Paris Hilton on heroin, work dreams, and Nip/Tuck

I had a lot of crazy dreams this week but didn’t have a chance to write about them till now. I work at a website that has a community, and one night earlier this week I dreamt that I found out a bunch of my website’s members had died in a fire. There were a couple members in particular that I remember having learned of their deaths. I was really upset at work…but then when I rememebered my dream halfway through the next day I thought it was rather hilarious. Then I felt bad for thinking it was funny.

I dreamt about my website’s members again the next night. In the dream, we invited 10 female members to come to our office for some sort of event where we would celebrate them as great members. Meeting these women in person was cool and weird at the same time. And most of them looked different in my dream than they do in real life. In my dream I thought, hmm, that’s odd, I almost didn’t recognize so-and-so because she looks so different.

At some point during that dream, Paris Hilton was hanging out with us and I discovered that she was on heroin. I found her in the bathroom and she had done so much heroin that her legs had completely wasted away and basically looked like rubber bands. We got her to go to some rehab facility that not only got her clean but somehow made her body go back to normal.

Then last night, I dreamt that I started watching the fifth season of Nip/Tuck. In waking life, I recently finished watching the fourth season on DVD. The season was beginning with the revelation that Julia McNamara has obsessive compulsive disorder. My dream brain kept calling the character “Annie”, which is Julia’s daughter in the show. That’s about all I remember from the dream.

Bill Hader, YouTube, The Arch, and a Frotteur

Last night, I had a couple dreams that seemed to go on forever and had a lot of little details. I’m going to try to remember everything as best I can.

I first remember going to a gathering at some house, I don’t think I knew the people who lived there. They had this patio/deck kind of area where everyone was hanging out. There were a bunch of people there that I did know, including my most recent ex, and my friend K. I think my current boyfriend was with me but I didn’t want my ex to see me with him.

There was a pool where I saw a group of guys started to get into a fight, so I filmed it with my digital camera and uploaded it to YouTube. It got  3,000 views in an hour and started getting lots of comments. It looked like it was going to go viral. There was something about Bill Hader from SNL being involved, and you could see a brief glimpse of him in the video. So I’m not sure if it was a real fight or if it was staged.

At some point, I found myself talking to a couple girls inside the house, and I do mean girls. They were 13 and 16, and talking about getting married or having babies, I can’t remember which. I do remember saying something about how I was twice their age. It was one of those conversations where you realize wow…I’m supposedly a grownup.

Then I ended up going to a discussion group and I think it was in a jail type place with security like they have in airports. I had a laptop with me and was asked to move to a separate security area so they could screen my laptop before they let me through. I was standing there waiting when I felt a hand on my ass. I turned around and saw a strange man standing behind me, so I slapped him in the face. Hard. He seemed surprised and asked why the hell I did that. I started yelling at him and said it was because he put his hand on my ass. He denied having done this and that just made me even angrier. In the dream, the feeling of the hand on my ass was almost exactly the same as when, in waking life, a frotteur put his hand on my ass on a street corner in Seattle. It made me incredibly angry, yet I did nothing about it. Well, I guess last night I was able to recreate that moment and stand up for myself.

Then, a second dream I had last night involved work. And a ton of work stress. I had a hideous day at work yesterday so I’m sure that filtered through into my sleep. Basically my entire office (a small company of about 15-20 people) was pretty much being held captive in a room. It was crunch time and things were really intense. The CEO said they would order pizza lunch for us. I was hungry and excited for the pizza, but it never seemed to come. I felt like the food was being withheld from us until the executives saw the results they were looking for. I’m not even sure exactly what those results were supposed to be.

The CEO rearranged all of our desks so that they were in a big rectangle, and we were all facing inward so that we could all see each other. The way the desks were arranged, you couldn’t even walk all the way around to get to the door. I found myself on the opposiste side of the room from the door and needed to pee really badly. I was afraid to speak up and say something about not liking the new desk arrangement, so I said something to the coworker next to me and she spoke up about it. The CEO pointed out that there was a way for us to get around the table to the door, so I got up and went to the bathroom.

When I left the office, it turned out that it was inside some sort of crazy playland type place with games and rides for children. It sort of looked like a movie theater, with lots of vending machines. I guess it was a combination of a movie theater, Dave & Busters, an arcade place I grew up with in St. Louis called Tilt, and the inside of the St. Louis Arch. In order for me to get back to my office, I had to crawl up an incredibly steep, carpeted slope with basically no traction at all. This is what made me think of The Arch. I managed to get all the way to the top of the slope by simply putting one hand in front of the other and pulling up a bit. I was afraid that I would lose what little grip I had and slide all the way back down to the bottom, and have to start over.

