven months.  But the intubation/drugs/lights combo sounds about right:

"Robert Hughes, in the opening of his book on Goya, writes about a prolonged delirium during his recovery from a nearly fatal car crash.  He was in a coma for five weeks and hospitalized for almost seven months.  In intensive care he wrote, 'One's consciousness...is strangely affected by the drugs, the intubation, the fierce and continuous lights, and one's own immobility.  These give rise to prolonged narrative dreams, or hallucinations, or nightmares.'" [p. 186].

And this sounds almost exactly like the visions I had when I closed my eyes - the ones where I used Stripe the Pillowpet zebra to slowly get rid of them (although it may have been time at work).  In particular, look for "German" on my post about visions.  Ties nicely to his example of Anne closing her eyes and seeing Chinese movies.

"Then came a more radical change.  Anne found herself in the back of "a 1950s Chinese bus on a propaganda tour of Chinese Christian churches."   She recalls watching a movie on religious freedom in China projected onto the rear window of the bus.  But the viewpoint kept changing--both the movie and the bus suddenly tilted to odd angles, and it was unclear, at one point, whether a church spire she saw was "real," outside the bus, or part of the movie.  Her strange journey occupied the greater part of a feverish and insomniac night.  // Anne's hallucinations appear only when she closed her eyes and would vanish as soon as she opened them." [ p. 190-91].

Finally - this has nothing to do with my accident.  I'm just highly amused that someone has hallucinations where the end result should be screaming THAT'S NUMBERWANG!

Regarding sleep paralysis and a woman named Christina: "He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-ONE-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically...." [p. 234]

Dream

I haven't really dreamed much at all since the accident.  At least not anything I can remember.  I suspect that having to sit up for ten minutes in the middle of the night while the sweat on the sheets dries, and then again in the morning, attests to the fact that I'm having some pretty good nightmares I don't remember.

But I had my first dream that I can remember since the accident!  In a car, driven by my dad.  My brother Andrew and his old roommate Steve are in the back seat.  We're headed to a DQ renowned for being a bit different and in a scenic area.  Right near the DQ is one of the great lakes, and a wood road that crosses part of the lake.  My father passes the DQ, considers turning around, and then panics when an SUV comes the other way, falling off the wood road into the lake.  We start bailing out.  Andrew has an XBox intended for Klund or Mean Mr. Mustard and swims to shore (only a few dozen feet away) with the XBox in the air.  My Dad has piles of important papers related to Grandma's finances (go figure what he talks about all the time) in the glovebox.  He puts them in a paper grocery bag and urges me to swim to shore with them. I look out and realize a.) the car isn't sinking, it's sort of floating, b.) there are big waves, c.) I have a paper bag full of paper.  The chances of getting the paperwork to shore seem slim.  So instead I paddle and we drift toward shore slowly until we beach right next to the DQ.  I hand John his paperwork and wander off to find an ice cream cone.

I don't know if Klund or Mean Mr. Mustard ever got the imaginary XBox.  They'll have to take it up with my brother.  And I don't know why Andrew's roommate Steve was there in what was obviously a bit part.  Perhaps because I always worried Andrew might kill him in a car accident.  I'm just happy I got my ice cream cone and I was dry.  It doesn't surprise me at all that my first dream is about a car accident, although it turned out better than the one in real life.

Two married oceanographers...

Two married oceanographers, Marine and Stratus League.  One deep sea research sub containing two single person reinforced mini subs for even deeper exploration, beyond where anyone else has ever gone.  The kicker, they want a divorce, but their careers can't afford it.  Will their romance be rekindled by the dangers of the deep?  Or will they learn to love again with the advice of their two gay crew members?  Who gets the kids? Who gets Jeeks the dolphin who accompanies them on excursions and gets them out of tight binds?  Lost cities! Espionage! The giant albino kraken that haunts them in their travels!  Join us for an 80's style marriage adventure comedy, Two Leagues Under the Sea!

This was my dream last night.  Enjoy the madness that haunts my sleeping hours.

Picnic Nightmares

I had a dream last night that I moved far away from here, to a beautiful little place in the mountains that, while not as glamorous as the huge Wrightesque and ultra-modern houses overlooking the valleys nearby, was very nice, and functional in that it served as a base for all my bicycling adventures. Only a few days after the move, my boss showed up. After I'd left, he'd joined the mafia, and had come visiting to make me host picnics for the various mob families in the area who wanted to use the mountains to meet as they were far from authorities. I only hosted two picnics before I woke up in a sweat.

