Dr. Phila's Dreams and Dealings

The Dream of October 23

2011-10-23T11:28:00.004+02:00

Right, so James has started blogging (there's a link under "The Doctor Prescribes") and I've been thinking I should resurrect this thing. I've been a bit short on dreams, lately, but I do remember a fair amount of the one from last night.

I was in my mum's flat and we were packing things up to move somewhere. I knew I could only pack a few things because I had to go somewhere first and meet up with my mum (and presumably my brother) in the new place a couple of days later. At no point while this was being planned did I seem to stop and think about where I was going since I couldn't help them with the actual move.

At some stage I must have set out, though, because I had a backpack full of equipment and I somehow materialised on an alien spaceship which was threatening the planet. While I'm not entirely sure why I was there I can only presume I was planting some sort of explosives or other destructive materials, but the part I was focusing my efforts on was getting out of there again.

There were three floors of the spaceship and people were living on it and walking around. They looked like humans but I'm not sure that they were. On the other hand the thought that they may not have been did not seem to bother me particularly. I could identify the military forces of the aliens without too much difficulty, they were dressed in black, wore helmets and some type of masks across the lower halves of their faces armed with what looked like rail guns out of Quake (but attached by tubes to some kind of containers they carried on their backs).

While I could blend in with the civilians it seemed that if I made eye contact with any of the soldiers they could identify that I was not one of them.

On each floor there were two points with some type of control panels with points where I could connect the equipment I carried which could teleport me back to earth. I had cables which looked a bit like XLR and they connected to a handset I needed to speak into to confirm that I where I wanted to travel to, but I needed to get to one of these control panels in order to travel. Some kind of message through the speaker system seemed to announce that everyone had to gather in meeting rooms on each floor, making it a lot harder to merely walk to the control panels without drawing attention to myself. I walked along with the other people trying to turn corners and pass behind anything which would hide me from view whenever I saw the soldiers approach in the crowd.

One of the civilians seemed to have noticed me, because he looked at me intently, but did not alert the others to my presence. He had long hair in a pony-tail and had a little bit of an "hippy" air about him. Somehow he also seemed to stand out from the rest of them, but not even the guards seemed to pay any attention to him. Eventually I had managed to get to one of the control panels and I was digging through my backpack for the cables I needed when the guards spotted me. They walked up to me and aimed their weapons at me and fired.

I presume I died, but I can't be sure as the spaceship part of the dream then started over - nearly as if I were in a computer game and had another few lives to use. I restarted my mission and again it ended with me being shot by the guards. This kept repeating but it was never the same twice, I would be shot at different locations in the ship and I encountered different things. The man who had observed me appeared each time and as the dreams progress the encounters were longer. It eventually became clear that he was a human earthling, like me. I was never quite sure what he was doing there, but he was never able to save my life from the guards and I don't know if they also killed him.

A few more "attempts" at the dream in he seemed to have fallen in love with one of the women on the ship and wanted to bring her back to earth with us. Again, it kept repeating a few more times as we tried to break free and bring this woman with us.

Eventually, we managed to connect the cables and speak the instructions for transporting us to my mum's new flat just as guards were approaching to kill us for the umpteenth time.

Not the best dream ever but if I'm going to try to start this blog up again we may need to have to ease into it.

The Dream of June 9th

2010-06-09T15:59:00.002+02:00

It's aaaliiiivee! Or at least slightly resurrected. I was reading up on Kit's regular blog, which has also been resurrected, and thought this would be a good day to bring mine back too. I'm off sick today and moving, talking and swallowing hurts and general feverishness is preventing me from doing anything but sitting on the sofa. However, my hands still operate as normal - albeit with some joint pains - so I thought I'd pen one of the dreams I had last night. Or keyboard it. You know what I mean.

Most of my night was spent having short nightmares about being at work - which I suspect is guilt at not being there, even though I know I'm not well enough to be.

But then I had this other dream.

I was hanging out with Beppo and Linnéa, and I think Jonas and Richard might have been there too, making Los Cinqos Fantasticos complete (those were the days, eh?). We decided to go on a day trip somewhere. We were having a great time, laughing and travelling to some sort of café or sweet shop which was next to a river. Inside one got to walk around with this sort of tall glass jar in which the staff would anything you pointed at in. They had ice creams, and chocolates, and other kinds of sweets and we were walking around. The others finished their orders and walked outside but I had trouble finding stuff I liked and wanted and kept wandering around in this little place which looked more like someone's old tool shed after a makeover. After I finally filled my jar up with bits and pieces I walked outside and Beppo immediately started shouting at me for taking so long.

"You were in there for 45 minutes, and we have to catch the bus at 17 10 if we're to make it home today. That's less than 25 minutes from now!"

But we didn't go to a bus. We went to this really long canoe thing and started paddling down the river. It looked a whole lot more like the Amazon than anything in Sweden, but we kept paddling away, and surprisingly I didn't turn the thing over.

I can't remember where we went, but whatever animosity had been there between Beppo and myself seemed to go away as we kept on paddling in peace and quiet.

Not a very detailed dream, but I have a fever so this is as good my memory gets right now.

The Dream of the Nap of April 2

2009-04-03T00:20:00.003+02:00

I've forgotten most of this dream as it's been many hours since I had it, but as it's the second appearance of a social-democratic politician in my dreams* it should be blogged.

What happened was... I was getting restless and angry with my family and couldn't take it anymore and for some reason I ran off to the Hultsfred Festival - a festival I've never been to in real life. Apparently I got there late at night the day after it had ended or something and there were only a few more people left. The camp site itself was... imagine a volcano or something, without the lava, with a lawn and forest-y area at the bottom and a road spiralling up the inside of it, to the top, where the exit was. That's how it looked. Everything was dark and gloomy but I went with this guy who was leaving to catch a train. Once at the station I realised I had no money to buy a ticket with but suddenly a woman I recognised appeared. It was Laila Freivalds and I approached her about my troubles and explained how I'd ended up where I did. Apparently, she felt for me and didn't think my silly, sudden departure for a festival that had already ended was stupid because she told me she'd be right back and went into an office. A few minutes later she returned and told me a girl from the railway company would be along shortly and give me a ticket home and that train would definitely stop by where I live, no change or anything required. I thanked her and waited for the girl with the tickets. She appeared with what looked like a big pad of A4 papers and called out various towns and tore off tickets to them and handed those who approached her, but she didn't call out mine. Then when I asked her about it she gave me a ticket and pointed to a train just where we were.
'That one,' she said and I got on and asked some people where this train was going.
'Paris,' said one man, and I got worried.
'But I'm going to Jönköping?'
'Oh, it might very well go there, you never know with these trains, they're always adding stations they need to stop at. Don't worry.'
So I didn't. But I should have done, because we never went to Jönköping, and I didn't have a proper ticket and got chucked out somewhere in Germany.
I located a computer with internet somewhere and managed to send an e-mail to Freivalds, telling her how disappointed I was and how I'd always liked her and stuff, even when she'd been getting told off by the media for that business with her flat. I don't remember if I threatened to go to the press about what she'd promised me and what had happened of if I actually did. And I don't remember if she saved me from being stranded in Germany, but there you have it.

*The first one was pre-blog and involved the former Minsiter for Justice, Tomas Bodström and the two of us building flats for the homeless in an old castle on cliffs by a sea.

The Dreams of April 1-2

2009-04-02T05:41:00.002+02:00

After battling a bout of nausea for most of the afternoon and evening I went to bed early and was in for quite a night! For the first time in ages, no people in quite "crowded" dreams were real even if some of them sort or reminded me of people I know or have known.

The first dream started with me being at home, late in the evening. It wasn't this home, nor was it any other home I've lived in, but a flat possibly 15 floors up in a very tall building. I was living there with my dream mum and possibly someone else too. Noises from outside caught our attention and I think we might've seen a car get stolen because I remember seeing one joyriding around and knowing for a fact that whoever was driving it wasn't supposed to.
Right next to our building was a river, and the currents in it were quite strong. There was a drop of something between five and ten feet to it from the carpark. Suddenly the stolen car drove through the fence and dove off the edge of the carpark, it got caught between hill going into the river and a tree. The front of the car was just touching the water, but it looked as if the entire car might drop at any second and be taken away by the currents.
'Oh my God, we have to help them,' I said.
'No wait,' said my mum, 'we don't know who these people are!'
I remained concerned, noticing that the driver door had been a bit damaged and might not open. But then, someone did open it and started climbing out.
I'm not sure what happened next, but I know that three teenage boys had got out of the car and then proceeded to doing something else they weren't supposed to be doing. The reason I know this is because I armed myself with something that I could swing around, like a bat or something (for sports, not the blind flying buggers) and went down to chase them away with it.
What happened next is unclear to me in some respects. I know that I, for some reason, was "sent away" to stay with relatives and I know I went from Sweden to England, but I'm not sure why. I also know that in that area there were three trouble-making bullies getting away with all kinds of crap, and while I kind of remember them as being the same as the three from the carpark, I'm not convinced they were. I think possibly they just reminded the dream me so much of the first set of boys that I get them confused, or that the dream me actually believed they were the same boys.
In England I got to stay with what I think might be relatives of some sort. I stayed with a woman from an Asian country, possibly Sri Lanka or something. The woman was fairly overweight and looked quite gloomy and aged, but I suspected she'd aged prematurely. She had a daughter of about five and I think the girl might've been my cousin and the woman a "mail order bride" my uncle had married. He did live there, I think, but I can only remember seeing him once and all I can tell you is that he wore a hat and seemed to love his daughter a lot and, in some way, care a lot about the miserable woman he'd married.
I made friends with a couple of "weird" kids in the area. One was an overweight boy who suffered a lot by the bullies. The other two were a girl and boy I can't remember a lot about, except they were sweet and shy.
I can't recall all the ways in which the bullies tormented us, but I can remember one of the weirder incidents where one of them had chased one of my friends when they were coming to see me and I grabbed the first thing I saw and started swinging at the bully. What I'd grabbed was one of those old wooden folding yardsticks and I remember someone saying I shouldn't take that as it belonged to someone's collection of antique yardsticks.
The last incident I remember was the worst one. They'd been chasing us around in a car that belonged to one of their rich fathers and they were targetting my overweight friend especially. I can't remember the particulars of what they did, but the dream ended horribly with that friend being flat on his back in the middle of the street and the other boy from our group desperately pulling at his arm trying to get him to his feet. Then a car approached and the other girl and I screamed at them to get out of there but just as the car hit I had to look away. When I looked back I saw that it had basically cut the boy who was on the ground in two and the other boy was sitting by a parked car, in shock, still holding the hand of the boy whose blood was all over him.

It really was horrible when it happened, but affects me less now that I'm awake due to the fact that the car which ran over the boy at the end was like... an old Formula 3 car or something. Very strange, and sort of funny in a horrible way.

It took me a while once I'd woken up properly to realise it had been two dreams, for in the next one I was also, for the greater part, in unfamiliar environments with unfamiliar friends.
The details that actually tie the different events into a story are gone, but basically we were going to various places in town, driving from place to place and there was something about big cats. Not big cats as in huge housecats, but lions and tigers and panthers and stuff.
There was also a moment where I discovered that I might have screws in my arms. Apparently, it was normal to have two bones sticking out of your elbow like an upside down V, but I became increasingly certain that mine wre screws. But after a while I realised there be scars if someone had replaced my bones with screws and once I'd told one of my friends about that she felt her own "V-bones" an they felt much the same as mine. So all was well.
Until we were about to drive up to where I live and passed a panther about to be captured by some sort of animal control unit.
We drove past and vowed not to get out of the car until we were far away from it. When we did get out we soon realised there was a lion outside my home and for some reason, one by one, we walked past it and went to sit down on a bench next to where it was. I assume the bench was "safe" or something. The girl I'd talked to about the screws in my arm walked ahead of me and the lion walked up to her and smelled her before following her to the bench. She sat down and the lion sat next to her before looking at me, the last one left standing, and then it took a few steps toward me and did something. I can't remember what, but whatever it was it made me think: "Wait a minute, that's not a lion!" and I spoke to it. When I did it turned into a girl.
I've no idea how she came to have the ability to turn into a lion, or why she'd done it, but whatever her explanation was we accepted it and when she asked for a ride into town we agreed to it.

That's all I remember. Dreams really work better with a story, don't they? Maybe next time!

The Dream of March 29

2009-03-29T09:54:00.002+02:00

I'm sitting by my computer, except it's in my brother's room (which it was for a while after he moved out so we wouldn't have to keep a cord to the modem all the way through the flat), and I'm playing something that could be an odd dream version of the World of Warcraft, while keeping one eye on something on the telly, sort of (not literally, even though stranger things have happened in my dreams). There was a film or something on in a language I don't speak. Something east or south-European. A dark-haired woman wearing what looks to me like an 80s style blouse (in some odd white, grey and black pattern and a light material) - but the fashion of it could be older - is doing something by a wooden bench in an old cottage. I'm not sure if she's cooking or making something out of wood or what she's up to, but suddenly she looks out the window in front of her, pulls an angry face and darts out of the cottage very quickly. It's summer outside and she heads for an oak tree across the yard where chickens (well, they're hens, really) and little girls are running around. There's a bloody mess of feathers on the ground in one spot and further away is one of the girls, seemingly killing another chicken. The woman shouts at her, angrily, in that language I don't understand, but the subtitles tell me she's telling the girl off:
"What are you doing? You can't do that to the chickens! You all get out of here, now, run along with you!" She adds, to that girl who'd killed chickens: "And you go home and tell your parents what you've done!"

That's all I remember of the film. In the next part of the dream I'm still at the same comp, in the same room, but some of my brother's furniture have gone and a woman is standing next to me. It's job interview and I'm supposed to show her my Office skills or something. So I close down that game I've been playing and I attempt to start working but I get a weird error message saying F: (the DVD-burner/player is F: on my comp) has stopped working completely, and I think "Shit, that's not good, I can't play CDs now. But at least the one in there now is just the installation CD for the webcam." (this is true). And I press the button to push it out and remove the CD, but nothing happens and for some reason I have to get rid of it, so I just pull on it and the sort of "loading" thing for the discs just comes flying out as if it wasn't in any way connected to the rest of the DVD-burner. That, and the actual CD dart across the floor and there's a hideous odour of burning plastic. I decide to ignore it, given my ongoing interview and smile at the woman while thinking to myself that my brother's gonna kill me for the mess I've made of his room. In addition to the demolished bits of my computer I've got a little notepad and some little book-like things that look like instruction manuals for various components on his desk (other things too, but I can't recall what they were now).
The computer is locking up and I decide to reboot it, but when I do it loads up the game I was playing before and a lot of other things that have got nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be doing. I try to shut them down, but they start up again. I can feel panic setting in and I try rebooting it again, same thing. Now I'm at the point where I no longer care about the job interview, I just want to be rid of that stupid game and the other stuff that keeps loading and I just crash the computer manually and leave it off. But it boots itself and everything starts again. I crash it again and it starts on its own. This time I crash it and switch the power button in the back of it off, thinking that'll be the end of it. And it is... For a few seconds before it powers up again. I look at the power switch at the back and it's back into on-mode. I switch it off there instantly, not even bothering with the normal power-button thing at the front. And I watch as it slowly switches back into the "on"-position and starts up again.

Now, I can't quite recall what I do next. I know that I considered unplugging it and I might've done. But I might actually have gone nuts and bashed the entire computer up until I was sure it wouldn't magically reboot again.

Either way, at this point in the dream I know the computer isn't going to start up again, it's dead. It's early in the morning and my mum's just getting up. She asks me what I'm doing up that early and I just shrug, not wanting to explain the computer situation (the job interview woman is long gone, she must've left some time during my psychotic attempts to kill the computer). The last thing that happens is that I think:
"Oh no... that computer is never gonna work again. I'm computerless now, what's James going to say?"

At that point I woke up, feeling massively dehydrated.

The Dreams of March 28 and 26

2009-03-29T00:47:00.002+01:00

I know I had two separate dreams this morning but the first one's the only one I can still remember something from.

I was at some sort of boarding school situated in the countryside with different buildings one had to go to. It was summer and I slowly made my way across the yard to the building I was supposed to be in next. There was an exam that day, but no one else seemed bothered by it.
So, I was alone, I got the feeling I was rarely anything else, and I sat on a bench underneath coat hangers in the entrance hall to that building. It reminded me of the place my music class in junior high was taught, but this place had stone walls and was more of an old manor type place than a mid-late 20th century building. I was in a grey school uniform, much like the others'. Then a man opened the door and came out and said a few words about the exam. He ended by making a comment about not having any expectations about me passing it, I had after all only been accepted because I was his granddaughter. Everyone giggled.
And yes, it was my grandfather who opened the door (paternal one), which is weird since he's never taught anything in his life as far as I know. And I guess it's easy to explain this as me having some kind of fear of disappointing people or something. I'm sure I do. I'm sure everyone does.
But there we were and we all went inside and sat down at these large wooden tables with our exams. There was a robot functioning as a servant gliding around from student to student offering them crushed ice, which, apparently, was useful in some way. Not sure which way.
..but if you've interpreted the first bit of this dream, what about the thing with the robot?

A couple of days ago I had a dream where Kit and I went to something that can only be referred to as a ski resort. But I don't recall seeing anyone skiing. In fact, what everyone seemed to be doing there was to ride these ski lift-type things downhill, really fast. Which seems like a lot more fun than actual skiing to me. The actual resort was more like an old castle, and it was cold, and the corridors had water dripping down the stone walls and stuff. And that's where most people had to live and sleep, 'cause apparently one always had to wait a few days for a room. But the rooms were more like medieval prison cells anyway, so it wasn't as if we were waiting for 5 star treatment.
We found a spot that had some light (from one of those torches sticking out from the wall that you always imagine old castles to have) and talked to this teenage boy who was nice.
The ski lift things sort of ran from the actual castle out into the snowy, hilly landscape around us. There were basically gaping holes in the walls where one climbed into an unsafe looking box, hanging from a wire stretching downhill, further than one could see. I remember getting into one to set off after having spent 24 hours guarding my spot on the floor of the corridor, but nothing after that. So I've no idea if it was cool. (:-P

Out in the cold...

2009-03-27T07:24:00.002+01:00

There aren't that many things I can pride myself on being great at. I'm one of those people who're anywhere from average to very good on a lot of things. But one of the things I definitely have a talent for is starting out in one place on the Internet and ending up somewhere completely different.
So, when I was poking around the website of major, Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and stumbled across an article about the construction of this season's ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi it was really unevitable that I'd end up reading more about it. Ever since I first heard about that hotel a few years ago I've always found it intriguing on many levels. So, there I was, looking at all the different designs of this season's ice hotel when one room in particular made me halt, re-read the name of the room, tilt my head slightly as I made sure I wasn't imagining it, and finally giggling as I realised what the two designers had done with the room dubbed "Getting Cold Feet".
Reading about the designers I immediately became curious of the "masked" one known as INSA. Because artists who hide their identities tend to be graffiti artists and that's one of those areas of art that absolutely fascinates me but I know very little about (there are plenty of those areas, by the way, far more than someone who's studied art history and contemporary art for as long as I have should be allowed). So, I started looking for information on this guy (unless it's a woman who's taken a lot of trouble to cleverly hide her gender, in which case I apologise and say that I'm impressed) and there doesn't seem to be a wikipedia-page about him, go figure. I did find some articles though, and through them a link to the "official" (I so hate that word sometimes, but I suppose it's needed to sort out these little pages we call web) site.
Now. Someone who just gave INSA's work a quick glance might say it's just the work of some semi-perv wanting to gawk over half-naked women, but that's not it (or maybe that's some of it, but that's none of our business, really, and it's not of importance), there's much more to it than that. The use of the high-heeled shoe (sometimes with an accompaning leg and arse), which is a common representative of fetishes, is quite thought-provoking. In itself it's just a shoe. Depending on your disposition and feelings towards footwear that can make you think about fashion, footwear you might crave but can't really afford, Carrie Bradshaw half-running down a New York street, pin-up models, pornography or maybe how your wife spends far too much on shopping. But there is something these things have in common - consumerism. If you'd seen a sensible shoe for walking you might just think of necessities, but the high-heeled shoe is not a necessity, is it? Nope, it represents both the aforementioned consumerism and something much more primal - desire. For women (yes, I'm generalising) it's the desire to have it. For men (still doing it) the desire have the woman wearing it.
I've spent hours reading and looking at things by or concerning INSA. But those little cog-thingies inside my brain have been spinning around, making all that machinery work at high-speed too. Because this did something that various things do to me every now and then; I started thinking about consumerism in modern society. It sounds really pretentious, I know, but things just set that stuff off in my head every now and then, but always from a slightly different angle. And this one was quite different and more intense (just goes to show what art and culture can do to me), because this time around I was forced to come back to myself, and scrutinising your own behaviour can be both fun and horrible, but it's always at least slightly frightening. While I occasionally will be watching something trashy on TV with my mum (like Dr. Phil or something) and we'll both exclaim how we don't understand those shopoholics who keep turning up with their "addiction" and how we could never do that. That's not necessarily true. While I get bored very quickly if I shop for clothes (and I even did during that lovely year I felt somewhat thin) if I had the money to spend on my fetish, I'd spend it. And you know what that means, right? Yup. Boxes upon boxes of mint condition original 70s vinyl.

My head was still racing with ideas about consumerism in media and mainstream culture (and subculture too!) and how this could easily turn into one of the two 10-week papers I have to write to ever get that stupid degree of mine when I accompanied my brother as he took the dog for a morning walk. Once outside, my mind started drifting back to the art aspects of INSA (possibly triggered by the dog doing his own street art by spraying the innocently white snow with an in-your-face kind of yellow) and then to the ice hotel (which is looking stunning this season, you must go to their website and check out the pictures of all the rooms). And as I walked there, being viciously stung by the tiny snow flakes which were whipped around in the wind, I started thinking about how much I'll miss this when I move to the UK. I'll complain about it like everyone else, but it's no secret that I love snow and winter. Hell, I was born during a blizzard and a temperature of -25 (rarely experienced this far south, even back then). And I don't even mind when it springs itself on us like this, killing all the flowers which had begun to stick their defiant heads out of the ground. In fact, I was quite enjoying the feeling of an early morning being filled with daylight and snow and birds singing (though, I swear they were louder than normal, as if shouting complaints about the damn weather to one another).
You can't really put a price on the art of snow and ice, can you? While I love leaving the first set of footprints on virgin snow, I know they'll have filled up or melted away a couple of hours later. Or been trampled beyond recognition by other feet whose intentions were much less poetic than my feet's were as I went for that 3 am walk with no other purpose. And while INSA can sell his own range of stilettos, inspired by the artwork he's made for years, for £200 a pair; come spring, his ice suite will return to Torne river and it won't turn up on a 22nd Century edition of the Antiques Roadshow.

The Dream of March 24

2009-03-24T14:28:00.003+01:00

OK, I've already lost track of some details that become important when this dream ends, but the gist of it is still safely in my head and I think I can guide you through some of the odd twists and turns of it.

