Scary eyes and poo

So it's been a long time since I updated this thing, but I had such a vivid dream (nightmare) the other night that I can't not write it down. Seems this is the best place for it. 

Onto the dream ...

I was an onlooker in this dream and didn't really appear in it whatsoever; it played out like a film. A horrifying film.

It begins in a Slimming World group, where everyone is bunched into small groups of four or so on tables around the room. We have been asked to tell the group about our proudest moment, and a beautiful woman is speaking.

"My proudest moment? Getting my new face," she says. Everyone looks at each other confusedly. "Well, let me explain..."

The room evaporates into the scene of a family holidaying in some overseas, sunny destination, at a resort that sits right on the beach. They consist of a Mother, Father and two children. Mother and Father decide to go for a swim, leaving children at the hotel, and are happily enjoying the waves when (all of a sudden, as it always is with dreams) a humongous cruise ship ploughs its way into the beach.

Mother is under the waves when it happens. She is buffeted all over the place as the cruise ship causes a mini tidal wave (I don't know if this would happen, but it's a dream so stfu) and engulfs the resort's beach. She manages to clamber back to the surface, but can tell she is injured. Something just doesn't feel right.

Dragging herself to safety, Mother finds Father - who is badly injured and appears to have been rendered blind - and makes the decision that they need to find a hospital. Chaos has erupted around them as people rescue each other and the cruise passengers make their way from the wreckage. The two of them hobble around the city for a while, seemingly aimlessly wandering around until they finally come across the hospital.

Inside, Mother and Father attempt to get help, but no one speaks English and they don't know the language everyone is speaking. It sounds like English played backwards on a tape. They eventually manage to figure out that the A&E is upstairs, so they find a lift and get in it with a young man. They stand in the middle of the lift, she supporting her husband, but the young man cowers in the corner of the lift and covers his face with his hands. He refuses to look at either of them and groans shakily. She assumes he is mentally ill.

When they get off the lift, Mother desperately tries to get someone to help them. She keeps trying to flag people down, but they just scurry away from her. She finally gets a woman in a business suit carrying a clipboard to stop for her, but she looks flustered and shocked.

"Please can you help us? There was an accident, we need help," mother explains. The woman with the clipboard tells them she can take them to a ward where they can get medical attention. She calls another young woman over and, together, the four of them make their way to a lift.

They get in and travel to the bowels of the hospital. Mother thinks this is strange, but she's too preoccupied with keeping her husband upright to really worry about it. They traipse through the basement and up a flight of stairs, down a long corridor and into the hospital kitchen. Just as mother is about to complain, the woman with the clipboard tells her it's not much farther.

She leads them all down another corridor and to a second flight of stairs, which they go down. Halfway down, on a small landing, Mother looks out of the window and notices that they're right by the beach (somehow).

"Look!" Father suddenly shouts. "There's a man pooing in your shoes!" Mother looks out of the window again and realises he's right - a man has indeed squatted down and is shitting in her high heels, which she left on the beach in her hurry to find help. She gets angry and is about to shout at both the young woman and the lady with the clipboard, but she's quickly ushered down the remaining steps and into a room, which turns out to be the ward they were hunting for.

Father is taken away to a bed in the adjoining room, while Mother is given a private room and a sedative. She has fitful dreams that seem to last days and, when she eventually wakes up, she feels even less herself than before.

She climbs out of bed, removing the IV from her arm and attempting to flatten her hair, as it's standing on end from all of the tossing and turning she's done while unconscious. She shuffles, zombie-like, to the doorway, having to reach out to steady herself against the wall as she walks. She feels as though the skin on her face is too tight, and she can't see properly - she has no peripheral vision.

She makes her way to the lift outside of the ward and jabs at the button with a shaky finger. It arrives and she falls in, only just catching herself against the handrail at the back. Once she's sure she isn't going to collapse, she presses the button for the floor above and then looks up at herself in the lift's mirror.

Reeling backwards, she stares, aghast, at her reflection. No wonder she felt all wrong. Her entire face has been crudely rearranged. Her eyes are turned at a 90 degree angle and appear like diamonds, her mouth is an empty gash with no teeth or jaw, just a tongue lolling against her neck. Her nose is a stub of bone and snotty flesh.

