I dreamt last night that I was hanging out with Dong Ch0i, Andrew Wong, Sam Lau, Eb3n Polk, and Roger M@r-tang. What an utterly random group of people.
I've mentioned before how I dream a lot that my teeth are falling out. I've come to believe that this happens when I grind my teeth. I read that somewhere, and it makes sense. I'm grinding my teeth, I must be feeling some sort of teeth pain, makes sense that it would translate into something in the dream world.
Anyway, I recently got this appliance that prevents you from grinding your teeth which is pretty awesome. The thing is, the other night, I still had that dream. My teeth were falling out.
OK, so, in high school, in Psych we learned about lucid dreaming, that's where know you're dreaming and can control it. They have these devices you wear that tracks your eyes, and when it finds you going into REM, it starts flashing red lights. Idea is, you see these lights in your dreams and it's like a signal that you're dreaming so you realize that and then control them.
I thought that was really interesting. Anyway, back in those days there were certain dreams I'd have over and over, in particular that I was flying. So for a while, every night before I'd sleep, I'd say to myself, if you start flying, you're dreaming. And one night, it happened. I started flying, and I excitedly realized that I was dreaming, but as soon as I tried to control the dream, everything faded around me, melted like a Dali painting and I woke up. Very odd.
At any rate, that happened the other night. I dreamt my teeth were falling out, but then I thought to myself, no, that's impossible, I must be dreaming. So based on prior experience I tried to prove it by waking myself up. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not wake myself up. So instead, I tried to control the dream. But I only remember having semi-control, and right after that, I don't remember any more of the dream. Weird experience.
Bizarre dream last night. I'm watching a football game, Fox's #1 broadcast team is covering. They're going through a series of replays of injuries. The thing is, it's football, but it's all taking place on a baseball field, all in the outfield near the wall. The first two, the receivers catch the ball but hit their heads on the wall and crumple. The last one, Doug Flutie (as a receiver I guess) catches the ball near the wall and doesn't hit it, but he crumples. Then you see this horrific sight of his right arm with the skin torn so you can see the ligaments, blue veins and arteries underneath. It's disgusting. But they show a clip of him later with it patched up and it looks OK.
On to the halftime show. Starts out with Matt Damon, and he's wearing an enormous pompadour (which turns out just to be a part of the background). The caption says he's dressed in his role as George Washington in some upcoming film. He's clearly lip-synching, and the voice actually sounds exactly like Steven Curtis Chapman.
He moves to a different part of the stage, where he's joined by Amy Grant. Two unusual things: one, she towers over him, and two, she's dressed in very skimpy lingerie. They're singing this song, which I understand to be from Mel Gibson's movie about Christ, and the chorus goes, "Do you believe in Jesus? Jesus!" It's kind of showtuney, kinda OK, except Matt is badly lip synching, and Amy is nearly naked, which makes it bizarre.
Nevertheless, I cry while watching it. Issues.
Then, the announcer introduces a guy who looks exactly like Troy Aikman, but he's described as being a former All Pro center. And then I wake up.
I'm at some sort of retreat and I go the bathroom. The toilet is essentially a big open barrel. I thought I had locked the door, but apparently I hadn't, as someone comes in. My elementary school friend Jer3my N1shihara. With spiked hair.
Anyway, I'm having trouble with my aim. Not to get too specific, but yeah, that happens sometimes in real life. Anyway, my stream will just not straighten out, and it's splattering a little on the rim. Jeremy is looking at me like I'm crazy. But there's nothing I can do.
And I go forever. I end up filling 2/3 of the huge barrel. And I still don't feel satisfied. A couple minutes after finishing, I go again. Also, the urine in the barrel is a dark honey color. Very odd.
After I'm done again I go and get scrubbing bubbles to clean up the rim splatter.
Boring dream, I'm just glad that I didn't go in my sleep. This happens a lot. I have these dreams where I just urinate endlessly and get no relief, and I wake up having to go really bad. Happened again with this dream.
So anyway, these kids at church are essentially potty trained but they still wear diapers at night just in case. My question, how do you train a kid out of doing it at night? I mean, they're unconscious. How can you train someone out of unconscious actions?
I dreamed last night that my dad was trying to teach me about God through scientific principles. The first lesson was based on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and his point was that there are things in life that you can know without being able to directly observe, namely God. If you think about it, that lesson doesn't really fit the principle but it made sense in the dream. I was annoyed because my dad was surprised that I knew the Heisenberg principle. I guess it bothered me that he underestimated my knowledge.
Cut to a scene where people are throwing around a football. Thing is, no one will throw it to me, not my friends, not the other people my age, not the little kids, no one. Totally frustrating. It's actually not just the football. There's some sort of game going on, like paintball, maybe capture the flag, that everyone's involved with but no one will tell me what's going on. I think it took place at our old church in Campbell.
