adiva_calandia

Couple of vivid dreams this morning, one involving going back to college and seeing a bunch of my classmates. (Kyle R was in there, Ben F was in there, Arya was in there, I think Kaleigh might've been in there.)

More interesting was the hypnopompic dream where a female figure was standing behind the head of my bed, reaching down to touch me on the chest. I woke up enough to jerk my arm through where her arm ought to be, and was aware I couldn't touch her, so I asked (thought?) "Are you a ghost?" Then I fell back to sleep enough for the dream to move to a stairwell, where the female figure was sitting with a black fox. The fox moved away from her and it turned out its body was made of/like those expandable tissue paper decorations -- like the tissue paper Chinese dragons? -- so when it moved its head and front legs expanded away from its hindquarters and did this sinuous thing. Very Miyazaki. Then the fox appeared right next to me and put its chin on my shoulder, and the female figure said, "Yes, the Ghost of Christmas Past," and then I woke up for good.

I have joked in the past about this apartment being haunted, buuuuut.

I have had heart-pounding being-stalked-by-a-monster nightmares for like three nights in a row and I would like that to stop.

 Dozing in my cousin's guest room, I had a vivid but very short dream that I left a pot of pasta on the stove and it was boiling over and when I went to stir it the spoon dropped in far past where the bottom of the pot and the stove burner should have been, as if the bottom had burned away and turned into some kind of black hole. I woke up like a shot; it was incredibly unsettling.

And then a minute later I had some kind of hypnogogic auditory hallucination that someone said ... something ... maybe "Oh, there you are"?

Anyway, HAPPY OCTOBER, I guess.

(I didn't leave anything on the stove, right?)

 . . . I think I had a dream this morning where Johnny Lee Miller got me pregnant accidentally and I was frantically researching the abortion deadline in Washington state. (It appears to be "viability," which is usually defined as 24 weeks.)

????

Shockingly, after playing a choose-your-own-zombie-adventure game right before bed and stressing about apartments yesterday, I had a zombie nightmare tonight! Lovely.

I had a flying dream last night, which never happens! It involved Tron somehow, in spite of the fact that I have not seen Tron or Tron Legacy, but I know it ended with me trying desperately to wake up Jeff Bridges by wrapping him in a blanket and trying to cuddle him, while some villainous lady tried to stop me with, I don't know, a Tronian cattle prod or something? I just remember she kept poking me and my friends with something painful to distract me from waking up Jeff Bridges. But to no avail! I was not going to be deterred from waking up Jeff Bridges, since he was clearly some kind of deus ex machina savior type, and I managed it, and he gave me a big hug and I guess saved the day, although I think around then I woke up. So it ended happily!

I had an anxiety dream, of sorts, where I got so upset about . . . something . . . that I held up a convenience store with nothing but a carton of eggs and a raspberry pie while wearing an evening dress and a long scarf. It started out as a semi-serious threat, but the clerks caught on to the fact that I didn't want to hurt anyone and helped me chase everyone out of the store while I brandished a pie at them. The hold-up ended once everyone was out, and the clerks were congratulating me on a hilarious afternoon; suddenly I was just too tired and depressed to stay standing anymore. I ended up cuddled up to my scene partner from last year, Asia, and falling asleep.

When I woke up (dream-wise), there was more stuff about how I thought I'd slept for about fifteen hours and missed the talkback I'm leading on Tuesday, and one of my actor friends hugged me comfortingly (second time I've dreamt about him hugging me in the last few days), and then there was something about a car inside a bus? And then I woke up for real.

In other news, my parents are here in Pittsburgh!

Zombie dream. I distinctly remember there being some Pontypool elements, with repeated words, but mostly it was my standard waxy gray zombies. It was in a universe where zombies were a recent but well-established threat, not post-apocalyptic at all, and I and my parents and the group of people we were living with had systems in place for dealing with daily life, like what to do if there's a stampede of people.

Don't remember the first half of the dream, really. I think it was exposition, kind of. Anyway, we come in on me and my parents wandering around the city on a gorgeous sunny day, and coming out onto the sidewalk when we see some friends. They're making stampede signals -- groups coming from both sides -- so we duck into a sheltered spot behind some stairs and wait it out. When it's done, we go up the stairs in a hurry to catch a bus to somewhere.

The bus looks like our RV inside, but very dark. I get in and start to sit down, and notice a rather mummified looking woman standing in front of my seat, behind the driver. I scoot over and sit next to Mom instead -- I almost sit on her lap, or on the far side of her, and then decide it's not fair to put her in harm's way and sit on the close side of her.

And naturally the zombie wakes up a moment later and comes for us. She throws her arms out to the sides as she comes, bracing herself against the seats. I start yelling at the driver that he has a zombie on his bus, while I hold her off with an arm across her throat. The driver yells jovially to relax, she'll be fine, and indeed a minute later her vision clears and she's a normal, if very dehydrated, person. "It's my sister," the driver explains, though she looks more like his mother. The woman says something breathless about not always being able to control it, so terribly sorry, but she'll try and give us the signal -- throwing her arms out and bracing against the seats -- so we have some warning.

The driver stops the bus by a mall and gets out. Mom and I follow him as he runs into the mall and up to the second floor, to a bank, to deposit some huge amount of money. While Mom and I wait, a woman next to us suddenly starts coughing and retching: the sign of oncoming zombie-ism. She's between Mom and me. I tell Mom to go downstairs and I'll meet her outside, go, now, and turn and go find another set of stairs. As go, I see more and more people with little gray patches of skin, starting to cough, and I start telling people I pass "There's an outbreak. Full-blown outbreak here." I get to the first floor and push past people coming into the mall, saying "Don't, guys, there's an outbreak," and hear a woman behind me say "Great, we're going to have a quar valley."

And then I woke up, shaking heart-pounding don't-you-dare-go-back-to-sleep et cetera.

I hate these dreams I hate these dreams I hate them.

Nightmare. Xenomorpho nightmare rather than zombie nightmare, but even then it followed the same basic rules the zombie nightmares do: people around me are turning in implacable monsters, and the best I can do is run to someplace that's somewhat defensible and wait for them to come for me.

( Pools, people realizing their body isn't their own, and Cordelia Chase. )

So yeah. That was fun. I'm pretty certain there was a ton of other stuff earlier in the dream, but that's all I can remember now.

Elements for a wake-up-shaking nightmare: A zombie that can not only climb, but can balance on top of a fence and open screen doors; a door with a malfunctioning deadbolt; your sister in harm's way while you try to make the lock work (sorry, ceph); a setting of the house you grew up in.

ETA: 4 AM html is also rather nightmarish.