Dreamspiking

I've come upon the realization that I spike my dreams.

It's a well-known fact that if you eat before you go to sleep (or if you drink something other than water, at least) you're going to have bad dreams. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are immune to this phenomenon, I'm sure there are plenty of people who avoid eating before bed for this exact reason, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't even remember their dreams to an extent that would allow them to make the assessment.

I, on the other hand, both intentionally enact eccentric dreams and actively attempt their implementation.

For an instance:

Last night, I ate a twinkie, drank a coke, and had some chips and salsa just before going to bed. Every now and then, with no paticular pattern of foodstuffs evolving, I'll eat something and, in doing so, consciously, assure myself a night of interesting dreams. It's like an extremely involved and absurdist movie.

This particular time I had a dream that I was a part of some bizarre sort of academic decatholon that involved a myriad of strange and dangerous events the participants must go through. My team, as far as I could surmise, consisted of myself, some asian chicks, Strong Bad, and a weird, deformed, cartoonish baby that spoke in gibberish and seemed to be covered in powder burns. The few events I can remember, I remember as being largely circuitous and not necessarily quantitative in any way, making the judging difficult to impossible, I'm sure.

Por example:

The one I remember most vividly involved the team being on a rickety metal box that seemed to constitute an train engine, much in the same way that a box with wheels constitues a car. Strong Bad was inside the box pedaling the car while I was relegated to the outside of the box, along with the blackened child that became somewhat gremlin-like as he appeared and disappeared around the perimeter of the box. Our role, as the teammates outside the box, was chiefly to not be eaten.

Because there was a polar bear chasing us.

So Strong Bad would pedal inside his oven, getting extremely hot and exhausted as he did so, and the young, malformed, charred Tommy Pickles and I would flitter about the surface of the machination attempting to cling onto its awkward shape while positioning ourselves away from the Arctic beast's gaping maw. Or, at least I did. Like I said, the tar-baby took to the sheet metal like a bighorn sheep to a rock face.

Also, come to think of it, the opposing team had someone on it that was a combination of Helga and Angelica, so I suppose a lot of Rugrats imagery was present in the dream, though I tend to lean more towards her being a representation of a more canonical, archetypal "pre-pubescent beeyotch" character that, when you think about it, has really been around even before Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales which contained the epic verse of "Tiffany the 2nd Grade Bully."

At one point Strong Bad was pushed too far, and he simply stopped pedaling, putting us all not only in danger of losing to that man-hating trouser-dyke, but, more immediately, in danger of being eaten by a bear (S.B. himself being safe inside the box, a fact that did not escape me when I chided him concerning his teamwork). I was forced to hop off the train and physically push it over the sawdust which seemed to suddenly cover the track (and impede our progress considerably) while Strong Bad complained from the inside of the box. Luckily, we'd pulled enough ahead of the bear that we were not in danger when I jumped off, but we easily could have been, Strong Bad. We easily could have been. I stand by what I said.

So we pedaled the trains into a tunnel (and it does not escape me, either, that if both trains were on the same track, as they were, then one of them was always in front of the other, and that one of them has a polar bear in front of them as well, making the decision of who won not only difficult but somewhat inconsequential in the process) that led to the next event, which was a low-ceilinged classroom venue peppered with worn and seemingly outdated kiosks featuring riddles, puzzles, and problems for the teams to solve. Before you could take a crack at solving them, however, you first had to dive under an extremely low bar to get to. I got dusty from skidding around on the unattractively patterned tile, and the asian chicks began to really shine as the backbone of our team as they, grouped and giggling, began dismantling the problems with oriental expertise.

At this point, I think Strong Bad had stalked off, demoralized, and the soot-kin evidently had showed itself to be the geist of the box-train that it was, never really having existed on or off the train, but being a part of the contraption in and of itself.

And that's all that I can actively remember. A lot more was going on, I know that, but this is the stuff that is the most lucid for me. Furthermore, in hindsight, I think that what was going on could have been both hellish scholastic meet and everyday life. Yes, a particularly surreal and panicked life, but not under any sort of pressure from judges or coaches or unibrowed, pigtailed nemeses.

If the mood takes me, I may start transcribing my nocturnal visions just for the sheer fright of it. I never used to mind telling my or hearing other people's dreams until I saw an MST3K episode where Joel joked "I hate it when people tell me about their dreams." If it's good enough to be a joke on MST3K, then it must be funny, and if its funny, then it must be a widely accepted social norm. I suppose.

I could be wrong. Have been before.

I must away, now, and teach children things I do not know. I swear, it's like I live in a Carroll poem.

Today, if I'm to get my wish,
Where you find me, you'll find dead fish.