Glory Be

We are returned from the shadow realm!  Hail!

While the website was down, I had a few queued posts, so somehow, the streak continues.  Go ahead and read those, if you please.

As for me, I’m so tired I’m just gonna lay down dead now.

Wait.  I wish I could remember this dream I just had better.  Super detailed, something about young ladies that were friends, but one of them was an aquatic creature with properties of or kinship to cnidarians, even tho she looked fully human.

That amateur porn contest a local weekly mag used to run was involved, and some hijinks with the law.  Banana cream pies?  Fear of heights?  Was jellyfish girl trans?

She reproduced by cloning at the end of the dream. Some of her new selves got tangled and died, mute and mindless.  She got away.

I feel like both girls were parting ways to chase down love and glamour in their own particular ways, and one was meant to feel uplifted about it.

The main run of the plot is gone.  I cry.

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Dreamposting – Gun Culture

Had a dream that I was a security guard again.  Some kind of mayhem had transpired in Seattle in the night, wherein a gun had been discharged in public.  We were all under suspicion, but one specific guy had done it, and copped to it before we got into real trouble.  Even so, there was so much going on that I wasn’t aware of his confession until it had already transpired, and was running around trying to sort out defense evidence along with my home boy Clark.  Some seagulls had been killed, and during the course of events I found their bodies floating in water, gelatinized and translucent…

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Creative Mush

Taking a day off work for reasons, might try to get some writing in on Centennial Hills.  Not sure how capable I’ll be; we’ll see.  I’m feeling odd.  Sometimes I feel inspired to create something, specific or in general, but the sauce to actually do that is a whole separate feeling that does not always coincide.  One of the last things I did before I fell asleep was randomly think of an element for a story, but didn’t write it down.  Let’s see if I can remember…

A video game where you can name your enemy, like in Pokemon, and the protagonist as a child accidentally uses their own name, playing the rest of the game opposing their own moves.  Later in life, this connects thematically to something that’s going on in the current story.

Yesterday in the morning I was having some very specific and detailed dream about machinery.  Back up, get out of the way of the guy operating the mechanical arm.  No not there, there.  Now in the back yard the red construction light got broken because the thing fell into it, and it’s your fault.  This morning I dreamed I walked into a part of my house I never use and there was a toilet spewing water like a fountain, and a few other pipe leaks, and have these been going on for months?  Calls to mind a time I dreamed the floor of my apartment was covered with moss and broken boards, and scorpions and eight-inch isopods were moving in and out of the heap at random.

The day before yesterday and the day before that I had slasher dreams.  A hillbilly family like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre was going to kill this trucker, but they were shining him on like, just a minute, gotta do this thing for your truck before we let you drive away.  Gotta chop everybody up and their trucks too.  Heaps of body parts, just another day.

Another recent dream there was some kind of deadly competition with a lady as emcee.  If we play the game right we all fight to the death, but if we defeat the emcee maybe we can leave.  Were we undead in the vein of soulsborne game protagonists?  There was a guy with dwarfism and a lot of guns, to improve his odds of defeating her I traded legs with him so he could get around faster.  Left me with short legs, waiting for somebody else to win.

The RPGs I wasted the most time with as a youth were Palladium books, which are much scorned by most of the TTRPG community these days.  Understandable, but their ads in Dragon magazine circa 1988 always worked so well on me.  I sometimes get curious what people were saying about them online and it ain’t much.  One time when I looked it up on tumblr, I found a person talking about their few meatspace RPG experiences were all with one of those games, either Rifts of the Palladium FRPG.  Whichever it was, they had memorized the rules for a “mystic” character class with a combination of psychic and magic powers.  Recently I thought of that, of the mystic character class, RPGs in general.  What is the appeal in making your own little guys in somebody else’s world?  Like a billion other dorks, I still have an embryonic fantasy RPG of my own laying in docs and on scraps of paper; maybe all of it is still chasing the weird thrill I got off of old Palladium ads.

Been listening to Maharaji’s Seward Park again.  My boyfriend said it’s a novelty song.  The casio dog bark effect?  Come on.  But I say no.  It’s incredibly dated and corny, but for its time, it was a very legit hip hop song.  So cool.  Rappin’ Duke by John Wayne was a novelty song.  Seward Park ain’t that.

Mish mash mush.  These are all things that could be converted into new art, written or visual or something else, a video game, a poem, a song.  Will it happen?  Maybe this post is the closest any of the creative slurry gets to achieving expression.  Almost certainly it will be.  But u kno, all we are is dust in the wind, and our daydreams even more so.  Take it easy.

Peace!

