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Nightmares

Nightmare #332 – The Huge Storm

(Female, 30’s) In real life, we built a new garage in our backyard a couple of years ago. And it was sort of the garage in my dream, but not exactly, you know, in the way dreams are different from real life. Anyway, this dream was short on story line, but big on image.

In my dream, there had been a huge storm and a gigantic tree collapsed on the top of our garage (there’s really no trees anywhere near our garage).

Half of the garage was destroyed, like utterly smashed in. The upper story collapsed in by this tree. The roof was left all jagged and unstable.

Then a big machine with a big claw was scooping up the damaged bits.

I had no idea how we were going to fix the garage.

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This Just In

Your First Vampire, The Count, Dead at 78

If ever there was a vampire whose death we should mourn, it is The Count from Sesame Street. Jerry Nelson, the talented muppeteer who portrayed numerous characters over the years, including the Count, is dead at age 78. For many, this character was the introduction to numeracy as well as to word play (The Count, get it? Get it?) I can’t help but think that this link between vampires and a near obsession with numeration is the subtext for the vampire on that episode of the X-Files that Mulder distracts by spilling a box of matches which the OCD blood-sucker must stop to count before attacking. A stretch? Perhaps. But ponder for a moment the poetic fittingness of numbers which go ever on and on with the notion of immortal life represented by the undead. The Count was a cuddly monster, a near contradiction in terms. Though Jerry Nelson be dead, let the Count live on.

One. One heart-felt tribute. Two…

http://www.sesameworkshop.org/our-blog/2012/08/24/in-memoriam-jerry-nelson/

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Nightmares

Nightmare #317 – The Tantrum Student

(Female, 30’s) I had a really weird, really horrible teaching dream. I’m a teacher, but I teach high school. In my dream, I was in an elementary classroom and I had to deal with a violent, insane student. I spent almost all of this exhausting dream trying to reason with him.

At one point, the little boy threw a lengthy temper tantrum, which reached its peak with him throwing himself down backwards onto the top of a table. Fortunately, I guess, he landed with his head on top of a huge cake that
was on the table. When he sat up, he had frosting and decorations stuck all over the back of his head. It struck me as hilarious, and I was fighting the urge to laugh at him.

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This Just In

The Blood on the Sidewalk


As Elsa L was relaxing on the porch this weekend, she watched a police officer amble down the sidewalk while chatting on a phone. This was a real police officer, gun and all, not a rent-a-cop. We don’t have beat cops in our neighborhood so this was an unusual sight. A few minutes later the same police office walked by again. Elsa greeted him.

He asked “You didn’t happen to see someone run past here last night who was bleeding profusely, did you?”

Elsa answered “No.”

The officer mentioned that a window had been broken and whoever had done it didn’t get away unscathed. He thanked Elsa for her time and departed.

Ever curious, Elsa got up and followed the blood trail herself.

“Quite impressive, really” She told me. “It goes two blocks up this street and a half a block down past the corner. The person lost a bit of blood.”

By the time I made it by to to take photographs, the blood was dark brown. Oxidized I suppose. The spatter pattern looked like drops of very thin paint and there were quite a generous number of them. Some places looked like the person had stopped, perhaps to catch his or her breath. I walked the trail up to the broken window — now patched with a piece of plywood — and tracked it back past Elsa’s place where frankly I lost interest.

I did get a couple dramatic pics… well, dramatic only if you know the back story.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #316 – Interview Gone Wrong

(Male, 30’s) I was in a strange town for a job interview. I had just come in that morning and planned to head home that night if I didn’t get the job. I went to the building where the interview was supposed to take place, but it wasn’t an office. It was a parking structure as tall as a skyscraper. I started walking up, floor after floor. It was inhabited by street people. In the parking spaces, instead of cars, there was waiting room furniture: chairs, end tables, lamps that didn’t turn on. I could hear the sound of cars echoing through the cement walls but I guess the commuters had learned to park on other floors. Almost every seat was occupied with someone squatting with all their belongings in a garbage bag at their feet. Everyone wore too many layers of clothes, like a couple wool knit hats and several coats. I found a seat that wasn’t occupied and sat down.

Then I realized I had brought with me a couple strange items. One was an old brown comforter that I used to keep on my bed. I loved that comforter, as I recall. I don’t know whatever happened to it. I also had with me a leather briefcase, nicer and bigger than the one I own in real life. I had no idea what was in it. When I got up to leave, the comforter was gone. I felt a deep sense of loss but decided to let it go, decided not to hunt around finding it. I held onto that odd briefcase extra tightly though, so it wouldn’t disappear.

The homeless folks knew how to create some extremely powerful explosive. Occasionally for entertainment, it seems, they pour a bit of it into the gas tanks of the fancy racecars that are parked in the parking structure. These were not normal cars but rather were the very expensive racecars that folks watch on TV going around and around on oval tracks. When this explosive was added to their gas tanks, eventually they’d explode into a huge fireball. There wasn’t much concern from anyone about this. The commuters in their racecars seemed mostly just annoyed by the delays, not concerned about the carnage and destruction.

I started walking down the concrete staircase. I heard a roar from a few floors down. A whole stampede of commuters were heading up to their cars. I was likely going to be crushed underneath their feet. I looped my arms around one of the railings and hoped I could hold on. Then I realized I had a whole test tube full of that weird highly explosive liquid. It slipped from my fingers and fell, down, down, flight after flight of stairs until it hit on the ground floor.

It exploded with an earth shattering groan. Screams from thousands of voices, maybe more. I woke up.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #331 – The Invaders’ Barbecue

(Male, 40’s) I woke with oily puddles of half evaporated tears in my eyes this morning. Horrible dreams about my mother, where she was still alive, where people were having a barbecue on her back lawn, neighbors encroaching on her space like she wasn’t even there. They were using her grill and had pulled another one in as well. Hundreds of invaders. I went over to speak to them. The chief instigator looked like that actor, that guy who played a thug in Dazed and Confused. He offered me a joint. I tried to look cool, to be cool. He assured me he’d got an OK from “the old lady.”

I retreated still agitated. Mom in the dream had a dog, a small shaggy poodle. Wherever it went, the carpet changed from blue to brown, like it was changing the territory to places that belonged to Mom. It strayed into my house — in the dream, I lived next door to my mom. My carpet turned brown, square by square. I went over to talk with Mom. She started complaining about how I hadn’t put a proper tombstone on her grave. I didn’t know what she was talking about for the longest time. I hugged her hard, wrapping my arms around her like I didn’t do enough of in life. She was small and frail. She wore a faded pink housecoat. I told her I was sorry. She didn’t seem to hug me back, she seemed pre-occupied as if I’d caught her in the midst of doing something else. Eventually, I realized what she was talking about with the tombstone and I started weeping. I was still crying when I woke up this morning, early, long before sunrise.

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Nightmares

Nightmare #333 – Celebrity Eviction

(Male, 40’s) About a year ago, I moved back to my hometown to take care of my aging parents. In the dream, I come back to their house to find none other than Kanye West digging up the bushes in the front yard. Every now and then, he’d stop and consult a landscape designer then he’d go back to digging. When I asked what the heck he was doing, Kanye explained that my folks had sold him the house. My parents were nowhere to be seen. I asked if I could at least get my stuff out of the house and he flatly refused. He said I’d have to leave.

I was pretty bummed at losing all my memorabilia but the kicker was when he said “And what were you thinking with these bushes? I mean, really?”