Wherein Melancholia, Criminal Minds, Assassin's Creed, and a random assortment of sci-fi/fantasy nerdery have had way too much of an influence on my subconscious.

It has been a long time since I've had a dream worth remembering that I actually remembered long enough to write it down, but here I am again, with another quasi-apocalyptic, quasi-lucid dream.

This one's actually in Tunisia, but whatever.

I was sitting at the window of a minaret in 16th Century Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul, but which was also kinda present-day, I think, staring at the sky.  It was night and the sky was dark and scattered with clouds.  A celestial body which I could not identify as the sun or the moon was on fire, encompassed by an eerie halo of flames, which sometimes appeared to snuff out into a halo of smoke, but then would reignite again.  Because clouds were passing across the sun/moon/whatever, I thought maybe I was just confusing cloud cover as smoke, but I wasn't sure.

Once again, Nick's painting, Equilibrium, depicts it best.

Suddenly, a dramatic spray of sparks showered from the mystery body into the clouds, and I realized that it was a planet that had just entered our atmosphere and was headed straight towards us.  As it burst through the clouds and sailed ever closer, I thought, Oh shit, this is it! This is really happening! The whole planet is going down! Wait, is this real? Or am I dreaming? Real? Dream? I can't tell!  The planet, whose diameter was roughly the length of a small town, floated by a few miles overhead. Oh hooray! It's going to be a fly-by! Wait, hold up, this has to be a dream. If this were real, that thing would have a much more destructive effect on the atmosphere, and wouldn't be moving so slowly. Yay! Just a dream!  With that comforting realization, I was able to watch calmly and curiously as the planet gradually descended and finally crashed about 20 miles away--just on the horizon.  The impact made a low, booming sound, and the shockwave rumbled outwards in slow motion.

I got down from my windowseat and ran down a flight of circular stairs into a round, candlelit room which was filled with my group of friends--which, in addition to Irene, Aaron, Nick, Natalie, Caitlin, and Chuck, also inexplicably included the cast of Criminal Minds and our fearless leader, Jeremy Irons dressed as a White Wizard, complete with flowing white hair and beard.

Too bad I don't care enough to Photoshop his face onto Ian McKellen's wizardy body.

Except for Mr. Irons, we were all dressed in period garb, but additionally had to put on stilts because apparently there were aliens among the humans of the city who were there to ensure that all of us stayed on the planet for its, and our, demise, and they would turn anyone who tried to escape into zombies.  The "people" who had paid to be on the planet were on stilts, whereas those who were serving the paid guests were the humans who had to be kept under control.  We were wearing stilts to disguise ourselves as paid guests.

Our task was to make our way through the bazaar to this wide, flat, paved area where we could make our escape.  We had broken up into smaller groups who were taking different routes in order to appear less suspicious.  My group was Irene, Chuck, and a Cuban woman who was not dressed in period garb, but rather a white tube top, white Daisy Dukes, and had a clitoral piercing donning a gigantic hoop earring that hung outside of her shorts and dangled between her legs.

Imagine that sucker hanging from your clit. Ouch.

Irene leaned over to me and whispered, "Do you know her? I don't remember her being a part of our group."  I looked at her closely and tried to remember if she'd ever been a cast member of Criminal Minds, then determined that she hadn't, and was therefore a stranger.  Chuck got up in her face and whispered harshly, "YOU ARE A SPY.  NO SELF-RESPECTING HUMAN WOULD WEAR A HOOP EARRING AS A CLIT PIERCING.  THAT IS A DEVICE TO SPY ON US AND GIVE AWAY OUR LOCATION, AND MUST BE DESTROYED."  He ripped the hoop earring out of her crotch and smashed it to pieces with his boot, but she didn't even flinch.  Irene yelled, "She's not human! That should've hurt like a bitch!"  Chuck threw her over a bridge into the water below and we hurried away.

But as we walked I realized that all the women of Criminal Minds had been captured and turned into zombies.  Even in a dream-state, however, I'm still a raging feminist, and since the dream was partially lucid I was like, "No.  I reject this.  This plot is completely misogynistic.  Women, you're fine.  Stop being zombies and get on with it."  All the women stood up straight, pushed past their captors and walked off into the crowd, which made me quite proud.

The part of the dream where we walked through the bazaar and buildings to get the meeting area was long, convoluted, and somewhat hazy, but the one noteworthy part was that I temporarily got separated from Irene and Chuck in a building that resembled the bar scene from Star Wars.

Except the aliens were, you know, incognito.

After we found each other again, we quickly arrived at our meeting place.  White Wizard Jeremy Irons handed us each a glowing cylinder, and we were supposed to stand in a certain pattern on the paving stones.  The shockwave from the crashed planet had finally reached the city and was starting to devour it.  It was getting close enough to us that we were being buffeted by hurricane force winds.  I shouted over the wind to Jeremy, "But where are we going to go?  The entire planet is destroyed!  There's nowhere else we can survive!"