It's dreams like these that make you realize that while you think planning a picnic for your department (three departments if you add the department we just merged with) leaves no indelible impression on your psyche, you're very wrong. And here I thought the only impact to my person was the physical exhaustion of loading and unloading the Ford Focus top to bottom and front to back twice.

As an amusing aside to my picnic hosting activities, we were going to leave a bunch of sodas and bottled water for the department that was having their picnic the day after ours. After talking to the Park and Rec boss, I was told in no uncertain terms that we couldn't leave anything behind. Knowing that the maintenance guy (nice guy - shout out Abraham) would be along later to lock up and check for issues, I thought it would be easier to take everything home rather than risk getting called back to the park at 7 or 8 p.m. However, I didn't realize that someone had already told the other department the soda and water was there. So the next day, when I was returning the extra volleyball set to City Hall, the Park and Rec admin gave me a bit of the riot act about our company accusing their maintenance staff of stealing sodas and water. Doh! I think I'll haul some donuts and coffee over there on Tuesday morning just to grease the wheels.

Pants of Doom

I had a dream. In this dream I possessed the Pants of Doom. Innocuous khakis with the power to destroy the world. Many ninjas were tracking me trying to get the pants, but I was staying one step ahead of them. Until I tried to escape over a tall, mesh fence and threw the khakis ahead of me. They snagged on the top of the fence and nothing I could do would get them loose. Stupid pants of doom.

A Rose by Any Other Name

I had a dream last night about a someone giving me a black mamba, a poisonous snake, as a pet. Later it turned into a boy, but he was obviously still a poisonous snake. Then into an attractive woman, but still obviously a poisonous snake. And then into a puppy, but still obviously a poisonous snake.

As near as I can figure it, this is the result of a.) watching a show about an exterminator on a science channel who was dealing with lots of poisonous snakes and b.) having a discussion about Shakespeare with Eryn that evolved from discussing biting one's thumb, to her teapot from Stratford on Avon, to a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Apparently a poisonous snake by any other name and/or form would be as snakey.

Soundtrack

The night before last I had two dreams.

1.) Zombie apocalypse. In addition to zombies, there were strange oozing, cubes with pulsing runes on them here and there, and other more cthuluesque creatures. Seemed more like an opened-a-gateway-to-hell ala Mist (movie) or Doom (game) than just a zombie issue. But really vivid, lots of death, and a despair vibe.

2.) Little girl slips into the river and slides to the bottom (after being told to stay away from the slippery stone at the edge). The edges of the river were smooth stone, laid there like a canal of some sort, and the girl (whom I don't know) just ignored the advice of the adults nearby and slipped in, with barely a sound, and down the rocks at the bottom of the river toward the mud and immediately down river. I dove in to save her and, despite the crystal clarity of the water when looking in from above, it was disturbingly difficult to see once under the surface.

I'm not too concerned about the meaning of the dreams. I've had maze dreams (of which number 1 is an example) since I was about six. What I'm concerned about is that the soundtrack for both dreams was Dancin' from Xanadu. Although it certainly took the edge off the seriousness of both episodes. I think it speaks of a mental illness lurking in my pysche. Horrible, flesh-eating, apocalyptic end times - fine. Little girls drowning - fine. Dancin' while both of these things are underway - really not fine.

Here...maybe you can add it to your dream soundtrack tonight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts9GdyGD5e4

Bifkin

I had a dream last night in which I had a black pet snake (whatever - my dreams are generally process oriented, not symbolic). The pet snake, realizing I paid more attention to dogs than to snakes, grew a poodle - also black - out of its mouth until the poodle was full formed, at which point the original snake bit dropped off like a residual tail, and the poodle came to life.

Seriously creepy, even for dream me. So I called in a herpetologist who examined the poodle, listened to my story, and proclaimed my snake was a bifkin, a species of animal which would evolve to a shape where it felt it was getting optimal food and attention. After that, the next lengthy chapter of the dream was me looking extremely nervous and wondering when the bifkin was going to change into some version of me by growing a human body out of a poodle's mouth.

I'm sure the snake dream is a result of reading The Red Queen book about evolutionary pressure and parasites. But bifkin? I had to look it up. It's a synonym...for perineum. I don't believe I've ever consciously heard or read the word before. But now my dream has educated me with a new word for taint that was previously outside my vocabulary. I think the instructor who told Ming and I to open a dictionary more often would be proud.

perineum /peri·ne·um/ (-ne´um)

1. the pelvic floor and associated structures occupying the pelvic outlet, bounded anteriorly by the pubic symphysis, laterally by the ischial tuberosities, and posteriorly by the coccyx.

2. the region between the thighs, bounded in the male by the scrotum and anus and in the female by the vulva and anus.