It started out with me going downtown - but where the "downtown" was I couldn't tell you. I'm pretty sure I was either living with or visiting my grandmother because I know she was "home" when I left.
There was this shopping centre I went to, which was inside a building that was older than the actual shopping centre and had not always been used as such. It was quite small, but because they used both floors they still managed something like... ten shops in there. And that's also where my grandfather's nursing home was, apparently. I visited him every now and then and this time found him sharing a room with two or three French people. So I went to talk to one of the nurses and point out that my grandfather speaks only Swedish and shouldn't share a room with French people. I think one of his brothers was actually living in the same nursing home so there wasn't a shortage of Swedish people to put him with. I did say that I knew that it might be difficult to arrange and when I said that the nurse sort of whispered that "if Mrs. [some odd name I can't remember] can get a new room in the midst of a war we can get your grandfather one now". This triggered a thought about a war the UK had been in a couple of years earlier (fake one, not the Iraq thing) so I guess that's where I was.
The next thing I remember is being out on the streets, trying to get somewhere on the busy streets. A girl who was walking in front of me suddenly stopped or side-stepped or something and I had to sort of throw my hand out and put it on her back to manouvre around her as I passed by. But I did this a bit roughly and I might've nearly slapped her. But I didn't really have time to stop and apologise so I hurried along. Then something came flying at me and struck me hard in the head. I toppled over and heard people gasp around me. Looking up I could see the girl I'd just passed looking furious, she'd thrown something at me. She said something about hitting me and instead of pointing out that she had purposely hurt me much worse than I had her and getting angry about it I stood up and calmly apologised for hitting her earlier, saying I really hadn't meant to, but she didn't listen. With a threat of something that would happen if I showed my face where she was (can't remember exactly what), she hurried off towards that shopping centre - and I needed to go back there for some reason, probably to check on my grandfather again.
So I started moving towards another entrance, making my around the building, looking inside it as I went. I spent quite a while sneaking around inside trying to avoid her attention, and I know I went back into the nursing home. I think we occasionally bumped into one another while we were both sneaking around through shops and I know we talked to loads of people including a Portuguese health chef who was forced to work in a shop due to lack of work in his field. There was a run-in with her later, on the street, but I don't remember what happened, just that after we'd argued (or something) we were both sitting down, resting ourselves against the wall of a stone building, twenty feet, or so, apart from one another and we weren't talking.
I'd had a brief memory of having forgotten my money and card some time earlier, not sure when, and I was down to my last four dollars (yup, they were dollars - a one-dollar bill and a non-existant three-dollar one). For some reason I threw the two dollar bills into the street, they flew quite far before landing in front of a somewhat old and tired-looking man who then slipped on them and fell down. He immediately shouted something to me, apparently suspecting me immediately. I then pretended not to have heard him and shouted to that other girl:
"Look what you did now!!! Why did you throw those there?"
The man turned on her instead. She kept trying to get him to turn his focus back to me, and we both stood up and I walked over to her and the man, who was now shouting furiously at the both of us. He wore REALLY weird glasses (that's not really important, I just wanted to mention it. They we like... the shape of upside down speech bubbles from a comic book and all the colours of the rainbow, but slightly metallic-looking). He went on and on about what street punks we were, and we were both dressed in nice-looking coats and we had proper suits on underneath. He seemed to think I was the scruffier-looking one but at some point he seemed to hear what we were saying and proceeded to take his weird glasses off and look at us proplerly and he then said we looked wholesome and pretty or something.
But that didn't stop him from having us both prosecuted for this crime, together. It turned out that he had loads of money and the prosecuting side of the court dealings had gathered up that Portuguese chef, among many others we had interacted with during our bisarre cat and mouse game. They all testified to what they'd seen us do throughout that day and we were shown satellite images of me throwing that money (which somehow still incriminated the both of us, despite the fact that I'd thrown the money), but lastly it was time for the man who'd slipped to testify.
Then he started telling this long story about how his declining health had forced him to seize working and how he'd been feeling terrible for a couple of years but as this trial had started he'd met all these people, like that chef, who were all able to help him somehow. He listed all these people that I remembered having met in my dream who were all great at something. And apparently if you put all of them together they were perfect employees for the man who'd slipped and he was already feeling much better. He finally ended his testimony by saying how meeting me and the other girl had been a blessing and shortly thereafter we'd been cleared of all charges.

Then I woke up and had to use the loo. (:-P

The Dreams of March 18

2009-03-18T13:06:00.002+01:00

What happened this morning was I woke up 'cause the phone was ringing and realised I'd forgot to set my alarm. No biggie, I wasn't going anywhere really (except for a walk in the gorgeous weather we're finally having).
So then I remembered just what I'd been dreaming before I woke up, and I started retracing my steps and soon realised I'd been dreaming like crazy... I'll try to remember as much as possible.

Dream 1. James was visiting and I think his parents were here too, but I can't remember much of what they were doing. We were all at the local shopping centre (not that it looked the same as it does in real life) and it was nearly closing time which, for some reason, was 2 am on week days... or nights, rather.
I'd been off on my own for a bit, to buy something, and I was heading back to the food court to meet up with the others when some guy I had a vague recollection of having met a few times before came up to me and started chatting me up. I wasn't particularly amused and politely tried to excuse myself but he wasn't discouraged and followed me, grabbing my arm trying to get me to stop. I felt myself getting slightly nervous and started half-running away from him. On my way there I suddenly saw a very familiar, green sign above a closed off shop. "Starbucks ...opening soon!"
Wow. Starbucks here? In *my* hometown? There aren't even any in Stockholm! I ran back as fast as I could to tell James about it.
Here's where it gets hazy. I know I got back and told him and we were talking to his parents for a bit, I remember his mother telling me something, but the next clear thing I remember is me being alone out by the carpark.
Something gets really weird here, my car isn't working as it normally does and for some reason I have to drive slowly through this huge crowd of people. Not just a huge crowd, an actual parade. Some of them were in matching costumes performing some sort of dance routine!
Not sure what this was all about, but that's all I remember, anyways.

Dream 2.
I think I may have been one of the two women in this dream, at some point I did turn into one of them, but to begin with I think I was sort of... just seeing them, like on a film. They were in water, just by a beach and talking about things like seeing birds (ducks I believe it was) swimming in the water. They were trying to get across this river (or whatever it was) to the other side where there were these huge concrete pillars, holding a bridge that crossed the river up. The young woman, or rather; teenage girl, was saying things that implied she'd never really been out in the world before and the woman was telling her things about it that I'd consider completely untrue but somehow seemed to make sense in this dream. For instance; the girl was commenting on never having seen birds flying on water before and the woman said that seeing that was a way of seeing God's love, or something.
There was something very pale and sickly about the girl and she was exhausted once they reached the pillars.

Now, the next bit sort of feels like the same dream. As if those pillars were this magic gate and by getting to them this girl was made healthy again and sent to where she was supposed to be. I distinctly remember her having straight, brown hair in the first part of the dream, but now it was curly and I was her. And I was in a house with a couple of other people, but I was just exiting it through the back and there was an orchard behind it where some young men were working. By the looks of the home and the clothes people were wearing I'd say time had shifted back to early 20th century. I asked the closest boy where another boy, whose name I can't remember, was. The young man shouted something to the others working further down the orchard and they, in turn, shouted further down and shortly thereafter the person I was looking for came running and gave me a hug. When the other young men started making remarks he told them I was his sister, but I don't think I was.
And that's when the phone rang and woke me up.

A lot of things were hazy about these dreams as there was so much to try to remember. Oh well. I hope you had a good night!

The Weirdness of Dreams

2009-03-14T18:00:00.000+01:00

Yes, this is it. The first non-dream-post. I should probably drink something festive to celebrate, but I can't be arsed to get up so the slight taste of garlic still residing in my mouth since lunch will have to do.

For those of you who didn't stop reading from being too grossed out just now, welcome! I've been meaning to get this done for ages, but it's never seemed the right time. But today, as I was reading a blog post on the blog of a delightful woman who on the web goes by the name of dyermaker I was reminded of a wonderful album I haven't listened to for a while, namely This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours by the Manic Street Preachers. Lately, I've mainly listened to Send Away the Tigers, but it was time to reacquaint myself with the older stuff too.
So, I found myself inspired by a delightful blog and a wonderful album and I decided to sit down and write a non-dream blog post.

Since I'm trying to ease you into it, this is really only an introduction, also touching on a subject you will be familiar with if you've read my earlier ramblings. Dreams.
After James had read my most recent nocturnal adventure (well, it was really morning when I had those dreams, but still) he posed an interesting question, namely that if he has as weird dreams as I do? Since he's one of many who can't recall their dreams very often it really it's not easy to tell what he dreams. This got me thinking... Do we all have as strange and odd dreams or is there something wrong with me? Wait, that doesn't put me in a very good light, does it? Am I... different? That's a better word.
The more I thought about it the more odd dream descriptions from various friends over the years I could remember. Clearly, there's Kit and her strange dreams. Beppo has mentioned a few as well, and then there are others - including James, who's mentioned one or two odd dreams he's had. Is it very common to have strange, crazy dreams where nothing seems to make much sense? Could it be that a lot of people for some reason think it's embarrassing to talk about and therefore never tell others about their REM-induced endeavours?
Every time I see one of those "dream charts" they always explain things like dreaming about a ladder... And while I can understand that not everyone dreams the way I do (comeplete with sound, smell, taste, sensations and different languages - all in full colour, of course) are there really people who just dream about a ladder? Do they just stand there looking at it? What kind of ladder is it? Doesn't it lead somewhere? Do they climb it? I've seen a few ladders in my dreams too. One was propped up against a house that was being painted white and purple by kids from the school I went to in that dream and somewhere around was a boy I then spent the most amazing day with, walking alongside a road, smelling flowers and went to all kinds of places with before he got in a fight with one of my brothers (I had two in this dream) and as a result died, since he'd had a heart problem no one had known about. Do you see what I'm getting at here?

So what causes dreams as elaborate and odd as mine? I know I get a lot of from real life because I can often relate things in my dreams to things going on in my life and even in dreams where I'm in "fake" places with "fake" people I can still see resemblances from places I know in life. But how come it all comes through so vividly? Is it because of my fondness for the evil rock music? Is it because my diet isn't healthy enough? Or because I watched Gremlins when I was five? That, by the way, was only one of many "scary films" I saw when I was a child but still the only one to give me nightmares (oh, poor Gizmo, those bad ones were throwing darts at him in my sleep too that night), and I've yet to turn into a psycho killer or anything so it couldn't have been too bad.

Any theories on this? I'm not sure I've really composed a proper problem here to hypothesise on, but if you've any thoughts feel free to share them.

As a side note I might add that I've never had a recurring dream that I'm aware of, and I think that's quite common. If I kept getting recurring ones this blog would really be lacking in content.
I wish you all cracked and entertaining dreams!

The Dreams of March 13

2009-03-13T12:44:00.003+01:00

I had quite a few dreams during this night, though, most of them I think appeared after I'd been up once around 8, to call James and wake him up (he was already up, though, but at least he wasn't late for work this morning).
Not sure of the order in which I had them, but let's start with the nightmare first and work our way to the silliness, shall we?

The first one was quite brief. I received a call on my mobile from someone close to me who could barely speak from crying too hard. I heard something about someone being shot, but not who and I nearly had to shout at this upset person to get them to repeat who it was as they were so upset.
"My mum!" came the answer. "It doesn't look as if she'll make it."
The rest of the dream was spent on the phone as I tried to find a way to get to this other person as fast as possible.
It was a very frightening dream. (:-/

The next one was longer and had a lot of story to it, but most of that's gone away now. I was a member of a team of some sort, possibly a police one, investigating these houses out in the middle of nowhere. It didn't seem to be night-time, but there was no daylight either. Just this really dark blueish grey that seemed fixed to the area. As if it was a really cloudy day and the sun was just setting, pulling most of the light away from behind the clouds. Except it never changed, and the air seemed cold and wet.
The village was very isolated and no one seemed interested in talking to us. We hadn't found the person or house we were looking for and were ready to give up when someone in the team spotted cables hidden in the grass, going towards what we just thought was a really dense patch of forest. But as we approached we realised there was a gate and a small house that looked as if it might collapse at any second in there. We had to keep the man living in it, who was away from his house at the time (apparently) from finding out we'd been there and cautiously made our way to it. Booby traps were set up all over it, some merely there to alert the owner to our having been there, but others were designed to kill. Like the grids of very thin metal wires with very powerful currents of electicity running through them, cleverly hidden among things he expected us to touch. The whole place was a mess and we soon left, though I'm not sure if we'd found what we were looking for.
The people in the village didn't want to talk to us either, with the exception of a little girl with fair, curly hair. And for some reason no one seemed interested in stopping her from doing so.
I can't recall if she told us anything important, but I can remember that she showed us these odd drawings she'd made. They weren't odd because of what they depicted, but how they depicted it. Not only were they much too good for a girl that age, there was something about them I can't explain... It was as if there had never been drawings like them made before. Ever.
I don't know if there was more after that.

This next bit was really brief and might have been connected to the previous dream despite being in such a different setting. In fact, I think it *may* actually have been us somehow going into the little girl's drawing, because I remember one of them being about California and there were palmtrees and things.
So anyway... We were on a beach somewhere (I think it was the same people), dressed a bit too warmly as we tried to get somewhere. One of the guys who had been sort of a leader of the group charged ahead and started climbing this odd-looking tree to get through the dense patch of rain forest (yup!) which was on the beach (yup!) in California (possibly!). He failed to notice the huge snake that was perched halfway up it and the next person going up had a run-in with said snake. She screamed and somehow one of them managed to push the snake to the ground where it was attacked by a large creature we'd never seen before. It was sort of like that scene in Jurassic Park where they're in the lobby of that dinosaur place and the T-Rex grabs a velociraptor. The two battle it out while we get away.
End scene! Or dream, more like...

The last dream started out with me having an idea for a massive artwork made out of fusible beads. You know, those plastic ones you put on a peg array-thing and iron so that they melt together. Kit and Julian make a lot of those and now that I was rich and living in a massive house with that music room I've always dreamed of (this dream started out so well) I was going to have the cover art of Van der Graaf Generator's Still Life album covering an entire wall, and they were going to help me. Clearly, my role was to let them call the shots of it as they have artistic talent and I can remember just doing what Julian was telling me to do.
But for some reason this dream stabbed me in the back. Suddenly, I was still in a room like my music one, but there were all kinds of professionals running around, and massive lights being aimed at the wall. And... And... The Spice Girls. They were posing against the wall and then they brought in some smart-looking woman with glasses and a suit that probably cost the same as my mum's flat. She was talking about her artistic outlet and then the Spice Girls were commenting on the emotional process and a video being showed portrayed them posing for something and arguing and crying (which is pretty much what I picture them doing most of the time, really). And then, after the video was over, one of them was talking about how she'd dreamed of having this. Just as I was getting annoyed at never finding out what was going on they unveiled it. The fusible beads artwork covering the entire wall. Except it was her wall and the artwork was a massive picture of the Spice Girls, not Still Life.
Then people started drinking overpriced champagne and I woke up.

The Dream of March 2

2009-03-02T10:25:00.004+01:00

Desperately trying to remember details from this one as I found it interesting. I don't think anyone in it was "real", but possibly a few people shared characteristics or appearances with friends of mine. I'm also struggling to remember if the people in it spoke Swedish or English, but I really don't remember that particular aspect.

I was somewhere in the countryside, with a man and a girl who I think were my father and sister in the dream. The other girl and I were both quite young, possibly about ten years old. We were visiting an elderly couple, the man's parents. They lived in a house, possibly with a small farm, in the countryside of a country that... I think either had been at war about thirty, or so, years ago or the people in the area had ties to a country that had been at war slightly more recently. One thing which definitely suggests something had caused the elderly couple to move to a different place at some point was the fact that their son, or my father, I guess he was, spoke with an accent as if the language the rest of us spoke wasn't as familiar to him (we can ignore the fact that no matter where he grew up his parents' first language would've been his. Maybe they both spoke these two languages perfectly and thus the other language had been their first whereas the one we now spoke had turned into a second one for their son?).
The house of the elderly couple was right next to a field, and there was only a dirt road leading up to their house - definitely in the middle of nowhere. But on the other side of the field was another house, one that had been inhabitated by a family with children but then left abandoned. I was told the story of it, but I don't know if they had abandoned it due to a war raging in the country or if they'd gone on holiday to the country they were originally from and then a war had started there and caught them by surprise. Either way, we knew the family had died. And my father had promised us we'd go explore the old house.
Since no one had tended to it in more than twenty years we were told to be very careful as we entered the house, hearts pounding. The ground floor seemed solely devoted to being a kitchen and dining area, and off to the right was a door that opened onto a small, fenced in area that now seemed as if every planted thing there had died - even the weeds. There was a small gate in the fence, which opened directly into the huge field that separated this house from my grandparents'.
As I followed my father and sister out there I looked down on the ground and spotted small holes in the dirt. I voiced my concerns about snakes to the others, but my father didn't seem to hear me. My sister looked scared though. Just after my father had gone back inside a mouse appeared from one of the holes and I shrieked and stomped on the ground to try to scare it away. Then we ran into the house too. We very carefully went upstairs and looked around there too. The whole place was very eery and I remember half-expecting the ghosts of the family to turn up and chase us away from their home. On a table by a sofa and a television there was a huge bowl full of tiny chocolate bars. I remember approaching it to check the expiration dates when my sister grabbed me.
"You're not going to take those, are you? I don't think that's legal!"
"I'm not going to take them, I just want to see how old they are."
But I can't remember actually checking them. The next bit I remember is being inside a bedroom and looking at books in a bookcase. There was a series of biographies about an author I was very familiar with. In fact, my grandmother and I had discussed those very biographies the night before. However, the one book in the series we'd talked about the most didn't seem to be there. My grandparents had now appeared outside the house and it seemed my father and sister had joined them, I was the last one in there. After finding those books I went halfway down the stairs, until I could see them through the doorway, and excitedly told them about my findings. I think I was heading back upstairs after that, but I can't remember any more.

I really enjoyed the mood of this dream, it felt just the same as reading a scary book did when I was a kid.

The Dream of February 27

2009-02-27T10:06:00.003+01:00

I've been a bit annoyed lately that I've no money to spend on the annual book sale this year, perhaps that's how this dream came to be centred around a book!

I was browsing through the music-related books in a bookstore in Gothenburg and found one about the Manic Street Preachers and bought it. It had been released by a Swedish organisation arranging gigs and things and I thought that was interesting. When I started reading it I realised that the first 30 pages of the book was filled with pictures from a music club that same organisation ran and had nothing to do with the band in question. The pictures weren't even of bands playing, they were of "metal"-looking people dressed up in stupid costumes (I distinctly remember the guy dressed as an enormous condom), doing stupid things and being stupidly drunk. So, basically, pictures that are only entertaining if you were actually there or know the people in them - and possibly not even then.
Then I got to the stuff about the Manic Street Preachers and found that it wasn't particularly well-written and didn't contain anything that wasn't already well-known about the band (note that I don't know a whole lot about them, even if I do have most of their albums so I've no idea what would be new information).

I'm not sure how much time passed between this and the next part of the dream, where I was going to a gig, but Kit and Julian had now turned up to join me. For some reason we were in the same building as the bookstore, but we went down below ground and ran through tunnels that looked just like the ones underneath campus Valla at the uni in Linköping. Loads of other people were running too, I guess people wanted to get to the front. I lost Kit and Julian somewhere along the way, and actually outran them (possibly the only time I'll ever get to outrun anyone who isn't a turtle) in the struggle to get to a gig with bands I didn't even know the names of. When I finally get there, three guys are standing in the front, they look to be about 15. There were seats towards the back, though. They were like those bleachers you always see in American films, and some people were scattered across them, but the whole point of running to the gig now seemed strange. Especially since the band setting their gear up consisted of five teenage girls and the name of their band was something like Edgoy. Clearly, an Edguy cover band and I'm no big fan of coverbands in general and I'm definitely not a big fan of power metal coverbands with teenagers in them. But there was no way I was leaving until I knew what the main event was. So I asked a few people who didn't know. Then I approached an Asian-looking guy who was sitting alone on front row and looked every bit the part of a power metal geek. Swedish didn't work, but after rephrasing the question two times in English he told me a name I don't remember but recognised in the dream as being another power metal band. Definitely not something to stick around for.
After managing to locate Kit and Julian we started walking back through the tunnels, but soon found they were a lot harder to navigate when you couldn't just follow the running power metal kids. We finally ended up in the right building but came out through the wrong exit and found ourselves in the bookstore I'd been to earlier. I told them about the horrible book I'd bought, only then realising that the venue I'd just left was the same one featured in the photos of that book. We spent some time browsing through books and laughing at romance novels with Fabio-esque men on the cover and titles like "Nights of Passion" and "The Stable Boy". I am sooo not googling those to find out if they're real titles of books like that, I'm sure they are but I'd rather not know that my subconscious knew somehow.
I don't know if anything else happened in the dream, but I doubt it. Not the best one ever, but given the lack of updates lately I thought I'd post it.
I wonder why my power metal past has decided to come back to haunt me?

The Dreams of February 22

2009-02-22T07:35:00.004+01:00

I've been crap with dreams lately, mainly because James has somehow worked his way into nearly all dreams I can remember having had (yes, you may all proceed to ridicule me and hurl tomatoes at me). There have been a few without him I think would've been worthy of blogging (and a few with him too), but I've managed to forget them all before I've had a chance to write them down.

I had two last night. One of them was indeed one with James, we were going somewhere and the entire dream - or the parts I can remember of it - took place in a hotel where we went in together but for some reason I had to go up to our room alone and there loads of different lifts and I had trouble figuring out which one to use before finding a really fast one (not that I needed a really fast one, the building only had seven floors), but somehow that felt important. Then I had to go back down (I don't know why, there might have ben something wrong with the room) and for some reason forgot half of my belongings in the corridor, by the lift on the seventh floor and when I got back down I think I cried about having left it. Either it was at great risk of being stolen up there or I was REALLY fond of my stuff. James went up to get it for me, and I made sure to tell him about the fast lift.
"Interesting" fact about the fast lift: It wasn't shaped like a normal lift. Usually they're sort of square or rectangular (well, since they're boxes that would make them more cubical than anything I guess, but whatever), but this one was... I swear, it was sort of shaped like a croissant.
Anyway, that's about all I can remember from this dream - it's not all that interesting, but it somehow worked its way into the next dream where I, towards the end, started feeling as if I was actually staying in that hotel, on some kind of holiday with James and I felt that I'd rather be with him than where I was (if you just "awwww"ed you're permanently banned from these blogging premises).

Right, down to business then. I was in my late teens (but I was in my "skinny phase" which was at age 20, not that it matters) and someone was having a party, a birthday party I think. It seemed to be arranged by some of the girls for another one of the girls, and while most of the girls who were there before the party started were either friends of mine from my mid-teens or characters not existing outside this dream the girl whose birthday it was I know from the choir I was in at uni. Her name is Karin too, and in this dream I guess she was having boyfriend troubles.
We were in a flat I've never seen and there were about seven of us there, I think. In the dream I could easily distinguish everyone separately and I can tell you that (for instance) there was a girl with curly hair slicked back in some kind of knot with glasses and freckles on her face, dressed in a black dress of some sort and I could have just as easily told you similar information about all the other girls when I was in the dream, but it's all fading now.
The woman of the hour spent the most part of the dream down in the street, outside the building (which I think was late 19th century/early 20th century and it was in a town/city but from a window I could see a park with a lake in it... It looked a bit like we were in Nässjö, but I sincerely hope we weren't), arguing with her boyfriend. Everytime she came back up the other girls fussed and redid her make-up for her as she kept crying it off. People were talking on their phones, being upset, probably informing other people coming of what was going on with the girl and her boyfriend. One of the girls was probably taking care of party things, she spoke in a much more businesslike voice and seemed very stern and unmoved by the whole thing.
At some point, when things were calm and seemed all right, loads of the girls kept making remarks to me about a boy who was coming. In the dream I knew exactly who he was and what he looked like and while he's not a real person I can definitely see why he was a boy I would've liked as a teenager. Very geeky. Everytime they teased me about him coming my face turned crimson and I kept excusing myself to go to the loo. For some reason, there were two bathrooms and I kept going to one where the toilet was all strange (massive thing that was difficult to flush and the water seemed odd and the entire thing was a bit filthy) and the lock didn't work - the door kept sliding open again - but no matter how many times I went there and the door openedm exposing me to the world, I never decided to go to the other one - despite actually thinking I should in the dream. Very strange.
At some point someone got upset with me for fiddling with my mobile. A bit odd, since everyone else kept talking on theirs. I think this is where the other dream started working its way in, and I was either texting James or checking the time or seeing if he'd attempted to contact me. Someone knocked the phone out of my hand at one point, and it slid across the floor. I remember getting on my knees to look for it (but not immediately, it was after I came back from the loo that wouldn't lock for the umpteenth time). When I found it I asked myself what I was doing at that party when I was in town with James and he was just waiting around for me at the hotel, feeling guilty. And I can actually remember how it felt as if I physically grew and aged in that moment. I was sort of towering over the rest of the girls (anyone who's met me and most people who haven't know that there are few people older than ten I get to tower over). It was as if I was back to being an adult and they were all stuck in 1999 or something.
And then the dream ended.

