The Rabbit Hole

Last night, I dreamed that I found an enormous dog on the street while walking around NYC with my roommates. It was slightly mangy-looking--it's head was balding and its fur was thinned all over--and it had some bleeding wounds. I wanted to take it to the shelter where I volunteer, but moonlightalice told me they wouldn't take it if it was openly bleeding. I'd have to take it to a vet first, to treat it, and then it could go to the shelter. Dream-me was very put off by this and wasn't sure if it was worth the investment to treat the dog only to take it to a full-service shelter where, if it wasn't adopted, it could be euthanized.

There was never any question of treating the dog, to the credit of dream-me, just a question of what to do with it after. I was trying to work out how to con, like, the ASPCA into taking it despite the fact that they rarely have space for animals, much less strays with injuries and mange, or whether I could possibly deal with a dog in my life (or if I could pass it off to someone like feiran, who has always loved dogs) when I woke up. I'm dunno what to make of this dream. I think I might just need more sleep to work it out. I'm feeling very dopey at work today, and even a little ill (like dizzy-ill, not cold/flu-ill). I cannot say why. Hope it blows over.

In more important problems-people-have news: this tumblr account is making me cry at work.

I dreamt, vividly, last night, and I remember it so well, perhaps, because I was woken abruptly by a series of coughs that are the last remnants of a cold. (Yes, I caught a cold in summer. Sigh.)

Basically, I was walking up the steps to my parents house, after hanging out with friends, when two men--one of whom was James Van Der Beek--came up to me, rather agitated. In my dream, I instantly became alarmed because we had agreed not to meet for a while. This meant there was A Problem. They threw a metal tube (that was somehow also a drinking glass) at me and said that they couldn't keep it any more. It was a bit rusty, but I panicked because it could have easily been blood.

It probably was blood. We had killed somebody, months ago, and they were now throwing the last bits of evidence my way to hide/dispose of. As I ran into the house to sterilize and bleach out anything I might have touched ever (CSI says you can't type blood if it's been bleached!), I was trying to remember if, in fact, I had been a party to murder. How had I gone on living so indifferently since that sort of thing? I began to question whether it could even have happened, given that I hadn't really changed my lifestyle all that much. Was I a monster? What the hell...

Naturally, I awoke in the midst of that panicking and spent ten minutes at 5 am this morning coughing my lungs out trying to remember if I HAD KILLED SOMEBODY. Basically, it was a more macabre version of this dream that I do still have all the time. Unpleasant in the extreme, but it's good to know that dream-me is as appalled by the idea of my being able to kill people and live a normal life afterward as real-me is. I believe this particular twist came up as I was contemplating how I would have fared and, should I have survived, lived after participating in one of the Hunger Games. As for why James Van Der Beek was in my head, I blame this post on Project Rungay that I read yesterday.

I had a dream that I was avenging the death of a friend and proceeded to wipe out, like, a billion army dudes who were trying to invade my lawn. All my other friends were high-fiving each other and going back into the house for drinks, giving me the o.O face when I was still a snorting, wheezing maniac coming down off homicidal highs into guilt-wracked, PTSD lows. Then the lawn flooded and everything below this staircase leading up to the balcony flooded and I started to, grudgingly, go back in to relax and "celebrate." I noticed, on my way in, some strange silver coins that were oddly shaped and I dove for them. Turns out they were Ye Olde Romane Coines. Having something new and shiny to think about instead of slaughter, I was about to run inside and show everyone when I woke up.

Now I'm giving my subconscious the o.O face....

I'm out the door for my Stats final in a few minutes. I think I'll be okay. Keeping my fingers crossed, though, which hurts because I burned half of them last night cooking. My fingers on my writing hand. Geeeenius, I be it.

At least I had no huge anxiety dreams last night. I did dream that the burn on my pinky swelled up into this huge blister, but other than that, I just dreamed that my brother sent me an e-mail with a picture of a crowd at a football stadium. He'd enlarged one area because he couldn't believe who was sitting in the crowd: it was either my cat, Wally, large as a person, or Lu Bu from Dynasty Warriors. Either one would probably not be fun to attend a game with--Wally because he's large and skittish and would freak out on you, and Lu Bu has those head feathers that would really ruin your view...

Okay, enough. Test time. Ciao!

The idea was, last night, to get to bed early, get loads of sleep, and wake up refreshed so that I could then spend the next night (tonight) not sleeping at all but playing Mass Effect 2 until either my eyeballs or my wrist gave out.

(Aside: OH MY GOD, IS THERE NO WAY TO EXPRESS THE PAIN OF CARPAL TUNNEL FROM PLAYING VIDEO GAMES TOO LONG WITHOUT IT SOUNDING DIRTY?)

Of course, my Statisitcs homework turned out to be hours long. He chopped three problems off because we hadn't gotten to the material he intended to cover in time, and I was still up until 3 am. Note to self: start homework earlier.

The best part of the not sleeping much is the part where I dreamed that I had been bitten by a bug like a cockroach. This was icky but manageable until the point I realized that the bug had been infected with a parasite that subsequently infected me. Dream-me was in hysterics about how there were now open sores on my body. These sores were holes into my tissue and every so often I could squeeze them to make the stuff coming out of them come out faster so they wouldn't swell and burst on their own (kind of like a pimple).

