Scatmania

Strange dream last night. I only remember fragments of it, but here’s what I do:

At some point during it, I left work at lunchtime to visit my dad and my sisters (who lived, conveniently, within walking distance of work). I bought a bag of sherbert along the way, but I was disappointed with how clumpy it was. I met my sisters - Sarah and Becky - on the way to my dad’s house, and Becky told me that she’s just got a job working at a chain bakery (a Greggs-like place) conveniently situated at the end of my dad’s road. Sarah teased Becky about the low level of skill required to do her job, and they argued. Oh, and both Sarah and Becky were black - I’m not sure how that’s relevant, it wasn’t important in the dream, I don’t think, and in fact it’s only now, thinking back over the dream, that I’ve noticed that that’s a little unusual.

In any case; when we got to my dad’s (and I’d almost finished my bag of sherbert) he tried to persuade me that I needed to start running up and down a hill in order to get into training for some kind of event, but I pointed out that I needed to get back to work, so I left.

When I got back to work, the caterers were carrying some kind of large soup pan and a ladle along the corridor to the kitchen on our floor.

The creepy bit of this is that when I got to work this morning and popped my head into the kitchen opposite our office, there is a large soup pan in there. It’s a fair bit smaller than the one in my dream, but it’s in the same style. Weird.

Interpretations welcome, as usual, but don’t expect to make sense of me.

The dream I remember form last night was particularly strange, even by my standards. I think I remember it so clearly because I woke up several times during the night. The first time I remember waking up it had been after a dream in which I saw somebody creeping up on me, asleep, and so I woke myself in order to repel them. When I woke up I grabbed my phone (it’s bright screen serves as a pretty good torch) and looked around before realising I’d been dreaming. The second time I was woken was by Claire’s rats, Mario and Luigi, who had pushed over something or otherwise made a loud clattering sound. The third time I woke was by my "system clock," about two minutes before my alarm went off, during the following dream:

My dream was set in a network of concrete buildings on a hillside (somewhat reminiscent of Penglais campus at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, only not). It was Claire’s birthday, and Paul had come up with some kind of surprise celebration and wanted me to help make his plan succeed. Critical to this plan was that I delivered a six-pack of canned lager to "Claire’s bedroom" without her noticing. This room which was on the top floor of one of these concrete buildings, a black-painted hotel of some variety.

Claire wanted to know where her room was, so I hid the lager in a carrier bag and led the way up through the building. The top dozen or so floors before our destination was some kind of nightclub, comprised of a number of small interconnected rooms with steep staircases running through them. Climbing upwards through them all was quite strenuous, and not helped by the masses of people stood or sat in each of the rooms. Claire began to get tired, but persevered.

Finally we reached the correct floor. A wide, upwards-sloping corridor lead towards a cinema, and somewhere along this corridor we know we’d find Claire’s room. Paul reappeared, having followed us up through the building, because - he announced - he’d forgotten to tell us something: it was only possible to get to Claire’s room by walking along the corridor while nobody else was (as if the destination changed based on who was traversing it). He advised us that there were two regular cinemagoers who were liable to walk down the corridor at any time, thereby potentially scuppering our chances of getting where we wanted to go, and he excused himself for awhile to check whether or not these two people were likely to appear any time soon. He returned and said that they were not likely to come here soon, and so we waited for a break in the human traffic in the corridor (remember: we needed it to be empty for it to "work") and the three of us started walking down it.

Unfortunately, we were still unable to get into Claire’s room because the door was locked with a complicated combination lock that seemed to have been modelled on a tile-sliding puzzle. A block of tiles, each with different coloured circles on, eluded us: we tried a few combinations, but not one of the three of us could decipher it.

We backtracked to look for help, but because there were now other people using the corridor, we instead found ourselves in a cave mouth which opened out over a sheer cliff face. A sterotypical cave man sat near the lip of the mouth, alternately looking over the edge and retreating. We noticed that the reason he was unable to look over the edge for long was because an enormous ostrich - about fifty metres high - was reaching up the cliff and attempting to eat him. Fortunately for him, he had a small black umbrella which he was able to hide behind, which was sufficient to distract the ostrich and trick it into thinking he wasn’t there at all.

And that’ll be where I woke up. Which is probably for the best, because that was beginning to get distinctly trippy.

Last night, Liz and her new girlfriend Sundeep came over for some variety of Troma Night-like event, and Liz cheated on Sundeep with me. I found it odd that Tom S kept trying to find out what we were up to.

This was a dream, of course. Isn’t it fascinating how Liz and Sundeep’s sudden sexuality gear-shift and their appearance in Aber didn’t ring any alarm bells, but finding Tom’s curiosity odd was enough to make me realise I was dreaming. The brain’s a funny thing.

A few games of Hacker after lunch (and before Troma Night) today, if anybody’s interested.

