Sometimes My Brain Is A Jerk

I can't remember most of the dream but the bit that stuck with me was that there was something drastically wrong.
Something was going to happen and it was going to endanger people across the galaxy or make life on Earth impossible or plunge people into endless suffering.
The point is there was a very real reason that a bomb had to be set off that would destroy the entire world and I was the person who had to do it.
So here I am, in front of a bomb that looks like the sea mine shown in Hot Fuzz, pressing a couple of buttons on its face to start the countdown.
As little red numbers flicked and counted down I thought 'No-one else  knows this is about to happen, so they don't have to be scared, they can be happy right until the end and then they'll be safe' and 'At least I won't feel anything, I'm standing right next to it, it'll be instant and then I'll be gone'.
Then there was a bloom of light and then darkness but I was still there.
Nothing floating in nothing.
Just thinking 'I'm sorry. Good bye. I love you. I love you.'

The worst part was how real the emotions felt.
I had this peaceful moment before I pressed the button where I thought 'All those things I thought I would have time for, I guess I'm not going to get do them now' and just let it all go.
So now I know what it feels like to realise that you're going to die before getting to experience certain life events, along with wanting to call loved ones to say goodbye but knowing that it would make it harder for you and scare them so it's best to just remember the last conversation you had with them instead.
Not to mention the annihilation of the planet.

Needless to say, I awoke feeling more than a little messed up :-/

The Secret Meanings Of Dreams (Or Why You Shouldn't Eat Cheese Before Bedtime)

It looks like even the earnest flowery 'Interpret the Meanings of Your Dreams' books and websites are trying to get with the times. Or at least keep their source material relevant enough to maintain the rate of crystal sales.

A few years ago there would never have been any mention of what it means when you dream about zombies - not so much as a passing reference - leaving those of us who had seen Dawn of the Dead without any way to work out what our subconscious was trying to tell us.
Apart from 'have a zombie survival plan' of course.

Now you can find online dream dictionaries and the like that tell you that dreaming of zombies means that 'parts of your greater self are stalking you'*, whilst others suggest that it means that someone might be threatening you in real life 'emotionally, mentally or physically'**. Oh, and if you dream that you are a zombie it means you are 'not in touch with your humanity, compassion, feelings etc'***.
The bit where you are terrified of being ripped to pieces and communally devoured like a large dish of paella isn't addressed in the various entries for 'zombie'. You have to look at entries for 'cannibalism' for any hint of what the consumption of flesh might signify****.

Unfortunately these illuminating guides to the collective human psyche still dwell heavily on the meaning of individual symbols without giving you any clue as to how to combine and interpret them as a whole.
If waterfalls indicate 'goals and desires' and a unicorn means 'high ideals, hope and insight' does a dream about a unicorn by a waterfall mean that you've had an insight about your dreams and hopes or is your idealist unicorn thirsty for direction?
What if you barely notice either of them because you're too busy running from zombies?
The nerd in me wants a point-based scoring system where zombies are clearly trumped by monster trucks which therefore dictate the overall message of any dream that features both*****.

So despite having access to this new information I am still unable to determine which parts of my greater self are stalking me when I dream that I'm hiding in a butcher's shop while zombies rage around looking for meat and whether this reveals a self-destructive streak or a more than healthy dose of stupid.
And I've got even less to go on with the dream that starred a bungee-jumping Indiana Jones-esque sheep!

Maybe I should just stop eating so late at night.
Or start drinking less.
Or more.
Or possibly just accept that my dreams are crazy goobaloo nonsense and that I can't apply blanket or standardised interpretations to every item or event.

But seriously, if anyone could explain the dream with the bungee-jumping sheep that'd be awesome.



*Whatever that means!
**Thanks for the vague warning, I'll get right on that.
***Sociopaths Anonymous: Your membership card is in the mail.
****You are concerned about exploitation and submission/domination apparently. Nothing to do with being eaten alive at all. That'd be too simple.
*****That you should go out and commandeer a monster truck and mow down zombies!

