Posts from — April 2007

(Male) Massively strange dream. I was walking down a row of shops and all of them seemed to sell relatively strange things. Like one of the shops sold exclusively cartoon art. Not comic books but large canvases and boards with single panel cartoons on them. There was someone in the crowd who resembled one of the figures in the cartoons and he found that funny.

Down the street a little way was a window box / display case. The frame to this case looked like an extremely thin, young fawn. It was extremely odd. I walked up close to it to see if it had been in fact made from a fawn - actually it was made from very small twigs nailed on their side. A dog started barking at me. The dog apparently belonged to a Japanese couple who didn’t speak very much English at all. I tried to indicate that I wasn’t afraid of dogs. The dog, a dachshund, kept barking at me angrily. The couple laughed like they were embarrassed by the poor behavior of their dog. I stretched my palms out to show the dog I had no ill will toward it. It ran toward me, jumped up about two feet and bit the pinky of my left hand. It didn’t bit hard enough to break the skin but it bit hard enough to hold on. I shook the dog off. I shook my finger at the dog and said “No!” in this deep growling voice. The dog’s owner told me “good voice” but did nothing to discipline or restrain the dog that continued to bark furiously at me. I thought maybe this is how they treat dogs in Japan, maybe they do what they want.

Then amazingly from a dead stop this tiny little dog jumped up five feet all the way to my face and bit me on my eyebrow above my left eye. Again, it did not break the skin but it held on tightly enough to hand there. I was terrified. I had this dog - albeit a tiny one - biting my face and growling. I had no idea what to do, nor did anyone around me.

That’s when I woke up.

In just about every aspect, The Addams Family kicked the pants of The Munsters, except when it came to theme song. The Addams Family has an embarrassing below average theme song if for no other reason than it tries pass off “ooky” as a real word. In contrast, The Munsters has that wonderfully cool yet creepy Transylvanian surf music instrumental. I could listen to stuff like that all day long.

This model of Lily Munster is a cautionary tale. The original modeling comes from an Aurora Models set of the Munsters’ living room recast during the 90’s by Polar Lights. (Incidentally there’s a far FAR cooler model of Lily sculpted by the dearly departed Jim Fawkes of Fairbanx Models. Why, oh why didn’t I buy one of them when I had the chance?) I started with Lily. I lovingly painted and then dry brushed the creases in her dress — the trick with painting highlights on red fabric is to use scarlet because if you simply lighten the base color with white you’ll end up with pink and that’ll just make the fabric look faded. I under painted her necklace with black and touched it with silver to make it look deeply tarnished. I added individual streaks of grey and white to hair and light blue strands to her ball of yarn. I thought she was just about finished…

..Until I looked up some reference material.

Lily’s gown is very very clearly something lightly toned, my guess a baby blue satin. Red was entirely the wrong choice. What’s more, I could have remembered that if I had just stopped to think before I grabbed my brush. I could have stripped the piece and started over, or actually I could have probably just primered the thing and painted on top but in the end, I went out and bought a whole new kit. It only was around $25 or so. I would have been much more upset if it had been one of those $100 resin beauties

She’s not too big (maybe 3 or 4″) or too obtrusive so I keep her around at the corner of my shelf to remind me to double-check that color scheme BEFORE I crack out the brushes.

(Female, mid 40’s) It was dark evening in this dream and I was riding my bike back to my car, which is not something I do in real life. My car was parked in a huge parking lot, like at a football stadium or the airport, and I couldn’t quite remember where I’d left it. I was biking up and down the aisles of the parking lot, watching as car upon car drove off. Soon the parking lot was nearly empty and that made it easier to find my little blue Honda, the car I really drive.

I put my bike into the trunk of the car, where it really wouldn’t fit in real life. Then I got in the car and started driving. I thought I knew which way I was going, but the streets didn’t look familiar at all. Still I kept driving, turning down different streets and trying to find my way. I turned down one street, but it turned out to be an alley running behind the backs of a row of buildings, rather than a street. I thought I would go around and come back out on the street, but the alley turned at odd angles. I turned down another alley, a narrower alley, that I thought would bring me back to the main road, but it didn’t. My only way to go was a narrower alley still, either right or left. There wasn’t room to turn around. Now the fences and doors and garages were even narrower. But I kept driving, slowly inching along. The sides of the alley were nearly touching my car on both sides, so I decided I’d better go back. I put the car in reverse and started backing up. It was so narrow that I had a hard time moving without scraping the sides of the car. Then I saw a door that looked really familiar– like it actually was the place I was going. I backed up the car far enough that I could open the door and I got out.