Time for another episode of Dan’s bizarre dreams. Here’s last night’s:

At least to begin with, the whole dream was animated like an early 3D computer game - with a certain Castle Master feel to it - but became less and less like a game as the story went on. I was in some kind of tower in which some friends and I were trying to gain access to the room at the top, which was locked. The friends - who I hadn’t gone so far as to assign identities to at the time - stayed on the ground floor, while I ran around the upper floors trying to solve the puzzle that would open the door. They were generally useless, needing me to run ahead and sort out the route before they’d go anywhere. I needed to flip the correct combination of switches, hidden on different floors, to turn a set of red lights to green which would indicate that the door on the top floor could be opened. I was making good progress at working out what I needed to do, but was having some difficulty in finding all of the switches.

Having gotten all but one, I found myself in the (more realistic looking-and-feeling) ground floor again, and Helen G (turns out she was one of the folks I’d left at the bottom) indicated that the final switch would be on the roof, and pointed out a ladder that went through the ceiling, up the side of the tower, and onto a platform at the top. There was one of those silly ladder guards at the bottom in an attempt to make the ladder inaccessible, but I was able to climb up the adjacant wall in order to get above it, and began to climb.

Outside, it was very windy and beginning to rain, and it was difficult to keep hold of the ladder as I climbed up to the platform at the top. Struggling accross the platform, I discovered that to trigger the last switch, I had to fill a bucket with water that would pull against a pulley (perhaps I’ve been watching too much Crystal Maze?). In any case, I found a system of pipes and opened the appropriate valves. I turned a "wrong one" as well, it seems, because water started to pour from pipes above me, too. I huddled as best I could to avoid getting soaked and to cling on to the tower while I waited for the bucket to fill, and that’s when I woke up.

Pretty structured, as far as my dreams go.

As you know by now, I enjoy sharing with you all the more memorable of my typically trippy little noctural slideshows. I didn’t sleep well last night, but between waking up at strange intervals I recall the following fragments of dream, which my near-waking brain has somehow tried to wrap together into a single episode with strange jumpy "scene changes."

Here’s what I dreamt:

Claire, Bryn, Liz and I were camping, sharing a large tent in a campsite somewhere summery and green (think I’ve dreamt of camping in the same place before; can’t remember when). We were in the central "communal" area of the tent, brightly lit from the sun shining through the walls, when Penny arrived. Somehow we ended up taking turns to dare Penny into removing articles of clothing, but only so far before - to everybody else’s disappointment - she stopped playing.

Instead, the five of us trekked out of the campsite, climbed a wall, and found ourselves in a village. We went to the village station and boarded an express train, and I found that I was the driver. I was only a trainee driver, however, and my actions were being supervised by Simon (my boss), also in the cab, who generally seemed approving of how I was doing. At some point, a seagull crapped on the windscreen, which somehow resulted in bird shit landing on the controls of the train, which Simon didn’t approve of, and I hastily cleaned it up with paper towel.

The train arrived at a city (somewhat reminiscent of Manchester), and I rejoined Bryn, Claire and Liz on the platform (not sure where Penny had disappeared to; seemed to make sense at the time), and they indicated that there was somewhere in the city we were supposed to go, but I told them that I knew the way and I’d catch up, because I had something else I needed to do first. I took a left off a main street where they carried on, and entered a shopping centre. It was dark outside now, and I was surprised that this shopping centre was open so late. All of the shops were still open, but that wasn’t what I was here for.

I got into an elevator alongside a smartly-dressed woman. She pressed the button for the second floor. The elevator stopped at the first floor, revealing a restaurant above the shops. People tried to get in, but the woman in the lift said that she was going up, not down, and they stayed out. The woman seemed surprised that I didn’t get out. When we got to the second floor (filled with offices), she challenged me, asking what business I had up there. I used a little cold reading and a name-drop to sufficiently confuse her into thinking that I had some right to be there, and she left me alone.

Exploring the offices, most of which were empty and dark, I came accross the left-on abandoned laptop of somebody who I suspected was the alias of a superhero (see, I’m smarter than Lois Lane!), and I tried to sift through the data on their computer to find evidence for this hypothesis. Realising that I was running out of time before I was found here, I tried to find a writable CD or a flash drive or something to which I could copy the data I was uncovering, but hadn’t had much luck before Claire leapt out of bed and asked me a question about her dressing gown, which woke me for the last time.

And for some reason, I woke up humming Eiffel 65’s The Past Is Gone. Very odd.

So, after that - another trip into the somewhat fragmented world of my subconcious - I’d better get on with some work.

I have a system, and if you’ve watched me leave the house, you’ll have seen me implement it: my strange little “tap my pelvis four times” dance is actually a sophisticated check that I’ve got everything I need. Whenever I go out, I like to double-check that I’ve got with me my wallet, keys, mobile phone, and change, and this helps to ensure it. My change goes in my back left pocket, and I know it’s there because of the jangling sound it makes. I’ve left the house before and felt like I must have forgotten something because I only had a single coin, before realising why. In my back right pocket go my keys: the RFID keyfob and large keyring I use gives them a distinctive shape, and tapping them to ensure they’re there seems a little overkill when I should be able to feel that they’re there anyway, but it’s a useful reminder of a habit. My wallet goes in my front left pocket, and my phone goes in my front right, screen facing outwards.