She faints.

The dream cuts back to the Slimming World group, with everyone staring in wide-eyed wonderment at the woman.

"And that," she finished, "is how I ended up with my new face! Don't you think they did a good job?"

We all applaud her.

WHAT DOES IT MEEEAAANNNN?!

Playing football with the dead

Very nightmarish dream last night, a little bit psychedelic and sad as well. Mostly scary though.

In it, I was playing football and I think it was meant to be as part of a school thing. I wasn't in school though, so everything was generally a bit confused.

Anyway, I was meant to be playing in some kind of championship (but not like the World Cup) and was running down the pitch with the football when I noticed lots of hands beginning to come up through the earth. They were moving and looking to grab hold of things, with the fingers clenching into fists and then unclenching again. I was (obviously) incredibly scared by this and stopped running, but everyone else on my team started shouting at me to keep going and it became clear that only I could see the hands.

So I kept running, but dodging the hands so I ended up dribbling the ball all over the place. I don't remember if we won, I just remember that it ended up being a sea of hands and towards the end of the game I had to start standing on them because there was no more space to dribble through them.

The match ended and everyone went home, and I lived near the football pitch so when I looked out of my window I could see all of the hands grasping and searching. I realised that everyone buried underground was dead, but that they weren't zombies. They needed to be freed, and since I was the only one that could see them, I would have to do it.

At that point in the dream things got a bit muddled up, because suddenly (in dream terms) I was a man, and I realised that my wife was buried in the football field. I had to get her out. I found some way of getting underground without digging or anything, and when I got there I realised that everyone looked the same - rotted and bloated. I couldn't tell who was who, but they all grabbed for me with their free hands and cried out to me.

I wasn't sure who I was looking for, but I found a woman who I thought was my wife. I got her out and took her to the surface, but when I got there I realised it wasn't my wife at all. But I couldn't face putting her back underground where everyone was soulless and desperate. So I took her home and she was still unhappy, and all the while I knew that my wife was still underground, but I knew that even if I got her out she wouldn't be herself, just like the woman I had rescued.

Needless to say I had a migraine when I dreamt that, and was also drugged up to the eyeballs with migraine medicine.

Wedding dresses and vegetarian bacon

Since I moved into my new house I've been sleeping incredibly deeply, and have therefore been having the most vivid dreams I've ever, ever experienced. I actually think they're not letting me get any kind of good sleep, since it's like watching a film all night long. Anyway, one of the latest instalments featured one of my colleagues barging into my house wearing a wedding dress. 

In the dream, I was in my new house repainting the walls with turquoise paint, all the while worrying that it would be too bright. One of my house-mates was hovering around somewhere in the background, but she wasn't disturbing me or anything. So, while I was frantically painting, my colleague let himself in through the back door. He was wearing a big meringue-y wedding dress that he was having to hitch up to stop standing on it, and I distinctly remember that he was wearing brogues with the socks pulling up to his knees beneath it. 

You'd think this would have shocked me, but it didn't. I just quickly said hello and went back to painting. He started rummaging through my kitchen drawers until I turned to him and asked what he was looking for, to which he said (and I'm fairly certain I've got this word-for-word):

"I'm absolutely ravenous, Aurora. Haven't you got anything a starving man can eat?"

I flapped a hand at him and told him there was some vegetarian bacon in the freezer and he could help himself. He went hunting in the freezer and came out with the Quorn bacon and started eating it straight from the packed while it was still frozen.

This went on for what seemed like quite a while, until he said:

"Right, thanks for that. Must dash."

And then he left and I went back to furiously painting the walls turquoise.

What does it meeeaaannn??

David Attenborough saves the day

I was living in a huge Victorian house with about four floors, each of which was split into a single apartment. I has the top floor, which was the attic, and there were around four rooms, one of which had been converted into some kind of shrine for paganism by the previous owner. There were huge fireplaces in this room that constantly burned and all over the walls were slightly creepy looking markings of paganistic things. This room scared me quite a lot and I felt like I couldn't move anything or change it in any way, otherwise I'd be smited or something.