Last scene - I have testicular cancer. I know this because there's a softball sized growth on my left testicle. And I wonder how on earth I didn't notice it before.
I'm fairly certain I had a dream last night about the Entertainment coupon book. But for the life of me I can't remember what exactly it was about.
I did have another dream though that freaked me out. I was in some public gathering, and I noticed some shady character in the back with some bundle, who walks out. I dunno, I got paranoid, maybe he's a terrorist or something, so I didn't want to be there, so I followed him out, to kind of see what he was up to. And as I walked out, this guy started trailing me. Actually, a high school friend, Par1n.
I didn't want to make it seem like I was following the first guy, assuming he and Par1n were in cahoots, so I went into the men's locker room instead. He follows me, sits next to me. And we chat, while I change my socks, I dunno, just doing something to look like I meant to go in there. Strangely, everyone in the locker room has someone sitting next to them, like Par1n is next to me.
Then Par1n casually mentions that he has to kill me. Then he, and all the other guys, as if on cue, start to smother the people they're trailing. So his arms are wrapped around my head, and in an attempt to escape, I try to elbow him in the face.
And then I wake up, and I realize I had elbowed Jieun in bed next to me. Apparenly not hard, because she didn't remember me doing it this morning. But yeah, that really really worried me. What if I hurt her someday in my sleep? Is there anything I can do to prevent that? I dunno, I'm really worred about it.
Scene 1: I am AIMing with Scott Kim, of all people. About what to do with my life. He is predictably using amazing prose. I'm doing this on a Palm Pilot with a cool wireless keyboard. Can't remember what we said, exactly.
Scene 2: I am in an arcade. I've realized recently that I dream about arcades a lot. It's a recurring dream and I'm familiar with the layout of this particular arcade, having dreamt about it before. Anyway, we play this one game, 4 player, like Gauntlet, in which each player plays a role. Like you can be different professions, or even play particular people. I take too long scrolling through the choices and the timer runs out so I get stuck playing as... Mike Scoscia. Did I mention who I'm playing with? Scott, Joe Kwan and my high school friend Yash.
Scene 3: Me and road trip people are at my San Jose house, watching the news, a la Guns and Talks (interesting Korean movie, if you've never seen). KTVU Channel 2's 10 PM newscast, to be precise. After that we watch some tapes of SNL. Andrew asks, which broadcast is this? And I say most recent. He says, but that one had Perfect Strangers. And I think, and remember, oh yeah, it must be a tape of the week before. Last week I was in Texas, I say.
Scene 4: After everyone goes to bed, I have to practice piano, for an upcoming recital. The thing is, I know none of the songs. I look at the program, and I'm supposedly playing 4 Bach pieces, none of which I've heard of, much less know. So I open up the Bach songbook I have, one of those with the first few measures printed in the table of contents, and none of them look familiar at all. So after warming up (with As The Deer) I start playing one randomly. It turns out to be a Latin-flavored song. Written by Bach. Meanwhile, I start reading about famous Hollywood figures, like Ronald Reagan and Kim Novak, which for some reason is printed in the songbook.
Oh wait, there was another component to the dream that I forgot about, precedes all the above. Jieun and I go to watch Titanic on IMAX. They show some stuff before the show, then they get onto it. It's awful. The picture quality looks like a 3rd generation VHS copy. And they only project it onto a fraction of the screen, so it's actually smaller than at normal theaters. And you can't hear the audio at all. So we leave.
Kind of a meta dream, but not really. In my dream, I've just woken up from sleep and I'm vaguely aware that something's wrong, but I'm not quite sure what it is. I'm not missing something. I'm not wearing odd clothes. Can't quite figure it out. After some time, I realize what it is. There's a toothbrush in my mouth. For some inexplicable reason, in the middle of the night (in my dream), I must have gotten up, stuck a toothbrush in my mouth, and gone back to bed. And for some reason, after waking up (in my dream), it took some time to realize it was there. Very odd.
Did I mention the other dream I had the other night? I was on missions training, maybe actual missions, but it was Survivor style. So Jeff Probst was there, and he would give our mission team challenges for certain creature comforts. For example, we competed for a laptop. Odd.
Anyway, this particular mission trip / Survivor was an odd mix of hot and cold climates. Like, I think we were in Antarctica. The challenge involved breaking off the biggest chunk of iceberg that we could. At the end, we had to choose whether to use that chunk for drinking water or get the laptop. When we chose the laptop, the natives were given the iceberg chunk. The thing is, the natives were black, dressed in traditional African garb. Where the heck was I? No clue.