What was coming out of them? LADYBUGS. These gaping holes in my skin ejected LADYBUGS from my body. There are not words for the revulsion I felt as I watched the hole in my arm bunch together around a bulge when I pinched it and BUGS CAME OUT. LADYBUGS. THEY ARE NOT CUTE WHEN THEY ARE UNDER YOUR SKIN. I WILL NEVER RESCUE ANOTHER LADY BUG AGAIN.

I had several dreams last night, all vaguely stupid in a way I recognized but could not use to overpower the stupidity. One involved me and my family--but not my real-life family--existing in some 1970s-esque mansion with a giant pool that just happened to have a shark in it. And people kept going into the pool and getting 'et, and it was both horrifying and horrifically stupid! (Keeping with the 1970s motif, one "uncle" of mine, with a giant moustache and a horrible tan jumpsuit died manfully.) How were we going to solve this terrible problem!? Uh, stay out of the pool? Drain it and let the shark die? Hello?

This was about the tenor of all the dreams, though it's the only one I remember. Awesome, subconscious, thanks for that.

Last night, I dreamed that my parents' house was under siege by zombies.

( You'd be surprised to learn that this isn't a frequent dream for me. )

...and woke up. I blame our trip to the Met's Samurai swords/armor exhibit for some of that dream.

( This is why Trinity does not do body-mod. )

I woke up still in a panic. Not cool, subconscious.

In other news, I saw two things this weekend: the pilot for White Collar and Drag Me to Hell. I enjoyed White Collar, though I'm simultaneously a tad bored by it, if that makes sense? It's very much one more of USA's formula works, with the bickering leads and the supporting characters along with a mystery to string you along for a season. I did like the episode, but I suspect a lot of that has to do with Matt Bomer's beautiful eyes. Well, that, and his incredible ability to be very vulnerable. He's less cocky than most of USA's other "characters," which is odd given the premise of his character. But there's a real defeat to him that is charming and heart-breaking at the same time. I don't know how well that works with his character being a master criminal and all. I'm definitely interested it watching more, but they're going to have to work very hard on improving or at least balancing the tone. But cheers to Matt Bomer's baby blues. I never noticed they were so disarmingly clear on Chuck, but that's probably because up until the end of season two, I kinda hated Bryce Larkin.

Curiously, a problem of tone was what kept me from liking Drag Me to Hell. I come down on the Army of Darkness side of horror-Raimi (as opposed to Evil Dead II), mostly because I think Raimi's strength is in humor. His attempts to be genuinely scary without being somewhat (or entirely) silly are just not that impressive to me. Drag Me to Hell wanted to be gross and funny at the same time, but the timing was off. Gross-outs went on too long, were far too staged to be anything but stomach-churning turn-offs. (Yes, there are stomach-churning turn-ons, and, yes, it is possible to tell the difference.) Usually, when something is dragged out, it becomes ridiculous. The problem with the gross-outs in Drag Me to Hell is that the set-ups were so ludicrous that they were, themselves, the joke, not the fifteen extra seconds of gratuitous fluids being projectile-vomited into the heroine's mouth. That's another problem: repetition of the exact same gross-out gag. I just didn't find the balance between the funny and the not-so to be as finely tuned as Raimi's earlier horror work. It probably doesn't help that the film opened with a child being taken to Hell--little hard to laugh at that--and that I'd seen Paranormal Activity before this which had a similar bent but was genuinely scary (which made the humor all the better, since no one laughs louder than someone who is freaked out).

Worse, Drag Me to Hell was utterly predictable. I don't hold that against horror movies, generally speaking--there are only so many ways the horror can go: the heroine (it is almost always a woman at the center) wins; the heroine loses; or the heroine thinks she's won but the ghost/monster/undead slasher comes back at the very end. Options are a luxury horror doesn't tend to have, you know? What I resent is how telegraphed those endings are. feiran had seen the movie before, and she spotted the ending a mile off compared to me, but I still felt like I knew far too soon how it would play out. I knew the exact twist, knew the exact steps it would take to get there. Everything that wasn't on that agenda felt like extraneous noise and Raimi trying to reclaim some former glory. It's one thing to go, "Oh, this is an ending C movie (heroine thinks she's won, but...)" and watch anyway. It's another to go, "I bet she does X which leads to a scene where Y happens, and then there's a fake happy ending for Z-length of time, and then it's a C ending." That's how I felt about Drag Me to Hell. Very disappointing, on the whole.

Night before I go to the dentist, I have this horrible nightmare about waking up in my bed and practically spitting out broken teeth. My entire mouth is like full of teeth shards and I'm crying because I have no idea how it got so bad overnight. My mom just stares at me. Then I get to see inside my own mouth and it's even worse than it feels. There are gaping gashes in my cheeks where the broken teeth have cut through. It looks like a fleshy cave system ::shudder::

I guess it was a good way to get the heebie jeebies out of my system. Plus, no cavities!

Because now I can report on my awful dream from last night!

( This is some extremely delayed PTSD or something. )