I'd like to think that this is more than some kind of "coming to terms with being an adult" dream, or "fear of growing up" dream. That just seems too easy. Anyway, sorry about the lack of updates, I'll try to dream more - or actually start blogging about other things too, which I've been planning to do for ages. There. I said it, and now I have to!

The Dream (dreams?) of January 27

2009-01-27T06:47:00.004+01:00

I'm desperately trying to string my bits of dreams together. I think, and kind of hope, that they're all connected, but the thing is that I was different women in many of the parts. At least three different ones, maybe more. And while there were many, many weird aspects clearly not connected to the times they were in I still felt strongly *when* these were taking place. While not all things included in every bit here was clear in the actual dream in that same bit - I've used information I just *knew* in the other bits. Oh, and I think I went back and forth in between different parts of the dream, but I've put them all together here.
While these bits happened in an order I'm not sure of, I'll try to write them in a way that makes sense. The first bit of the first one was the first part of the dream, though. And the last bit of the last one was the last bit. So THOSE are where they're "supposed" to be. Confused? Me too.

1. I was a woman making her way through a forest area, trying to get away from someone, yet trying to find someone else. My perception was a bit... unnatural, a bit like a fairytale-ish film for children so I think that someone else was reading a book about what I was doing in this part of the dream (which would make sense with what comes later). From patching together different bits of the dream I know that this woman, or teenage girl, is a runaway slave in 19th century America.
Now, there is a very odd aspect to this bit which lasts for a very short time. The woman is riding some strange creature, not unlike a pig, which is levitating a couple of feet above the ground as she searches youtube on the huge sort of screen that has appeared in the dream. Yup. That really happened. But it was over really quickly.
While it felt as if she was looking for someone, I don't think it was anyone specific. All I know is that she reaches a farmland area and finds a family that takes her in. She must be in the north by then as they're white but still happy to take her in provided that she helps with the farm. But they didn't quite realise that she and one of their two teenage sons fell in love as soon as they locked eyes with one another (my dreams are so romantic when they're not actually about me). When this was discovered I think there were a looot of difficult situations, but at the same time I think they either ran away or worked it out with the boy's parents somehow, because they had two children (or more). I don't think they got married or anything, though, that seems unlikely.

2. I have a very brief dream (or part of one), and I actually think it was in black and white which would make it the first dream I've had that was, where a black woman in her twenties gets a job in an office. I think it's the 50s or 60s and it *might* be for a news paper. She loves to write.

3. I'm another woman. She's in her early twenties, and she's Swedish. I think this is the one I "really" am in the dream. She goes to uni in Gothenburg and she's the one who either read the first dream in diary notes (or something) - or dreamt it (ugh, I hope not. People with "supernatural" dreams are soo not welcome in my dreams). What I do know is that despite being a typically Swedish-looking woman (yup, I was all blond in my dream - yuck!) she is the descendant of that girl who ran away.
Gothenburg Uni has just acquired a guest scholar for the year, a writer and literature professor who is well-known and well-respected all over the world. She's an African-American woman who worked her way through college and started writing something like fourty years ago - and the young woman I am in this dream is very confident that she is also a descendant of the woman I have diary entries from. Or maybe they're letters? Either way, she wants to talk to this literature professor and has gone to campus very early in the morning, having heard that the professor comes in at 7:30 every day. On her way there she encounters other students (a couple of which are real people I knew in Linköping), including a guy with an Iron Maiden t-shirt who supposedly had lost a lot of weight and had originally weighed just over a tonne (which for some reason was unlikely - but definitely possible in this dream). These people were still partying from last night. For some reason some of them are singing a Porcupine Tree song while drinking cheap beer.
The young woman finds the literature building where cleaners have started their work day and she's looking at a list of employees and offices, trying to find the right one. I don't know if she finds it because this is where I wake up.

There was a lot more to this dream, but... You know how it works.
If I were to hazard a guess as to what this dream stems from I think it's the conversation I had with Tengil (or Torbjörn, which apparently is his real name! (;-P ) the other day about everyone knowing each other in seven steps and everyone being 50th cousin or less with one another. That, and talking about Gothenburg Uni with Emy yesterday.

The Dream of January 17

2009-01-17T12:35:00.003+01:00

This is getting ridiculous. I'm having really complicated dreams every night and now they've taken a turn for the possible crime-of-the-century-film-script-type. Right now, though, I am beyond angry with myself for forgetting so much of this one in the process of waking up. I SWEAR to you that I knew every detail of this well-thought out crime as I discovered it and began to piece the story together for my mum as we alerted the police.
Of course, there are some oddities in it too, things that don't make sense. Towards the end, over a period of probably ten minutes, I manage to walk through three completely different types of environment at different times of day.

Awww, fuck. I'm still angry with myself. I was trying to run through the dream again and I can think of a few "small" things that happened, that became important, but I can't remember how they happened, which would be important for the character who did them all. Crap. Oh well, here we go:

Our neighbour, a little old lady, had moved out or died (there was a little old lady there a couple of years ago, who's since moved out and been replaced by a young man). A woman came to live there instead. She gave us sort of her life-story, I think. About how she was from Belarus and was now looking for a new start here. I think she might've been in a relationship with a Swedish man and had moved in on her own to learn Swedish better before getting to know his young daughter...
The trouble here is... One day she just upped and left, and another woman of similar age (about 35-40) moved in instead. This one was also from an Eastern European country, and we got to know her and her life-story too. And I may be mixing them up a bit. But that's not really important. What does change with the second one, though, is that she stays longer and we get to know her better (there are also dream-oddities such as her living next door but somehow still living in our flat and keeping her dog here. I think I woke up one day to find her and her dog in my room and that's how we were introduced. The dog was a bearded collie, like Yatzty, btw, but less cute).
Anyway. We get to know her quite well and she gets to borrow my mobile, my mum's car, amongst other things. I think she brings me on shopping trips and stuff... I've no idea why I went with her. But over the months she becomes very close to us.

Then, at some point. I go on a trip or something. And I *think* I'm on a ferry or something. I'm definitely on a transport that allows me to, without too much trouble, get into the cargo area. That being said, I may not have been allowed there, but I got in nonetheless.
A few things have now happened, but it's all so faded that I can't tell you how.

1. A bank, or something, has been robbed of a huge amount of money.
2. My mum's car has been stolen.
3. Our neighbour has mysteriously disappeared.

Now, clearly, when reading this it's not hard to connect the three, but in the dream no one had any idea that any of these things could be connected to one another.
So, I find this cargo area. And when I get in there I see a lot of like... bikes and skiis and things. And my mum's car in the corner. Our neighbour is painting it. She's painting one side of it white, while leaving the "details" black. On the other side the "details" are becoming white. Don't ask me the purpose of this yin and yang design - but believe me when I say that, much like every other detail in this dream, it had a purpose. Not only that, but I figured out the purpose of it towards the end.
For some reason, I leave. I think I somehow make it back as we approach our destination (which is still Sweden for some reason) and I see two men in matching overalls and similar backpacks doing some type of work down there. They finish up and they put everything they had to move back in its place as they head off.
Somewhere along the way I've seen our neighbour with a man in a very nice suit. He's roughly 50-55 years old and has a beard. That's all I can tell you really. Well, that and the fact that he's just pulled off the greatest bank job in history. Somehow, I work this out as the two men in overalls leave, because something they've been doing made me put the final pieces of the puzzle together and I've now figured out every detail in their complicated scheme.
But I can't call and tell someone from there, because my neighbour had done something to my phone when she borrowed it, which I now discover. I can't alert anyone else on the ship (or ferry or whatever) because the two "workers" have been meticulous in putting all the bikes and things back in a way that adds another five minutes to my getting-out-of-there-time.
We finally reach land and I'm running down a wooden staircase of some sort to get to the harbour. In it I encounter a guy who's so drunk his nose and mouth are both bleeding (yes, it really was due to the alcohol for some reason). He's clearly not in any position to take care of himself and I stop as he says something drunkenly (I may have madet that word up) to me.
"You shouldn't be out here alone," I say, considering to get him help before I do anything else.
"It's OK, I'm keeping an eye on him," says a guy I know from a forum, except I can't remember who it is. Someone I've never met but respect. And for some reason, in the dream, I know I've seen him with equally drunk friends before and I think to myself that he ought to get new friends. At this point it's late at night and it's pitch black outside, except the night is lit up by millions of lights in a city that seems very big.
I venture on, and manage to phone my mum form my mobile, at last, telling her, without getting into detail, what I've discovered. She sighs and is very troubled by it. I ask her if I should find a police officer downtown and she says that there's no need as she'll phone Kerstin (I don't know if this is a Kerstin we actually know and what she's expected to be able to do about it, but...). Now, it's daytime and I'm on a street here in Jönköping.
A few minutes pass and I phone her back again, asking if she's done it. She says she hasn't, yet, and I sigh at her, knowing she's sneaked out for a cigarette rather than phoned. We hang up, and I walk the last few steps up a grassy slope, where I'm following two police officers I've just spotted, to talk to them about this whole thing. Just as I reach the top of it I see two small wolfish animals lurking about. They're at a bit of a distance from one another, and things now turn very WoW as I guess I step into the aggro range of one of them and it attacks me. I shout for help, hoping the police officers will hear me. A woman, close by does and attempts to help me, but gets in the aggro range of the other one instead. The police officers come running and I manage to free myself of the jaws of the wolf-like creature and throw it a few feet to my right, where it's been shot by one of them before it even hits the ground. Then they kill the other one too, and I can finally begin to tell them my story of the crime of the century...

...of which I've now forgotten all the interesting twists, and details. Bugger. And it was soo much longer than I've made it seem here, there was so much more to it. I'm reeeaaally annoyed.
For what it's worth, I felt very clever just when I worked it out in the dream.

The Dream of January 16

2009-01-16T12:42:00.002+01:00

I've been watching several episodes of Prison Break every day recently, since I fell in love with it after Gustav told me to watch it. Then, yesterday, I didn't watch any. When I normally would've been watching PB I was on the Improv Everywhere website. I LOVE those marvellous people. Honestly, with stuff like Gaza going down they sort of restore my faith in mankind. It sounds corny, and exaggerated, but it's true.

Anyway. So not the point. I didn't watch any and it resulted in the following dream (sadly, lots of it's faded, which is a shame, because I'm fairly certain there was a storyline worthy of a film in there):
The first bit I can remember isn't set in present-day time. It's probably the 1930s, from what I can gather of clothes and cars. I'm watching this as if it's a film, I'm not actually there.
Someone, who looks like a cross between Edward Norton and Wentworth Miller (the Prison Break guy), gets out of a car in front of a building. It's dark and rainy outside. He has a compress or something stuck to the right side of his neck. No bandage going around his neck, just that white patch (let's not get into how it's staying there, I realise they probably didn't have that medical tape-stuff back then, but this is my dream, and that's what it looked like).
He enters the building into something that'e either a small restaurant or a shop of some sort. There's a younger man, late teens - early twenties, inside, who's got his back turned to the man who just walked in (facing the "camera" which is now at the back of the room).
They start talking about the woman who owns the place they're in. She's the mother of the younger man and has apparently just ended up in hospital. The man with the compress asks how she's doing and the younger man says she's going to be all right, but is quite badly hurt. It's unclear what her injuries are, but from further conversation it becomes clear that she was meeting someone earlier that night and they hurt her. It's implied that she was somewhat involved in something illegal and a deal went wrong. The younger man turns around to face the other. He looks at him, silently, for a few seconds. The Norton-esque man says that they will find whoever did that to his mother and take care of it. He asks if she said anything about the person, and the younger man says she was very confused and nearly unconscious.
"She did tell me one thing, though... She managed to injure him before he attacked her."
The other man nods, completely unfazed.
"That's good. That is really good, now we know what to look for."
"Do you think I'm an idiot?"
The patch-man's face darkens, and he knows he's been caught.
"No. That's why I hate having to do this."
I don't find out what he had to do, but I think we can assume the younger man doesn't make it out of there.

The next parts I remember are set in modern times. The same man as in the previous dream (although he's looking more like Wentworth Miller and less like Edward Norton now) is in jail, and so am I. The trouble from here on in is that I can only remember bits and pieces, which is a shame as I can sort of recall things I have trouble describing and had I been able to, and piece those things together with one another, I think it would've been a cool story.
This man is the brains in that prison. He's the one people turn to when they need something - those who dare to. I know him better than anyone in there, but not enough to really know him, and not enough to not be surprised at the brilliant schemes he puts into place.
I'm struggling to remember these schemes, but the only one that immediately springs to mind is one where he got a fellow prisoner back some of his personal things, like a watch and his keys and stuff. I remember watching the man get his stuff back from the top bunk. My genius friend/boyfriend/whatever has put them in a pair of trousers and handed those to the man who wanted his things back, saying "you might want to change your trousers". Apparently the other man didn't quite know how many things he could really get back since he starts laughing as he puts his hands in the pockets and says something about Norton-Miller-esque man really being "something".
I think we're in a room with two bunkbeds placed alongside one wall. Below me is where my friend sleeps, in one of the other beds (probably the bottom one) is where trouser-man sleeps. And the other one must belong to Kit, because at some point she is teasing me about having so many different tops there. Apparently we get to wear our own clothes, at least on the upper body. And as I feel my face flush and I stutter something about just having four or five, in my dream I recall that my mum (who apparently visited me a lot) had brought a few and I was probably up to about seven or eight. Kit smiles condescendingly at me as she tells me that she has four and I have more than she does.
There's another instance in which my brilliant bunk-buddy has given me something that I think is a kind of mp3-player, only it's much larger and heavier. It's sort of shaped like a half circle and probably two inches thick, and thirteen inches along the "diameter" (it's not really a diameter since it's not a full circle, I guess). There are these things on it... Like little clamps or something, and when I remove them, music seems to flow out through them, as if they're headphones or something. I manage to connect my proper headphones to the thing before anyone hears the noise it's making.

That's all I remember before the scene where I've been released but I'm still helping out my friend who's back there. I'm on my way down a hill in a place here in Jönköping, that apparently leads from the prison. Suddenly, there's a man waiting for me. It's the former prime minister, Göran Persson, and apparently he knows I'm up to something with my friend and for some reason that's his business (as if he was with the police or something).
I think I'm out for a jog or something, but I've slowed down to a walk to talk to him. Then, from my headphone, the intro to Opeth's The Drapery Falls kicks off and I start jogging. So does he. When we reach the point the distorted guitars start playing he starts to run at full speed and I struggle to keep up. We reach the bottom of the hill and there, behind a fence, is my friend Louise (Swedish one, not English). It seems I'm still inside the prison grounds, so I guess I haven't been released, as I thought when the scene started. She looks surprised at seeing Göran there but greets him. I'm sure we have something to do with "business" to talk about and I think we manage to, once he leaves.

That's all I remember!
(And I can now add Göran Persson to my list of politicians I've done unexpected things in dreams with. Running with him is almost as strange as that dream I had a few years ago where I built flats for the homeless inside a castle on a cliff with Thomas Bodström.)

The Dream of January 15

2009-01-15T12:09:00.002+01:00

I'm not sure how it started, really. I just know that suddenly I was doing some kind of art class thing with a former teacher of mine (well, she was a former teacher of mine in the dream and while I can think of a few ones I've had that she bore some resemblance to, she's not real).
Now, this woman was a bit... eccentric. I was well aware that she had some mental issues, but she was widely considered a brilliant artist.
For some reason, I could actually paint a little in this dream. I'd like to stress that it was still only a little, but you could actually see what I was trying to paint. And in this dream I was painting a picture of a woman behind a window. Or three windows, actually. It was the windows of my room in Ryd (which, now that I think of, I realise that I haven't been thinking of and that I miss terribly). Two large windows on either side of a much smaller one whose purpose was to ensure that one could air out the room without having a huge window taking up all the space of the room (yes, they're *that* big and they open in). Anyways, my picture depicted a woman standing in front of the tiny one, so you couldn't see her arms, because they were hidden by the blinds of the two other windows. She was wearing a white dress so what I was trying to do was to paint the center of the painting white and the sides of it a grey colour. And I was trying to do this by means of the huge mass of grey colour that was on the table. Really, it was like... a spectrum of shades of grey, similar in texture and density to mashed potatoes. Not that easy to paint with!

I was struggling with that and the teacher kept telling me what to do and acting all strange. My mood was not the best. And the room was full of girls who all worshipped that teacher. After giving up on my painting, which had turned into a grey mesh, the teacher started showing me pictures of her former students and what they'd done. I think there was more to that than just the art-stuff, but I can't remember what... When she finally left me alone I excused myself to the teacher's less peculiar assistant and said I'd just get some fresh air.
Outside, I started walking around an area that looked a lot like parts of Öxnehaga, where I spent about nine years of my childhood. And apparently, it was spring. I was surprised to find flowers on the ground and decided to pick some for my mother on my way home. As I was walking around I became less interested in the idea of going back into the art class, but I had something that belonged to the teacher and I'd have to give it back. So I headed for my old high school (which was not where it's supposed to be) to put it in her mailbox-thingie there.
Once inside, I realised that it looked nothing like it had before. Visitors had to tell a receptionist of some sort why they were there, rather than just walk in and do what they needed to do. I managed to tell him I was going to drop something off for a teacher and he waved me along. There were these glass display cases along the walls of the corridors and I was looking at one when a door opened and a former teacher of mine and the computer tech guy walked out. For some reason the computer tech guy was wearing a beret.
I soon realised that the teachers' mailboxes were no longer where they used to be and asked another teacher where they were. She asked me who I was looking for and I struggled to remember the art teacher's name. Christina was her first name, and her last name had the German letter ü in it. I guessed a name and it must've been quite close because she took the thing I was dropping off for me and disappeared. While I still can't recall what that was it was something small, and heavy. Possibly metal.

Now that I was there and had nothing better to do I started looking around and suddenly found myself in a place that smelled of leather and sold handbags. I was just beginning to wonder what the school council was thinking, putting a shop like that inside the school, when three girls I knew turned up. One of them showed off a bag she'd just bought (it was pretty much as ugly as all the rest of the ones in the shop - and how the hell can "bag designer" be a real job anyway?), and the other two seemed very envious of that bag. They started asking me questions about what I was doing now and why I was at the school when suddenly one of the girls found a tiny bag that had already been purchased. It had a sticker on it as if it were supposed to be checked in for a flight and there was a boarding pass inside it.
"Ha! And I didn't even have to pay for mine!" said the girl.
I was horrified, there was a boarding pass with a name on it and a flight to Hannover that wasn't going to leave for another 45 minutes - ample time to make sure it got back to its owner. I can't recall if I took the bag from her to give back or just left because I was angry, but here's where it gets weird. Just as I'm leaving, a pet of one of the girls appears that I'm sure I knew was there all along and didn't think anything of. It sticks its head inside my shoe, trying to keep me from leaving. I try to get it out, but it's really staying in there and it turns into a thing where all the girls have to help get it loose and restrain it so that I can leave.
So, what was this creature of doom, you ask?
A hen.

Right, so that's all I remember from that dream. I do recall that, just as I was waking up (presumably a while later) I was suddenly very much under the impression that it was January 30th, that the next day I'd be going to Ryd to move the last of the stuff and clean out the room - realising that they expect the keys to be handed in by noon and that we wouldn't manage that. It was quite a relief to wake up properly and remember that I'd already moved.

The Dreams of January 14

2009-01-14T11:55:00.002+01:00

The first dream was odd, but not very frightening. I remember bits and pieces of it. One bit was be being on some kind of a shuttle bus to and from the delivery ward of a hospital. My friend Louise (from Jönköping) got on and waved to me, she was working there and took that bus every day, but for some reason we didn't sit together.
At one point we passed these two people standing by the bus stop, a very pregnant woman and a man. And somehow I knew these were the people I was waiting for. The woman was a sister I'd just found out I had, named Elisabeth. I'm struggling to remember who told me about her, while I'm fairly confident it was my mum who told me when we were sitting in a café (having "fika", for those who've been learning new words recently)*, the reason I have to think about it is that I'm quite certain my father was still alive in this dream. Odd. **
Anyway, Elisabeth and her boyfriend didn't get on the bus. But a few minutes later the driver was contacted over the radio and told to go back and pick up some people he'd left behind. Then he took like... Every possible wrong turn back, making the journey unnecessarily long. At this point I was standing next to him, trying to give directions to the thickest man in the world. When he finally got it sorted I must've gone back to my seat, because when my sister stepped onto the bus, she sat down in front of me. I spoke to her.
"Elisabeth? I'm your sister."
I don't remember anything beyond that point. [cue dramatic music]

*From what I remember of this, because it did take place sometime prior to the busride but still within the same dream, we were on... something like an El-train that stopped at a café and you pressed a button or something to leave because I remember my mum having us transported to our next stop before I had a say in it. They were handing out free biscuits and I wanted to take some and bring home and I didn't get a chance to. I was very upset with my mother. (;-)

**What's even more odd is that I have a vague recollection of my mum and I walking around and my mother saying some horrible things that can not be described as anything other than racist. I think there was a discussion about a hockey team I was on (stop laughing, it could happen! ...if I somehow magically gained the ability to keep my balance on a pair of skates) and she made a accusation about something someone on the team had done to a black player. It was along the lines of "Was it that Africa over here?" in a very disdainful voice.
Most peculiar. I've never actually heard my mum say anything racist so I don't quite know where this came from.

Right. Dream No 2.
The first thing I remember is sitting on one of the sofas in my living room. I get the sense that I hadn't been there for a while, so perhaps I'd recently moved back (much like in real life) and I was having dinner (some sort of pasta) with someone who most certainly doesn't live here. I can't recall who it was, but it's someone young and female.
I said something about leaving leftovers out.
"Oh, anything we leave out here won't be here for long," she said.
"Why not?"
"Rats. Huge, huge rats."
"We've never had rats, we've never had anything even remotely alive besides family, pets and the occasional flying insect in the summer."
"We do now."
And soon enough, a rat the size of my forearm appeared on the table. I decided that my flat is not to be taken over by rats while I'm around and I knocked the pasta out of a pot I felt was sufficiently heavy and I started beating the rat, hoping to manage to kill it despite its size. And I was victorious.
However, soon enough, another rat appeared. It was much, much bigger. Like... Dachshund-size. The other girl said something about this being a male one, but despite the fact that I clearly thought "Aren't the female rats larger?" in my dream, I didn't say a word.
I realised that beating this thing to death with a pot wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world so I decided to try to scare it out of the flat and call someone who could deal with it. Somehow, it worked. The giant rat was moving towards the door, and I followed it from a safe distance. The odd thing (apart from its size, that is) was that it appeared to be gliding, rather than running the way rats do. And I swear it got even bigger from the time it left the sitting room table to the time it reached the door. Before we'd turned the corner I'd thought that I'd have to get really close to it to open the door and chase it out, but once we did I'd realised that the door had no lock, just a gaping hole, and the rat got up on its hind legs and put it's front...paw, or whatever, inside the missing lock and just pushed the door open. I closed the door behind it and went back to the sitting room. After I'd sat down I realised that the pasta I'd knocked out of the pot was already gone. A moment later, another rat - the size of the first one - appeared and as I raised the pot again I woke up.