Additional: Sure I could link to various dream dictionary websites but imagining hapless folk searching the interwebs randomly for dream interpreters and analysers is so much more rewarding.

A Moment's Grace

I got lost in my own fairytale.
I followed all the rules but I was running late.
I adorned my hair with faerie blooms, held forth soft light in my eyes and walked with an angel's tread but the revels had already started.
The prince's eye fell elsewhere and far less steady.
I found myself useful rather than ethereal.
A hand offered and ignored whilst around me all others took their place in the story.
Even my mother lay in sheets of vivid red, spelled to ever sleep, murmuring a request for a restoring cup when stirred but blissfully unaware of her predicament.
So I gave up.
I accepted.
I embraced my invisibility and helped myself to the dessert table.
And watched as the prince and his chosen princess slowly broke each other's hearts.
Whilst I ate cake and made my mother a cup of tea.

The Dog Ate My Blog Post

Bah!
As this is the first full weekend off after NaNoWriMo I thought I would be hella full of energy and ideas and my writing muscles in my brain would be so bulgy that I would churn out a teetering stack of blog posts that I could release at whim over the course of many weeks.
Unfortunately given several factors this did not happen.

First of all my weekend was hijacked by malevolent elves. Well OK, they weren't actual elves.
One of them does look like an evil version of Jesus though and Jesus hung out with a bunch of guys kinda like Santa and... look one of the factors is that I didn't get a lot of sleep.
Let me start again.

Weekend. Hijacked.

What with cancelled trains, late nights, too much booze, demanding friends who have unrealistic expectations of the amount of hours in a day and my ability to travel from one place to another faster than the speed of light I seem to have spent most of this weekend turning up to things just in time or just in time to be asked why I didn't turn up earlier.

Without the power of sleep I have been unable to come up with any rejoinders wittier than 'so's your face'.
Without the power of wit all the conversations I've had have been ridiculously boring.
I tried to remedy these two problems with the power of alcohol which unfortunately just made me sleepier and my rejoinders slipped down the class scale to involve such zingers as 'your mum was [insert other person's previous statement here]'.

I've only been home long enough to have a couple of showers and get enough sleep that I didn't actually pass out at any point.
I've got nothing done, had no real meals and am getting major guilt trips from the cats and the dog who are going to great lengths to point out to me how abandoned and starved for affection they are. This has been conveyed via the mediums of poop, shedding and piteous noises of an almost Geneva Convention breaching magnitude.

No part of the weekend was actually bad per se but they were all jammed together so closely that I have had no time to myself and am going to roll into work tomorrow feeling tired, cranky and wondering if I somehow hallucinated the weekend altogether.

I know that this rambling bitching about nonspecific events doesn't constitute much of a blog post.
I also know that this is basically me making excuses to myself about not getting anything written during the week let alone over the weekend which is pretty weak.
But despite all the things that kept me from doing anything this weekend, none of them were actually significant enough to stick in my memory which is a little depressing.
The most memorable part of my whole weekend was this dream I had about a time travelling bumble bee man who changed the universe so that everyone I know was working at a giant hairdressing salon... but it doesn't get any more lucid as it progresses and I know that there are few things as uninteresting as other people's dreams.

Except the one I had where Batman was rappelling down the inside the chimney of a mansion wearing a santa hat as a disguise so that the gremlins who were living there would think he was Santa and... *coff coff*

Anyhoo by next weekend my energy levels should be back up, I should have actually produced some actual material, and I will be politely but firmly telling anyone who wants me to go anywhere or do anything to go do something of a fairly unpleasant and probably anatomically uncomfortable nature. Because if you can't occasionally tell your friends to go swivel then are they really your friends?
In the meantime I'd better go grab some sleep so I don't start trying to tell that bumble bee story at a meeting at work...