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Fvck You Willem Dafoe

Had a dream I was temporarily roommate to a young white lady, conventionally attractive except her eyes were a bit buggly and heavily lidded, an art major at the University of Washington.  We were in a fictional version of the U District of Seattle, owned by this one specific scummy business guy.  He was known for chasing trendy artsy aesthetics, making the place a corporate version of New Orleans, with giant colorful murals on every storefront in a faux eclecticism that was way to crisp to be authentic, big white lettering on every business in a similar font family.  These were mostly restaurants.  The internet was free for tenants but shitty, I had a theory he was getting the service free via Alaska somehow and using it as an enticement to stay in his otherwise extortionate little kingdom.

Weirdly the businessman wasn’t the villain of the dream, but if I fictionalized it, he would be.  Instead the villain was one of the girl’s exes, a violent restaurateur played by Willem Dafoe.  He was younger in the dream, maybe in his early forties, but she was super young, in her twenties, the relationship possibly from her late teens.

None of that came out at first.  I thought her eyes were interesting and offered to draw her after the friends cleared out for the night.  There were typical dream distractions – suddenly I have to clean the non-present cat’s litter box and water dripped in it that was making it all clump up, just miscellaneous BS.  Again, this would be edited out if I made a story of it.

We got on OK, but when it was bedtime, we went from having a vague conversation about memories to entering a shared dream state, where it was lucid but we didn’t really control it – just our own actions within it.  Similar to Inception, but the setting was the actual history of the area we were in.  We kept getting separated, like when the storefront we were in suddenly changed into an abandoned grocery store, with us on opposite sides of a wall.

One or both of us were responsible for us being trapped in the magic dream due to a psychic power we hadn’t disclosed to each other, that was activated in the other’s presence.  Something like The Shining, but dream magic.

Through this all we’re occasionally being harassed by Willem Dafoe, but we usually get away and it isn’t full-on violence, just a menacing demeanor.  Also through it all I was discovering her back story, teasing it out in serially interrupted conversations.  She was the too-young girlfriend of bullying Willem, and came back to his neighborhood for college partly because of a lingering obsession of her own.  She related a memory of being cradled in his arms, him using some grody language about how she was supposed to be the best lay.  She told me “I was supposed to be the pussy he came back for.”

We got back to a version of our apartment and I was like, “Let’s make sure he isn’t still with us.”  I looked out the window and there he was, standing halfway around the corner of the building like Michael Myers, his own eyes bulging, big smile on his face, bouncing in place like a Fleischer cartoon character.  I said, “Fuck you.”

He started coming at me, faster as he came, with a big black combat knife in his hand – one of those jobs with openings in the flat part of the blade.  As he drew near, I kept saying, “fuck you fuck you,” again, faster as he came.  My boyfriend heard me cussing as I stirred in my sleep, and woke me up IRL.

Anyway, I think Willem Dafoe seems like a decent dude, but apparently his cinematic villainy was working for me in a way I didn’t notice.  Acting as mind control.  He Inception’d me.  Not cool.

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IANAG Dreampost

I am not a Gamer™ but video games can be an excellent source of fuckery for frustration dreams.  Last night I had a dream about being in some kind of MMO where the game had been designed to punish people for small failures.  There was an urban area that normally had mud splashed up from the road by rushing vehicles that knocked your character down if you didn’t hop just right.  During a patch, maybe an event thing, the rushing vehicles were gone – no more mud.  Cool.

But then I found out trespassing on the streets at night causes some unbeatable giant robots to show up and annihilate your character.  Alternately, if you’re in a corner a robot can’t reach, you’ll get a freaky murder fetish lady like Orin from Baldur’s Gate 3 to do the deed.  I knew the game wouldn’t let me kill her, but thought maybe I could get a ring-out victory by throwing her off the side of a building.  It just teleported her right back to the spot.  On one play-through I was with these orphan NPCs and I figured she’d kill them while I was watching the “you died” graphic.  Instead she recruited them to be murder kids.

You return to a hub in the game when you die, like Agartha from The Secret World.  To keep your death from feeling meaningless, they motivate you to go after your body.  In Everquest and Ultima Online originally, it was to pick up your equipment, which stayed with your corpse.  In FromSoft games, it’s to pick up the currency of the realm, souls or blood echoes or whatever.  I don’t remember what it was in my dream, except it was important, and walled off by instant death.

Worse, there was some kind of a stat penalty, like all my stats were reset to a sad base level.  There was a machine at the hub that was supposed to give you a little boost that you could customize before heading back out into the game world, but instead it drained all my stats to zero.  I thought it was a glitch, but no, just an evil design element.  The machine also split me into three versions of myself with straight zero stats, and I had to get all their stats up again individually before I could re-merge them into one, which I had to do before I could even go try in vain to get my equipment from behind the murder squad.

