Dreams

I don’t have any idea why, but I was crawling around in some sort of attic like space in a large garage, almost a warehouse, that was quite tall — the wooden structure I was crawling around on was probably 15 feet off the ground or something like.

It resembled a large shelf, and was extremely flimsily constructed. The supports were 1x2s or something like that. I had to crawl very carefully and as it was flexing and creaking underneath me I was calmly thinking to myself, “I wonder why I’m not freaking out about this.”

I was making may way back toward the corner where the “entrance” was (maybe a ladder or something like that). This required in a at least one spot precariously swinging myself around a large object affixed to the ceiling from one section of the flooring/shelving to another.

As I got close to the corner, KrisDi showed up, and a scraggly black and white cat. KrisDi explained that the cat had been causing a lot of trouble for the woman who owned and lived in the building we were in, and that she’d been trying to get rid of it for a long time.

I asked if I should kill it, and we thought, “Probably.”

So I grabbed it by the neck. The cat didn’t react or try to get away or anything like that. I thought about it for a moment, then swung it in a half-loop and flung it as hard as I could toward the floor below. As the cat was headed for the floor below and my flimsy platform shook, I thought to myself, “I wonder if I’ll feel bad about this tomorrow.”

I think I woke up before the cat hit the ground.

A few nights ago…

Chilkat, Chilkoot, KrisDi, and I were driving somewhere together. We stopped at a Wal Mart. We were parked near a corner of the building and not many people were around. A few guys came running out of the building toward the car next to us. Apparently they were thieves or something, except they weren’t exactly making a getaway.

Somehow, we ended up being their hostages or something. They “made” us (though I don’t remember any force or threats) go with them back into the building, where there was a living space (a pretty decently sized apartment) on the ground floor in the back corner of the building, which is where they (we?) were going to hide out for the night. We obliged without any real complaint, ducking down behind furniture whenever there were lights or signs of movement outside. Everyone eventually fell asleep, except for me. I had trouble sleeping.

From the time we had gone into the Wal Mart apartment, I had a mild feeling of dread or anxiety, but it seemed to be more about getting caught than about the bad guys doing anything actually bad.

---

Night before last…

I was on a boat. I think the family was with me. The area reminded me of the canals and channels or whatever near Punta Gorda — lots of long narrow strips of water. Anyway, our boat was getting into a long line of boats, and there were some orcas a little ways off in the distance. Then some orcas came up close, and then there were some swimming immediately in front of us and immediately behind us.

I had forgotten about the dream by the time I brushed my teeth, but yesterday Chilkat said something that reminded me of it. Apparently he remembers Sea World and wants to go back.

This morning, Chilkat came downstairs a little earlier than normal during the last week or so of coronavirus isolation. She told me a nightmare woke her up. Here’s what I got from her description of her nightmare:

Our house had a flat roof instead of the peaked roof that it has in reality. Instead of a back yard, the world ended behind our house. The Playfort was in the front yard instead of the back, and it also had a flat roof. The front yard had a landscaping wall similar to the one in Nana and Papa’s back yard. A big storm was rolling in (we did actually have a short period of real-life lightning and thunder a couple days ago).

For some reason, she jumped up on top of the Playfort, and from there she jumped up onto the roof of the house — but she was scared she was going to go over the house and over the edge of the world and she woke up.

---

Edit in the afternoon…

Chilkoot later told me (independently to the best of my knowledge) about his own recurring nightmare that he has whenever he’s sick: It’s like a gray screen with just screaming. It makes me feel kind of scared.

This is disjointed, but it’s what I remember.

KrisDi and I were in the house that we lived in (but it’s not our actual real-life house). The kids weren’t there because they had been abducted by aliens. KrisDi and I were kind of in shock. Alien “invasion” was all over the news all over the world (I think they even had the classic saucer-with-a-dome-on-top spaceships), and we weren’t the only ones whose kids had been stolen. I don’t know the exact means, location, or timing of their abduction — their absence was just a precondition of the dream.

One of the aliens came to talk to us. It was a remarkably peaceful conversation. It was tall (maybe 8 feet), somewhat squid-like except that it walked on land on its tentacles and didn’t appear to be sticky or slimy or anything like that, primarily dark gray. The tentacles it walked on made up about 5-6 feet of its height.

The aliens had only recently learned human language, so this was one of the first times they actually communicated with us. We asked it if it had taken our children, and it said yes. We asked if we would ever see them again, and it told us no. KrisDi sobbed, I was filled with a strange combination of grief, anger, and terrible fascination. I might also have been sobbing while talking calmly to the alien, in the way you can simultaneously do two mutually exclusive things in a dream. There was some other discussion to the effect of “Are they OK, where are you taking them…” etc with no answers that I particularly remember.

Then there was a major shift in the dream, and now some people and I were in some kind of underground structure, under the impression we were escaping from the aliens. We made it into a kind of open room near an exit, and there was an alien there (now it looked mostly like a big, strong human male — except for being a dark gray and having some kind of unusual collar that may or may not have been part of its body). It was acting peaceably, and saying something along the lines of “We mean you no harm”, but I felt the need to attack it anyway.

I grabbed it by the throat and tried to strangle it, but it was a bit like trying to strangle a tree. It seemed perplexed by my aggression and defended itself by pushing me away with its tentacles (which were also simultaneously human-shaped arms), coating me in some kind of a slimy material that was poisonous, sedative, corrosive, or something similar.

The other humans and I got out of the door and into an open area. I never actually saw these other humans — I just knew they were there.

The area reminded me a little bit of a 50s-era public pool in California. There was a bunch of tile and it had a kind of Mexican vibe to the decor and architecture. Somehow we knew a bomb was going to go off, and we went into some nearby buildings for protection. I went to try to wash off the slime, and had to go through three or four doors in the bathroom to get to an area with a sink, whereupon a found an old man in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, pulling up his long, black socks, and looking very puzzled at my appearance.

Then I woke up.