That’s about all I remember. It’s a lot of disparate events, but I think this dream had a lot of meaning. Lots of things that reflected my insecurities about myself and my anxieties about work.

I can see clearly now

I have poor eyesight. I got glasses when I was eight years old and started wearing contact lenses when I was fourteen. My eyesight has gradually gotten worse over the years, and if I don’t have contacts in or glasses on, anything more than a few inches from my face is blurry.

A few years ago, I was visiting my parents in St. Louis, where I grew up. I woke up in the middle of the night and had to pee, so I went to the bathroom. I didn’t bother to put my glasses on, because the bathroom was just a few feet away from the bed. As I sat on the toilet, I realized that I could see perfectly clearly. The way I can see when I wear my contacts. And the perfect vision slowly faded back to my usual crap vision as I sat there.

I know that I didn’t leave my contacts in before I went to bed. I know this because I take my contacts out every night, religiously. And I also know that if I do fall asleep with my contacts in while taking a nap, when I wake up, I can’t see clearly for a few minutes even with the contacts in, because they have dried out while sleeping.

So this experience can’t be blamed on leaving a pair of contacts in my eyes.

I think it’s another hallucination I experienced while coming out of sleep. Similar to the shuffling man experience that I shared here. This perfect vision experience was totally bizarre, but also amazing. It’s like my eyes still know HOW to see clearly.

The Shuffling, Disintigrating Man

I had a creepy experience a couple of years ago. I was living with my boyfriend at the time, and he tended to stay up late working in his office in our apartment. It wasn’t abnormal for me to wake up at 2am needing to pee and find him still up and working.

One night, I woke up and saw what I thought was my boyfriend shuffling very slowly towards me, lying in bed. I think I actually said “What?” out loud, because I thought it was weird that he was walking that way. Then the man turned into someone who looked like a co-worker, and continued to shuffle towards me. As I became more awake, I realized that I could hear the shower running in the bathroom and that my boyfriend was actually in the shower getting ready for bed. And I felt terrified.

The man then disintigrated before my eyes. Like a special efffect in a movie.

I felt really creeped out for a few minutes and laid in bed, feeling somewhat paralyzed. I knew that I was physically able to move, but I was afraid to. And the feeling that this man would come shuffling towards me again if I went back to sleep hovered over me.

I later realized that this was a hallucination that is not uncommon for people to experience as they are going into or coming out of sleep. Knowing that these phenomena exist doesn’t make an experience like this much less scary. More on these sleep hallucinations (called hypnagogia and hypnopomp) at a later date.

Kittens in the basement

Last night I dreamt that my family was still living in the house we lived in when I was in high school (note: my parents moved out of that house about 8 years ago).  I went down into the basement, which looked remarkably like the actual basement of that house – layout and everything. Once I got downstairs I discovered that somehow, cats had been getting inside, I think through a crack in the door to the backyard. The house was built on a hill, so part of the basement was accessible to the outside rather than being totally underground.

I first saw just two cats. Two gray tabbies who looked very much like the first cat I ever had while in college, Norman. In my dream I thought one of them actually was Norman. The cats had taken up residence in one of those black wire dog crates. As I looked around the basement I started to see other cats darting around in the shadows. And when I took a closer look at the dog crate, I discovered that there were tiny kittens inside, about 6 or 7 of them. They couldn’t have been more than three or four weeks old. I realized quickly that one kitten was dead, so I took it out of the crate and put it in the trash can. The others were still alive and I was freaking out that these cats had all been down in the basement for so long without anyone realizing or providing them with proper care. There were a few dishes of cat food and water lying around, so they weren’t starving. But I started to look around for a bag of cat food that I believed must have been there.

I also decided that I was going to go to the pet store and buy things to care for the kittens. I would take them upstairs to my bedroom and give them kitten food and treats, and a nice warm environment. I really wanted to keep them. My parents thought I was crazy.

I picked up one of the kittens, who was cream colored, rotund, and sort of unclean looking. For a moment I thought it was dead too, but then it squirmed and peed on my hand. I didn’t mind, because he was at least alive.

During all of this time, I kept seeing various cats in various color patterns running around the basement. Black tuxedo cats, tortoiseshell cats with red coloring, tabbies, calicoes. Somehow the basement had become a den for stray cats.

