My cool neighbor dislikes my disheveled neighbor. (dream)

DREAM

I'm standing on the tiny front porch of the house I grew up in on a cool summer day, and my new neighbor comes over. She's what I would call a "cool girl." She's friendly, she's good-looking, fashionable (wearing a bright, summery, crocheted halter top), she's confident, and makes conversation easily. She has a rather thick Mexican accent. We discuss the other people in the neighborhood. 

For some reason, she really doesn't care for the man who moved in next door to her, but I'm not sure why. He seems very "normal" to me. He's got hair the color of hay and blue eyes. He wears a baseball cap, navy blue tee and jeans that are all just a little dirty. For the first time since we've been discussing people around the neighborhood, I don't really trust this woman's judgment. 

I go back inside my house, and it's winter. Not only is it winter--icicles dripping with water are bursting in from the glass doors leading to the back yard. I work on removing some of the icicles, but some of them are too thick. 

A man dressed in drag is floating in the living room, and explains to me that PewDiePie has moved into the neighborhood and that he's been such a positive influence. 

I decide that I'm going to try to seduce the neighbor in the navy tee, but I'm not sure how direct I should be. Should I just knock on the door and ask for sex? Should I draw this out and get to know him over the course of days, weeks, or months? I know what my end goal is, so do I need to delay?

INTERPRETATION

I think this dream is just me ruminating about the short stories I'm trying to write again. The character of the cool girl and the situation with wanting to seduce the neighbor remind me a little bit of things I've been trying to write. 

I guess I'm thinking about it a lot because it's really difficult for me to crank out actual pages of work now that I'm attempting to switch gears and do something comedic. 

Before, I knew the general direction I wanted to go in and it required more instinct than thought. But instinct doesn't come easily for me with these new short stories. 

I feel as though I can set aside time to think about things, and do comedic exercises, but that doesn't mean that good ideas will actually come to me. I don't have control over that part. It's not like writing about my dreams, where original ideas and events and experiences just come flooding in every night. All I had to worry about before was being authentic, but now I have to worry about being entertaining.  It's much harder for me to write with the goal of entertaining rather than just inviting people to read snippets of a diary or inviting people to look into a story that's been going on in my head for decades.

Dreaming up better scenes for my fiction. (dream)

 DREAM

I'm watching two of my characters from the Lost Atlantis series make peace with an alien race. 

The aliens look mostly human. Some of them look completely human. It's just that they often have a rougher, more animal-like quality to them. 

There's a big ceremony in a sports stadium to celebrate the peace between our two races. The two characters negotiating the peace, Shem and Sandi, enter into a large "space taxi" ship afterwards and head for home. 

On the way home, the aliens they're in the ship with attack them with flying discs and swords, and all the humans die, not just in the space taxi, but all over the planet. They were all completely taken by surprise.

I think to myself, "That's not how I want the book to end!" 

I rewind the events in my mind until I set the scene so that Sandi sees a slit opening up in the forehead of one of the aliens just before a killer disc comes flying out of it. I play the events.

Sandi is able to warn everyone about this subtle indicator that there will be an attack. It seems that just knowing about this indicator is enough to pass on the knowledge to every other human on the planet, and so everyone has a couple of seconds warning to get out of the way, or subdue the androids. I realize that's a problem in terms of logic.

I'm not sure how she's supposed to actually stop the discs, so I think about that for a while. I think about her using her hands to block the opening. That won't work. I think about her blowing on the opening and that will take care of it. 

No, that's really quite a silly idea. 

I skip that problem too for now, and just run the scene as though the two characters are utterly destroying the aliens. And the battle on the rest of Earth goes successfully as well after a great deal of struggling. For one thing, a lot of these aliens/androids look perfectly human, so no one knows they aren't until the last minute, when that slit appears in the forehead. 

I really like the way that scenario ran. Now, I just need some logical connections between some of these events.  

INTERPRETATION

I'm working on a comedic book for the first time, and I'm finding that it requires a lot more thinking and rearranging and experimenting than I'm used to. It's much slower going. I wonder if this is because I don't have a system in place for exercises to do every day to bring out the humor in everyday life. It could also just be that this is a new experience, so it's getting my brain working out neurons that have been underutilized. 

Right now, I'm mainly making logical connections between jokes into a storyline. I don't think it's the best or only way to get the job done, but it's what I'm doing. Hopefully, I can eventually come up with a way to consistently create funny material in the future. 

Going to college in a tent along the side of the road. (dream)

DREAM

A teacher has been molesting me at my college, but I can't find a way to talk about it to anyone. We students all do our homework in individual tents in a long row on the side of the street, and a teacher regularly comes into my tent and snuggles with me. 

I definitely do not like it. But words about it just aren't coming to me and I don't know if there's anyone I could tell who could do something about it. My only hope is that these new cameras they've been installing has caught some footage. Maybe someone is monitoring that footage. 

I see that the researchers at this college are studying physical abnormalities in students and wonder if that's part of the rationalization for coming into my tent and doing this to me.

I write in my diary about the commute to the school--how to get there via the bus, and it's like I'm reliving the experience. The whole city is very gray and subdued in color.

INTERPRETATION

This dream is both related to my trauma from last summer, and not related. It's related in that I definitely felt taken advantage of, and I felt as though there was no one to talk to about this, and words were always insufficient when I tried to talk about it--but there was no physical or sexual assault like in this dream. 

I think I have the strongest memories of college from my days in California, where I took the bus to the college and carried everything I needed for the entire day in small, rolling luggage. I'd stay there sometimes from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., so it was like camping there. 