"Wrong!" Jeremy crowed, "We're hitching a ride on the Heart of Gold!"

From Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for those of you who aren't hip.

The glow from the cylinders swelled and enveloped us right as the force of the shockwave hit, and as a cascade of images flashed by in quick succession I thought, "This is so fucking nerdy.  You are such a nerd to be having this dream, Emily.  Ugh, just stop already."  Thus ended my nerdiest dream yet.

What. This is how you're *supposed* to behave at funerals. (Backlog, pt 1)

So... to populate this blog from the start rather than have it be dead and boring for an undetermined amount of time, we're going to post some old dreams here that we had documented elsewhere earlier in our lives.  I'll start with this oldie-but-goodie.

(from June 19, 2006)

I was at the funeral of a guy whom I was really in love with (I think we might've been a couple, 'cos I was seriously in love with him), although it wasn't anyone from my real life.  Pretty much everyone that I've seen, talked to or thought about in the past few days was at the funeral, including Mellowdrone and some of the people who were at the Austin and Dallas Mellowdrone shows.  My coworkers were there, my sister and brothers, Amy, Val, Sabrina, Deidre, Bethany, Sara, Caitlin, Beth, Rafi, Leigh...so I'm serious when I say pretty much everyone I've interacted with in the past few days. 

Anyway, we're in this funeral home that looks pretty much exactly like the one in Six Feet Under, and this guy whom I was in love with who died had apparently committed suicide, and had chosen Bright Eyes' "No Lies, Just Love" to play at his funeral.  I was standing in the aisle in the back, watching everyone grieve and listening to this song, and I'm just sobbing, because I'm so sad and shocked and overwhelmed.  Then suddenly, I became furious at the absurd emoness of the situation.  I mean, what kind of asshole kills himself and then requests a Bright Eyes song to be played at his funeral, right?  So this wave of blind hatred hits me, and I want to seriously hurt him.  Of course I can't hurt him because he's dead, adding helpless frustration to the utter rage.  Hot tears were coming out my eyes and burning my cheeks, and I was like, "If I don't do something right now, I'm going to claw my own face off."  So suddenly I remember that I sell sex toys!  Of course, hello!  So I walk into the grieving room next to the funeral parlour, and of course my box of sex stuff is in there (I mean, why wouldn't it be?).  I pull out this ginormous dildo, rush into the funeral parlour and up to the casket, and start trying to cram the dildo into this guy's dead mouth, screaming, "COCKSUCKER!  YOU'RE A FUCKING COCKSUCKER!  COCKSUCKER, I HATE YOU!  SUCK A COCK YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!"  It wasn't as easy as I had hoped, though, because his face was all cold and clammy and rigid, so I was kind of clawing at his chin with my hand, and his gross dead-guy makeup was getting under my nails and grossing me out, but I was so angry that I couldn't stop clawing at his chin with one hand and shoving the dildo into his lips with the other hand. 

In the meantime, pretty much everyone at the funeral rushed up to me and was trying to stop me.  Most people were grabbing my arms and waist, trying to pull me away from the casket, and someone was trying to pull the dildo out of my hand, but I looked over and a few people are just straight up laughing, namely: Jay, Bev, Beth, Rafi and Amy.  There might've been more, but I don't remember.  Seeing them laughing made me want to laugh, but then I was pissed off because I was losing my momentum, and I still really wanted to cram that dildo in his mouth.  But then Jon (Mellowdrone's lead singer, for those of you who don't know) came up to me with a grave look on his face and began to chastise me: "Em, what are you doing?  You're embarrassing Brian.  Look!  The man's blushing, Emily!  Did your mother raise you to be like this?"  I looked up and, sure enough, Brian (Mellowdrone's drummer, for those of you who don't know) was turned away from me, head down, face flushed, looking mortified.   

Suddenly, I felt so guilty for making Brian feel bad that I was like, "Aw, Brian, no!  It's ok!  I wasn't really trying to cram a dildo down his throat!  It's just a hankie, see?"  And sure enough, my dildo was now a frilly hanky and everyone who had been trying to pull me away from the casket was magically back in their seats, except for Jon who was still standing in front of me, and Brian, who was now facing me to see whether I was holding a hankie or a dildo.  (And by the way, I love the fact that we were even calling them "hankies" in my dream.)  I sort of shook the hanky in the air so Brian could see it, and he cracked this huge, beautiful grin and said, "You should stick that up his nose."  So I turned towards the coffin to cram the hankie up Dead Guy's nose when the thin little stick that was propping the coffin lid up snapped. 

The crash of the coffin lid slamming down woke me up. 

Moral of the story: If you ever date me, don't think about commiting suicide and having Bright Eyes played at your funeral, or you will get a dildo crammed in your mouth, or a hankie crammed up your nose, or both.