I’m not really sure how the dream ended. I don’t think I made it to the pet store to get kitten supplies before I woke up.

Someone told me to wake up

I remember one time back when I was in high school, just before I woke up, a voice in my dream said “You’d better open your ears or you won’t hear the alarm.”

And then I woke up to the sound of my alarm.

I’ve always had a pretty spot-on internal clock and I think it crept into my dream and somehow told me to snap out of my deep sleep. Creepy, yet amazing.

Dreaming while sick

When I am sick with a fever, I tend to have really odd, repetitious dreams that make me feel even worse. One that comes to mind is when I was about 9 years old. I had a Debbie Gibson poster on my bedroom door. In my feverish dream, I watched a rollercoaster go round and round, while superimposed over the Debbie Gibson poster. I wasn’t ON the rollercoaster, but was just observing. I felt like this happened all night long, though in reality it probably didn’t last long at all.

What are Dreams?

Dreams are still somewhat a mystery in terms of cause, purpose, and content. Much scientific research has been dedicated to sleep and dreams, but because dreams are a personal, subjective experience they are hard to study in a rigorous manner.

What is known is that dreams occur while in a phase of deep sleep called Rapid Eye Movement (REM). REM sleep is characterized by the following physiological signs:

* Muscles relax
* Respiration speeds up
* Brain wave activity increases
* Major voluntary muscles become paralyzed
* and of course, rapid eye movements which can sometimes be visible as fluttering eyelids

It’s during this phase of sleep where people (and animals) experience dreams, which can be very intense experiences involving any or all five senses. It is believed that the paralysis of major voluntary muscles during REM is to prevent us from acting out our dreams, but as we know this is not always the case. Witness this sleepwalking dog (poor guy):

It’s unclear why some people remember their dreams frequently while others claim not to dream at all. Researchers believe that everyone dreams – some people just rarely remember their dreams. Why do some people remember dreams while others don’t? That’s yet another unanswered question.

Why do we dream, anyway? Just a few theories, according to Wikipedia:

* Dreams help solidify our memories

* Dreams help us work through repressed thoughts and desires

* Dreams help regulate mood

* Dreams serve as “expectation fulfillment” which leads to lowered stress levels

* Dreams help create new ideas

Whatever the purpose, dreams can be fascinating, thrilling, arousing, terrifying, and often bizarre. Personally I find that I have certain recurring dream themes that seem to represent some of my fears, anxieties, and insecurities. Other people have dreams that replicate their mundane, everyday experiences. I seem to run the gamut of all of the above – the mundane, the recurring, the real-place-with-a-twist type dreams. I can’t wait to share more of them with you.

Cocaine as Erectile Dysfunction Treatment

This afternoon I took a nice long nap and dreamt that I was moving into a single dorm room. My landlord from my current apartment came with me to the dorm to help me get my electrical outlets all set up. It was summertime so no one was around the dorm when we got there. We went into the room and I found some bags in the closet containing boxes and boxes of Levitra – an erectile dysfuntion drug. On the boxes was a note that it was equivalent to cocaine. I showed my landlord and he got all excited. I was going to give him the drugs so that he could sell them. Then I thought, what if the people who left them here come back for them?

Sure enough, there was a pounding at the door and several people had come to collect their drugs. They were trying to threaten us but we were willing to give up the Levitra without a fight so they would leave us alone. Finally, they took the drugs and left.

Dreaming in French

Note: originally posted to LiveJournal on February 5, 2007

I’ve been having a lot of bizarre dreams as per usual, but have been seriously slacking on posting them. In last night’s dream, I had to take an exam, but I was allowed to choose which subject I wanted. For some reason, I chose French. The weird thing is that I didn’t expect the actual exam to have to be WRITTEN in French, and I sort of panicked when I sat down to take the exam. I thought, how can I do this, I haven’t taken a French class in ten years!!

The exam was bizarre – it was a series of questions written in English about movies, that I had to respond to in French, on paper. I just decided I’d do the best I could, even if I was writing like a French three-year-old. And somehow, I think that in my head during sleep, I actually did bust out some French sentences on paper – real ones, but just dreamy jibber-jabber. Nothing fancy, and probably quite literal English-to-French wording, but still.

In the end, I really wasn’t concerned about the grade I was going to receive, which I figured would be borderline passing, if that. I felt a lot more worried about the amount of time it was taking me to complete the exam.