 
One day, I went out to buy food and, when I cam back, I realised I'd forgotten my keys and was locked out of my flat. I called my neighbour to help me to get back into my flat and (very handily) he happened to have the same locks on his door, so his keys could open mine. Once I was back inside I realised it was freezing in the flat, so I decided to move my bed into the pagan room. This didn't take too long and once I was there I went to sleep in the gorgeous warmth. I was woken up by people screaming outside my window though. I got up and looked outside - directly below my window was a river that had a willow tree overhanging it, and it looked like the house itself was set in the grounds of a university. There were people canoeing on the river and the water was bubbling and breaking the banks. They were shunted aside in their canoe by something huge in the water - it reared up for a second and everyone watching saw that it was a gigantic whale, bigger than any other in the world could be (don't ask how a whale this massive could fit in a river ¬_¬)

At this point the willow tree started smoking, but it looked like when heat is rising off something. I somehow knew that it was because the whale was something inhuman and that it was breaking the world from being there - like some kind of butterfly effect happening before my eyes. I ran out of the house and rushed to get my boyfriend and explained what had happened - he said he had feared it would happen and that the whale was really a genetically modified monster. He said he knew someone that could help us to solve the 'whale mystery' but that we had to keep everything hush hush.

The guy that could help us worked in a secret underground lab and his assistant was David Attenborough. He took my boyfriend and I to a room with a huge tube filled with water and a holding tank at either end. He explained to us that the whale was completely natural and that we had nothing to worry about. He pressed a button and a normal-sized dolphin swam down the tube and through into the holding tank at the other end. He pressed another button and a slightly larger dolphin came out. He said that aquatic animals were slowly getting bigger and that it was nothing to do with genetic modification. He kept pressing buttons until we'd seen about four dolphins of increasing size.

At this point the guy told David Attenborough to escort us out, which he did. He took us aboveground again and we were on the battlements of a castle. David Attenborough rushed us to one side and quickly explained in hushed, urgent whispers that the guy had been lying and that he'd seen the experiments he'd performed on the dolphins and that he was working with a group to create monster aquatic animals to take over the world with. He told us that we had to create a resistance to save the world, but that we must go now. Suddenly, a man appeared on the other side of the battlements (he was standing on am impossibly tall ladder) and told us to come quickly, otherwise we'd never escape. My boyfriend and I promised David Attenborough that we would succeed and we managed to escape just as the nasty scientist guy appeared on the battlements and killed David Attenborough.

The End.

Talking cats and an entrance to Hell

On Monday night I had the most amazing dream, which really should have been a nightmare but wasn't. Instead of waking up afraid I woke up naturally (which I rarely do - I either get startled awake by my upstairs hoovering-neighbour or by my alarm) and felt completely at ease. And here's what I dreamt:

I was myself but I didn't look like myself (one of those dream quirks) and I was living in a huge old house on a secluded farm in what felt like rural America. I lived with two old women that reminded me a lot of Hilda and Zelda from 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' and my husband, whom I'd never met in my (real) life before.

We lived a nice life that was full of baking cakes, running through the fields, playing with the pet cat and dog and generally being happy. That was until we heard that people had started disappearing from the town. We were a bit worried about it but assumed they'd turn up eventually. Curiously, the people that had vanished were the ones that were most likely to cause trouble, such as those with political views that went against the grain and such.

A few weeks went by and more and more people went missing. Eventually we started to get worried so we went into town to see if we could get the goss and find out what was happening. Once we arrived we noticed a big gathering in the square and came to realise that people were vanishing because some crazy psycho lady and her posse were making them disappear. They had somehow managed to find an entrance to hell and were throwing people down it when they disagreed with the main lady's rules for running the town.

The entrance was located in a tiny little disused shack and when the door was opened there was a burning red hole in the ground which, quite obviously, didn't go anywhere pleasant. When we happened upon the group they were in the final throws of a witch hunt for two or three people that we happened to know, so we tried to intervene. This just led to us being completely overpowered and thrown in the pit with our friends though.

When we were thrown in it was very much like Alice going through the looking glass, in that we all tumbled about and went through various levels. Eventually I landed on my feet in a big room and thought I was alone until I noticed my cat (who was actually my real cat Jack in the dream) who looked at me and said 'Oh, you made it.' 

