Purely Whimsical

Everyone has weird dreams, right?

I remember when I was a kid that I had such graphically scary dreams that when I told them to my friends at camp, one of them didn’t sleep without waking up screaming for days. The only dream I remember from that time was waking up in a dark pit, standing up, trying to climb out, then seeing my friends standing around it, all zombified with shovels in their hands. I yelled at them to help me out, and they started burying me. Intense stuff for a 5 year old.

I still have dark and usually banal dreams, like falling off of a cliff, drowning, being forced to eat florescent bugs, being raped, tortured, fighting in a war and dying in various ways, etc etc. I don’t know where this stuff comes from. Despite all of this, I usually don’t wake up screaming (I can only remember it happening once), and I usually forget most of it immediately upon waking.

I’ve heard that some people don’t dream in color. My dreams involve all of my senses. I can taste, smell, feel, and so on. One of my most vivid dreams has been after I quit smoking. Even a couple of years later after quitting, I have dreams where all I’d be doing is lounging against a wall, smoking a cigarette.

Another really weird dream that I actually remember was set in a classic spaceship. There was a crew of 5 people, and I was the pilot. Three people were awake and running the ship, two were in their bunk when we ran through the tip of an unusual nebula. Soon after, our engines died and we were only running on inertia, so I sent one of the other crew members to investigate. After 10 minutes, I sent the other figure out what was taking so long. When neither came back, I went myself.

The engine room had a lot of shielding to protect the rest of the ship from the bleed off of the energy it generated. So to work in there, you had to suit yourself up to make sure that one day you could still have kids. Also, unlike the rest of the ship, it didn’t have gravity (because of how the engines worked, artificial grav would have interfered), so you had to use magnetic booties to stay velcroed to the deck.

Grumbling, I suited up, then cycled through the airlocks to enter the engine room. At first glance, it almost looked like Christmas. The engine was a Rube Goldberg machine of unlikely devices connected in strange ways, but there were these beautiful glistening red globes hanging everywhere. In the middle of it was this really gorgeous woman with billowing blond hair - and what’s this? Fangs and a fishtail? All of the sudden I realized the globes were blood from my crew, and I screamed in my helmet as I heel-toed it to the door in the clumsy magnetic booties. All that I remember right before I woke up was the cling-clang of those stupid boots against the decking.

See what I mean about weird? I can’t be the only one.