I’ve had a series of strange dreams lately. It’s something to do with the rich holiday food before bed (perhaps richer food can afford to pay for weirder dreams); here, for your consideration, are two.

The Cat

I’m at Camp Tamarack. I know this, as there’s a campfire on a hillside. Laura’s cat, which is in the habit of making noises no cat should be able to make, is making child-dying sounds. It approaches me, even though it strongly dislikes me, and I ask what’s wrong. The cat shows me it’s paws in an Aesop-like gesture of friendship. Nothing wrong. I think to myself, “Maybe if I listen, the cat will speak to me,” as if cats are somehow like the Holy Ghost. Leaning down, the cat whispers to me, “I got too close to the fire and burned my face.” Like the cat is ashamed that it let such a thing happen. I told the cat – the cat that had just spoken to me, mind you – to go get some salve and apply it liberally; I suppose I figured a talking cat shouldn’t have much trouble figuring bottles of ointment out. Then I woke up.

The Tor

I very vaguely remember this one, except that I am having an argument with someone I can only assume is an agent of the state working in some sort of capacity to remove privacy laws. Shortly after the discussion, armed men break my door down, streaming into my apartment, shouting, “Where’s the onion router? We know you have one in here!” That’s all I can remember, except the impression it left that I’m some sort of uber-alpha-geek-type.

The Fishbowl

This one’s not a dream. It just happened. Let me put it this way: you often hear how a man needs a good woman around to keep him neat. You may not realise how true that is until you find yourself setting the your coffeepot to brew at 5:00am into an abandoned fishbowl.

• It turns out that I’m liberal. Like, really liberal. Shocking, though, as I’d become used to the word “liberal” as a pejorative, thanks to most of the people I know. On the other hand, I absolutely am not a Liberal Party supporter, especially now that Stéphane Dion is leading that motley pack. But who does that leave me to vote for? Certainly never the NDP: I may be liberal, but I’m not a union shill, and I’m not a communist. The Tories are alright, if you like the West, which I mostly do not. The Libertarian party is weak to the point of comic relief. The Green party is a viable candidate, as always, but it’s also weak. As for the Christian parties, the day I vote for a Christian political party will be the day I hand in my membership card in the, you know, Kingdom of God (the one that isn’t organised around political solutions to moral problems, and certainly doesn’t go for an official mix of church and state).
• I had a strange dream last night. Laura had been kidnapped, and I had been given a series of clues to her whereabouts: I remember driving frantically around the city, trying to find her, when the van (yes, the van) I had commandeered was hijacked by a tiny thug wearing a ski mask, holding an Uzi. Normally, I might have drawn some relevant size-related conclusions, but this was, after all, a dream. Turns out that Laura was the one in the ski mask, and it was all a huge joke. Heh. Good one. After that, it got even weirder, but I’ll save that narrative for a more appropriate place (like my extremely porous memory).
• Steve and Jo just had a baby boy. They have named him Isaac, because Sarah laughed at God, and that’s a great thing to memorialise. I agree.
• I’m sick of a society that breeds women to be uptight, moralistic feministas. What ever happened to women being pirate wenches? Who told us men that the woman should be the one controlling the remote (in my vernacular a much better variation on “wearing the pants”)? That’s right: when I want a tankard of ale, I’ll have me a tankard of ale, and she’ll be wearing saucy pantaloons and a corset possibly made out of the bones of my victims. I’m not really sure of that one. But let us men raise the battle cry: bring back the wenches!
• I’m going to spray some Axe in my office. Lisa will soon be over to flog me with a cat-o-nines for giving her a headache.

I’m going to tell you about my dreams again. I am doing this with a bowl of pot noodles waiting to cool down, so I assure you this post will only be as long as it takes water to get from scalding to less scalding.

Introductions aside, I’ve been having a series of vivid dreams lately. Digression: you can tell how well I am doing personally – mentally – by how often I blog and by my dreams. When I’m fine, I hardly dream at all. Maybe because when I’m fine I have less time to think, as I’m out doing things. Am I the only one in this? I don’t think so. But I’m probably the only person I know that actually blogs about my dreams (though I’ve yet to decide what level of pathetic it involves). And if you see me blogging a lot, that means a lot is going through my head, and as invariably happens, it ends up spending time on your screen. How much? You choose.

YouTube is down. My noodles are still too hot. Maybe I’ve learned to type faster or some such.

Some of these dreams are not fit to be written, I admit. But the strangest of them was a rather surreal trip through an entire supermarket for what felt like hours with – well, let’s not mince words here: a former girlfriend. Surreal because the supermarket was not selling food or anything else one might expect to find in a supermarket. It was selling houses, and in the proceeding hours after the dream happened I still cannot figure how they fit the houses into the building. Nor do I remember what either of us said, except that I remember speech of some kind. What I do remember is the instant after waking up knowing it was just a dream, something of a departure; usually the dream fades and with it fades any security in possible futures. I just remember waking to the facts, and to the regrets, and to the guilt.

