Fractals, Thespians, and Skylights

The following dreams occurred on the night of Satuday, May 10th, 2008:

It all started with me standing in my house, and really subtle things would happen that i would notice were wrong or out of place, like I heard the sound of an animal lapping water, the I remembered that all the pets have died at this point. I went to check it out and suddenly someone ran past me. They were a dark shadowy figure and they hid in the shadows. I then closed my eyes (in the dream) and I was looking @ exactly what I'd been looking @ before, as in, I was seeing through my eyelids, then I realized I was sleeping. but then I remembered that I'd been watching something on my computer before I fell asleep, and my computer had been sitting on my lap. So I tried to move my waking hand to move and check if the computer was still there while maintaining the dream imagery. and it worked... to my dream eyes I was standing in my kitchen back in P-town, but I could feel my computer. So I picked it up and moved it to the chair so I wouldn't knock it over, then I was completely awake and I took a drink of gatorade, and prepared to re-enter dream world mind you... I think the whole part about moving my computer while asleep could have all been a dream. I may have dreamt I felt my computer and moved it. I think I may have moved it earlier, because the other scenario is too crazy to comprehend...

*

I was @ AL’s house (as I seemed to be for quite a few sections of this dream series). I was down in the basement in the room that was first ML’s (AL's brother) but then became AL’s. ML still owned it, and he’d added some extension to it. It seemed like the house had been abandoned or something, and ML had taken up occupancy as a last resort. He was showing off his new spacious skylights over the area that previously stretched out to the retaining wall. It seemed like ML was sitting on a ladder towards the edge of the space that was his old room and the new extension, he pointed out and said, “check it out, isn’t this pretty friggin awesome?” I stepped out and walked around. It was raining really hard, and water was pouring in everywhere from cracks in the ceiling. The carpet was a deep red, and it was completely soaked (reminiscent of the carpet in my sister’s room was before the refurnishing). I pointed out the leaky ceiling and he went into a rage and wanted to fight me.

**

It was as though my entire time in the music school were turned into a television show about medicine, and they didn’t bother to change the departments around, so there was still theater/drama, ect. I was on the top floor of the medical building, between some research lab and the chief resident’s office. Someone in my class was on the brink of death. He was staying in a hospital, and a lot of my classmates were there with him. He was suffering from a skin condition among many other things. I was told that one of the treatments he was undergoing had something to do with blood oxygenation therapy. There was some sort of large mechanized vial holding some of his extracted blood sitting on the counter in front of me. For some reason it was my duty to work this mechanism. The way it worked resembled a miniature bike pump. I’d pull and push the pump and watch how the blood was responding to the oxygen. The trippy part was that incandescent fractal swirls would manifest as the oxygen soaked in, and if there were too much/little oxygen in one area it would glow red or purprle, or all shades thereof. Properly oxygenated blood would briefly glow green before fading to black (it were as though I were watching this take place on a screen). The fractals were incredibly brilliant, some of the cooler stuff I’ve seen. I was pumping for what seemed to be about 5 minutes when I realized that I had no idea how long I was supposed to pump, or who I was supposed to report to. As I started to walk to figure these things out, I accidentally pulled the top section of the vial open and some of the blood managed to splash into my mouth. I was freaked out about the possibility that I’d contracted something. So I tried to hunt down the chief resident to see if he could help. The chief resident looked a bit like Rev. Jackson. I searched all over the hospital but couldn’t find him, when I finally did find him he was extremely busy.

***

I was in some sort of thespian drama class and we were doing a dramatic reading of a play about programming. Everyone else was having a really easy time, but I couldn’t pull it together for the life of me. It was ridiculously hard to find the correct page, and then it was even harder to find my line. When I finally found my line it would have pictures and symbols intermixed. As I went on there were less and less words, and more and more pictures. For a line that should read “mother has a deep love for you all,” there would be a picture of a woman holding a baby, then a heart sunk deep beneath the ocean, and then a group of people standing around. Everyone was getting really irritated by the fact that I couldn’t get my lines straight, but they were acting as though they were playing it off in a theatrical passive aggressive way.

it was like I had to figure out a riddle as I was reading for the first time, and I was the only one having a problem with this everyone was getting really pissed, and one of the professors came over and said the greatest monologue ever... "Do you remember AB? Little guy, wouldn't think much just by looking at him. Well AB never took shit from anyone. He may have been small, but he was always on top of things. I think you can learn a lot from AB. He never would have had this much trouble, and he certainly wouldn't have taken this kind of shit if he did." Then the prof started walking away, I stood up on my chair and yelled "WHAT THE F***!?" and the room went silent, the prof turned around and I said... "That's what AB would do."

Note: The portion of the brain which enables reading is "turned off" while we dream, so technically reading should not be possible. A friend pointed out that my brains ability to substitute symbols for words was a subconscious attempt at working around this. A few nights later I became lucid and decided to test this out. I grabbed a book and sure enough, when I tried to read words letter by letter everything would disintegrate into squiggles and symbols. However, I found that if I didn't focus on the words, and took them into my peripheral vision, I would see an entire word suddenly flash into focus. This makes me wonder, is it possible that the area of the brain that handles phonetics and linguistic patterns is shut down, while the ability to call up words/phrases as chunks is still possible? More on this later.