He explained to me, much to his annoyance, that because I'd been sent to hell he had to come with me, but that the upside was that animals could talk in hell. We went out of the room and found it was in a huge house, so we wandered about until we found everyone. We eventually came across everyone that the crazy lady had ever thrown into hell, along with all of the pets that had been forced to come along with them. 

As time went by we realised we were actually happier in hell than we were in the real world, because we were altogether, our pets could talk to us and there wasn't any crazy lady. I also remember that you didn't need to eat, drink or do anything other than what you wanted to do there, so we just hung around talking for the most part. 

Every now and then another person would arrive, which we greeted with mixed emotions because we were happy to have them there but were upset because we knew they'd be confused about it all at first. Once more and more people arrived we started holding meetings and, as a result, decided to stage a coup, rise back to the real world and bring everyone we loved down to hell before the crazy lady could throw them down, then seal off the entrance so she could never join us and would be stuck in the horrible part of the universe with her nasty posse forever and ever. 

The End. 

American diner/bars and waitress Kaye

2 nights ago I dreamt that I was in a very noisy and extremely busy diner. It was definitely supposed to be American, but then I've never been to America and have no idea what a diner over there really looks like - or if you even get diner bars. WHATEVER. 

I knew it was one. 

I was sat at the end of a very long wooden bar, and behind it was a big mirror. I couldn't see myself in the mirror, which I thought was slightly odd, but I just kind of went 'Meh'. There was only one waitress/bartender working, and she was rushing round like a mad woman. Most of the customers were men, and they were all getting pretty pissed off with her. I was really hungry, but I didn't want to be a bitch so I just waited my turn.

Eventually, she got round to me. I ordered some food (I have no idea what) and she bustled off to get it ready for me. I sat there staring at the room reflected in the mirror, watching everyone enjoying themselves. It was really, really sunny outside, but it was as if it was nightime inside. Anyway, I happened to look down the bar and, right at the end, I noticed by friend Kaye was sat there with a guy. She winked at me, but I was just surprised to see her (she lives in the US) so I didn't respond. She was waiting politely for the waitress as well, but she was trying to get my attention at the same time. She was leaning out over the bar, reaching around the other people so that I could see her properly, but I still wasn't responding. 

Just as I started to think 'Oh! It's Kaye!' there was a loud smash - the waitress  had dropped what I instinctively knew was my plate of food when she was coming out of the kitchen (I think she was supposed to be the cook too ^^;). All of the men started to jeer at her while she was squireling around on the floor trying to clear the mess up. 

I looked back at Kaye, who sighed and rolled her eyes at me. She got up off her stool, went around the bar and grabbed an apron. She didn't say anything, but I heard her think 'Well, if no one else is going to'. She put the apron on and went to help the waitress. 

Daddy's a superhero now

Second one from the dream backlog:

My dad was a police chief ... and a superhero. Like a proper pants on the outside superhero. Everyone knew he was and it was completely normal, except one day I got a call saying that he'd gone missing. I rushed home and got there incredibly fast. When I arrived it was summer and was very very hot outside but, inside my Mum's house, everything was dark. There were lots of long corridors with black ends, which made everything look very spooky. 

My mum, my two sisters and I had lots of group meetings in the kitchen (which is where everything important happens in my family). The conclusion we came to was that the only person who could help to find my dad was his arch enemy. This guy reminded me of Crowley in Supernatural, and the only problem was that he was missing as well. 

We all decided that what we needed was a day out, to take our minds off what was going on. My mum said that she wanted to go walking in Alton (I have no idea why), so suddenly we're all in Alton going for a stroll. We got ice creams and had fun and everything, then popped back into the house when we were ready. 

We were in the kitchen, as if that was the only room in the house, and were all talking when we heard the front door open. The front door in my Mum's house has bells on, so you can always hear when someone's coming in. We though it would be my Dad, so we all rushed out into the hallway and saw that the study door was open. We went in and the arch enemy guy was there, standing right in front of the dresser that my Dad's ashes are on now.

He turned around and told us that he didn't know where my Dad was either, but that he was really going to need to come back soon because there were loads of tornadoes popping up all over the world and there wasn't anyone to help stop them. 

Rotten corpses and petrol airships

Not done a post in a while, even though I've got a massive backlog of dreams!