Ah the noodles are a good heat. Let me eat inbetween typing.

Maybe you think I’m quite the odd duck for letting a dream deconstruct my equilibrium. Or perhaps there’s a better explaination. See, tomorrow I have a date. Yeah you heard me: a date. And some of you are scratching your head, going, “I though you said rebounding was stupid?” Bollocks. Who am I to know anything? It’s not rebounding: it’s taking a chance, making the shot, sinking the putt when you really need to. Maybe I’m just saying I don’t have the stones to pull myself up by the shoestraps anymore. Maybe you all will reply that that sentence made, quite literally, no sense. But shit, I’m sick of sitting on my hands.

Pot noodles sure are a good source of… something. I’m no dietician!

Bravery; what is it? Going forward in the face of fear? Something like that. Some of you will wonder what I have to fear. And I will tell you I fear doing it wrong. Screwing up. Getting in deep and pissing all over it. I will tell you that I’ve found the enemy, and it is me.

I suddenly enjoy these noodles much less. Cardboard crap in a bucket…

• I should apologise for some things: they never should have happened. But what do you do when patterns become so deeply ingrained erasure seems impossible? I don’t know. Neither do you. But a dream last night reminded me of a few regrettable roads taken (though it took me a while to be able to say that, even).
• Don’t be disheartened. It’s not all going to be like this. Remember, there is joy in passing the torch to a fresh lung.
• Maybe the next season of Scrubs should switch the format of the show; think about it: until now J.D. has been a goofball whose largest crisis was probably his on/off relationship with Elliot. Through his eyes, the hospital is one big screwball comedy. Now, with his girlfriend pregnant, his goofy immaturity can be cast aside, the show can be filtered through the grownup eyes of the new John Dorian, and it can become an hour-long medical drama competing with House. Of course, a move that gutsy and edgy would alienate its entire core audience, all twenty-three of them
• I fail to understand why people seem constantly shocked that soldiers get killed when they go to war. Civillians also get killed. It’s just a fact. Get used to it, or do something to help. In the meantime, shut up.
• In that vein, I have a hard time mustering up any empathy for people in Lebanon and Israel: I know people are dying and incredible pain’s being absorbed by thousands of people, and on an intellectual level that fact troubles me. But if these people aren’t in my specific vicinity, I can’t really feel their pain. Does this make me a bad person? It seems as if I should feel something; the fact that those who know me say I have a healthy dose of empathy for those I can touch and can see doesn’t help. I know that already.
• That dream follows: I was kissing an old girlfriend in my dream (the most familiar thing in the world, I might add; we knew eachother like a Swiss watchmaker knows gears, to borrow a phrase), when she leaned over, saying, “I can’t believe I’m still with you.” Later, I woke up and thought, “I can’t believe she’s still with me,” smiling until I remembered she is not in fact still with me. On this morning’s drive to work, I found myself thinking I may not be as over it as I’d like to admit. You understand this is painful to throw out there: I don’t like this feeling or this admission. But I am – as always – naked and ashamed.
• My wonderful sister Elyssa is out buying coffee for me right now. Wonderful, wonderful girl.

One last thing: some lyrics for your eyes from Mae’s Embers and Envelopes.

We write to apologize. We ask to look past life as it goes by.
I know you have sacrificed time, life, love, time to fly.
Please consider all things trite, forgiveness will be the thing that gets us by.
I know to have something like this broken is hard to fix.

Embers, we’re burning bridges down. Envelopes stuffed with feelings found.
To write this down as means to reconcile.

We write to patch things up, maybe not to agree but to proclaim love.
Let’s look ahead and then we’ll see the One whose glory never ends.
And based on that we’ll see, there’ll be room for change, but gradually.
I know to have something like this broken is hard to fix.

If all is said and done and over, if we don’t have to, we’re not going to.
Make the change, it’s worth the try. What’s broken can’t be fixed tonight.

Okay, last night I had one of those dreams where nothing in particular sticks out except one strange moment, which has been with me all day long. In this dream, me and this girl I very barely know (who will remain, for the benefit of our possible future fledgling friendship, nameless) were sitting on a couch all comfortable-like until she asked me if I liked her.

Now, this is odd and I know that: as the moment progressed in the dream my mind was rationalising what I would say next. I distinctly remember thinking to myself that if I say no, I blow the romantic possibilities for sure; if I say yes, I probably ruin the friendship eventually.

I don’t remember what came next. But I’m pretty sure I said no. That’s what I think I’d do now.

