Some dreams

I have a longform post that I spent a lot of time on yesterday, though it's still nowhere near complete. It's actually mostly assembled from comments I left on another site. By the time I write it it may be irrelevant.

Instead I'll write about some dreams I had last night.

I had two dreams shortly after I went to bed. I know this because I woke up about two hours after I had started sleeping. Waking up during a dream-state is a prerequisite for remembering the dream, I believe.

I don't remember the first one. I had tried to force myself to remember both of these dreams, but one has slipped away. The other is going fast.

I don't remember all the details, or the dream-reasoning behind it. It involved the ruins of Skatarama, which were now an elaborate complex of decaying buildings rather than just the wreckage of a garment factory that had been turned into a bowling alley and skating rink. It also involved girls - several of them, in their twenties, who were apparently sociologists studying something. Possibly me. I don't know. But I remember in the end, two of them had lingered longer than the others, who had already left town, and I insisted on giving them my contact information. But the first time I tried it was with a dull pencil on cheap paper, and I wrote in a large, sprawling hand, and wrote far too much information that was impossible to read. Next I grabbed what turned out to be a gel pen, only this left a line that looked more like cake icing or gel toothpaste - and promised to smear once I handed them the paper. As they waited with increasing impatience, one of them insisted that they leave right away. I was finally able to jot down my e-mail address and blog address in ink on paper.

I just remembered the other dream from this period. It involved me on a bicycle. I had started out from Olyphant, where I work, and I was headed for upstate New York in the Catskills, where a friend's family has a lake house. But I got seriously lost and ended up in Baltimore, completely in the other direction and about twice as far away. I got a map and got my bearings and decided to set out again, but this time by car. My car happened to be in Baltimore. Only it wouldn't turn over. So I decided to roll it down a hill to try to catch it in gear. Only after I started downhill did I remember that this was an automatic transmission vehicle, and the "start it by catching it in gear while rolling downhill" trick wouldn't work. Also, the brakes wouldn't work without the engine running. I guess I should have stuck with the bicycle.

The third dream was hours later, before I woke up now. It involved zombies. Fun fact: I hate zombies. Zombie movies freak me out. In this dream I was hiding out in a complex of buildings that may have been my old high school. I was with at least one other person, and the landscape outside was infested with zombies. We concealed ourselves by stringing clotheslines across the rooms and hanging clothes on them to block the windows. At one point one of the zombies - a surprisingly articulate female standing just outside one of the very large windows - noted that she could see one of the shirts we had hung up moving, and speculated that there might be people inside. They were coming to find us. I hate zombies.

So. That's how I finished up my shortened off-days. Now, it's back to work for at least five nights.