Hooray for Gumbo

[rinue]

My biggest annoyance - annoyance, mind you, not grievance, axe to grind, irritant, pet peeve, crusade, aggravation, distress, concern, disappointment, gripe, or betrayal - my biggest annoyance is the fact that blue jeans' fifth pocket - that little rectangle inside the right hip - is exactly the right size for a tube of chapstick, but bottoms out right at the crease where your leg bends, so that that the chapstick is pushed out of the pocket the moment you sit, squat, or walk vigorously.

Last week, I dreamt about being shot in the head, which is notable for being the first time I've ever died in a dream. I assume it was the result of a particularly vigorous paragraph of Hemingway. The night afterward, I dreamt that I was a quality assurance taste tester of packaged glazed donuts, and later semi-solid cat food. Both tasted awful. I woke up wanting to spit out my tongue, and confused because I didn't think you were supposed to be able to taste in dreams. I was also humming "Hello, My Name is Joe," which probably links this dream to the credits sequence of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

My friend Merlin has become a regular in my dreams at this point, in that at any point of any dream, I am able to go visit him at a diner and say, "what the hell is going on?" and he can say, "I'm not involved in this." He seems annoyed, and also bored. Sorry, Merlin.

Comments

[hipgunslinger.livejournal.com]

I had a third person dream once in which I died, where after it's fulfillment, the rest of the dream consisted of a prolonged period of time of watching the blood stream out of my body and the shape it formed on the pavement.
There were no passers-by. I felt a silent witness to my own death.

Last night, I dreamt that a settlement of a dozen ladies were living in my attic. They came down for my birthday party, as they forbid themselves regular interaction with my life, as they were charged with chronicling me.

There's also the story of how I almost had a lucid dream once, but those people in it managed to convince me it was real.

I feel strange now.

[oddment.livejournal.com]

I still feel slightly cheated whenever I have dreams that hinge on reading--I heard once when I was a kid that you couldn't read in dreams because it was a function of the left brain that just couldn't happen in a right-brain-generated world.

Also, they tend to be very silly: I had one last week where I had found out accidentally that a songwriter I had newly come to like was cribbing everything from Shakespeare and I...spent the whole dream trying to keep Johnny M. from finding out. So he wouldn't be disappointed. It was like a nightmare of manners.

[marveloustrick.livejournal.com]

Many of you, Romie included, know that I dream about my death and the deaths of others almost every night. I go through periods where such macabre fantasies do not torment me, but they are rare. The dreams vary in intensity; sometimes they are quite academic in their approach to my death other times they are intense visceral nightmares of agony and fear.

It is rare that I die of a shooting in my dreams, and shots to the head sometimes feel like a relief after several nights in a row of, for example, being torn apart by dogs. I have noticed a few common themes that will bring about dreams of sudden, relatively painless, deaths. I normally dream of a shooting death when I feel that my world has grown completely out of my control, or perhaps when I feel that I am persecuted in seemingly random ways.

I know that you have been in suspense over Ciro's citizenship and other such bureaucratic things, and I often feel like troubles of that kind are doled out without cause. This dream of a cold, faceless murder (your killer simply being a gun and not the person holding it) may come from a feeling of anxiety over dealing with institutional red tape.

It is my guess that this dream was simply a passing materialization of present troubles, and it will pass as soon as those specific fears are resolved. That is just my guess, but an educated one.

Your other dreams... well... they have me at a loss. I specialize in death, not weirdness.

Cheers,
Trick