That’s a pretty unusual configuration, I’m aware - many men keep their wallets in their back pockets, keep their phones’ screens facing inwards (to protect them) and so on, but there is a system. I’m right handed, and as a result I find it easiest to rifle through my wallet for notes, cards etc. using my right hand, holding it with my left, so the wallet goes on my left-hand side. It’s also rather big and chunky - I carry a lot of cards and stuff in it - and keeping it in by back pocket would make it difficult to sit down in places where I’d want to keep it in my pocket - like at bus stops, for instance. Having put this first lot of money on the left, I keep my change on the same side. It just feels right: in addition, the weight of my wallet plus change is approximately equal to the weight of my keys plus phone, which makes me feel balanced.

By reaching for my keys with my right, I’m able to use my (obviously more agile) right hand to identify the key I need by touch, usually before I’ve brought the ring round into eyesight, which is a simple efficiency improvement over putting them on the left. I’d honestly prefer it if the RFID sensors in my office building were bum-high, so that I could open doors with my arse and spend even less time fiddling with keys. Perhaps I can persuade the building management that the sensors are too high to be accessible to people in wheelchairs, and get them to lower them. I’m sure that my bottom is at a different height to that of other people, but I don’t care: that can jump or crouch or whatever - I’m the one who came up with the arse-key idea anyway.

As far as protecting the screen of my phone by facing it inwards; my mobile phones get quite a beating at the best of times, and they tend not to last long enough to be at risk of screen breakage. If I had a touch screen device, I might treat it somewhat differently, but this will do for now. It also affords me a couple of benefits: firstly, the lighting up of the screen when the phone rings can be seen through my trousers, which means that even in loud environments, odds are good that somebody will notice that my phone is ringing, and, hopefully, I’ll correctly interpret their pointing at my crotch as meaning that somebody is trying to get in touch with me, and not that - for example - a snake has climbed my leg and is about to bite off my right testicle. Another benefit is that, with a little practice, I’ve learned to be able to press the “reject call” button through a jeans pocket: ignoring people without even looking at the screen.

Perhaps this behaviour seems a little OCD; well, maybe so, and maybe I’ve hammed it up a little bit here anyway, but it works very well for me. Except when it doesn’t.

This morning, I went downstairs and put three of my four items in my pockets. I’d just woken from a dream in which I was left-handed, and as a result, I ended up sleepily putting my things into the pockets on the wrong side (don’t ask how I ended up doing that: instead, ask about the time I dreamt in four-dimensional space - that’s a better story). Realising that I’d not put my phone in my pocket, and wondering where I’d put it, I picked up the landline handset and dialed my number. I heard the phone ring from near the coffee table, so I hung up and started rummaging around there. No sign of it. So I pick up the landline again and dial again: now it sounds like it’s to the right of the coffee table: maybe it’s on the dining table, under some of Claire’s revision or something? I hang up and look. No sign of it…

Eventually I found it. It was in my pocket. The missing item was not my phone but my wallet, which was still on my desk.

I need a phone that doesn’t feel like a wallet in my pocket.

Had a rather unusual dream last night: I found myself swimming at my dad’s local swimming baths, with him (as, in fact, I did the weekend before last for the first time in years - we used to do so weekly). The swimming was particularly easy going: I was going at a hell of a rate for very little effort. Later, I got out of the pool to go to the toilet, but was surprised to find that my urine was coming out in many very different directions and spraying all over the place. Eventually, I was able to deal with this by strategically standing in front of three urinals and having each stream caught by one. And that’s all I remember of it.

Really; kids - you don’t want to be in my head. I don’t get it, and you don’t too.

Unusual dream last night. Gareth challenged me to a race: driving lorries (which fluctuated in size throughout the dream from mini-vans to huge artic’ trucks) along a dirt track somewhere up in the Welsh hills. Jon was his co-driver, and Bryn was mine, but somewhere along the way to the racecourse our vehicle broke down and by the time we’d repaired it, the other truck was way ahead: and we didn’t know the way. Bryn suggested, “Let’s take the Clarach road,” pointing up Gray’s Inn Road (for those not of Aber, this couldn’t be anything but the wrong way). I don’t remember much else of it, but I’m pretty sure we never got to the race.

I blame this dream on the heatwave we’ve been going through - which, thankfully, seems to be coming to an end now. The heat had given me a nasty headache by last night, so I knocked myself out with co-codamol and I suspect the strange dream was a side-effect of the drugs.

We watched the final episode, “Going Too Far”, of Excel Saga at Naruto Night last night. Added nothing to the plot, but well worth-seeing (as are all of the final episodes, actually… or the whole series, pretty much) for it’s crazy paedophilia-promoting, nudity-filled, blood-and-gore interpretation of the series. This - with it’s musical numbers, re-animation of the opening and closing sequences, and little re-use of animation - must have been the most expensive episode to make, which is terrifying considering that it never got screened on television.