Feeling excited about change. (news)

I think I'm getting over something traumatic that happened to me a year ago, because I'm working on some new techniques with my therapist, and it's loosening up nightmares about that event. I've just been left feeling quite sad for a few weeks versus feeling extra spicy like I'd been feeling for a couple of months after the initial trauma.

I'm really enjoying life between these sad moments. I kind of feel guilty for it too. I feel as though I should be working at a job I hate somewhere, but instead, I'm enjoying reading, writing, and I've been rekindling my interest in visual art. 

I don't know where I should share the art I make when I make it though. If I were business savvy, I'd probably open up an art store/portfolio online, do shows, make business cards, etc. But I've done that in the past, and I find that no one buys anything, and it attracts people who want you to make artsy things for them for free. It's kind of weird, because they usually express a lot of criticism about it at the same time. It's as though they don't like it, but want it anyway. 

Anyway. I've finished the second draft of the last book in my Lost Atlantis series, and I've decided to attempt something I'm calling Satyr Plays, which will probably be comedic short stories based on the Lost Atlantis series. 

I am extremely worried that I can't be consistently funny. In my life, I enjoy making people chuckle, and am successful at making that happen sometimes, but it's not like consistently writing humor. That sounds like one of the toughest things in the world to me. But making people laugh is, for me, one of the most satisfying things one could hope to do aside from something like curing a disease or advancing quantum mechanics. So Satyr Plays may never see the light of day, but I'm going to try my best to try and figure out how to write humor. I'm enrolling in autodidactic clown college. 

Do I lose people, or do people lose me? (dream)

DREAM

I'm at the church I grew up in, and an improvisational jazz musician tentatively begins to play the keyboard. A lady joins him on another keyboard. Soon, another lady joins.

We go through a series of several other skits and recitals in various languages: Spanish, German--probably French... Languages and art forms I don't recognize.

A choir wearing mostly high heels performs.

As my family exits the sanctuary into the foyer, my mother remarks that I will lose my friend's phone number. I say my own number will remain unchanged, so she will be able to find me when I'm older.

We go throughout the church talking. First about how to buy a house. Then, I see the choir director chewing out the choir for complaining about the use of high heels.

One lady says, "I could wear heels too, if I had a horse."

Then I see the choir director is a man on a horse wearing modestly high, thick heels.

INTERPRETATION

The thing I take away the most from this dream is the part about the phone number. I think I'm  increasingly unbothered by people's rejection and abandonment. Is it really possible to lose people, or were you just not right for each other? I don't know anyone else's circumstances or thought processes, but I do know my own worth. I'm a decent friend/worker to have around. But at the same time, I wonder if I'm not putting enough effort into keeping in contact with the people I find who I really like. Am I just expecting other people to reach out to me? 

Auctioning off conversations on eBay. (dream)

DREAM

I need a little extra cash, so I put up an ad on eBay auctioning off a conversation with me. I'm not really sure what about, so I put "about sharks" for the first conversation, and leave the second conversation open-ended. 

All of a sudden, right before the auction ends, I realize that the person who buys the conversation might be looking for a lot of advanced, factual information about sharks that they can't get elsewhere. I recall that I volunteered someplace that does work with Shark Week, and I hope that maybe I can revisit them and collect some interesting facts before the conversation happens. 

I'm in a bus with an old friend, and we pass by the bar that I frequent. They've put my name up in various different spellings about 10 times all around the bar--all painted on great big signs. 

I duck down in my seat, sinking to the floor. I take my blank canvas down with me and imagine all the possibilities for it--especially if I were to use black and white and red paint. 

Then I find out that John Lennon bought the conversations, and I'm in a dream/fantasy land in which I do more of the asking and less of the conversing. 

INTERPRETATION

I have been looking at alternate ways to make income on the internet, although they haven't been nearly as successful as in the dream. It's actually quite hard knowing whether you're really providing value to your customers, sometimes, as indicated by my panic about not knowing enough about sharks. 

I've also been very interested in getting back into painting--maybe with some abstract art. And John Lennon did write the song "Imagine." 

I am pregnant with two men's baby. (dream)

DREAM

I go to the doctor with a group of people. The nurse comes out and says to me, "Congratulations, you are pregnant! These two gentlemen are the fathers."

I look over at my two friends, and I feel no anxiety about having their children. They're older, mature, caring, and stable. 

"The egg split into three parts: one part for each of them, and one part salmon." 

"One part salmon?"

"Human-hybrids are rare, but they can live long, healthy lives." 

I go back outside with my friends, and I observe my belly throughout the day. It's not very big. I would think that a fish-human baby would be quite large. I wonder if I really am pregnant.

Then I remind myself that a medical professional not only said I'm pregnant, she pinpointed the fathers. I have to be pregnant.

I wonder what kind of a future my baby will have after I see what a seal-human hybrid looks like. It just looks like a seal. But I have to assume that it has the mind and heart of a human trapped in a seal's body. It can't socialize with other humans. It can't work together with other humans. It can't marry. It's all alone. And its human parents go on an ice floe and feed it fish every now and then. It seems like.a sad, lonely existence.

That's not the kind of life I want for my child.

I imagine what my child will look like. I'm sure it's not just going to be a plain old fish. Then I imagine it will have a really creepy, alien-like upper body and a large, fishy lower body. And it will have to live in the water. I feel sick. 

INTERPRETATION

I think this reflects the worries I would have if I were to have children. Is this the kind of world in which the child would thrive? What if it was born with some unusual proclivities, like a genetic predisposition towards drug addiction, or what if it was born with a frail, neurotic temperament? Where is the infrastructure necessary to having a happy life in our time? There are such few jobs and houses. If I can't somewhat guarantee that the child won't have a miserable life, why have kids?