Since I sat down here, I haven't put my feet down on the floor once. I'll have to now, though, I need some chocolatey milk to calm my nerves.

The Dream of December 10 (all is well again)

2008-12-10T09:28:00.002+01:00

I know there was more than one dream, but all I can remember are little bits of one. I think the general idea was that Kit and I were in a school that looked like a cross between my junior high school and the Zenit building on Linköping University's Campus Valla. We were with these two guys (fictional) and I know I was younger than I am now, probably in my late teens. There was a little something going on between me and Hassan, one of the guys. I'm not sure if we were an actual couple or just flirting, but that's not important.
The main idea, I think, was that we were carrying out some kind of plan to get a lot of money. Like, millions. I don't know if the acquisition of the actual money was illegal or if it was some of the steps along the way that was - but I do know that we weren't the only ones after the money, a whole lot of other people were.
So. Little things I can remember. At one point we were on this stretch of grass in the middle of what looked like South American jungle or something. There was a statue carved from stone and two guys were trying to get the "clue" we needed from it. I know we got it in the end (it was two tennis balls to add to the other two we already had, they had numbers written on them in red marker pen), but I don't know what happened to the two guys who got there first. Probably we just beat them up and took their balls (hee hee).
Then I remember us being back in the area of our school that looked like Zenit, and we were on a bench or something in the corner, hiding our tennis balls. Actually, I was the one hiding them all behind my back, leaning up against the wall - it hurt! Hassan was sitting in front of me and I remember having my legs propped up on either side of him and thinking "fuck, it's been a few days since I shaved them last, I hope he doesn't care", since he was gently stroking them just where the trousers - that had been pulled up a bit from all that extra leg-bending - ended. (how the hell do I remember details like my trousers being pulled back to reveal my calves??)

Then we needed to get a Magnum handgun of some sort, I think. I don't remember how we realised this or acquired it but somehow we did. Then, to throw someone else after the money off their track I was sent to an area with classrooms. I didn't even know who I was looking for, but there would be someone there. Once I got there I only recognised two people. One was Kattis, a girl who I went to junior high and high school with. The other was Lisa - not sure if she's been mentioned before. We were great, great friends for a couple of years, then we hated each other (ahh, the friendships of hormonal 13-year olds) and now we're friendly but not close. Anyway, they were both there and had both - for some reason - had to start their first year over in high school. I guess that puts me in my second year. And I remember thinking that Kattis seemed so young and immature, before remembering that she's three weeks older than I am. I talked a bit to them (both were wearing t-shirts from really cool, fictional music festivals I wanted to go to) but they didn't seem to be the people after the money. Suddenly someone opened my backpack and pulled something out of it. I wheeled around to find a girl with curly, brown hair clutching a toy gun going: "Ha-HA! I got your Magnum!" to which I replied: "HA! It's not real!" and snatched it back and shot at her twice. The gun made some kind of laser-toy-gun sound and she looked so disappointed that it wasn't real.

Now we, apparently, had almost all the info we'd need from the school. But there was heavy security at one door, checking people with a metal detector - which was a bad thing for us since we had a gun. The added security seemed to have something to do with the American students who had appeared and was now being shown around in groups.
One of the guys, for some reason, had to go out the front door with the security while Kit, Hassan and myself could sneak out through the glass door right next to us. We were all very concerned that he'd be caught, but a minute later we reunited outside and all was well. Time for the next phase in the plan!
But I can't tell you what that was, because we never got that far. I remember looking up outside and seeing a giant, bright green zeppelin flying over us. It was heading for an equally green tower-thing that looked just like the zeppelin towers in WoW, where another green zeppelin was already waiting. For some reason I know that one of the zeppelins was going to either Hamburg of Frankfurt (can't remember which). Oh, and the best part was the name of them. They had the name printed across the balloony bit in huge white letters: "Papal..." and I can't remember the second word. But it was a body part! Like "Papal Hand" or "Papal Knee" or something. What a great name for a zeppelin company - and how little sense it makes!

That's the last bit I remember, but I know there was something about old castle ruins somewhere in the country side in the beginning. But since I can't remember what we did there...
Oh, and at some point Kit and I were sitting in armchairs in my grandparents' home and I asked her if she could get me some tea since my knee hurt after all that football I'd played (yes, we all know how much I love to play football. Err...) and she grinned at me and said that her legs were tired too, and told me to get it myself. Hrmpf.

The Nightmare of December 9 (and the reason I'm not going to sleep again until I'm unconscious)

2008-12-09T03:09:00.002+01:00

It's... 3:10. I woke up... maybe ten minutes ago and my hands are still shaking so bad I can hardly type. I've just overcome the violent sobs that had me trembling, curled up on the chair. I didn't wake up that way, in fact, at first I wasn't too upset. But it was as if the realisation of what I'd just woke myself from gradually crept up on me (yes, I woke myself out of a dream and in case it ever happens again, I hope I work faster next time).

I'm not entirely sure where it started, I think I dreamt that I woke up, but in order to get the full scope of this dream, let me explain a few things about where I am and what I was doing before I went to sleep.
By the way, it's 3:16 now and my hands aren't shaking anymore. They just feel as if I've been holding something heavy for a long time. It's an improvement.

I live in a typical student room in a hall of residency, or "student corridor" as we call them here. I have a main room, I have a bathroom and a little hallway-type-thing by the door. There are lights on the ceiling in the main room, bathroom and hallway. Then I have one lamp on my nightstand and one by the window, close to the desk (it's the one which might get a temple built in its honour soon). The lightbulbs burn out at an unusually fast rate in this corridor, everyone knows it and I often whine that both the hallway one and the bathroom one have both gone out. Right now, every single light in here is working.
There's also a power switch beneath my desk, to which the window-lamp is connected, as well as the computer stuff. The power switch has an on/off switch that glows orange-y when switched on.
I have a friend called Sandra. While it's been a long time since I spoke with her and an even longer time since I saw her (and I feel terrible about not being better when it comes to keeping in touch with people, and especially her since I miss her) I still consider her a very good friend.
Before I went to bed, which, now that I think about it, was actually just twenty-thirty minutes before I woke up again, I was watching the Gilmore Girls on my computer.

OK, here comes the dream. Every time you see something written in between two ¤ it means that the marked passage in the dream was the way it is in real life too/absolutely true.

I can't swear that I know how the dream started, but I *think* what happened was that I woke up in my dream. And the room was dark, which it is this time of year if I wake up before 9-10 in the morning. It was even a tad darker than it normally is, I could still make out certain shapes, but it was too dark to see properly. I reached out to turn on the lamp next to my bed, it didn't turn on. I assumed it was broken, and had a vague recollection of the one by the window having burned out and me changing the bulb in that one (since I use it more) with the one in the lamp on the nightstand. (Note: This has happened, but the broken bulb has since been replaced)
I get up and walk over to the desk and switch on the lamp by the window - it's not working. Frustrated, I turn on the ceiling light. Not working. I try the one in the hallway, same thing. But since I usually keep the one in the bathroom working I try that one instead. Not working.
Exasperated I head back to the desk, to turn the computer screen on. I can make out very faint, grey shapes of Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel (the way you sometimes can when a video clip is stopped and it's frozen in the very last second - if you've seen this you know what I mean, if you haven't then just take my word for it because that's how it looked). So I use ALT+TAB to get to the Explorer, knowing that the background is white and it'll give me the best lighting possible. For some reason it's not working. I think that perhaps the video software is in fullscreen mode so I ALT+ENTER to rectify that. It doesn't make any difference, as far as I can tell. The screen is still black with vague grey shapes that no longer clearly resemble the leading actresses from the Gilmore Girls. I wonder what the hell is going on and get down on my knees. Maybe the on/off button on the power switch is jammed half-way or something, and the computer is getting enough power to run, and the screen is getting enough power to run but it's not showing colours clearly and the lamp isn't getting any power. I see that the switch is as it should be but still press down a bit extra on the button in the on-direction, just in case. Nothing changes.
I start to feel more panicky now, and I'm starting to hear voices outside my window. While this is a student neighbourhood and that's not unheard of in the middle of the night these voices... They just don't sound like drunken in-the-middle-of-the-night-in-December-voices but like it's-daytime-in-June-and-we're-all-excited-about-summer-voices. But I don't *quite* figure this out. I just hear the voices and feel a bit frightened at the prospect of it being in the middle of the night and strangers are making noises outside my window while my room is dark and I'm alone.
I manage to locate my mobile, now realising that it might be my eyes that are the problem, rather than the electricity or lights. But I still feel confident that it will be all right, ¤my mother once told me a story of an elderly man in our building who woke up blind one morning and managed to call his son who got him to the hospital where they sorted it out¤.
I can't see the keys on the phone. But I know that ¤there are six keys in the left-hand column. The top one is not important when calling someone in the phone book. The second one is the dial key, which is followed by 1,4,7 and star. I need to press the down-key in the center to get to the phone book, once there I need to press the 4 key to get to the letter G and my brother, Gustav, is the second name in the G folder.¤
I try to dial. And I get through, it connects rather quickly. Imagine my surprise when the voice of a woman who's clearly just been awoken from sleep answers. It's Sandra. I must've hit the 7 key with the letters p,q,r and s instead of the 4.
Crying desperately, I apologise to her for being out of touch for so long, but I try to explain the situation and that I need to get a hold of my family. I hear the voice of a man in the background, wondering what's going on. The last time I spoke to Sandra she was single and living alone so I feel even worse about my lack of communication when he speaks. She mumbles something I can't quite make out, and I realise I couldn't have made much sense because a few seconds later she hangs up on me and clearly she wouldn't do that if she knew I was in trouble.
I try to dial again, and this time the call connects immediately. This is probably the first time in the dream that something isn't absolutely cohesive with reality, or at least the first time I notice it. But I don't think anything about it, because someone answers the phone. I don't recognise the voice and I ask whose phone I've reached. The voice, a much more androgynous voice than my brother's, confirms that it's his phone and I ask where my brother is. The voice says that it is my brother. I'm almost numb with fear at this point and I shout that it sure as hell isn't and that I know my brother's voice and I want to know where he is because I need his help. Then the phone disconnects. I think that maybe, just maybe it's a dream and that I wish I could wake up. Outside, I can hear someone playing an acoustic guitar and people singing along to it, but my room is still as close to pitch black as a room can become but still have faint shadows and shapes in it. I'm hyperventilating and, again, think: This is a dream, and I need to wake up now. I HAVE TO WAKE UP NOW. Desperation kicks in on a whole new level and while I remain standing I jerk my upper body around violently, in an attempt to wake my still, sleeping body up. It worked.

I once had a dream in which someone had lined up all of my closest friends and family, and that person was standing there with a gun and told me to decide which one of them he should kill. If I didn't choose one he'd kill them all.
I've always considered that to be the worst nightmare of my life - and clearly, nothing can top pain and agony such as that, but when I woke up it was still easy to shake those feelings because it was so obviously a dream.
This one... I was using logic throughout it. Everything was as it is in real life. I remember stepping over a suitcase that's really there, I was watching the same show I'd been watching before I went to bed, I did exactly what I'd do if I woke up in the middle of the night and for some reason had trouble seeing. When I woke up my first thought was "It WAS a dream" and I hugged one of my pillows, taking deep breaths as the close-to-life-aspects of it started to sink in. Then I started getting upset. And my first thought was to get to my computer, to turn on that screen, see that white background of Explorer and talk to my brother on MSN (knowing that he'd probably be online). And I got to turn the lamp by the window on. And once these reassurances that all was as it was supposed to be hit me I just started trembling and crying even worse. One hour later and I still feel weak just thinking about it.
I'm trying to find the silver lining. I woke myself up from a dream, I don't think I've ever done that before. But even as I started throwing my upper body around like a rag doll I still wasn't convinced it really was a dream, and I can still feel a small remnant of that desperation. It's very, very frightening. Just that little bit. I'd rather not have to relive the full force of that desperation again.

Fuck. I need tea. Or whisky. I might let you know which one I opted for in the next installment of this blog. If I ever do decide to sleep again.

The Dream of November 28

2008-11-28T08:06:00.002+01:00

Right. A bit of background information on this one:
I was about to head to bed shortly before four. Which, as it happened, was the time a bunch of really loud, and I mean REALLY LOUD, students decided that shouting and pounding on things that make noise was the way they wanted to spend the next two hours. Not particularly sleep-inducive and this was the first time I ever considered phoning the police on some of my fellow students. I didn't, though.
However, at some point I did fall asleep and I think I got about two hours out of it. Plenty of time for a dream, here we go:
I'm walking along this street in what appears to be the center of a reasonably-sized English town. It all looks very English, anyway. With me are Kit (who just last night accused me of not liking her anymore since she hasn't been featured in a dream for ages - well, here you are, Kit!), Julian (Kit's boyfriend, not sure if he's been in one before) and Louise. But not Louise from Norwich (which would have made more sense as we were on our way to a gig) - it was Louise from Jönköping.
Aaaaand... I'm pregnant (it's been a while since the last time, so I guess all is in order)! Not very though, like... 4-5 months into it. We're on our way to queue up for a gig by an unknown band, and across a big parking lot is the start of the queue. No one's there yet and it's a fairly warm day and the particular spot where it starts is in the shade, so I'm hurrying along to get there before someone else does. I'm feeling a bit... bloated by the pregnancy and start to complain about pregnancy stuff to Louise who agrees and gives me hints. Either she's pregnant too or has a kid in this dream, I guess. When we finally reach the queue point it's suddenly further up the street, in the sun, and there's one girl waiting there already. We hang around for a while before I decide to head across the street, to the Starbucks. The sun is causing me discomfort and I want an ice cold frappucino (with absolutely no trace of coffee in it) to keep cool. As soon as I decide to, the traffic becomes crazy, it's a small street but somehow people manage to drive like... nothing I've ever seen, all over the street, switching to the wrong sides, stopping for no reason and all kinds of things. When, finally, one car drives like a normal person, I watch it as it passes me and see that - you're not goin to believe this - there's a man sticking through it. Yes. Through it. As if the car backed into him at a violent speed and his head burrowed through the glass - without breaking it - and his body became stuck haflway through. Now his legs are sticking out and I can see that he's wearing those bright orange trousers that people working along the roads wear sometimes. After this, a few more cars pass by before I can cross the street. When I get there I can't find the entrance to Starbucks, but a group of three girly girls who're talking about coffee walk into a linen shop and I follow. Apparently you're supposed to walk up the stairs inside to get to Starbucks. But a woman in a green apron stops me before I manage it and informs me I can order from her. Not sure why I'm stopped, but I wildly stared around for a menu, knowing the frappucinos change every now and then and that it's been a while since I was there last. She gives me one and I locate a drink, but then I suddenly decide I want ice cream too (which apparently they have now). I'm struggling to choose and she hands me the phone on which she's talking to the person who's supposed to make me my frappucino - and that woman sounds annoyed at having to wait.
Now, I'm in a proper Starbucks (or, at least there are now tables and sofas and armchairs behind me, even if there's no proper counter), and the annoyed woman is standing in front of me. Apparently I'm not there alone anymore. John (my Frost*ie friend, for those not in the know) is standing next to me, patiently waiting for me to make my decision (much more patiently than the woman taking my order). I've finally located the ice cream and they've got some sort of "series" of ice creams to do with ice cream through the ages. For some reason one of them's named "IKEA" and feeling my forehead sweat under the stare of the annoyed Starbucks-employee I decide to go for that one. Even though I've no idea if that's the kind of ice cream I want.
John and I sit down for a bit and the woman returns with my order, saying something like "it's so late now that you won't have time to finish it here". I look around, confusedly, and there's a girl at the next table (another employee, probably on a break) who says I shouldn't listen to her, that she's just in a bad mood. Peering out through the window I can see that the line has grown now. Louise is no longer there, but Kit and Julian are being their normal selves; Kit is climbing Julian like a tree (I don't know if I've actually seen her do that, but it wouldn't surprise me if she did). She sort of falls over his shoulder and he catches her and puts her down on the ground again. Both of them are giggling. I point them out to John, who says: "So that's Kit? She looks really cuddly". I've no idea if one's supposed to describe people as looking cuddly, but it's a description that fits her really well.
I guess we keep talking a while longer, but I can't remember what we say after that. Then I wake up.

Who the hell would name an ice cream IKEA?

The Nightmares of November 27

2008-11-27T05:45:00.002+01:00

I was on a street, a regular little street with houses on both sides. It was dark and fairly cold, but not winter. A little girl, no older than seven, is walking towards me in the distance. She's got blond hair in pig tails, and walking alongside her is a white goat. I'm immediately cautious, as I recognise this. It might be that I've dreamed it before or that I just think I've been in that situation before in my dream. As she approaches I'm utterly terrified, but not letting it show. I ask her what she's doing out here - I can't remember if she replied. For some reason I grab the goat with one arm and decide to try to get them both home to where they're supposed to be but I wake up.

I've forgotten some details of it, I know there was more interaction between me and the girl. And I realise it doesn't sound like a nightmare, but it was indeed frightening.

Next dream.
I'm walking along what seems to be a dirt road in the country somewhere, there's a dense forest on the left side of me and there's a clearing, with just a few trees on the other - but further up and down the road there are forests on that side too. I don't know if I'm scared as soon as the dream starts. Probably. Suddenly I hear absolutely frantic barking from my left and fear grips me as I see a large german shepherd bolting out from between the trees. Normally I'm not afraid of dogs, but if one is barking as if rabid and going straight for me I'm not as inclined to act warm and welcoming. Just as it's about to jump at me (or so I think), it changes direction ever so slightly and runs past me, stopping right next to me, and starts to bark at something on the other side of the road. Two wolves. They don't appear to be ready to attack, at least not when I spot them, the dog might have scared them. From what I know of wolves they're not likely to attack you, but since I've never seen them in the wild I'm still very much frightened as I feel the warmth of my canine rescuer against my legs and try to remember if I'm supposed to try to scare them off by making noise or if that's what you should do with bears. Terrified, I don't move and hope that the confused-looking wolves will back off. Then I wake up.

Next dream.
There's supposed to be a sequel to a very violent film (dream-fictional, not real) opening soon and I'm talking to Beppo about seeing it (we saw the original and loved it so we decided to go together to the new one when it would be released). But now he's saying that he never liked the first one - it was far too emo for his taste - but he's going to go see it with his girlfriend just because she wants to. I think I yell at him for forgetting it.
Then the dream shifts and I'm at a computer in a bedroom. Suddenly I'm aware that I'm inside the first film. And I "know" that I survived the film the first time I was in it because I happened to be out when the crazy, violent and very disturbed killer arrived to kill everyone in the house and he didn't know who was supposed to be there, other than the one girl I think it was his "mission" to kill. So I get up from my chair, deciding to leave now and stay out until it's dark outside as I know he came during the day - even if I don't know which day.
But as I'm tying my shoes by the door I can hear shouts from outside and I immediately run into the bedroom that's right behind me. Through the crack of the door I can see a hand grab the hair of the blond girl (apparently they're popular in my nightmares) and I don't need to see more to know that she's getting decapitated or worse. I get on the bed and draw the covers up, hiding underneath, pretending to be... I don't even know if I'm shooting for dead or sleeping. Sleeping probably. I don't dare to move at all and I'm suddenly aware that he's in the room. I'm laying there with my mouth slightly open and realise that I'm beginning to drool out of the right corner of my mouth (yes, it's a lovely image, isn't it?) when the covers are pulled off me. For some reason, despite pretending to sleep, I'm staring at the ceiling and I can see the killer standing next to the bed. He's looking at me, not doing anything. I want to close my eyes, I don't want to see what he's going to do to me, but I don't dare to and he just stands there for a moment. Then he moves the odd-looking weapon he's carrying (it looks like a sword you "fold out" of a metal contraption of some sort. Ideal for the man who can't decide whether to slice his victims to death or bludgeon them) from his left hand to his right. And lowers his left hand towards my face. He's holding out his index finger and with it he, slowly, wipes the saliva off my face. Then he lifts his hand back up, still moving very slowly, then puts his finger in his mouth, and - still slowly - pulls his finger out of his mouth again, creating sort of a "popping noise" as the tip of it leaves his lips. Then he takes out a knife from a holster and I all I can do is watch as he holds it out over my body. But then he sets the other weapon down on the floor, holds out his right arm, and cuts himself. At this point I'm so surprised and confused that I think I make a faint noise, almost like a squeal I've tried to suppress. He shifts his gaze momentarily from his arm to my face, as if to check to see what I'm doing, then he looks back again. Blood is starting to run down his arm and drip onto my shirt. Then he tips his arm down, angling it towards my face and the blood starts running down it, towards his outstretched finger. It drips into my mouth and after ten, or so, drops have landed on my tongue he backs away, pulls down his sleeve, picks up his weapon and leaves.
And then I wake up (and decide that I'm done with sleeping for now).

The Dream of November 22

2008-11-22T07:32:00.002+01:00

I've been dreaming a lot lately, or rather, dreaming things that have been memorable enough for me to hang on to some details as I wake up. This, along with the fact that my entire body has been aching for the last few days, suggest that I've got a virus or something.
Oh, well, let's get down to business right away, shall we?

The first few parts of this dream are shorter "scenes" and I may not be remembering them in chronological order, but they feel as if they belong to the same dream somehow.
In the first part of the dream I'm outside this house with a group of people. I don't see myself as being younger than I am, but it feels like a school trip and next to me is a girl I haven't seen for something like ten years. I'm fairly sure I've actually dreamed about her, and mentioner her, before, her name is Nina.
The house looks like a small cottage, really, but the front door is open and peering inside I can see that the house is large and that the room I know we're going to in a bit is huge. We're receiving instructions about what to do when we get inside, and how we're getting inside. Everyone's supposed to walk in twos and there are some rules concerning what colour clothing we should be wearing. Some pairs have to be dressed completely in blue - not like a uniform or anything, just any clothes of any blue kind - and I know there are two (possibly three) other colours represented too, but I can't remember which ones they were. Then there's the other group, where there's no rule for the colours of the clothing, and that's the one Nina and I belong to. But it still feels like the clothes we're wearing have been selected on purpose by someone else. I'm struggling to remember the sequence in which we were all sent inside, but I have a hazy memory of being sent inside, and waiting for a moment before proceeding to the room furthes in and being seated on a bench or something by the wall on the opposite side of the entrance. It's decorated much like a sitting room of an old cottage, so that part seems somewhat consistent.
I remember there being teachers there too, one of them may have been one of my computer teachers from high school. For some reason, I am unwell. I can't say what it is, but it's as if they spot me being about to fall to the floor because I have a distinct memory of a rather beautiful, heavy-set woman sitting down next to me and me resting my head against her lap while she strokes my hair and she and the other teacher scold me for not taking care of myself properly. Apparently, I'm very sick. How I do not know. Maybe everyone there is.

My next memory is still a collection of friends together in one place as if on a trip, but the ones I remember this time are from my uni. Beppo is there, I think, but we don't talk to each other. Jonas is the one I have conversations with. We're no longer in the cottage, I'm no longer ill, but it still feels as if it's the same exact location as before. This time it's more of a warehouse than anything. We're talking about something and I make some kind of comment about him and living in a proper house rather than a flat. I think there's a sort of socialist/communist edge to it, as if it's bad to live in a house because that's too posh and he's too much of a "leftist" to want to do so. But it's clearly some kind of joke because he laughs and says "Yeah, becaus it's not as if I actually live in a house back home". For the record; I have no idea if he lives in a flat or house back home.
Then a teacher arrives. This time I can't quite put a face to him, even if it feels like the same computer teacher as before but somehow morphed with one of my art teachers from uni. He's saying something about installing a door to campus. One of those big silvery ones that really large garages have and we're all a bit confused. We want to know where on campus it will be and he tells us it'll be on "our end of it" and not the other side and we want to know if they're going to close off the old doors then so that we all have to use this new door, and he says "no, it's just a new door". I think we approve of it.

