#dreams

If you can dream without limits, you can soar to great heights.

Kerri Maniscalco, Escaping From Houdini

October seems to be the time of year to talk about such things.

It begins at a church. I have no idea what church. Never seen it before. I was there with my family, it was some sort of fellowship outreach or something but everyone had already left for the most part. I was in a parking lot with lots of light gray gravel until I found myself in some sort of attic. I don’t remember why or how. Someone was with me. I’m not sure who. There was lots of small plain wood beams and deep red colors. Nothing felt right. I’m not sure what happened after that, but I realized that it was a dream and I woke up.

I was now in a different place. I was in a hallway. It was sparsely decorated. I entered a room, mostly black. My sister was there, so was a red haired lady I’ve never seen before. My cat was also there. She’d been sick for a while. I went in the room to find that this lady I’ve seen before had accidently killed her. I left the room, panicking, praying desperately that I was dreaming. It was then that I realized the previous experience was a dream. Then I woke up again.

I crawled out of bed and stumbled out my room, like you do when you wake up from a good nap. I went into the kitchen, noticed the finally familiar surroundings, the clutter, the imperfect tiles. I touched the deep brown wooden doorframe to make sure it was real. It felt real.

It wasn’t until I opened my eyes and saw that I was still in bed to realize that it wasn’t. I had finally woken up. Or at least I was pretty sure I had.

I spent the rest of the day trying figure out if I was truly awake. Sometimes I still wonder.

Fortunately I don’t remember most of my dreams.

This is a show I saw in a dream. I cannot emphasise enough that all of this was a dream I had. All of it. This is an expansion of some really quick notes I took on my phone as soon as I woke up. 

McQuilligan was a tough Irish cop in 1950s New York. After a dishonourable discharge he now works as a private detective wearing a polo neck under a leather jacket in his beige office because it’s the 1970s. He has an eyepatch because he thinks it’s cool. 

If you need help, if you don’t have a lot of money and you are not dissuaded by abject alcoholism and rank incompetence, maybe you can hire… McQuilligan.

In first episode, a little girl is kidnapped. For some reason he doesn’t feel comfortable taking cases involving little girls, so the desperate parents had to keep raising the age until he agreed. I have no idea what was going on in this part of my dream. None of it makes any sense. But he was on the phone to the parents in his little dark office and it was like this: 

“No.” 

“12?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s 14?”

“No.”

“OK what if she was 18?”

“Hmm… I’ll take the case.”

I remember two dreams from last night.

In the first dream I went to a record shop I used to go to years ago and asked if they had anything for me, meaning had any of my orders come in. They had a look and they found two books, one of which was an AD&D manual. Then I went back to where my own shop was on O’Connell St. in Clonmel. My father and I were just closing up when I friend of mine from school that I haven’t seen in 35 years came up, still dressed in our stupid school uniform even though I’m 46 now.

The second dream started with me in the middle of a hunt for killer crocodiles. I was in a sewer under Los Angeles when I saw some in the tunnel ahead, just sort of lazing around. And when I came back, some more killer crocodiles had wandered into the way I had come. Thankfully these ones were docile, but I was happy to get the hell out of dodge. I knew I would need to save the city from these things because they were close to overrunning the place. 

In this dream, my first best response to the problem was to grab a helicopter which dropped me right into the top story of a hotel. I wandered into a room and there were several models / actresses on the bed (not in any state of undress or anything - I cannot emphasise enough how not-sexy this whole thing was - it was all business). I can only remember Baywatch-era Pamela Anderson and Yasmine Bleeth. I told them I needed their help and they seemed happy enough even though they were shocked to hear the news.

“The LAPD are calling them killer crocodiles.”

“Oh my god.”

“Because they seem to be larger than normal crocodiles and also more aggressive.”

“Right.”

We started making plans and figuring out how to approach Los Angeles’s killer crocodile problem when I noticed something in the bed.

“E-Rat. Out!”

At this point a previously unrevealed Emily Ratajkowski came out from under the bedsheets and left the room. I think the implication was that she’s shit in a crisis.

Related:Why I Stopped Keeping A Dream Journal 3