The other odd thing was the people there. Like, at one point Fr9nk R31sner, guy I knew in elementary school, gets in a fight with R0bert H99s, guy from high school. Frank was the bully, Robert the nerd getting beat up. And at one point, Robert starts crying and saying how the only person that was ever nice to him was Liz Oh. Random.
In the middle of training I use my Segway hovercraft (not a scooter. A hovercraft) to visit Brian Yue, who apparently lives nearby. He lives in a hobbit like home. While there, Cat Chen comes to visit. What an odd dream.
I'm standing in line. Actually there are 3 lines. Dunno why lines are a big part of my dreams. Anyway, the middle line is going at a much faster rate than the outside two. So I go in that line for a while, but it becomes clear that this line isn't a "real" line, that I'm cheating somehow, so I leave it and go back to one of the the real lines, where John Yoon is patiently waiting. For some reason, this feels like a moral victory.
At the front of the lines is an incline ending with a cliff and as we get close to the front I realize that the people aren't really willingly moving, they're just being pushed forward by the momentum of the crowd. I start to feel some dread. And as John and I approach the front I see that beyond the cliff is an enormous cauldron, the bottom of which is filled with red hot coals. In my mind I know it's not hell, it's suffering. Not sure how I can know that, but the dread I feel isn't the dread of eternal judgment but that of temporary suffering. And I tell myself, I just have to get through this. I've gone through it before. At which point I have the vague recollection of having to do something like this before. Making a choice to jump into hot coals. Maybe it was a previous dream? No clue.
So John and I simultaneously jump, as I repeat in my mind, I just have to get through this, I just have to get through this. Falling... falling... and just as I'm about to hit the coals... I wake up. Feeling oddly hot, but not sweaty. Very odd dream, very Abre Los Ojos esque.
I'm in a church much like Memorial Church. I'm aware that I'm in danger - someone is trying to kill me with ice skates. I need to call Jieun. The church has, in the lobby, a phone, but it's suspended from the ceiling maybe 20 feet in the air. But like I've said before, a recurring theme in my dreams is the ability to fly. I need a running start to soar, but a standing jump gets me fairly high, high enough to reach this phone at least. But I can't remember Jieun's number, and the number I have won't go through. I think the phone is broken. That's my dream.
In a separate but equal dream, again I'm back in school. My classmates are from elementary school. The facilities are from high school. And the teachers are my supervisors from work. Very odd.
Last night I dreamt I was waiting in line to ride a carousel. Except instead of horses and carts to ride, there were tables. Dining tables. In fact, it was a full service restaurant. That happened to be open air, spinning rapidly on a carousel base.
I was frustrated because I couldn't figure out how to get on the "ride". I was in a line but people were cutting in all over the place and I seemed to be in the wrong line. But I didn't want to go to the "true" line and give up my front spot in the false line.
Hmm, that might be deep. I'll have to think about that.
I find that when it's warmer in the bedroom, I dream more. Or at least I remember them easier. Anyway, 3 dreams recently stick out in my memory.
First dream: Jieun and I were living off of University Avenue in Palo Alto. The thing is, our place was also a bookstore. And we didn't own the bookstore. So people would be coming in and out at all hours to browse the bookstore, which was also our apartment.
In comes Dave Sohn with a bunch of people. And they just kind of hang out. At one point one of them remarks how bored he is. To which Dave responds, "It's a good thing we're all drunk." He then pulls out a guitar and starts playing the most amazing music I've ever heard. He's doing these incredible dual note solos; it's literally inhuman. I'm absolutely stunned. But outwardly, I don't show anything. Pride you know, even in my dreams.
Dream 2: Henry is selling a stuffed animal on EBay. It's a huge insect, like a ladybug. He lists the dimensions as 11" by 14", but I think that refers to feet not inches because he lists the weight at 265 lbs. That's the dream.
Dream 3: I'm talking to some French woman and she's showing off French inventions. Dunno if inventions is the right word, just things they have in France. And they're all ridiculous. I'm trying to be polite, but inside I'm thinking this is the most useless society in the world.
For example, she points out the phone system. You know how we have letters that correspond to the numbers so we can dial stuff like 1-800-DENTIST. She shows me the French way. And it makes no sense whatsoever. Like, they allocate entire numbers to useless letters like 'Q' and 'X'. So of course that requires that other numbers have many letters associated with them. And then, even though say the number 7 is reserved completely for 'Q', they still have 'Q' listed among the numbers for 8. Huh? That makes completely no sense. But whatever, it's French.
She also shows me an "invention" that's essentially a big clip, like on a clipboard. She explains it holds pieces of paper together. When you need just one piece of paper, you can open it and take the top one. It's very useful, she says. And I'm thinking in my mind, stick with food, France. Stick with food.