Then the dream shifts. I'm on a bus going back home. This time I'm carrying bags with vinyls and CDs in them, and I feel tired, and I know it's reeeally late - or really early, depending on how you look at it. I'm now with my friend Louise (Not Lovely Louise from Norwich, but the girl I've known since I was twelve), which in itself is odd as we don't really go to gigs and things together. Perhaps it should have been Kit, but since we were on a bus in some strange version of Jönköping I guess Louise just fit in better. We're at the back of the bus and a man gets on. He reminds me of Patric, but I don't know why. The only apparent things they have in common is that he too seems to be in his early forties and he's got luggage and some vinyl bags too (Patric buys a lot of vinyl, he knows quality music!). This man has very short hair and wears glasses, and he heads for the back of the bus where Louise and I are seated. Looking around me to see how much room there is I realise that I've got quite a bit of luggage, almost as if we're on our way back from the Burg-Herzberg festival or something. I move some of it aside, to allow the man to sit down. As he does I make a comment about a band I know I've just seen, and then I remember that I met this man wherever we were going back from and that we talked about or saw the band in question live. But I'm afraid he won't remember me. He does. And we start talking.
It gets odd here, because it's still the same trip home, but every now and then a few seconds or a few minutes disappear, and it happens a few times more from here on in. I'm going to write [break] to illustrate when this happens. It's a bit like watching a film that's got some parts missing.
[break] We're now at the bus stop by the school where Louise and I first met ("junior high school" or whatever one wishes to call it, grades 7-9) and the side of the road we're on suggests that we had been on our way to Öxnehaga (the area in Jönköping where I spent nine years of my childhood, and Louise still lived when we went to school together) before getting off the bus. We're discussing which bus I'm to change to in order to get home. She says something about no 34 (which as far as I know does not exist and definitely does not run there) and as we're talking I'm moving around a bit, restlessly, like I often do when waiting for a bus. I'm out in the street but suddenly become aware of a bus coming at me at full speed and I hurry onto the sidewalk. I can hear the breaks squeak as the bus stops, but for some reason it stops on the wrong side of the road. Then, another bus comes along, from the other direction, also at full speed, and this one seems to be headed right for us, almost as if it's trying to run us down, but at the last second it turns as to not hit us and the driver slams on the breaks. This one's also on the wrong side of the road.
[break] The drivers and one more man are now outside their buses, talking loudly and cheerfully about a party they're going to or something, not paying any attention to us despite the lateness of the hour Then they get back on their buses. I think one of them is the one I'm supposed to take but both Louise and I are too scared to get on the buses. The man from before is nowhere to be seen.
[break]
I'm on a bus heading into the center of town again, and for some reason I don't know exactly where it's going, I only know it's heading in the wrong direction and I try to find a good place to change to another bus, only I don't know if any other buses are running at this point. Then we pass a bus stop that has one of those big electronic "counter" thingies that lets you know how many minutes there are until the next bus leaves and I see that the next one runs past my house and that the morning buses are already running. I quickly get off the one I'm on, it stops inside some sort of building and there are doors to get on to the platform (much like some tube stops have a wall in front of the tracks and the driver has to stop the train so that the doors of the train are in the same place as the doors of the wall on the platform - same thing here, for some reason) and I wave to the driver before leaving the bus.

And then I woke up. I should've gone back to sleep but found my head too full of memories from this dream and I just had to write it down. A long one this time, I hope that there's SOMEONE who can get through the whole damn thing.

The Dream of my not so short nap of November 20

2008-11-20T20:45:00.004+01:00

I really don't remember much, just fragments from some of the various dreams I had. Honestly, I think I was too exhausted to remember anything as I didn't sleep last night. I'd set my alarm to 5 o'clock, and when I woke up it was a quarter to 8, so clearly, I must've woken up at some point and turned the alarm off. Well, actually, no, I just remembered that for some reason my phone was in the inbox for texts-thingie and that would suggest that a clumsy, sleeping girl tried to shut it up at some point.

Oddly enough, I think I visited The Netherlands with my mum for a gig in my sleep today. She's been appearing in a lot of my dreams lately, I wonder why that is?
Anyways, we were supposed to get to the UK from there and we had tickets for... some kind of transport, I sort of see what they look like but as strange as it may sound I can not for the life of me determine if they're boats or buses. I think maybe boats? Some kind of strange canals seem to run between wherever we are and wherever we're going. It looks nothing like any place I've seen before. Everything seems to be indoors, despite being outside, I definitely get the feeling that I'm under a giant roof of some kind. And there are floors everywhere and odd little houses shaped like boxes, and everything's very impersonal where I am. There are ramps by these canals and different levels and we soon realise that we're on the wrong one and we start running to get to where we're supposed to be, but we miss our boat/bus/whatever and we have to go somewhere else to find another one and we run through this place that's a lot darker. I get the feeling that the giant roof that's covering everything is a lot lower and, somehow, darker than the other one. The houses here are more personal and seem furnished and they have a lot more windows, and bigger windows. It's clearly a posh neighbourhood and despite the furnishing and the obvious fact that people live here it still feels empty, deserted and there's almost a sense of dread in the air.
I think we eventually get to another transport that's gets us close to where we're going even if it's not the exact place we were looking for.

I had a dream where I recall that I... kept my faith in someone who was either accused of something or looked down on by others, it's really fuzzy now though. There's something about innocence, like this is a young girl or something, perhaps. I'm not sure about this one, it's like I can almost see and remember what it was about but it's juuust out of reach. So you just get the hazy "feelings" of it, rather than something with substance. Just call me Derek Acorah. No, please don't. Unlike him, my dreams aren't fake.

Then I have this recollection of letters and signs flashing before my eyes, like a code or something. Maybe it was a formula for something scientists have been working on for years. But I hope not, since I can't remember what it was. Another odd detail is that I do believe I was involved in some serious kissing when this happened. I *think* I remember who the other person was, but I'm not one to dream-kiss and tell.

The Dream of my short nap of November 19

2008-11-19T20:12:00.002+01:00

There were actually at least two dreams (at least), but I've already forgotten most of the first one. What I can tell you is that I was in a world not too dissimilar from the World of Warcraft one where I encountered some kind of boss who bore the resemblance of one of the actors on Desperate Housewives (it's a guilty pleasure, I don't listen to any boy bands or anything, so i get to watch a few bad shows on the telly), but something happened in-game and he completely changed his appearance. This time to something more like what you'd expect from a boss in a computer game.
Suddenly, I guess I was outside the game and the game was no longer a game but that television show we don't need to mention the name of again. I was on the phone with my mum and I mentioned that he'd changed appearances and asked if she thought that actor would still be on the show. She said no, and I said something along the lines of "too bad, I quite liked him".

Then I don't remember any more from that dream, but I did wake up and walk to my desk to do something, I think I got a text or something. Anyway, I know I was awake and that I wasn't wearing my glasses. You'll know why that's important in a bit.

Next dream. I'm in Chicago. I think I'm in Grant Park, where Obama held his speech after the election, I've never been to that particular park, but after the awesomeness that was the three King Crimson gigs Kit and I went to there in August, I'm somewhat familiar with the city itself. I'm there with some fictional friends and the first thing I'm aware of is that I complain that I didn't want to go to "this thing". Clearly, they ask me why I came then, since I'm not one to do things just because my friends are doing them. I said that I only went because I love Chicago. Which is true enough. So what exactly are we doing? We're going to some kind of a launch for an Apple product. And the place is full of Apple "enthusiasts" (I use that word instead of "OMGOMGOMG FANBOYS AND FANGIRLS", which is the expression I'd prefer to use). It was just scary. Steve Jobs is on a huge stage holding up this thing that looks like a little video camera but according to him is "so much more than a video camera". And the crowd is what you'd expect from a really, really psychotic, religious cult. So, just your typical mac-users.
The launch thing ends and for some reason the security guards are supposed to escort Jobs through the crowd to the other side of the park thing. And I manage to get in their way or really close to them no matter where I move. When we're at the exit at the back of the park I suddenly realise that I've lost my glasses and I can't see anything. I start looking around for them, and since this is a dream I spot them from about ten metres away (whereas normally, one metre would make it challenging). Only, as I approach I begin to realize that these aren't my glasses, but a really odd pair. I'm so disappointed that I can't remember the shape of the frames, because I do remember that they looked really cool. I find a female guard who's also wearing glasses and I've no idea why, but I ask her if they're hers. They aren't (d'uh). Then I ask if they might belong to Jobs (despite knowing that he was wearing a different pair as he left the park just before. Note that I have no idea what he looks like of if he wears glasses IRL), and I don't remember what she says, but I do remember that, again, Jobs turns up just where I am, still escorted by five huge security guards. He's wearing his glasses. And then I wake up.

So, clearly the not seeing thing stems from waking up and walking around my room without my glasses on. The Apple thing probably relates to a PM conversation I've been having with a new-found friend on the Frost* forum, who made a point of telling me that his phone is not an iPhone (and I hadn't even asked!). Clearly, my respect for him inreased when he said that.
I'm running out of cheese now so I must hurry to the shop and buy a new piece. A piece of cheese? That doesn't sound right. Might have to get me some chocolate fingers too... I really shouldn't though, the scale was mean to me today again. Argh, enough of this, off I go.

The (still sick) Dream of November 12

2008-11-13T02:29:00.002+01:00

Well, actually, there were several. I only remember a very little from one and then most of the last one. The reason there are several is that I kept waking up. At first I woke up around nine when someone called me from a magazine called Vi Föräldrar (literally: We Parents) and said something about me having signed up for something on pampers.se (either some kind of contest or... I have no idea, I was still half asleep) and then I said something along the lines of "errr, no?". The way she paused after saying that stuff about me signing up and the off-handed way in which she explained my lack of knowledge about the whole thing as some kind of mix-up makes me think she was full of it and just needed an excuse for openly violating the don't-call-me-if-your-selling-something-protection-thing I signed up for a year ago. Basically, companies selling things can not contact me unless I've made business with them in the past. There are some ways to get around that, however, and I think this was one of them. So, instead of apologising for bothering me when clearly I had not signed up for anything to do with pampers or parenting she giggled and started telling me about their "great offer" for getting seven issues of their magazine. Idiot. If I haven't signed up for something on website dedicated solely to NAPPIES; maybe, just, MAYBE I don't want to subscribe to a magazine about parenting?
Somehow, despite feeling feverish and despite the throbbing pain in my hip and the back of my neck/shoulder (as I hadn't taken a pain killer for seven hours) and despite being awoken at the ungodly hour of nine in the morning (hey, I'm a student with no classes, I sleep in) I manage to croak "no thanks, I'm not interested" and refrain from (politely) asking her to sod off. And I had trouble going back to sleep for some reason. But when I did...

...I dreamt that I was on a train, having a swordfight with someone (not a real one, just playing around. I even suspect we may have been using baguettes rather than fake swords) and we fell off, and had to start walking along the tracks. Then we ate these really odd, very thick crisps with some kind of brownish spice on them. I can't remember who the other person was, but I don't think it's unlikely that it was Kit, seeing as how we were fighting with baguettes and all.

Then my alarm clock went off and I decided that I deserverd two more hours of sleep.
This time I dreamt that I was a witch in some kind of version of the Harry Potter universe. And for whatever reason I decided to get my Muggle mum (who was my real mum) some candy from Diagon Alley. Except, you don't access Diagon Alley from a secret entrance in London, you get on the Stockholm underground (or it might have been the London one with REALLY upgraded trains) and the Diagon Alley one runs rapidly upwards in a spiral of some sort and there weren't any walls, just air and infinity around it. You couldn't even see the ground below. And for whatever reason this police officer decided to chase down one of the trains in his car (he's actually a character from a series of Swedish books made into films, and this was the most recent film version of the character) and at this point I was seeing this as if in a film, or just floating around in the air, I wasn't in my own body. Suddenly, he's no longer in his car (which, by the way had been driving on the tracks) but in a train of his own, but he was going too fast and the train derailed. So it flew off into air and all the wizards and witches had to cast spells to get him down safely. I don't know what happened to him after that, but I was back to my own self and I was in Diagon Alley. Except it wasn't a street, but a platform by the tracks with some candy stands and things. I bought my candy and went my merry way.
Next thing I know my brother has picked me up and we're supposed to go home. In his car... except it was no longer a car but an airplane. And suddenly we're plummeting to the ground. We crash somewhere that looks an awful lot like the Hellfire Peninsula area in World of Warcraft (yeah, yeah, I know the level of nerdery required to dream about both HP and WoW in one dream - you're just lucky that there's no Van der Graaf Generator and Formula 1 in here to make the whole thing complete). The crash was fairly soft though and it's a car again. I'm in the backseat and I've hurt my knees a bit on the seat in front of me, but escape fairly unscathed, by brother is fine and most importantly: the bag of magic candy for my mum survived.

And then I woke up.

The Dream of the "being-sick sleep" of November 9

2008-11-09T18:08:00.002+01:00

The dream started with my grandfather being ill and in the hospital. At least I think he was the first one to fall ill. Me and my mother were visiting him and I'm fairly certain that my brother, his girlfriend and their dog (Yup!) were there too. Some kind of nurse or nurse's aid came to pick up my grandfather in a wheelchair to take him to radiology. I remember that I thought it was an interesting choice of nurse as he was this really tall, wide-shouldered man in his late 50s and looked more as if he were about to do a mob-hit than transport my grandfather to get X-rays taken. I walked with them part of the way and then they turned left and I said goodbye. Another nurse came by and, for some reason, asked me where my grandfather was going. I told her and she replied:
"But... radiology is that way?" and pointed to the corridor to the right. For some reason this scared me, as if I'd somehow been afraid that someone was going to kidnap my grandfather and I told my mother who didn't share my fears but at least was concerned enough that we go down to the ground floor and look for the nurse who'd taken him in the computer system, arguing that a man in that age group shouldn't be hard to find.
My brother and his girlfriend and their dog had now joined us out in the hospital corridor and the dog had lain down on the floor, on his side, not looking well. It seemed we knew he was about to get sick (there was also a discussion concerning whether it was dangerous for the dog to be on the floor like that in case someone came by pushing a wheelchair or bed without seeing him) and they decided to take him to the vet and my brother and his girlfriend disappeared with their dog.
My mum and I went down to the ground floor, which bore an eery similarity to one of the entrances to the shopping centre in my hometown. There was a computer to search for employees of the hospital there and it reminded me of a cash point machine. My mum was looking for the nurse while I was just looking around at all the cafés and people everywhere. A lot of con artists were selling things and causing trouble and there was an escalator dividing the ground floor into two different levels. Once you went up it you were free of the various con artsits and weird people and it looked more like a proper hospital up there. But now we were on the lower level and my mum said she couldn't find him. I went over to help her, but couldn't find anything either. There was a table and some chairs right next to the computer and we sat down to think about it for a moment. Some mid-twenties guy sat down too and he was smiling at me in a very creepy way. Then he put on the world's largest head set and started commentating a sports event. I'm not joking, he was saying something along the lines of: "Here I am at Hovet in Stockholm, looking down on the..." I remember thinking that he was either commentating tennis or the ridiculous, Swedish sport that is "floorball", I'm not sure why I knew it was one of those two sports.
We decided to head back upstairs, to look for my brother (who my mother now feared was getting ill, clearly it was a bad day to be a member, or pet, of our family). The right escalator was broken but I got on it anyway and started walking up. Then I saw my mother ride by on the one next to me, which they'd apparently switched on to compensate. But I only got half-way before some scary bloke grabbed me and lifted me up and held me, with the help of his friends, saying something about me not walking on the escalator. I think it was somehow moving now, because I remember thinking that I was afraid there'd be an accident if he kept holding me in that tight grip as the escalator was running. I kicked, and screamed, and after a while a girl came running down the escalator with her mobile. She shouted something about taking a picture of the guy holding me for the police and he threatened her, saying bad things would happen if she did, but she still took the picture and he let me go. She and I ran back up the escalator and she offered to send the picture to my phone. I gave her my brother's number since my phone can not accept pictures (which is true, actually, so there was some semblance to reality), hoping I'd find him before she sent it so that I could explain what it was in case he decided to erase the picture some stranger sent him.
But now I'd lost my mother, she was nowhere to be found and I started looking for her. But somehow, I decided to go to this... teenage village-type place where a girl I knew from my choir lived (except she wasn't in my choir in the dream, and she was a few years younger than she really is). I remember getting off the bus in this little area outside of town. It looked quite nice and peaceful when you hopped of the bus, and there was a little patch of trees just by the road. I saw a deer in there and pointed it out to the woman waiting for another bus. She said something about that being very unusual in those parts and I said that I saw a lot more deer and wildlife there than I did in my hometown. She was surprised at that and I told her not to be as I was from Jönköping. For some reason she said she'd figured out by my accent that I was from there, which was strange since I don't have that much of an accent and most people can't recognise the accent from my town anyway.
I started walking, but instead of following a road I went towards the patch of trees and went through them, and around a paddock and suddenly found myself in an area made up of tents. But it wasn't your typical camping tents it was the overhead kind they use a festivals and things to sell food from. And these teenagers had divided different tasks between them and were making food and serving beverages in from these different tents. It was really like walking down a street but still being inside a tent. Just before I'd entered the "tent street" I'd felt a bit of rain and when I reached the end of it, it was pouring down like you wouldn't believe, but just as I was about to exit it stopped and I pointed out how weird that was to some of the teenagers around me. Then I left the tent street and now I was on a, sort of, larger "street" that was pretty much just a long stretch of mud with a lot of tents and caravans on either side. I remember finding the girl I was looking for, but I have no idea why I was looking for her and then I woke up.

All in all, a very pointless dream, but since I remembered it so vividly when I woke up I decided to write it down. This is what happens when you go to sleep in the middle of the day when you're sick, kids! Beware!

The Dreams of August 26-27

2008-08-27T14:15:00.002+02:00

The first of these dreams was a bit boring, but for some reason I was in a group of people trying to keep alive and going from place to place where I, secretly, kept sending zip-files of pictures of famous paintings to my art history teachers at uni. Not a big head-scratcher as I've been in the process of finding out if I can enter a new course this semester.

Then the interesting dream kicked off, the one in which I was down at the E4 motorway and something like 15 square meters of it collapsed and we who were there had to get people out. The first thing I remember was seeing all these cars having been half-buried in dirt and dust and the guy next to me, who for some reason had a pick-up truck with a canoe on it, starting to prod the vehicle closest to us with a paddle. I'm not sure why, it's not as if he was trying to break a window to get in and it didn't make any sense to be "knocking" with the paddle either.
But we were getting people out after a few minutes and it was pretty basic rescue work, really. But then, I went up the slope to where there was this sort of road diner and gas station. I was outside the road diner and heard a group of men talking to a woman about food outside it, and there was something about rolling up sugar in some other food item and eating it (something like a pancake, but that wasn't it) and she said she was allergic to sugar. Then they went inside and were going to order from the ethnic food served in the restaurant (though I don't remember which country it was from, just that it had a lot of vowels and H:s in it but wasn't Finnish) and I remember the guy running the place trying to pronounce the names of the dishes.
Then I started hiking up the green hill right next to the restaurant, when I got quite high there was a fence and a rope to hold on to for the hikers as the slope got quite steep. The fence just seemed to end where the rope was tied to it, no gate or anything, just no more fence. And there were these little strange creatures, like a hybrid between boars and this orange, fluffy, long-snouted creature I read about in a Donald Duck comic as a child (though the dream-creature was not orange, but sort of... brownish-terracotta-burgundy). A quite hefty woman and her (about) five-yearold daughter came climbing up behind me, and apparently the grazing creatures belonged to them. One of the fattest little creatures belonged to the girl and she cuddled it, despite it being the same size as her. It greeted me by licking my face (though it was more like sucking my face, very strange but adorable creatures) and then the woman and her child started going down the steepest part of the hill where there wasn't any grass, just rocks and dirt and dust. But it looked dangerous and I warned them that the rocks might have shifted after the collapse of the motorway down below. The woman agreed that this might be the reason, but they kept going and then I woke up.

The Dream of August 23-24

2008-08-25T15:35:00.002+02:00

This dream has faded a lot since I was too lazy to write it down yesterday, but I remember some general things and a couple of details.

I found myself in Berlin one evening, it was quite cold and I feel as if it ought to have been rainy but I can't remember any actual rain. What I do remember is how autumn-y it was. Everyone, including me, was wearing lovely coats and hats and scarves. I remember leaving a train station, that looked remarkably like the one in Manchester rather than the huge Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. I'm not sure what happened between this and me about to cross a road with a guy I didn't really know, but I remember that the feeling of cold, dark and autumn had increased. And I was terrified. I'm not sure why, but we were crossing the road in a spot without a crosswalk, and I was so afraid of the cars and something else. All I can say for sure is that it wasn't the guy I was afraid of. We ran across half of the road and stopped in the middle. Now cars were approaching from both directions and I started to get hysterical as they whizzed past us on both sides of the road. One was so close behind us that I could feel it graze my calf. For some reason I know I was wearing my brown, knee-high boots. I think I fainted after this because I suddenly found myself flat on my back on the centerline and the guy was leaning over me. He got me off the road and we stumbled across to the other side where there was a park. Somehow we got through the park and later we were in the house in which he lived with his parents. I know he told them that I'd stay with him until I was to leave Berlin but I'm not sure when that would be or how I would travel. And this is really all I remember now.
The most vivid bits were the car grazing my calf and the general feeling of the cold autumn night. I can still sort of feel that.

The Dreams of June 25-26

2008-06-26T12:31:00.002+02:00

All these things may have been tied together in one dream, but as the "connections" between the settings have faded (I'm having enough trouble remembering the different parts themselves) I'll treat them like individual dreams.