…”Finally!” she yelled, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!”…

I opened the door to find this sort of hippie-gypsy looking room. There was draped cloth decorating the room, and incense, and lava lamps (!) I knew this place: it belonged to my step-mother! (I don’t have a step-mother in real life!) She was there, very angry, dressed like a hippie gypsy herself. “Finally!” she said, “finally you come but it’s too late! You are too late!” She was holding a baby, who was supposed to be my step-sister too. “You are too late to save her!” Then the step-mother knocked over a lava lamp, smashing it and making a little spark of fire catch on one of the shimmery draped cloths. In real-life, I know that the fire would have spread much faster than it did in this dream. She put down the baby to start more fires; she began to light matches from the incense and started dropping them around the room, laughing hysterically, like she was out-of-control crazy. I picked up the baby and carried her to the car and strapped her into her carseat in the back. Then I went back in for baby supplies. The crazy step-mother was still laughing and lighting fires. I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop her, so I left, closing the door behind me. Then I got back in the car and began to back out of the alley very slowly.

(Male, early 20’s) I dreamed I was inside of a video game, which I guess isn’t really that strange because I play a lot of video games. It was a first-person-shooter / capture-the-flag style game which means you run around a lot shooting at people and trying to get the other team’s flag. So in the dream, I get shot and I “die” which means I have to restart at a certain place and run back into where the action is.

The first weird thing that happens is that when I passed the place where I “died” I can see that there is a body there and that it’s me. My corpse is lying on the ground right where it must have fallen when I was shot. I thought that was weird because usually you just disappear when you’re shot. But I still was able to move around and play the game so I continued running around, shooting at people, trying to capture the other team’s flag.

Then I run past the place where I died a second time and my corpse is STILL there. But what’s really strange is that there are these other figures - figures who aren’t players in the game - who are picking up my body and are carrying it away. I look around and all over the battle field there are more of these figures who are carrying away the other player’s corpses. This made me feel really strange and right then, I woke up.

(Male, middle aged) This isn’t exactly a nightmare but it was sure thrilling, maybe less like a horror movie and more like an action adventure.

…When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm…

My wife and I were taking our grand daughter for a ride in a stroller. It was one of those huge, old-fashioned strollers with ruffles and big tires. It was a Sunday. We had walked around town all after noon and by the time we started back it was getting dark and we were getting tired. For some reason, we thought it would be easier if we took a short cut THROUGH an antique shop. The first trouble was that the antique shop was closed since it was late on a Sunday. We tried the door anyway and found that it had been left unlocked so we opened it and pushed the carriage inside. We discovered immediately another trouble with this plan which was the aisles of the shop were crammed too tightly with merchandise. My wife and I had to move things from the front of the stroller to the back in order to have enough room to inch it along. The process seemed to take hours - what a short cut! It was dark outside. We were so tired. When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm. We tried to work fast to get through the store. Just as the stroller was nearly out, however, we started hearing police sirens. We pushed the stroller the last bit of the way and an antique ceramic plate got caught in the ruffles. I caught it just before it would have shattered on the cement. My heart was pounding in my chest. My feet and back ached. I just wanted to get home. Just wanted to put my feet up. As we got the stroller out of the door and onto the sidewalk, this huge armored (!) police car screamed around the corner. It pulled up beside us and a couple very young policemen rushed out and started running around the building. My wife and I smiled and started pushing the carriage toward home.

(Male) I was supposed to water a plant a church that was closed for vacation but I didn’t have anything to carry the water in and also the door to the area where the water was seemed to be locked. I poured out my pop and filled it with water from a fish pond and started carrying it toward the church door. I’d made sure to leave the church door open so I could get back in. Just then this extremely small woman came out of the church - I mean she was probably 18″ tall. (Now I think about it, she resembled my grandmother a little bit. Then again she also resembled that psychic woman from the movie Poltergeist the one who says “this house is clean.” Only smaller. Maybe a third that actress’ height.) She deliberately lets the church door slam closed even though it’s obvious that I’m rushing to get in. Though I know that she’s a church lady, we still have some pretty harsh words. At the end of our argument, though she says “Well, come along now” then she starts to walk away. Then she turns and says “You’re supposed to follow me.” So I followed her. The woman is a little bit lame so she holds onto me a bit to walk. As we’re walking, she indicates when we should walk a little faster or when we should slow down or stop. We are able to cross at all the green lights and we avoid getting hit when someone bursts through a door. It’s like she can very precisely see into the future which was really rather creepy. We get to this hotel, climb up to the second floor and pause in front of a particular room. There are lights shining from underneath the door. She indicates that we should wait. When the lights turn off, the woman says “Now.” I didn’t know what she meant. She said “You’ll know what to do.”

I entered the hotel room which was extremely plain, more like a movie set from the 40’s than a contemporary hotel. There were a couple twin sized beds with metal frames and on the beds there were what appeared to be lifeless human forms. When I looked closer, I realized they were made of wood. They were like those featureless wooden models that artists use - only 5′ tall! And they were vampires. Wooden vampires. There was blood smeared on their faces. The old lady said I’d know what to do. I figured I was supposed to kill them while they weren’t moving. Beside the vampires, there were wooden knitting needles like they had been knitting just before bed. I tried stabbing one of the needles into their wooden chests but the tip of the needle just shattered away.

I awoke surrounded by sleeping monsters wondering how exactly I was supposed to kill wooden vampires.