Here's the first one:

I was on holiday with a lot of people I didn't know. In the dream, they all had black holes for faces, like people who you don't know in real life always have in dreams. They weren't scary, just faceless, like that was how they were supposed to look. There were around 10 of them, men and women, and we were going to a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. To get there we flew in this little plane that we piloted ourselves, but you couldn't just go straight to the island, you had to fly to the one next to it and then get out and swim the rest of the way. 

If you've ever seen that Leonardo DiCapro film called The Beach, that pretty much explains what the holiday was like. If you haven't though, here's a brief rundown: we arrived, frolicked in the sand and did the whole jumping off the cliffs into the sea below thing and generally having oodles of fun, and then everyone started fighting and 2 people died. I don't remember how they died in the dream, just that we had built this hut (it was actually properly built too, not just bits of coconut trees and leaves) and I found their bodies in there, hidden up in the rafters like in a barn. 

Everyone stopped fighting as soon as that happened. Obviously, the bodies started to rot, and we couldn't sleep in the hut any more. We wanted to take their bodies home, to give them to their families so they could have a proper burial, but we realised that we'd have to swim back with them.

It was horrible. They were, unsurprisingly, dead weight, and we all nearly drowned on the way back to the other island. I quite vividly remember having to hold onto one of the dead people's hands when I was swimming, and it was like a balloon full of mud. Very yucky. 

Anyway, we reached the island and flew back. When we got there, suddenly, my workmate Cheryl was there. We were both living in Bolton, and we got off the plane together and I walked to her house with her and then returned to my flat, which was empty. I thought it was weird that my flatmates weren't there, so I went to go and check the caravan that, for some reason, we also rented. No one there either, so I went to the park instead. When I got there, there were loads of people having a picnic, so I joined in.

At the picnic, people started talking about how there was going to be an air raid on the town, because of all the immigrants moving in and making the 'parking tax' go up. I didn't believe them and just swanned off home, but the flat was still empty. For some reason, that really made me believe it was true, and I looked outside to see this massive blimp which I somehow knew was full of petrol, and it was all going to rain down on everyone and then someone was just going to light a match on it all. 

I ran outside and bumped into my friend Sam, who lives in Korea now and who I haven't seen in a couple of years. He was on a bicycle and he knew about what was happening, so we both tried to run out of town. We were climbing up this big hill (he was cycling) and, just as we reached the top, we saw these 2 policemen and we knew that they were in on it all and were trying to keep everyone within the town, so that we'd all die. We stopped dead and realised that they were like the T Rex in Jurassic Park, in that if you stayed really still they couldn't see you. So they were coming closer and closer, saying they could kind of see the outline of something, and then Sam wobbled on his bike and lost balance and they got us :/

The End.

Stressful holidays on the farm

Last night I dreamt that I went on holiday to Beechenhill Farm, which is in the Peak District and is where my family and I used to go for holidays. It's a beautiful place to stay and there's lots of memories there for me <3


In the dream I remember being incredibly stressed, it felt like something terrible was happening to me and that I needed to get away. There wasn't any ifs or buts about it - I HAD to have a holiday, so I went to my dad (who died last year) and asked him what I should do. He told me that the only place to go was Beechenhill Farm and he arranged everything for me. It was like one minute I was saying 'Alright, I need a holiday' and the next I was there at the farm. 


Every time we've stayed there before we've been in the separate cottage, but this time I was in the main house, which looks like this:

I've never actually been in this part of the farm before, but in my dream everything looked warm and comforting, and there was a lot of wooden furniture and a HUGE television. There were dozens of bookcases packed with all of my favourite books, the fridge was fully stocked, the bed was amazing and everything was just perfect. I also remember feeling terribly small compared to all of the rooms, like I had somehow Alice in Wonderland-ed myself. 

This all lasted for about a day, and then that night I got really bored and incredibly homesick. I'd read all of the books (somehow), there was nothing on TV, there was no internet and I was all alone there.  


I started to get that horrible 'Oh no' feeling again, and I suddenly realised that I didn't know how much the holiday would end up costing. I called my dad, who told me that I didn't have to pay for anything until I left and I asked him how much it would be in the end. I imagined around £300, but he told me it would be more like £1000. 