I think the first one was the one where I was somewhere in the UK and I had some place to go and a plane I needed to catch (I think at Prestwick airport), but for some reason I knew I'd miss it so I was trying to get to another plane and go home for a day so I could still return to the UK a couple of days later on the other flight I also had booked. I was in a small town somewhere in England when, not sure how, I found myself in a hostage situation on a bus. I don't remember being on the bus before the guy with the machine gun turned up, but there were a couple of other people on there who had luggage too so I think I may have been on it already. There was a brown-haired Swedish girl on the seat across from mine. Hostage-taker-guy had a huge sack he wanted everyone to put their wallets and handbags in. I'd put my money in my pocket and for some reason knew he wouldn't find it so my bag was free of valuables. Since it was my Aviv-bag and worth nothing I asked him if I could hang on to it, for sentimental reasons. He agreed but then started bullying everyone to put their phones in there as well. Again, I wanted to keep mine and knew it was worth nothing so I told him that it was a Nokia 1112 that had cost me 300 SEK when it was brand new (I think hostage-taker-guy was Swedish too since he seemed to realise how cheap it was). He made a big deal about phones like mine being the best ones but the lack of monetary value of it was apparently enough reason to let me keep it.
The bus travelled somewhere and stopped outside a restaurant in an old stone building, like a small castle. For some reason the manager of it came out to talk to hostege-taker-guy. And it was the manager of the Pizza Hut at Baker Street tube station in London (a gangly, black man with really long dreadlocks - some of which are blond. He even wore the same suit as when Kit and I saw him at Pizza Hut). The manager went back inside and hostage-taker-guy seemed to be busy doing something at the front of the bus and the back exit was open, so I took my Aviv-bag and ran for it. I ran into the restaurant and up some dark, wooden stairs to a small landing with a window facing the parking lot outside and a bunch of closed doors of the same wood as the stairs. The manager was there and I think we talked about the situation but I don't remember what was said. At first I thought I'd gotten away, but then hostage-taker-guy came running up the stairs (I did not give any thought to why he'd left the other twenty or so hostages alone in the bus to get me). He went over to the window where manager-man was, I was sitting on the floor just where the stairs ended. Hostage-taker-guy said something and then began to fire his machine gun, making a "sweeping motion" across the room, starting to the left of me and then reaching the left side of my head. I remember how it felt to be hit by... whatever he was shooting. It wasn't bullets, I don't think it was paint, it felt more like powerful puffs of air. He shot at my leg too, just at the ankle and it left a weird pattern on the hem of my jeans. Quite stylish, actually.
-End part 1 of the dream

I was back in Sweden and I made my way home. Except home was in the woods, by a lake. In a tiny, brick-shaped house that seemed to have only the one room and no kitchen or bathroom. The entrance was a glass door leading onto a sort of patio, what you'd expect in the garden of a "real" house. Inside there was a bed in one corner and a computer in another corner. I went there, hoping to find a cheap flight back to the UK as soon as possible. Then Kit, at least I think it was Kit, was there and we were talking about something when a big, flying bug appeared and it was following me. I shrieked and ran for the door. The bug came after me, but Kit managed to close the door on it and squash it.
That's all I remember from this part of the dream, I think I left to go to the airport or something after this.
-End part 2 of the dream

I was driving in a car constructed for troublesome terrain, it might have been a jeep. Someone was with me, it might have been my brother or maybe Beppo. We were driving up a gravel road and on our left were rows and rows of grape plants. It seemed to be a vineyard. When we got to the end of the road there was a guard there. I saw a guy I know from uni talking to him and saying he was going to "Emme's party" and was let through. Since I had no such excuse I ran off to the left where there was a very steep grassy slope to climb up and I did. Then I realised I couldn't quite remember the name of the guy I'd spotted. I remember thinking it might have been Daniel but since I wasn't sure I just shouted "Hiiiiii!" at him (lucky I did, his name is Kristofer). When I'd started the uni in Linköping he'd been one of my "guides". There are all kinds of activities for the first two weeks and the new students are divided into groups with two or three "guides" helping them settle in. He was happy to see me and I asked if the first two weeks had started yet and he told me they'd start the following day.
-End part 3 of the dream.

That's it. There was more to this dream, or series of dreams, but this is all I can remember.

The Dream of June 24-25

2008-06-26T12:20:00.003+02:00

It's been more than a day since I had this dream so most of the details have faded, even though I've tried to keep it fresh in my mind.

The first part took place in a chemistry classroom, in which Kit's class was having an end-of-term-thing. It was summer, and really warm, and the entire class was dressed in white and lined up like a choir. For some reason, they were singing Christmas Carols. And Kit was singing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen as a solo. She actually did quite well! But some blond girl who seemed to think very highly of herself suddenly decided that she could do it better and took over. While she did have a very good voice it was completely uncalled for as Kit had not been putting the song to shame. I got soooo angry, but afterwards Kit was all "oh, it's ok, she's a total bimbo and always does things like this".
Then I walked down a grassy slope and found my lovely, English friend Louise sitting on a blanket and enjoying the weather. I really can't remember what we talked about, but I know she was there on business and had meetings and things. Not that I remember where "there" was, I don't think it was Stockholm or even Sweden.
After Louise had gone to another meeting I met a man who was renting a flat nearby. I think we went out to dinner or something and talked. He invited me back to his flat and it was simply a friendly type thing. When we got there I realised that he was living with his boyfriends and their pets. One of the pets was some kind of fluffy rodent and the other was just a small, fluffy, odd-looking thing. Like a cross between a collie and a llama, but tiny.

This is pretty much all I remember. The gay couple and their pets were adorable. (:-P

The Dream of the morning of June 17th

2008-06-17T11:03:00.002+02:00

I had this dream after waking up in the morning and resetting my alarm clock for one hour later. Yeah, I sure know how to dream fast. I felt a bit anxious throughout this dream, but it wasn't until I got to the last part that it got really bad. Really, really bad.

The first thing I can remember about this dream is that I was in an abandoned flat or something, tending to several sick, abandoned dogs who were in the tiniest kitchen I've seen, tucked away in different cupboards. Everytime I opened one I found a new dog. All of them were similar in colour, and I think they were supposed to be the same breed too, but I remember noticing differences between them, like one having curly fur on his head. All of them were white, but so dirty that they looked greyish. I had my mother's car with me and she'd said something about me having permission to drive one of the dogs to the vet in case it was really ill. Trouble was, I felt that several of them were, so I called my mum and after a short discussion she instructed me to put towels in the backseat that they could lie on. I remember thinking in the dream that I didn't have a driver's license, but perhaps I somehow did anyway or perhaps my brother showed up and drove because the next thing I know I was at the vet with the dogs. For some reason, I did not go in with them, but waited outside with Mia, my brother's girlfriend, while my mother and brother were taking care of things.

I had this tiny bar of chocolate, a kind I used to eat sometimes when I was a kid (back then it cost 2 SEK, I've seen it in a couple of places now for something like 5 SEK) and Mia asked to get some of it. The bar is split into 3x4 little pieces and she broke off the first three saying something about how that matched the calendar and how it was only fair that she got the first three since she, my brother and someone named Johan (who might be one of her nephews or her brother) had their birthdays in the first three months of the year. Now, this isn't true since my brother's birthday is in June and hers is in August, but I let her have the pieces she wanted and then took the next three thinking that: "well, this is only fair, my birthday and my brother's and my father's are all in the first six months of the year - only my mother's is later in the year" (this is true, so there was SOME logic to it).

When my mother and brother returned no one even mentioned the dogs, but for some reason we were supposed to go to the hall of residency in which the vet's daughter was living and give her something. My mother didn't come with us, but the rest of us drove there and I realised it was the same hall of residency that I lived in - which looked nothing like the one I'm actually living in. The dream one was top of the line in every way. Technology, design, etc. We walked down the hall and my brother knocked on her door and then pushed it open. Inside, three people were sitting around the counter of a bar that, apparently, had been added. They were studying and surprisedly stared at the people who'd entered without permission. I felt incredibly ashamed of my brother and quickly left the scene. Apparently Mia followed me, because we then found ourselves in my room down the hall and she asked why it had bothered me so. I told her that it was just not how things were done there, one didn't enter a room until the person living in it had opened the door.

After my brother had picked up Mia and they'd left I suddenly found myself in a corridor much like the one in my Hall of Residency, only this one was clearly underground. The light from the ceiling made the place seem an odd grey-green-blue-ish colour. I'm pretty sure that there was something happening that had to do with the dogs again, I think I may have had one of them with me but I can't swear on it. I had a copy of the national, daily news paper Dagens Nyheter with me, and suddenly I found an open door. Two people were inside playing table tennis, or badminton without a net. It might seem weird that I can't remember which, possibly they were playing both at different times during our conversations, but I'm dead sure there was no net for the supposed badminton match. These two people were the head of the political party Moderaterna (though not the real one, who is Prime Minister), this one was older and a woman from his party. I can not believe my eyes and immediately I dive into a discussion about the upcoming vote on the FRA law (which will grant the authorities permission to spy on any information that passes in and out of Swedish borders, like e-mails and such) which this party supports. Having read that anyone who votes against it in their party could be forced to leave it I had to ask about this. When I asked if it was true he said "Yes, it is. But that's true of all of the parties really." Then we got into a discussion of whether or not this was the case before I fell silent and started flipping through my paper, still sitting right outside that door. There was a full-page add in colour from a family looking for somewhere in the city for their son (who was starting university) to live. There was a picture of them on a lawn with an oak tree, in front of a house. Some kind of harness was attached to the oak tree and the "headline" of the ad went: "Where will [some kind of typical, cutesy dog name] get to swing now?" and it seemed that the ugly bulldog in the picture had some kind of swing for dogs in this tree and that they wanted a place for their son to live closer to the uni where they could still keep that harness swing-thing.

At this point Kit appeared. I think her boyfriend, Julian, was with her because I distinctly remember the presence of another person. As soon as she came up to me I know things were bad with her. If she's tired and the head ache she's had for six months is unusually bad her temper can be very bad too, but this time it was beyond bad. While I normally am on my toes around her when she's in a bad mood this time I was actually frightened. Somehow I just knew that one wrong word would push her from being upset to being suicidal. So I glanced over at the badminton-or-table-tennis-playing politicians and hoped there would be no more talk about the law she despised as much as I did (and do). I think I exchanged a look with Julian (if he was the one with her) and sort of agreed that "yeah, shit, she's right on the edge". A fresh wave of anxiety washed over me that was so bad I almost felt nauseous as I watched her take a few steps around the underground corridor. She then tore out a page from my paper, folded it into a little air plane and hurled it down the hall. It flew a long way and as it crashed a little girl with dark, curly hair came out from behind a door close to where the plane had landed. Kit folded a new plane and threw it, and the girl giggled and stretched her hands towards it as it came flying past her.
And then I woke up.

It might be useful to know that I watched a documentary about PETA last night (which pissed me off as they're a bunch of fakes) and that the FRA law stuff has been bothering me for a week so most of this dream is easy enough to interpret. I even think the colour of the fur on the dogs (which was supposed to be white) came from this as there is a manifestation of sorts outside the Parliament building tomorrow morning where people who are against the law will show up, dressed in all white.

The Dream of June 7-8

2008-06-08T12:00:00.003+02:00

Right, so, I had quite a dry spell for a while and then when the dreams came back, the blog did not. I may post short versions of ones I remember later, but probably not.

Kit graduates on Tuesday and we're flying to Stansted Wednesday morning and we'll head to Oxford from there to see Wes live. So, clearly, it's about time for my gig-travel-nerves to rear their ugly head and so they have.

In this dream we were indeed supposed to see Wes, but for some reason we'd not managed to get standing tickets before they ran out so we'd sent him a message about it and he, being the Wes we all love, said he'd get us in anyway and that we shouldn't bother with tickets. So far, he was very much himself.
The gig was, apparently, in my home town of Jönköping (though it looked nothing like it) in a venue that was actually a club (and does not exist in real life). It was run by someone who was a vicious bastard and much too stupid to run any kind of business, or so my brother had told me. The venue itself was actually quite cool. Standing stalls in the front (but quite a small area) and then two rows of seats behind it, and then clusters of seats on various levels behind that. Very odd looking but with surprisingly good acoustics.
Now, things get a bit weird as we're already inside but still looking for tickets, somehow. When I attempt to book the first time while inside I only get seats on row 4 and 5. We start to get worried and hope to find Wes to ask him about the arrangement with us getting tickets on the floor instead, ignoring the seated tickets we could buy.
What I can only assume is some kind of sound check starts and we get to hear one song from Wes before this other band shows up and sits down. They look like they belong at the Burg-Herzberg Festival and they have guitars, one violin and various odd drums and percussion instruments. At this point we're at the back of the room, up on some kind of balcony, behind the actual seats. Imagine the back wall of a venue, an elevated balcony with an open space behind it leading into the backstage area - that's where we were. And now Kit heads off to the backstage corridor to find Wes before he gets to the off-limit areas behind one of the doors. Another thing one should know about Kit in this dream is that she's working on some kind of project to do with the Spice Girls. It wasn't that she truly liked them, but I think part of her did and this project was her entire life for some reason, so anything she talked about - even if it was a subject that had nothing to do with the Spice Girls - could easily be related to her project.
I stray a bit, watching this new band - they were terrible, but the violinist was playing her instrument in a very odd way and I called out for Kit to come watch, she said that she didn't want to and that she had to ask Wes something. So I walk over to her and try to persuade her, and she takes one quick look at the violin player before we hear Wes approach and dart out again to meet him. Before I have a chance to open my mouth and say anything Kit has already (in a very hyper, frightening sort of way asked him if she can ask him a question). This is very unlike her, as she's normally a bit shy and... less scary. Wes says that he doesn't have time, in a very brusque manner. But she pleads with him and he gives in and agrees to answer one question very quickly. And, of course, she asks something that has to do with her Spice Girls project - and not about our tickets. What she asks is: "How long will it take before the very best pictures taken at a concert to be properly processed?" Don't ask me to explain it, I can't. I have no idea what pictures she's referring to, who is supposed to take them - Kit herself, a professional, some kind of magic robot - or how they have anything to do with her project. But somehow, Wes knows what she's talking about and says that it ought to take two weeks. And just before he's about to close the door he just walked through I manage to stop him and ask about our tickets. I don't remember his exact response but it was something along the lines of him not having the time nor inclination to deal with it and we had to sort it out ourselves (anyone who's ever met Wes will, at this point, realise why I consider this a nightmare).
Downtrodden, we head back to our little balcony thing and find that, by the seats on our right, just off to the back, there is now a man trying to break the world record of how high one can throw an object (that I've never seen before) that looks a bit like a plastic balloon. Someone's made a hole in the ceiling for him to throw it through and as he prepares to do so the man who runs the venue arrives from a door off to the side. Some kind of dance music issues from that door and this is when I realise that the venue is part of a bigger building with his club in it and that this man is calling the shots. It was definitely his idea to break that world record in the venue. It's hard to explain this man, he acts very strange and looks like a mixture of Peter Siepen (very annoying guy on Swedish television) and Alex from A Clockwork Orange.

After this there is more trouble with that club, its owner and whatnot. I think I exit the venue and find myself on the beach for some reason. And then they changed owners (which they'd done a few times before) and the new one was just as daft as the old one.

So, that's my demented dream of the day - I'll try to keep posting more of them from now on.

The Dream of February 5-6

2008-02-06T10:25:00.000+01:00

I can't actually put a face to the friend who was with me in this dream, but I think it was either Linnéa or Kit. And we were going to stay in this... I suppose it was something similar to a fraternity/sorority house but it was here at my uni. The difference between this place and a regular, Swedish hall of residency was quite obvious. The odd thing is that most of the place felt like it was underground. Odd corridors and rooms, twisting around themselves. Kind of like the trees that the Gummy Bears live in (for those who've seen that classic show!). It's difficult to describe in detail, but it just had the feel or a large underground shelter, all the corridors of it as small as possible. And it had that slightly damp smell of underground too.
It was clear that we were not in charge, that we were only guests or maybe initiates in whatever the organisation was. My neighbour, Carola, was there too and she had more respect than we did, but she was not one of the "top people".

At some point my friend needed to take a test and we were directed to a small table, in a room off the kitchen. We could hear the sounds from the dinner party in the kitchen area. A woman that I think was sort of a hybrid of a philosophy lecturer and an English lecturer I've had (both of them named Annika) and we were informed that under no circumstances whatsoever could our mobiles make any noise when she was talking - despite the fact that the noises from the rowdy party, her speech and the distance to us would've ensured that our phones could not bother them.
The odd thing was that the phones did not seem to be a problem for my friend's test. Neither was my presence there. Either way, she wrote her test and we talked to one of the "leaders" about leaving. And he said something about them having little kids in yellow raincoats stationed all the way back to where we actually lived and that we could not go there. We darted to a window - the first thing to suggest that we were actually not in a Gummy Bear-tree-type-underground-residency. Outside was this creepy, doll-like girl with huge eyes and a manic smile, wearing a yellow raincoat and she was staring at us. Naturally, it creeped us out. We were very frightened, but after a short discussion we reached the conclusion that he'd been lying and that they probably only had that one, creepy kid in a raincoat, and we decided to leave and go home.
After that I can't remember what happened. So I have no idea if we made it home or got killed by the creepy doll-kids. But I remember that we felt happy and confident about being right before we left.

The Dream of January 24-25

2008-01-25T08:57:00.000+01:00

I've been a bit under the weather and I was so tired that I slept for most of the day yesterday, and went to bed fairly early last night. As a result I had the longest dream, or rather series of dreams that sort of tied in with one another. I have very vague recollections of waking and remembering the beginning of this dream - which I've now forgotten the details of - but since this was such a long one I don't have clear recollections of the whole thing, so there will be some gaps in places.

I think that I was on a pier, or something, with Kit and some other people and we jumped in the water. And there was a heavy fog, but I have no idea what we were doing - all I know is that we somehow got away from each other and I know that I was walking along the beach very slowly, trying to navigate my way through the thick mist (those who know me will be wondering about the normality of this dream, well, just you wait).

I think at this point I was wearing something made out of tulle and silk, something quite odd - like a hybrid of a dress and suit. But I think that it was difficult to move around in since I'd been in the water and that I got rid of the bottom part of it as I was walking along the beach and now I was wearing a top of silk and tulle and the tights I'd been wearing underneath the dress-thing. In my hand was a glass of... chocolate milkshake (because if you're walking on a beach through the heaviest fog you've ever seen with no trousers on we all know you need milkshake.)
Suddenly I felt a hand on my back and I flinched and tried to get it off, saying something like "don't touch me!" but the hand was still there. So I turned and threw my milkshake in the face of what turned out to be a young main in what looked like a very expensive shirt and a backslick hairstyle. A typical Stockholm rich kid, carrying a bit of extra alcohol weight - like they so often do. He was furious and started chasing me but somehow I got away from him. After swimming for a while I found Kit and the others.

Here's a blank part, all I know is that I was trying to hide from him in different places but he kept coming after me. At some point Kit either stopped following me around as I was running or turned into a girl I knew as a kid - because the next part I remember does not feature Kit, but this girl Nina (who I recently remember thinking about, wondering what's happened to her).
I was now in Öxnehaga, the area in Jönköping that I lived in from age 2 to 11. (It's odd, I was just thinking that I don't know anyone who still lives there, all my friends who lived there when I did or after have since moved and I only go back there occasionally to get my hair cut at the hair salon I've been going to since I was little, but I now did a search of this girl Nina and found that she still lives there). Nina and I were about to go into the local grocery store (though it looked different) when two men came up to us and started yelling at me for doing what I'd done to whatever the rich guy's name was. I know these men from the Sweden Rock Festival message board and they are lovely, albeit a bit odd, people in real life. I remember feeling terribly sad in the dream, especially since the one who acted the worst in the dream is an absolute sweetheart and one of the best "huggers" in the world when you meet him in the real world. I don't remember exactly what they were yelling, but I remember that he spat me in the face. Nina dragged me into the store and I was crying (this was incredibly vivid) and thought "When we go to the Burg-Herzberg Festival this year he's going to be so mean to me and so nice to the others and it's going to be terrible!"

After this incident I was in a hotel room, thinking I was finally free. The walls, floor and bed spread was this dark, forest-y green and the doors were a dark wooden brown. Quite depressing, and disgustingly 70s. Suddenly the door opens and the man I'm running from enters, only now he's a different person (I'm not gonna say who, but I remember thinking that he kinda looked like the guy who would seem nice and quite and then turn out to be an insane serial killer). He says that he's in "that room" and indicates a door in my room that I had not noticed before this. It has a number and everything, clearly his room's entrance is in my room. He enters his room, shuts the door and even though I know the dream continued after this, I can't remember any more.

This was not as cool as I would've wanted the first dream after such a long absence to be, but that's all I remember of it - sorry.

The Dream of January 6-7

2008-01-08T02:03:00.000+01:00

Last night at Kit's place.

Don't know how or why I wound up there, but I think I'd been swimming in a lake or ocean, possibly lake Vättern as I'm pretty sure I was in some odd version of Jönköping. And I hadn't been anticipating the swim as I stripped down to my underwear to do it - something I'd never do in real life, a one-piece bathing suit is embarrassing enough, thank you very much.
Upon returning to the spot where I'd left my clothes I realised that they were gone. So it seemed I'd have to walk home half-naked. After a while I found a nightgown or something, at least that's what I think it was. It was a thin, white, cotton material anyways and it wasn't a great help but it would have to do. I walk along this road that seems to be an on-ramp to a motorway or something, but it was heading uphill, with another road crossing below it, and modern and strange architecture really close around it. I think it reminded me of an album cover, but I can't remember which one.

Somehow I found myself in a restaurant. But not at a table or on the floor, but on some kind of decoration or lamp hanging from the ceiling. There were plenty of them, they were red and had a circular shape to them. Each lamp/decoration was placed at a different distance from the floor, to give it more of an effect, I suppose. It would be tricky to manouvre between them and to the ground, but as I stood there wondering how to do it, I saw someone standingon one of them just below me and decided to follow him. It was Will Smith, and this was all part of a scene he was shooting for one of those sort-of-drama-sort-of-comedy-for-the-entire-family type films he likes to do. I got down from there, somehow, without disturbing the scene and then I went home. Back at home I locked the door behind me since someone had tried to open it from outside every now and then over the last few days, and it was making my brother quite frightened.
Then, later that day, we heard it again, and I slowly made my way to the door and saw a pair of small, pink shoes through the letter box. Confused by this I opened the door and outside was a girl who looked a lot like the middle-child from the family featured on "Medium". When I asked if she'd been trying to open our door for days she said that she had. So I asked her why and she said that she thought our flat was the only way to the thirteenth floor where her grandfather lived. Now, our building has seven floors where our flat is, and eight in some other places. But in the dream there were twelve where we lived and thirteen in number three, where her grandfather lived. For some reason she couldn't get in through the front door in number three, I don't know why. But then there was something with an elevator and an attic and... I'm not sure what else, but I think the girl got home to her grandfather all right.

The Dream of January 3-4

2008-01-05T18:21:00.000+01:00

So, I'm at Kit's for a few days and apparently listening to the B-side of Close to the Edge while sleeping is inducive to having strange dreams. And clearly, my return to World of Warcraft has affected my subconscious too.

Me and my brother were on a grassy slope just by a tower, typical of WoW. And the environment seemed very medieval. However, commercial planes were circling above us and my brother pulled out a bazooka and shot one down.
"Try it, it's fun!" he said. So I did. But I missed the first shot. I had more luck the second time and a plane crashed just one hundred metres away. Immediately people ran there to loot the wreckge and we followed. I found a pack of either really thin books or thick pamphlets. They were from some religious cult and dealt with "sexual abnormalities", like homosexuality and stuff. Clerly this organisation was stupid.

Suddenly the dream shifted and we were at a gas station where a friend of ours (not a real one, just a dream one) were loading stuff into the back of a huge SUV type car. The pamphlets were stuck between some of the stuff he'd loaded and I pulled them out Now, the government was run by this cult and our friend was going to some clandestine meeting for gay group sex. They were supposed to fake-kidnap him or something and I was really worried and told him to be careful. Just about here the dream ended, but I think that I just had time to see his car be stopped and attacked by men in dark suits.