I dreamed last night that I was at a Celine Dion concert. And a bit startled to be there. As were, apparently, the people around me. I was sitting next to a black man who says out loud, "What am I doing at a Celine Dion concert? Isn't she 50 years old?"
And I respond, "No, she's just in her late 40s." With no idea whether this is true or not.
At first I'm annoyed because it seems like she's lip synching. She stops singing for a while but vocals still sound. Then I notice that there are 2 background vocalists behind her - they're the ones singing. And then I notice there's a full band, somewhat shrouded behind translucent curtains. The band includes 5 drum sets. For Celine Dion.
Really weird dream last night. Of course, there's no other kind, but this one kind of freaked me out.
Again, it involved some situation where I'm in high school again, a recurring theme. Also, I was in my old house in South San Jose, which has come up more recently. And, another theme of my dreams - I was mad at one of my family members. This time, at my sister, but I can't remember exactly why I was mad.
Anyway, for some reason I had to dress up for Christmas (that's right, not Halloween, but Christmas) but I had waited until the last second so I was frantically trying to find a costume. I ended up buying a small tree, pulling out the branches on one part and wearing it on my head. Just had to find brown pants (I found some) and a green shirt (could only find a white one).
At this point I get tired of all the preparation and I just say to my mom how I don't feel like going to high school. And I tell her the reason why - all the kids know I graduated from college already anyway. Why did I have to go to high school again?
And then it gets scary, at least for me. I start asking her if she's sending me to high school because I'm autistic. For social reasons and whatever. And she kind of hesitates with her response. So I start asking her whether she thinks I'm autistic or have borderline disorder (that comes from Girl, Interrupted) or schizophrenia or whatever. And she thinks I might.
So I start freaking out and asking her whether some of the friends I have are real or not, because now I'm not sure. You know, like A Beautiful Mind. Maybe I just made them up. So I start asking about specific friends, starting from childhood, whether they're real or not. And the conversation goes like this.
"Jeremy Nishihara?"
"Real."
"Yash Mehta?"
"Real."
"Willy Pan?"
"Real."
"Dave Hong?"
"Unclear."
"What? Have you ever met him?"
"A couple of times. But it's not clear if he's real or not."
"Wait, if you've met him, he must be real right? How can he not be real?"
And then I ask my sister and she's not certain herself. I dunno, that just freaked me out, because I started thinking I have no idea what in my life is real and what isn't. And that's just a scary proposition. Frightening dream.
I had a dream last night where I went to Hell. Not in the sense that I died and wasn't saved, I just got to see what it was like. It was like being in a painting, and a weird artsy one at that. All around me there were things like scarecrows - faceless bodies that had no souls. I was aware that there were souls around, but the place was filled with these soulless dummies.
Somehow I became aware that it was a place where all values were reversed. Where in the real world (at least ideally) integrity, love, and goodness are among the things that are admired and seen as best, there deception, hate, and evil were extolled. Somehow I became acutely aware of this and it defied rational comprehension. I could understand it but could not grasp it.
I had another dream a couple of nights ago. I was in an amusement park and a person I knew who had died recently came up to me. And I was stunned to see this person because I knew they had dead, but they came up to me as if they knew what I was thinking and said "I told you so." And they were alive, but it still made me incredibly sad.
Had a dream last night where I was playing a Counterstrike like game against Dave Tsai and his friends. But it was like a virtual reality Counterstrike - you actually inhabit the game. Anyway, the setup was completely unfair, and it was essentially him and all his friends against me. And I kept losing. So at one point I asked him, "Is this even fun for you? Winning so easily and unfairly?" And he replies, "Yes." So I keep playing, love of the game.
At the end I get so fed up that I actually somehow leave the VR Counterstrike world and go to a completely different game/world or something. And dT still finds me. I dunno, that freaked me out.
I've decided to write about the dreams I have. We're going through Daniel and just got to the second half, the visions. Adrian's led the last study where we thought about what it would be like to have dreams like that and what they might mean. Although, come to think about it, we never got to the point about what dreams might mean. Hmm.
So I was telling small group, I have 4 recurring dreams, and most of them are negative. Incidentally, nearly all the dreams we remember tending to be negative. Adrian says that's a pattern in the Bible as well. But anyway, yeah, 4 recurring dreams.
Anyway, yeah, less common now but it still happens. Most recently, I had a dream like that but I was controlling some sort of wing, and the position I held it determined how I flew. Weird.
In the other, someone's chasing me and I'm trying to run, but I can't - I can only move in slow motion no matter how hard I try, like my legs are in some thick liquid. Not sure what that means, but it happens a lot.