Sweet dreams are made of these.

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Froget’s Thesaurus

I had a dream last night, think the location was a recurring one, where my home is an apartment or condo above a mall.  Moving anxiety lingers in the form of boxes of personal possessions left in public locations, impossible to move in one go, left available for any rando to snag.  I was trying to get those stray items up and moved into our unit, some cell phone salesman was giving me the business low key, and rats had gotten in, were causing mayhem.

My errant stuff had been left in a series of glass display cases along the stairwell, and in harvesting the goods from them, I accidentally disturbed a terrarium setup for frogs.  A little plant was in there with roots plugged into tiny plastic tubes, and I had unmoored the roots from the tubes.  The central experience I took away from this dream was this: trying to fend off a crowd of tiny colorful semi-transparent frogs long enough to plug roots into tubes with one hand, in this terrarium.  The frogs were cute, kinda like Breviceps rain frogs, but this was an annoyance dream.  Good to wake up.

Regarding the title of this post, I like to call frogs “froges,” which sometimes turns into “froget,” pronounced fro-jay, rhyming with the guy what made Roget’s Thesaurus, if I ever read that name right.  And as thesaurus just means treasure, behold a treasury of frogs, first from midjourney version 6.0, then niji version 6…

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Is This Real? Dare I Dream?

Our bloges having been laid low for an outrageous amount of time by one scam email, do I dare to dream that it’s over?  I awaken to find freethoughtblogs dotcom loading… Perhaps it is a fluke, and our woes are merely waiting in the eaves to pounce again.  Time will tell, but for the moment, oh…  sweet freedom!

edit to add:  Since the last time you saw me, not much to report.  I had a few half-interesting dreams and lost most of them to the alarm clock.  Been workin’ overtime.  House is still a mess from moving in months ago.  We got an ant infestation and seem to have successfully quelled it, for now.  And… I’ve had some random thoughts and forgot them before I had a chance to share.  This blog was my random thought collector.  I was lost without it, apparently.

edit to add:  In one of those dreams I got to be a ciswoman having gaydy sex, tribadism-style.  Nice, but there’s always some BS going on, it’s never what you’d conceive of in your waking hours as “goals.”  In the other dream there was some kinda battle royale kill-or-be-killed situation with different people or small factions trying to eliminate each other for the right to survive.  The more overtly baddy guys were about to get the rest of us when the “good guys” decided hey, why are we being good?  No solidarity, man.  I felt like there was some real good plot idea in there, something to do with the way the baddies were acting, that I could have used for a story.  Maybe it wasn’t as clever as it seemed in the early AM.

edit to add:  Oh yeah, one more thing that happened.  Not to be a starfucker on main or le problematique, but my boyfriend made elon musk’s ex-gf say “ooh” a couple of times.  Probably old news to people who hobnobbed with celebs on twitter before it became the xitter, but feels kinda wild to me, that sometimes you can interact with thems.
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We Live in a Society

Had a very believable dream Elon Musk had leveraged wealth and affection of his fellow wealthy to be cast as the Joker in a new Batman movie. In the trailer they’d taken some Joker lines from previous films and cleverly rewritten them as an “inspirational” techbro sales pitch. His Joker costume was weird, kind of a Lego Joker kigurumi. No bueno.
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The Blade of Lord Shiva

content warnings: ultragore, violence against women

Dreamed I was a South Asian teenager who was the only boy on a co-ed lacrosse team.  One of the girls was sick and had to sit out the game, so the others were all pissed off or sad, anticipating a big loss.  I was like, what’s the big deal?  Play just to play or go home.  They disagreed and my subconscious chauvinisms said, “girls are all the same. gotta have it all.”

The dream time skipped to the aftermath of the game.  At that point I was no longer the boy – it was third person – and the team’s mothers were presenting them with gifts.  They had lost; call ’em prizes for worst place.  “Lori I bestow upon you this shovel, that you may dig your own grave.”

When the line got to the boy, he was blood-flecked and all pumped up, like he has just defeated some guys in hand-to-hand combat, and was ready for more.  The dream’s camera eye was over mom’s shoulder, as she handed him a machete, like a princess bestowing a sword upon a knight.

“For great victory in battle I bestow upon you the blade of Lord Shiva.”  The boy roared in triumph.  The camera moved to where we could see mom’s face, and it was a flat plane of glistening bone and bloody meat.  The front few inches of her head had been cut off.

I feel like the story implied by the time skip was of a lacrosse match turned into a brutal fight, during which boy’s mom was mutilated.  The game was lost but the fight was won by the co-ed losers.  Anyway, yikes.

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