There was some kind of mad rush towards the end of the dream, like everything was on fast forward and I was in the middle of it panicking. Not a fun dream, not at all. 

Purchases and aerial rope acts

Following on from my dream about Japan and dollfies, I bought some new clothes for said BJDs today.

My sisters, Pan & Cate, run a website called Geek Stylish, which sells dollfie clothes for a few different sizes of dolls. I've asked for these three styles to be made for Alois and Yu-chan:

On the dream front, I'm currently reading 1984 (George Orwell) and the other night I dreamt that I was living in the same kind of dystopian world, although I was a man so I guess my mind was trying to  recreate me as the main character, Winston Smith. Anyway, I seemed to be the only person who understood that the Nazi-esque regime was bad and, for some reason, decided that the only way to solve the issue was to snap people out of it ..... by performing an elaborate aerial rope act, something similar to this:

Suffice to say it didn't work. Can't blame me for trying though. 

Aurora.

Living in Japan, getting chased by ninjas through hotels, and dollfies

First dream for the blog:

(We're in dreamworld now btw)

I was living in Japan with my flatmates, Helen and Graham, and my boyfriend, Justin. We were living in a traditional Japanese house that looked like this:

Everything was seen from above, and I distinctly remember that it was like there was a camera sat above a ceiling fan, so everything that I saw had the fan spinning around in front of it. That sounds like it would be annoying, but it wasn't, it just felt like I was watching a movie ... shot from a weird angle. 

Anyway, Justin and I woke up and decided to go into town. Skip to town - suddenly we were in a hotel going up to our room (very fancy hotel as well, but still in Japan) and when Justin went to open our room door (with a key, not one of those keycard thingys) a ninja dropped down from the ceiling. Typical ninja outfit and everything, just holding a katana. For those of you who can't picture him:

We both then unleashed stunning kung-fu skills and beat the ninjas (they multiplied) away, all the while still being seen from above. We had to fight our way back home, there was lots of shooting in the streets and a fair amount of 'watch outs!' and the like. 

Now, I collect dollfies and I have 3 of them, Alois, Yu-chan and Risa:

They might not lookit but they've all very, very expensive. Anyway, when we got back home Helen was in our room and was very pleased with herself. She'd bought me more dollfies (not sure how - wait, this is a dream!) and had somehow changed all of their faces, so mixed amongst them were MY dollfies and there was no way to tell which was which. I remember doing that 'I'm-so-angry-but-I-can't -do-anything-but-make-strange-noises' thing and her saying she had done it especailly for me - didn't I like it?

And then I woke up and frantically scribbled the dream down so I wouldn't forget. 

Aurora.

Dreamscapes and Bollocks: A Rundown

Welcome to Dreamscapes and Bollocks :D

So, what is this? 

Basically, you've wandered onto (or been pointed in the direction of) my dream blog, created after 23 years of suffering with some of the weirdest dreams I've ever heard of. I've had the one about the tiny vampires, the one about the children with the scary pieces of fluff in their pockets, the one about the dancing zombies and the one about the river of lava outside my mum's back door and, after all that, I've finally stopped trying to ascribe meanings to them. 

Don't get me wrong, I love dreaming. I feel incredibly sorry for people who don't have, or can't remember, dreams and, as a writer, they're a constant source of inspiration for me. The only issue is that I'm wont to forget my dreams as soon as I've brushed my teeth in the morning, unless they're extremely memorable. I've kept dream journals before, but they usually consisted of me falling back to sleep on the diary before I'd finished transcribing the dream, and it wasn't until a few weeks ago that the idea for this blog came about. 

Enter Natalie Mott, my boss, who came up with the latter half of the name for this blog. 

Me: I want to call it dreamscapes and .... something.

Nat: Dreamscapes and Bollocks!

Well, it went something like that anyway. 

SO. If you want to read about my weird and wonderful dreams, follow me. I hope I can entertain some people with them, if not entertain myself. And btw, there will be some bollocks in this blog as well, in the form of 'today I ate porridge for breakfast' and 'I bought a new dress the other day'. Sorry about that, but I'm too lazy to make two blogs, who do you take me for?

Peace out, 

Aurora.