• First off, I had two of the strangest – yes, two – dreams I’ve had in a long time. The short of it, we had a potluck dinner at what I can only describe as an amalgam of every house I’ve ever lived in; I was in line for the salads when I found all the good salads had been eaten, and the last person to get any of said good salads was the very person who had butted in ahead of me several minutes before that. Needless to say, I was pissed, a screaming match ensued, and it was of course my father.
• Second dream, I was going on a road trip into what seemed like a very rural Arkansas-type place with two faceless people who didn’t say anything for the entire trip (at least that I can recall). One of them gave me money to get pancakes, which I did by going to a vending machine which mixed batter and cooked the pancakes on some sort of oily platform – you have to remember this is my dream, so the maching was actually quite complicated, the pancakes rotating and flipping – until they came to rest on a plastic plate. Then we ate them. Now I crave them.
• One of the thing I think defines us most as human beings is how we react to situations. Or, let’s be honest, how we fill the time. Really, what is “bored” other than another situation to react to? Which is why we let our friends change and mould us (if we really care about them), as they become rolled up that definition of who we are.
• So much stuff, no place to put it. Why can men not wear purses?
• If the price of gas keeps on rising (hey that’s a Bloc Party song) I’m simply not going to be able to afford owning a car, or at least driving it. That could get a little sticky, as my church is 40 minutes of racecar driving away from me.
• For a human to function properly, there are several things that he must believe to be true without warrant. For example, he must believe that his reality is – in a word – real. He’s not a head in a vat connected to a machine controlled by a mad scientist, but is instead a physical body in a physical world. He must also believe that there is truth. Everyone does. He must believe that the things he does matters. And finally – I’ll go with Plantinga on this one – he must believe in God. [Editor: please excuse the rusty epistemology.]
• My musical diet right now is pretty much Modest Mouse and Derek Webb. Yummy.

I had a dream last night with a beginning, middle, end, plot, characters, and dialogue. INcredible. Although I have to say my mind ripped off The Sixth Sense.

Basically I was taking a roadtrip when I happened to save a couple from wrecking their caravan. After which I befriended their son, who had to have been twelve years old or so, but who they seemed to ignore a lot.

Eventually I ended up on the caravan with them. Somehow taking a vacation with them. And I began to dislike the family greatly, as they seemed to let their child do whatever he wanted.

A lot more superfluous details and we ended up at a graduation where I finally figured out the kid didn’t actually exist (ero his parents’ actions). Funny thing, I distinctly remember a cinamatic ending as the camera in my head pulled away from the kid and he slowfaded out. Like a crude metaphor, even.

Call the MPAA! My dreams are plagiarising their intelectual property!

Last night I had another of those strange dreams, except this time I only remember it vaguely. What I do remember is it seemed very, very long; and someone that I used to know was there, and she told me, “I have faith in you.” I’m not sure why she had faith in me, but apparently she did. So I’ll take my cue from that and live today like she has faith in me, even if it was just a dream.

In other news, the idiot dream left me waking up sad. Come on brain, if you have something to say, say it while I’m awake!

This is really getting out of hand. Last night I had another strange dream – and I do mean strange – this being the sixth or seventh night in a row I’ve had really vivid dreams I can remember.

In last night’s episode of “Dan’s Strange Mind”, I was a street fighter. Yes, a street fighter. There was a lot of yelling and fighting, and suprising scene where a guy threw a knife (a serrated kitchen knife with one of those two-pronged points on it) and buried it in my arm. And this took place in my shop, around the corner of one of the machine. Because he wanted money. Not sure what money, but he definitely wanted money.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’ve been having a series of strange dreams lately. Some of them are really not fit for reproduction – if you’ll pardon the pun – on the internet, but this one is just so bizarre I had to post it.

Apparently people had left earth (maybe on a spacecraft, although that wasn’t clear), and landed on a new planet. Not a normal planet, mind you, but one where the trees were all on 70 degree angles or so. I recall asking someone (also unclear who) why this was, and was told that our landing had “set the centre of gravity off” on the planet. Which in my waking hours I realise is totally idiotic. It would have to be an asteroid or something. And even then.

So the first thing we do when we get there is start building tennis courts right next to eachother in long row, each one side to side. Mine backed onto a sharp hill. I don’t quite remember who else was there with me, but I do recall they were familiar somehow.

Then the dream morphed to me rescuing people from some sort of mining camp run by these ugly-ass aliens who I defeated by playing music. Which, I might add, is clearly ripped off from Mars Invades. Stupid plagerising dreams.

I got back to the planet and there was a pilgrim-like feast there where I was elected “Spoon to the Emperor”. Like, what? Is that a good thing? I hope it doesn’t mean I have to spoon an emperor.

Also, I think I’m going crazy.