I had an even weirder dream last night, but even though I tried to remember it when I woke up in the middle of the night I couldn't remember it after a few more hours of sleep. (:-(

The Dream of December 27-28

2007-12-28T14:41:00.000+01:00

I don't remember planning it, and I don't remember actually going. But I remember Kit and I being outside some kind of venue in Florida. I'm not sure where it was, the only thing I can say for certain is that it wasn't in Tampa.
We were going to see Porcupine Tree (unusual, eh?) and when we got there we got to see the opening band on this outdoor stage. But it wasn't really an opening band so much as a mixture of musicians that were not in a band together, really. Gavin was playing the drums, Danny from Anathema was playing the guitar. There were these two keyboard players whose keyboards were facing one another. I don't think they're "real" but the fair-haired one on the left was someone we knew from hanging out at the Mellotronen shop or something in the dream. He was in a band back in Stockholm and we'd secretly mocked him for not knowing how to pronounce Gavin's name. Anyways, the guys were really getting into it and it sounded great, but then there was this weird passage where the two keyboard players took turns hissing Gavin's name into the microphones. It sounded just like the bit in Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "The Lost Christmas Eve" where this kid is whispering "Christmas", "Christmas", etc. Except that this was Gavin's name and it clearly wasn't planned 'cause Gavin started laughing and almost lost his rhythm. Yeah, I know, like that's ever gonna happen.
After this gig, they started to clear away the stage, or rather the equipment placed on the ground, basically, as there wasn't really a stage and no fences or anything. So we realised that the "real deal" would not be out here. We spotted a stage and loads of amps through the windows of the building behind the outdoor stage and ran to the entrance. The line was long and we were really upset that we'd not gotten to the front. But as we got closer to the entrance we saw that people weren't moving towards the stage, they were mingling in the entrance hall. A bit relieved I asked Kit to take out the envelope with the tickets. As she did we realised that our trip had been so sudden that we hadn't told anyone we were coming. Not Mel, not Wes or Sam, and not Lynn (who in my dream had moved to Florida too). We were a bit downtrodden by our own lack of sense but at least we were going to see PT. So we got the tickets out of the envelope and there was this folded up, freakiskly long set of ticket-sized papers that had the shipping address, receipt, ads and sponsorship information on them (usually you get one or two bits added on to the actual tickets when UK venues send them to your home, but nothing like this!). Two of them would be our tickets and we had to find them. We could only find one and when we reached the woman checking the tickets we were really nervous about the whole thing. She said she'd find the second ticket for us (she seemed really nice), but after a minute she declared that there was no second ticket, only one. And of course we got upset but I managed to keep my cool and gave her my name and credit card number so that she could check her computer stuff for information on my purchase. She came back and said that I'd ordered one ticket for the indoor event and one for the earlier, outdoor event (clearly this doesn't make sense as we both attended the outdoor thing). Now I got really frightened as the gig was sold out and we couldn't get a second ticket. So I asked if she'd seen Sam, the tour manager. She hadn't and I begged her to let me go look for him a bit, since we had one ticket and all. It was all right so I headed for the stage and saw Steven over by a window. I darted forward:
"Is there any chance you could help me, Steven?" I blurted out before even reaching him and realising that it wasn't Steven at all, just a very calm-looking fan who'd donned the hair and glasses. He must've heard me wrong because he said:
"Sure, I can help you meet Steven later."
I wasn't sure if he tried to brag that he knew Steven or if he thought I was coming onto him and this was some kind of perverted game he was hoping to play. Either way I was surprised and disgusted and excused myself immediately.
I kept looking for Sam, and asked a couple of security guards who had no idea who Sam was. I even asked for "someone in the crew who speaks English with an American accent" as that only left Sam and Wes and seemed like safe bet they would've noticed. Nothing. Then I saw Hans and thought to myself: "I can not ask HIM to fetch Sam AGAIN!" and I didn't need to, because then he came out on stage. The beard was a little trimmed, but still there (so apparently his mother hadn's slapped it off his face yet, like he once told us she would).
"Sam! Sam!" I shouted and moved towards the stage. There was a lot of commotion around me but he still managed to hear me and came right on over. At this point the fear of the prospect of having to miss PT when we'd travelled so far to see them really set in and tears started pouring down my face. I felt like an idiot but I couldn't help it. I managed, somehow, to explain the situation to Sam and felt even more like an idiot when I heard myself beg him to help us if he could. He responded by giving me a great, big hug and tell me everything was going to be all right, he'd sort it all out. I wiped my tears and turned around to see Kit standing there, smiling and giving me the thumbs up for finding Sam. Apparently that kind woman by the entrance had let her in to help her look for Sam.
Next Sam told us to relax, the gig wouldn't start for ages and there was some kind of local teen marching band playing before them (and they sucked) and we should head over to the adjoining café before the gig and we'd still get to the front, no worries.
We sat down and the woman from the entrance served us tea and some weird looking cake-thing that apparently was a local specialty. You poured boiling water into it and it soaked it up and tasted even better than before. Really weird, but it was great. We looked out the window and saw this beautiful sunlit street (despite the fact that it had been dark outside when we queued to get into the venue) heading down from a lovely park to some really old stone houses and we were really impressed by this beautiful town. The woman came over and we tried to pay for the tea and cakes, but she said it had been taken care of already.
"What? Was it Sam who paid?"
She smiled and nodded and started talking about Sam and Wes and how nice they were. Then she asked if we knew if Wes was driving over from Tampe on his own (this is how I know we weren't in Tampa) but we had no idea.

I think this is where I woke up, and my first thought was that the view from the café window didn't match Florida. The stone houses were too old (like 14th, 15th century) and the park looked very English, nature-wise.
This dream was just a lot of the good experiences from our recent trip to the UK (which was a great success in every way, despite my worries!) mixed in with some odd stuff that I always find in my dreams. Blogs about the UK trip (that got extended to Finland) will be posted on www.myspace.com/campmanerg before New Year's, should you want to read about it.

The Dream of December 2-3

2007-12-03T13:28:00.000+01:00

Things start out normal enough, but then there are some things that are just weird, and some things that are a bit... well, I won't get too graphic. Then there are a couple of things so weird I still, even as I write this, can't decide whether to include them or not.

OK. Once again the upcoming PT trip rears it's lovely head and this time things started out in the area I lived in between ages two and eleven. It was dark and Kit and I were waiting for the airport coach to arrive. I'm not sure what happened after we saw the bus arrive but then we were on this huge cruise ship, probably a lot like the one we'll be going on in March. Anyway, Beppo and Linnéa had joined us now, and why they were there I have no idea since this probably was a music cruise and we don't really listen to the same music.
I was off doing my own thing when I somehow ended up in this room that some people were staying in. It looked nothing like the real rooms on these ships, they had a really big living room - with a bath tub in one corner - and a really big bedroom next to it. The people staying there were some male musicians, their kids and these two girls who were their assistants (yes, they really were assistants and nothing else, though I have no idea why these guys needed them). One of the guys was supposedly French, though he had this really odd name that he actually had to write down for me to be able to learn it. One first name, two last names. He was living in India, though clearly not Indian, he had long, black hair in a pony tail, and it was quite curly. I'd say he was about 35-40 years old and judging by the teeth he was British (pardon my dental humour, but his teeth were not... bad, but certainly he didn't have that store-bought Hollywood smile), and he had a son who was about nine and had blond hair (and spoke British English). I remember that he was a widower (the man, not the boy), but I don't think he ever really told me, somehow I found out though. So me and French-British-Indian guy got on really well and then I left when it got really late.
Now, here some weird stuff comes in. Somehow, I know there was an earthquake. I think some of the interiors of the boat took some damage, but no one talked about it and everything else was fine. And I never made it back to our room because I met this man on the stairs going down who told me that Beppo had gotten really drunk and vomited on Kit's clothes and she was now washing them in the toilet. So I figured "fuck this" and headed back up to look for my Frenchman. And I found him sitting at a table not far from his room, playing poker. When I showed up he excused himself and we went to his rooms. The others were sleeping in the bed room and there were these windows between the two rooms that had blinds in them, blinds that were closed. And we sat there talking about his work, he was a session guitarist, when he said that he was playing Mejeriet with R.E.M soon. Mejeriet is, by the way, a venue in Lund that I've never been to and that is much too small for R.E.M, a band I don't really like. We agree that we should meet up at that gig and we keep talking. He tries to teach me how to pronounce his name - not that it was a great success - and then... well. There was some making out and removal of clothing. Aaaand then (here be one of the parts so weird that you're all going to think I'm deranged), for some reason, I was leaning over the bath tub and he was rinsing my hair, as if I'd had schampoo in it or something (which I hadn't). After this, I was in the bath tub and he was sitting next to it and we were kissing when I realised that the other people staying in that room
were watching us through the window. They were smiling. Not in a perverted way but more like "aww, our friend has finally found a girl". He got up to go in there and tell them to bugger off, or something, and I grabbed a towel and got out of the tub. My bra was on a table right next to the tub, except when I looked now there were ten bras, or something like that. I started looking for the one I felt sure I'd been wearing - because all of the other ones looked like other bras of mine. Thinking I must have remembered wrong I picked one up, and it was a 95 D (yup, European sizes, live with it) which is too big for me. Then I picked up another one which was "90A - for men" and I remember thinking "wtf???" in the dream before I put it back down and found the one I'd been wearing.
When I was dressed I felt a bit embarrassed and decided to head back to my room for some serious girl talk with Linnéa, who is really good at that stuff. But she's packing and says she has to go catch a train (apparently we're no longer on a ship, but at a hotel or something) to get home.* She says that she could ride with her parents in their car and leave thirty minutes later but that a car ride was probably the last thing her stomach flu needed. And then my mobile alarm clock went off and woke me up.

*As I typed this I had a recollection of a dream I must've had like six months ago where I was at this railway station that wasn't huge or anything, but had... Instead of tunnels running under the tracks that people could use to get to the platforms they had huge steel constructions with stairs and stuff to walk around. And it was dark out but this place was really well lit. I might have been chased by someone, because later in the same dream I remember being on a train, trying to run and hide from someone. Strange how thinking of some dreams brings back memories of other ones, isn't it?

So, that was my weird dream. The rinsing out my hair and bra for men was... well, weird. But I still maintain that Kit's dream that featured Peter Hammill speaking Swedish in a Scanian accent was weirder. I haven't dreamt about Peter Hammill for a long time. I hope I will soon. And I really hope that he's got his normal language and accent.
Though, at least my Frenchman was quite attractive. That's something, I guess.

The Dreams of November 27-28

2007-11-28T12:10:00.000+01:00

I know for a fact that there were at least three dreams, but there's one I just can not remember at the moment, and the two I do remember are a bit blurry, but here goes:

In the first one I was in what could only be described as something that reminds me of a castle, but it was probably "our time", and not the Middle Ages or something. I think I may have been part of a royal family, but we were quite normal. I remember that it was really hot outside and that that the environment was very dry, definitely not Sweden. And for some reason an old class mate of mine was my brother and we were like... the king's children or something. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but somehow he... sort of fell down a well. Except it wasn't a well, it was more of a hatch in the ground and there was this enormous underground space there... and he was hanging from a rope or something. I have no idea why we didn't get him out, but we couldn't. And so we called in MacGyver. Yup. MacGyver. He did his thing and got my, sort of, brother out of the uhhh well-hatch-thingie.

Then I think there was perhaps some kind of segue (which would be the dream I can't remember) into the next one, because I remember me and my mum getting out of the car (her new car, again, I wonder why it keeps appearing in my dreams - I must really like that damn car) in Nässjö, where her parents live. And I'm not sure what happened next but I remember that we were playing a board game or something, and there was something about getting these little creatures around in a circle a number of times. Depending on which creature you had they had to make it around the board a different amount of times. Because they moved at different speeds, though you were still the person moving them around. I can't explain it but they both moved on their own and didn't. All of them were black and left little trails of black goo that vanished after a few seconds. They kind of reminded me of liquorice.

This is all I remember. For once, I really can not figure out what brought these dreams on. There's nothing in them I can relate to anything, really. Except going to my grandparents. Christmas is coming up so I'll be going there with my mum and my brother, but that's it. Anyone want to have a go at this one?

The Dream of November 12-13

2007-11-13T13:14:00.001+01:00

Well, boys and girls, it's Porcupine Tree tour season. You know what that means? Yup. Loads, and loads of odd, scary and totally weird Porcupine Tree gig-dreams for me. Bus drivers go on strike, blizzards ground all flights to the UK, RyanAir goes bankrupt and we're nuked, band members get sick and postpone all December UK gigs... I tell you, the upcoming trip is going to give me ulcers. Especially since there has been no word on the tickets yet. Fucking seetickets idiots. How hard is it to reply to an e-mail and give an update on the tickets? Do they not have opposable thumbs?

Aaaaanyway. So, I had this dream that was... Well, I have to clear some things up first. This gig was always in a small venue in what looked like this old barn-like place. But the mood kept changing for me. At first it was as if it was just a regular PT gig, and Kit and I were so excited, but there were technical problems. Then the mood shifted and suddenly this was a PT gig like... ten years ago and the band was unknown, getting screwed over by the venue and promoter, and Kit and I did not know each other (although we were the same ages we are now).

Before the gig started, there were hardly any people in the venue, and we talked to Steven for a while up front by the stage. And it was really cool because we weren't nervous in the slightest and just had a really nice conversation with him. We've talked to Steven and the rest of the band several times, and while it's a lot easier now we still do feel reeeaaally nervous, which is why I vividly remember how wonderful this conversation was.
After we'd talked the band played and there were problems or something and they had to take a break. Everyone got frustrated and we weren't sure what was going on. When they came back the mood had changed and it was ten years earlier, the band was different - even though they were still their present day selves and Gavin and Wes were there - and Kit was a total stranger to me. There was this crazy old woman behind me that I talked to, she had no clue who this band was, she just happened to live in the rural area that the gig took place in. It was up north, in a province called Dalarna (sometimes referred to as Dalecarlia in English) - that I've never been to - and in my dream all the people there were cracked. I was the only one who was there for the band, well, Kit probably was too, but at this point I didn't know her.
They took another break, during which more scary people talked to me, and then they came back on. After a few more songs, and a few more problems I suddenly saw SW with this advent calendar thing. And he opened the 24th "door" and read the name of what sounded like a snapsvisa, in quite impressive Swedish pronounciation. Apparently, the fact that this was written in the advent calendar meant that they had to play it. I do not know if they did, I suppose I would have remembered, and then they finished the gig and I got to talk a bit to SW. I said it was such a shame that they'd pulled out that snapsvisa for no good reason. He said that promoters in some countries did that a lot to them and that they had to put up with it. Apparently it was also quite common in Poland. I suggested that next time they should just tell the promoter to fuck off. At this point I think I suggested a couple of fitting phrases in Swedish that could be used for this purpose, and SW had no problem with them, he must've picked up on a lot of Swedish while working with Opeth and Paatos. Then he excused himself and said the band had to leave now, and just before he left I called out to him and told him that the only phrase I knew in Polish might help when Polish promoters tried the same thing. He asked what it was, I told him, and he asked me to repeat it. Clearly his Polish wasn't as good as his Swedish. So I did and he wondered what it meant. I told him that it means "you're a fucking dick". And, this actually IS the only phrase I know how to say in Polish (can't type it though, sorry).
Again, the mood shifted, and now Kit and I were leaving the messed up gig. The mood was so subdued that I think in this alternate-universe-mood the band had said they'd never play in Sweden again. Stupid Sweden.

The Dream of November 8-9

2007-11-12T18:00:00.000+01:00

OK, so it's been a few days since I had this dream and I've been at Kit's and seen Riverside & Anekdoten since, but I did try to "go through" this dream inside my head several times to keep the details as clear as possible.

I was in high school, and for some reason it was this really small, all-girl school. In Sweden we have regular schools run by the municipalities and an increasing number of schools that are run privately. They don't cost money (in most cases at least) and they're usually focused on specific types of subjects. My school was one of these, though why it was all-girls I have no idea. In fact, the thought of going to an all-girl school horrifies me beyond belief.
Anyways, we were on a school trip of some sort. I think we might have been putting together some kind of Lucia celebration, but it could've been anything, really. We were in something that looked a lot like a warehouse. I think there was a boy there that I noticed for some reason, there might have been a conversation or something with him, but this part has become too blurry for me to retell. However, I did see two men in their mid-thirties there and at the time I didn't think anything of them. Just two men, one of them was Asian and one was African.

Something happens, I don't know what, or how, but suddenly I find myself in a house. There's a view from my window and I am very unfamiliar with the surroundings, but I know that I've been kidnapped. For some reason they haven't taken my mobile so I dial 112 (the emergency number in Sweden) and it doesn't work properly. I have no idea what's going on at first, but then for some reason I find out that I'm in Sudan and I dial 00 46 112, hoping that the international access code of Sudan is 00 like in most other countries. Apparently it is, at least in my dreamworld. And when someone answers I tell them my name, personal ID number (everyone in Sweden has one) and that I've been kidnapped and I'm in Sudan, but that I was at school in Norrköping (a town I've never lived in) when it happened. The woman on the other line laughs at me. "This is the emergency number for Uppsala!" Then one of us hangs up.
A few days pass by, someone puts a plate of food under my door every now and then and when I wake up one morning I look out of the window and the view is different. I'm in Hong Kong. I call again, and tell them whatever information I might have left out last time and that I've been moved to Hong Kong - anything that might help them find me there. Nothing. No one believes me.
A few more days go by and I look out the window. I'm in the country-side, in what looks like Sweden. And I realise that the room has never changed, even though the view has. From what I understand, they've been drugging me and I've been hallucinating different environments - probably based on the ethnicities of the two men who kidnapped me. And, again, I call for help and I know that in the end they were caught. But I think I managed to escape on my own first (not sure though, I can't remember actually escaping from the house), because I remember seeing this... place somewhere that has been in my dreams before. It looks like a mixture of three different places I've been to in real life. There's a gravel road with houses on the left side of it, and a field on the right. It goes up a slope and turns a bit to the right, past another house, and I think it leads to the house I was held in. But that same place has appeared before in dreams of mine, I'm certain of it. And the weird part is, as I look up towards the end of that road I can hear myself breathe. Drawing fast and heavy breaths, and my heart is always beating very fast.
I think I may have run from something there before. I'm desperately trying to remember in what dream, or dreams, I've been to that place, but it's difficult. Somehow I'm certain that a detailed dream has taken place there, but I think it's been six months, at least, since I had it. Damn. Should've started this blog earlier. (:-P

The Dream of October 31 - November 1

2007-11-01T11:53:00.000+01:00

So, this dream began with me and Kit piloting a commercial airplane. Huge thing, much larger than the RyanAir ones I'm used to. And it was maroon, not sure that matters, but still. Apparently my art class was going somewhere, because both my professors and all the people in my class were on the plane. Why Kit was there, I have no idea. Nor why we were the ones flying the damn thing. The really odd thing (well, ONE of the really odd things) was that we were indoors when we were preparing for takeoff. Like in a long, huge corridor. And we were not on the ground floor of the building, but on the second floor, making this even weirder. The building had a roof that covered it all the way to the end of the landing strip where there was no wall or anything. It was as if someone had just torn off the wall and the building ended there. And still we were supposed to get the plane to take off at the exact end of the runway, otherwise the plane would fall down to the ground when we reached the end. If you know me and Kit at all you will probably have realised by now that that's exactly what happened. And my teachers, my class... They were all yelling att me, telling me I fucked up and that I'd ruined the school trip. The plane was still fine, the ten feet drop had done nothing to damage it, and we were on this road right by a huge lake. There was a bridge across it and I suggested we try to take off from the bridge instead. Again, people yelled at me. This time for my stupid ideas. So I said: "Well, let's just... drive out on the bridge and go to Visingsö!" Visingsö is an island in the middle of Lake Vättern, the second largest lake in Sweden. I grew up in Jönköping, at the southern tip of that lake and I can tell you that there is no bridge to that island. But still, we went on the bridge in our plane.

Now, we've arrived on the island and we're looking around. It would make sense that we'd be going to view art or architecture, but suddenly we were in this huge place that held a whole bunch of smaller buildings inside it. They were fairly large, but not large enough to fit what the doors to them actually claimed they contained. The sets of pretty much every American daytime soap there is + a few more that don't exist, that I just made up. So we start sprinting down the "street" to look at every little house and see which ones are there. After six or seven of them we reached a much smaller one that didn't have the name of a soap on it, but actually the name of an actor. I don't really know his name and I didn't in the dream either, I just knew who he was anyway. The guy who plays "Renegade". That weirdo... outlaw, or whatever he was, from the TV series with the same name. You know, that 80's one where everyone has weird hair. For some reason, I decide that it would be so much fun to kick down his door, and no doubt he would be impressed. Behind me someone, not Kit, is shouting that I shouldn't. But still I do, and the second the door has been kicked down I know it was a mistake and I run. Not far, just to the sofa that's just nearby. There's a table too, and on the other side is a chair with a woman sitting on it. Then there are shouts from the room of the actor and I hear running steps from somewhere else, and more shouting.
"What the hell?!" said the voice from the room.
"It's all right, it was just a mistake!" shouts one of the two men who are running towards the room.
"Who are those girls? Give me one good reason not to shoot them!" says the man who has emerged from the actor's dressing room - only it's not the dude from Renegade, it's someone I've never seen before.
However, the two men who came running are the dude from Renegade and his sidekick, you know, the native American guy with the even goofier hair. And now I realise it's not the actors, but the actual characters.
"That one...", says Renegade, indicating the woman in the chair, "is my wife."
"And the other one...", says the sidekick dude, "is my girlfriend."
Now, I know that what he said saved my life and I ought to be grateful, but still, all I can do is to, very loudly, blurt out: "EEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWW!!!!!" at the thought of us being a couple.

And then I woke up.

The Dream of October 20th, approx. 3am - 4am CET

2007-10-20T04:44:00.000+02:00

I just awoke from this dream about half an hour ago and I think I need to get it out of my system before I try to sleep again, because just now - as soon as I started to drift off - I wound up right back inside it, even before I was even fully asleep. And it's not a funny dream, well, perhaps parts of it might seem to someone who just reads it, but every moment of it was drenched in anxiety, fear and nausea. I'll make little comments about how things relate to reality as I go along, since it seems necessary this time.
It started off all right, I think I was having a dream inside my dream - or it was its own dream and I just was aware of the fact that it was not real as the second dream started. I dreamt that Rush were playing (as they will on October 27th) but that they played completely different songs from their real ones. I vividly remember that they were playing "What's the colour of love?" (a song performed by two Swedish women sometime in the late 80's, I think. It's also a song my choir sings occasionally and I went to a party with my choir last night) and they were really upset with me - or possibly the whole crowd - for not knowing and singing along to the songs (odd, since after singing this one with my choir, I know it a lot better than most Rush songs). I think they stormed off the stage and that most of my friends who were at the gig blamed me for it. Kit, Magnus, Cristoffer, Claes, Harald - and loads of others.

Then the second dream began, or I awoke from this one in my dream. And I was so frightened of this happening that I began to search frantically for Rush songs on my comp to learn them. But at the same time I had a lot of other things going on too - stories I was reading online, and videos I was watching. I think that one of the stories had some kind of sexual content. There was something weird about how I was feeling, and I remember that details of the dream were sort of swimming together and I know that Rush somehow got affected by this in my dream. I definitely didn't dream that I was having sex with them or imagining that I was in the dream, but I am very certain that there was something about that, even if it's something untangible (It's important to straighten out that there was something sexual about one of those stories since something later in the dream will be affected by it). I remember that one of the videos I had going on youtube was a man talking on a grassy hill with a tree that was overlooking the ocean and it was quite windy there.

At some point, the focus shifts from what is happening on the computer to what is happening in the room, and I somehow become aware that not everything is right. I'm living in a room that seems to be on a floor that's more of an attic of this old house, the walls are wooden and the ceiling is at an angle (I don't know how to describe this in English, really, except point out that the ceiling was higher in one end of the room and lower in another - not just flat and at the same distance from the floor in every part of the room). I'm not sure if I exit the room first or not, and I'm not sure if we say anything before this, but I start talking loudly to my mum who is in the room next to mine and at some point she says:
'I know it's really warm, but just try to sleep!'
and I, who had not even noticed anything odd in temperature, go to check my thermometer, which is attached to a toilet in my room. It might be in a small bathroom that's sort of part of the room, I don't remember exactly, but it's still a very odd place to keep a thermometer and I think I realise this in the dream too. It's at 36,7 degrees celsius, I think. That's body temperature - so yes, it's warm as hell. And only now do I notice. Now that I have other things start to become apparent, like that the humidity and heat of the room have started to make items softer, and almost melt.The desk and computer screen have the texture of a very thick kind of paper that's been soaked in water. Next, I look up and see that the lamp on my ceiling has this little net attached around it, and inside them are bugs. Big ones. They've got a dirty kind of yellowish bodies that are about the size and shapes of large cigars, and wings so they're flying around in there. It's not a big net as such, and there are quite a few bugs so it's cramped. I alert my mother about this, fear making my heart beat faster and increasing my dread, unease and nausea about the whole situation in the dream.
'Which bugs? The large yellow ones flying around the lamps?' she then yelled from inside her room.
'Yes!'
'Oh, they're harmless! I'm more concerned about the big black ones crawling around under my bed.'
My breathing is really fast now and I know that I'm almost in tears, I'm so afraid. And I get on my knees and look under the bed - but I can't for the life of me remember if I found any bugs under there. I probably did, because I remember what those black ones looked like. They were like crayfish, only not quite so large (though, close enough to make them absolutely horrifying). And I storm into my mother's room without knocking. I remember thinking that this was wrong but at the same time she didn't say anything about it. Though, I have the same kind of hazy recollection of her doing something that I didn't want to interrupt, or not want to see or... I have no idea what - nothing perverted or anything, just something private. Just that sense of having bothered someone.
'What the hell are we going to do?' I asked, in a pleading voice.
'It'll be all right,' she says, but I am convinced that it won't be.
When I exit the room someone comes out of the room opposite hers. There's this little area by the stairs with no decorations except an ugly old rug of some kind, and another lamp on the ceiling with a net and trapped yellow bugs in it. There are four or five doors up there and the person who comes out is my mother's tenant. I know this, and this is probably the only part that I can, now, think about and see the humour in without being reminded about the way I felt throughout the dream. The tenant is Dennis Rodman. Yup. And in the dream it's the most natural thing in the world to have the NBA hero renting a room in my mum's old house. He wonders what all the loud talking is all about and does not seem bothered by any of the things wrong with the house.

I go back to my room and now my brother has joined me and he's noticed that I have a lot of stuff going on with my comp.
'Whoa, you need to upgrade your [enter name of some weird software that makes everything run smoother and definitely does not exist]! There's a new version out, it's great!'
'Not now, I'll do it later!' I reply, in a forbidding voice since I am aware of the story (or whatever it was) of a sexual nature that I still have open in word, or firefox.
'But see here, look!' he says, and he's opened a picture of the tray icon of the new, updated version of the software, 'Look at this oven - it's so much better than the old oven!'
Yes, I know. Oven? But for some reason, this makes perfect sense. The tray icon picture is definitely the picture of an oven - even though it's not, I can even sort of describe it. It was black with some red bits in it, the bottom half of the icon is mostly red - and all that redness illustrates how good the software is, compared to my old "oven" which is black and green - and the green in the black is much more sparse than the red ones on his version. Yeah, OK, this was funny too - but remember that in this dream not only did this software make sense to me, but I was also in a excruciatingly hot and humid room with bugs the size of my hands in it, a toilet with a thermometer. All this in an old, wooden house that also had Dennis Rodman living in it. Yeah, OK, the whole scenario is hilarious - but I was so frightened, and felt so sick and afraid in the dream - I felt worse than I have in any dream for a long time.

While my brother was updating that software I walked over to the only window in the room and found that my view was that same grassy hill with a tree that I had seen in the video on Youtube, and I had not been aware of this before. Then I sat down on the floor and a kitten walks up to me, it's eight weeks old (approx.) and I know that I have stolen it from a girl who was my best friend when I was ten but who later moved and we lost contact, running into each other just once a few years ago. The kitten (which by the way is white and grey, definitely REAL and in reality belongs to my brother's girlfriend - though it's a bit older now) walks up to me like it wants to be stroked or cuddled, but at first I ignore it. But as it turns to walk away I realise that I want to cuddle it and reach out to grab it. As I do, it apparently decides that it doesn't want to be cuddled and tries to walk away from my hand, and I tighten my grip to seize it and lift it up. But, and this was SO horrible in the dream, my grip isn't on the body right behind the front legs, where I would normally hold a kitten that I want to lift. I squeeze tha back of its body instead and I squeezed too hard. I remember that I could feel the internal organs through it's skin and fur and bile rose in my throat. The kitten seemed unharmed though and I immediately put it in my lap to make sure it was all right. By now, my brother had also sat down on the floor right opposite me. The kitten leaves my lap to go to my brother instead. I remember telling him that I've borrowed the cat and will be watching it for a few days.
'Oh,' he says, and that's the last thing I remember before waking up.

And now I'm supposed to be getting up in an hour to take a shower, pack a few things, and catch a train to Gävle with my friend Beppo. I had trouble falling asleep in the first place and as I mentioned couldn't shake the dream environment as I was trying to fall back to sleep before. But I'll try again now, maybe I can get half an hour of shut-eye.
Anyways, here's hoping the next dream is more pleasant but equally weird.

I am SO not reading all this through to check for mistakes and typos, even when I do I've noticed I miss loads of them. Perhaps something about just having awoken and hurrying to type out one's dreams before they are forgotten makes those mistakes a bit more frequent than they normally are. (:-P

The Dream of an unknown October night

2007-10-14T21:30:00.000+02:00

I don't remember exactly when this was, and the dream is very short. But after retelling it to Kit, who played a major role in it and getting positive feedback I have to post it. (:-)

I'm in a church, a small one, probably early 19th century - the decor is made only of wood. The seats are old-fashioned pews, you know, wide benches on each side that have little wooden doors you have to open to take a seat. I'm in a wedding dress and I'm marrying a musician. I don't think it's a "real" musician, I'm fairly certain that he was fictional. Anyway, we're walking down the aisle, slowly, to the music. The song playing is "Get Down" by the Backstreet Boys (now there's the 'go figure' of the century), and everyone is turning to look at us as we walk past them, but they're all still seated. Big, friendly smiles covering all of their face. Except for Kit, who is grinning like an idiot from her seat right by the aisle. And when I walk past her she jumps up and yells "HIGH FIVE!!!". So I high five her and we burst out laughing. We're laughing the way we usually do after spending a few days 'on the road' together and not getting enough sleep as we're on buses from town to town, checking out gigs. And then I wake up.

When I told Kit about this dream she informed me that she will most definitely do this if I ever do get married. I won't mind, weddings are usually too uptight anyway. (:-)

The Dream of September 24-25

2007-09-25T13:55:00.000+02:00

In this dream I was talking to some exchange students, French guys. And they were talking about new exchange students coming in from France the next day. I offered to drive to the airport and pick them up. What a brilliant idea! It's not like I have a driver's license or a car... But for some reason I had my mum's old car in the dream, a 1990 Ford Fiesta (or Death Trap, whichever name you prefer).
Before I drove to the airport I ended up at this kid's birthday party. The only people there were me, the kid's mum and some bloke she was dating or something, and an whole bunch of kids. For some reason the potential step-father bought the kid a keyboard and the kid was pressing all the weid buttons he could find ending up with all sorts of horrible rhythms and then of course he couldn't play at all. The man who gave it to him was half-heartedly trying to play an actual melody at the same time, but failed to do so. Then he looked up at me, our eyes met and he gave me this odd look.

The dream shifts.
Now it's time to go to the airport, I get in the car and head for Skavsta, whick is about 80 minutes, or so, by car. For some reason, probably fear of having to park next to other cars and not managing that, I find a deserted parking lot a little further away from the airport. When I get out of the car I know exactly which way to go to get to Skavsta Airport. But then I get to this area enclosed by mountains, where there seems to be a camp of some sort. Teenagers, no doubt on the run from their families, seem to be living here and I just know they kill outsiders (I think I'm sort of familiar with them and their story). So I do my best to try to look a few years younger than I actually am and... well, more sulky than I actually am too. Somehow I make it through the camp.
Then I hear on the radio, which is odd since I didn't have one with me, that police have heard reports of a non-licensed driver in the area and are on the lookout, putting up some roadblocks and stuff. Now, the police in this province DO have far too much time on their hands, but this seems a bit extreme. And how did they know? I hadn't run into any trouble at all so far, so how on earth they knew I didn't have a license I have no idea. But I'm too scared to go to the airport, so I just head into the neighbouring town - Nyköping - instead. It looked just like the neighbourhood I lived in when I was a kid. And I've been to Nyköping a couple of times and I know what it looks like in real life.
I walk around there a little bit before deciding to head back home. The road blocks have been removed and I set off. The odd thing is, while I'm on the right road home, I get to this off-ramp with a roundabout that's nowhere near where I was, it's actually right where my mum lives - and that's southwest of my uni town, whereas I was norteast of my uni town in this dream. For some reason I pull off the motorway, knowing full well that it's the wrong way to go. But when I try to get back on it I end up on this tiny, tiny road right next to it. It ends by this museum, or something, which is right by a tube station. We most definitely do not have an underground system in either of the three towns I've been in during the course of this dream. I check out the old museum, which is full of lamps, and see two middle-aged men who look... well, progressive. As I always do when I see people like that I thought "cool, I wonder if they like prog?" and then kept looking at the old lamps. When I left out the front door there was this old lady sweeping up, and I know we talked, but I can not remember about what.
After this I'm on the phone with my mum. To make sure she doesn't suspect me of having the car I tell her I'm slightly tipsy. Just that, no story, nothing that makes sense - I'm just a bit tipsy. Suddenly I realise that I'm not by the car, but at the tube station. I sigh and sit down on the stairs by the platform and the two potenitally progressive men are there. So I ask them if they know how I get to the place I parked my car from there, but apparently they've heard me tell my mum that I was tipsy so the one with the long hair (one had long hair, one was bald) starts telling me how bad it is to drink and drive... ...using Van der Graaf Generator metaphors. At least now I knew they were prog fans. I think I left at this point, but I don't know where I went or what happened next.
At some point I woke up and that was that.

(then I checked MSN and found the following message from my friend Beppo: "Karin calls on the mobile, but the other end is silent when I answer... I check the time and discover that it's a full hour until she normally wakes up and realise that she's probably sleeping ON her mobile and hit the phone book by mistake")

That was true, btw. I must have switched off the alarm clock and fallen asleep on the phone. I haven't dared to check to see if I called anyone else yet, but probably not as Beppo's number was the last one I called before this incident. And to redial the last number called you only need to press the "dial" key twice on my phone.
I'm tired, and the weather sucks today. Last night, at 4 30 (in the morning) I chased this rather large wasp around my room, trying to kill it. I ended up shutting the groggy-looking beast in a cupboard, I hope he's died in there during the night. Otherwise he'll be angry and annoyed when I open.
DUN-DUN-DUUUUUN!

The Dream of September 4-5

2007-09-05T13:25:00.001+02:00

All right, another weird one.

The first part I can remember is me sitting on a bench or something with a girl from my choir, and she's pregnant (this is the girl who had a son ago, and who asked me to sing at his christening - which I did). For some reason you can't really tell that she is although she's quite far along. I ask if she knows the sex of her baby and then she smiles and shakes her head, saying she can't find out. And I somehow know for a fact that there's nothing, you know, medical stopping her from finding out, but I don't push the point about it since I immediately think she has religious reasons (or something similar) for not finding out. Instead I just say that, "oh, you know if it were me I'd just find out as soon as I can so that there'd be no surprises or anything in the delivery room".
In the next scene we're joined by her husband, but her dream-husband doesn't look like her real life husband. We're on a street somewhere, and it's dark out. The street stretches on uphill and we start walking in that direction, but now I can't choir-friend anymore and her husband crosses the street to talk to a couple in their late 50s, presumably his parents, and I keep walking. When I reach the end of the street there's one of those really high fences with barbed wire at the top that you normally find around power stations and such places. There's a gate in it, or rather, a door and I want to get in, but can't. It's not that it's locked, it's that it won't open more than a couple of inches as there are huge, plastic barrels filled with some liquid (and therefore very heavy) blocking it. But somehow a man with a moustache, presumably someone who works in what I can now see looks to be a mine or something. Somehow, though I have no idea how, he manages to get inside. And after he has me and the people I'm with ('cause I know there are people behind me, but I don't remember who they are) manage to move the barrels and get inside.
I assume I went down into the mine because the next thing I remember is walking into this large open space with some small ponds in it and I know that behind me is a tight, underground path that I've just left. The walls are stone, and the ground is this reddish, powdery dirt (looks a bit like curry, but is actually real dirt). The whole space feels very warm because of the reddish colour of both floor (if one can call it that) and walls. There are loads of little spaces leading off from the "main room", that are just like dark, little dead ends and between then, against the walls, are these shelves with CDs and records. People are walking around, looking at them and talking, I suddenly I see that Stefan Dimle is one of them and I realise that this is Mellotronen Record Store. Stefan is walking across the room, there are quite a lot of people in there (even though it's so large it doesn't look crowded) but he does spot me and I smile and wave at him. But he doesn't smile or wave back, nor does he say anything, he just glances in my direction and walks on. I'm a little saddened by this as he normally says hello every time we meet. Now I walk across the room to the shelves by the other side.
When I get there there's another shift, and it's no longer Mellotronen (or it might still be but... well, read on). The first thing I see as I turn around by the opposite wall is a boy in the center of the room, fighting some little creatures that he's trying to kill. He does it and comes up to talk to me. At this point I'm not really sure if the other people and the records are still there, but I do not notice them anyways. The boy starts talking to me about my mount (in World of Warcraft you can buy mounts to ride on at higher levels, there's regular ones at lvl 40, fast ones at lvl 60 and flying ones at lvl 70), and I somehow know that I'm the highest level one can be bere, although I'm not sure what that is. And he's getting closer to it himself and wants some advice. And as we talk, more monsters to kill appear and when I look at the "action bar" of different kinds of attacks to make on the monsters I find that what I have are all the weapons from the game-series called "Worms" and I start throwing stuff at them. At one point I accidentally drop a mine by my feet and have to move quickly (I even think I hopped off the way the worms do), and after that I settle for the cluster bombs and start throwing those at the beasts until they die.
The place shifts back again and now there are two guys by the shelves I'm at (the prog section, of course) and one of 'em turns to me and goes: "I know you." "What?" I say.
"Yeah, I know you from the Internet. I've known you since you were a little kid, like five (*note* this is quite odd since I was five in 1990 and clearly not online at that point). Your online handle is Kendra."
"Errr, no?"
"Yes, it is." He started smiling, a little bit creepy-looking.
Then out of nowhere comes Kit and drags me off to look at the records, away from this guy. For some reason we browse through the different albums on one of those scroll menu things you get when you're filling out an online form, for instance, choosing your country of residency from a list. But we keep getting interrupted by different things. The last interruption I remember is my grandmother appearing out of nowhere to ask me if I've moved all my books out of her flat yet (which is odd in many ways since we rarely talk about books and I've never had any at her home), and I'm a bit... confused. But then, behind here, there is suddenly a rug with a pile of books on it and I assume they've got something to do with me and I now know the answer.
"Most of them, but there are a few left."
And then she starts talking about this one book that the owner has to rewrite by themselves and I think there's something odd about taking an ABBA-song and rewriting the lyrics for it to fit you (I know that "mine" was My Love, My Life but I don't know if that's the one everyone got or just me). And then I woke up. At some point, it seems, I had grabbed my mobile (which was ringing to wake me up as I had set the alarm on it) and turned it off because when I woke up it was underneath me, jammed quite painfully into my back.

A long one.

The Dream of August 6-7

2007-08-08T00:08:00.001+02:00

No dream the night between the 5th and 6th, but here's last night's err.... "adventure".

It started in a town somewhere, I think it was supposed to be Malmö, but I didn't recognise it (and I haven't been to Malmö all that much, which might explain the lack of familiarity in the surroundings).
Then, I found myself inside the terminal of an airport, or so I thought. I was with my high school class, I think, 'cause some of my old friends were there. But other friends that had nothing to do with my high school were there too, like Beppo and Kit.
Unfortunately, many details of this dream were (I think) lost as I tried really hard to remember the end of it. But I know I tied my shoes or something on a bench when some weirdo security guy in a suit walked past two police officers standing really close to me and told them off (very loudly!) for not wearing their little blue stickers that said "police officer". These stickers were really tiny, and the policemen were in full uniform but apparently the stickers were the important part of the uniform.

I remember me and Kit buying a lot of bread and stuff since apparently food would be really expensive in Germany (that's where we were going, I've forgotten what town). But after we buy all this food we remember that we're flying with RyanAir and to save money we've only got carry-on luggage and you can't get the food past security then. So I asked Beppo to take our food, and he refused. Then I asked a guy from my old class, Joel (I haven't seen him for like four years) to do it and he refused too. Then we had to get to the gate (apparently the security check would be at the gate) and we had to walk outside.
There were three different footpaths leading to gates. The right one had a sign with an airplane and it said something about RyanAir but it didn't have any info on our flight so while we weren't sure that it was the right one we assumed it must be started walking that way. Then I had a change of heart and told Kit that I would go back and see what the other two signs said, maybe I could rule those two footpaths out based on what departure information their signs had on them. So I got back and made sure that they were the wrong ones and then I turned to walk to the gate. Now here's the really freaky part. Suddenly it's no longer the way to a gate at an airport. Now it's a railway station and I think nothing of the sudden change of transportation.

However, a train passes by, right next to me, and there are already two trains waiting where the footpath used to be and with this third one there are now three tracks running parallel to one another and there's a train on each one. I know that I'm supposed to get past them to reach the platform, but how? One of the train tracks is situated higher than the other two (like it's on some elevated platform one and a half meters up) and has sort of a fence around it and I decide that the fence is my best option and climb up there. My intention is to hold on to the fence and make my way to the platform between these two trains. But it's much too tight for me to squeeze my way between the trains and the power lines above the middle train are now perilously close to me. But then the train on the higher platform starts to move and I can now walk on the tracks behind it.

Here is a bit of a blank part, but I make it to the platform where we're about to board our train to Germany. And now it's been obvious that we were going by train all along and I turn to Kit and say: "D'uh! Why were we so worried about bringing food past security? We're not flying, we're travelling by train!"

And then I woke up. I know more stuff happened when I was out and about in Malmö and more stuff happened inside that airport, which kind of resembled a shopping mall, really... But I can't remember any of that.

The Dream of August 4-5

2007-08-05T16:17:00.000+02:00

Bits and pieces again.

At one point I'm on the Camp Funkadelica bus, and I think I'm actually driving it too. And I'm supposed to get us somewhere but I keep getting lost and I drive around in quite different environments, though it's always in a town of some sort. Parts of it resemble Bristol, parts resemble the part of Linköping where my friend Beppo lives. Some parts don't resemble any place I can remember that I've ever seen, but somehow I kind of "know" that it's Lund (where my aunt lives).
In the end we get to a hospital, where I suppose we were going all along only I didn't realise it before then. And... I don't think I'm a nurse or a med student or anything, but for some reason me and some friends of mine (in the dream, I don't know these girls in real life) are giving another friend medication. And then they take her away into a locked ward. But then we realise that we gave her way too much medicine and we somehow have to get it out of her without letting the hospital staff know that we messed up.
We manage to sneak in through the locked door (which is actually one of those glass doors that shops sometimes use that slides open on its own when you're standing in front of it) and we start trying to think of different ways to help our friend. Then she sneezes, and like... white goo spurts out of her nose and mouth. We all keep trying to think of ways of reducing the amount of medication in our friend's system until someone points out that tests show that it's reduced to the proper level and that she must have sneezed most of it out.

I know there's more to this dream, but this is what I can remember.

The Dream of August 3-4

2007-08-04T23:41:00.000+02:00

I only remember bits and pieces of this dream, but I think I was at a festival in a forest with some friends. And there was something about the tent not being good enough and then I remember listening to music and getting into an argument with someone. A man. But we sorted our differences out and became friends, and then he turned out to be a musician in a Porcupine Tree cover band who were playing the festival. And, of course, after we'd become friends the band turned out to suck ass and he was the worst of the lot! Clearly, I could not keep this to myself and it resulted in another argument that ended our brief friendship (one might think I'd have kept my opinions to myself, to save the friendship, but they REALLY sucked).
Then there was something about me and my friend Marie (who was there for some reason) needing a new tent and she brought a self-inflatable one. You seriously pulled a string and the thing just expanded and erected itself in front of you. The tent had the shape of a circus tent, but smaller, of course. In fact, there were a lot of circus tent-type things at the festival area.

That's a quite boring dream, and I remember too little of it. I have to start sleeping with a notepad and a pen by my bed so I can write down the stuff as I wake up. And when I go back to Linköping it's time to start experimenting with music to sleep to. Kit gets quite interesting results with this...

My introduction to the world of blogging and the dream of August 2-3.

2007-08-04T03:19:00.000+02:00

My first post. Yay, or something.

So here goes, the first dream I intend to describe.

We're in Bristol, I know it's Bristol because I know that the river that runs through town is Avon, and the little part of the river banks in town that I saw looked a lot like this. Well, with the exception of the large medieval castle that was sitting right there. Oh yeah, there was a medieval castle in the center of town and this castle was a boarding school which Kit and I both attended. At the same time, with very strict rules that we both adhered to despite the fact that she's 17 and I'm 22.
So, there we were, attending school in an old castle that had a moat and a drawbridge and everything. For some reason, I was out in the afternoon one day and I was drinking coffee (well, probably something else since I hate coffee) or something at a sidewalk café with one of my teachers (I kind of know who it was, but I'll get to that later) - and I remember us talking about stuff and for some reason we started kissing. And as weird as that was, it's about to get weirder. After my teacher left I was leaving the sidewalk café (which I'm now pretty sure was either on a boat that was shaped like a square or in a house that also had a moat) and as I got up to leave I saw my mother on the other side of the moat and left to go talk to her. It turned out that she had seen me kiss my teacher and was upset with me and wanted to talk to me about my behaviour - she didn't seem upset at all with my teacher, just me. She made me feel really guilty about the whole thing.

So, the next day or something, I'm back at the castle. And Porcupine Tree are in town! I think we go to see them play - in the middle of the day when we're allowed out of the castle. Kinda strict place, really. Parts of the dream are blurry, but I think we saw them before we ate dinner or lunch in the school cafeteria. Kit was sitting two seats down from me, and opposite me was Jerome from "Ian Wright's Unfit Kids" (a really cute kid!) and apparently his rice was burnt and he asked me for some of mine and as I put some on his plate Kit got up from her seat, mumbled something about having stuff to do and left.

At some point during that day we'd overheard one of PT's roadies saying they were all going to a pub called "I love Jessie" (I know, right? Weirdest name ever!) and as it happened, this pub was right across the river (there was a bridge right after the drawbridge to the castle) and of course the little building that was the pub had a moat too. No drawbridge though, just a regular one. And we managed to sneak out and we could see Wes and Steven through the windows of the second floor of the pub. Steven saw us too and was standing very solemnly, slightly leaning out of the window, watching us. And then a teacher caught us - not the one I'd kissed earlier, a different one. He yelled at me for taking Kit out of the castle like this, taking her age into account, and then sent her back inside. But he didn't send me back, instead we walked over the bridge to the pub and continued around back where there were no people and... we started making out. And then I woke up. Two teachers in two days?!?!?! I'm the sluttiest boarding school girl ever!

So, the weird thing about these teachers... One of them was a friend (of sorts) of mine and the other one was Severus Snape from the Harry Potter books. I actually can't quite remember which pf them did what, but I *think* Snape was the one that caught us outside the pub at night, he seems to be a more nocturnal teacher than most others.

Why was I making out with them? Why did Jerome ask for my rice? Why was his burnt and not mine? Why was Steven watching us from the window of the pub? And why the hell am I attending a boarding school at the age of 22? A medieval one at that! Though, no complaints about it being located in Bristol...

That's it for my first blog post. I've officially sold my soul to the devil.