Tuesday, April 21, 2009

(no title)

There was no introduction or lead in. I was with my brother within a Team Fortress 2 setting, except to a certain extent it was real. But not entirely, still perceived in the back of my mind as but a game. My brother and I, and possibly a couple others had literally cornered an pair of enemy demo men, and while he held them at bay, I repeatedly and rapidly fired off grenades, bouncing them off of the ceiling, yet somehow from around another corner so I did not even have them in my own view (mind's eye made visible the ceiling ricochet, I suppose), until a count of five grenades from me, during which one foe fell, and at the end of the count, the other did likewise.

Next we were running through a large, winding stairwell. I was a pyro class now somehow, and had ignited a dark haired "Russian" woman with slightly large eyes and wearing a long red dress who somehow bore the mantle of medic and spy simultaneously, though not being both. We rounded a flight of stairs and another such woman stood at the top, and I either struck, or perhaps simply pushed her over the railing. (Such violence..) These particular stairs were vaguely familiar to me.

Past where the woman stood was a brown wooden door, above which a sign read "Mom Mom's House." I entered in along with a very large group of other people, though no longer in Team Fortress guise, and proceeded to mingle and look around at a party-spectacle in apparently my Godmother's former apartment, within my second-cousins' home. I remember there being two sets of bunk-beds, each comprised of large, polished, square wooden boards.
Something else had started, though I had faded into an intermittent state of sleep and consciousness. Suddenly my cell phone rang and I immediately leapt out of bed to check it, lest there be some emergency that required my immediate attention. I then found with great annoyance that the number displayed did not match any with which I was familiar, so I hit one of my volume buttons to make it stop ringing and just ignored it. They did not leave a message. Crawling back into bed I realized it only to be around 12:30 AM. I could have strangled the idiot who dialed the wrong number and woke me up for no good reason.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

One Not so Long

This was either Late Friday, or perhaps early Saturday:

I was but an observer. I saw my supervisor (team leader, I suppose) from work, and she was serving coffee in very small cups to presumably poor children laborers. Somehow it was inferred that this was how espresso began, by serving old, concentrated coffee to the Jews during Hitler-occupied Germany (in ridiculously small coffee cups). Then it faded.

I later saw Andrew Zimmerman, host of Bizarre Foods, watching a man "prepare" a very large eel for cooking. Truth be told, the eel was practically the length of an anaconda. The man was a plump, caucasian fellow of medium height, graying hair, balding, and bearing a mustache. He held the eel lengthwise along what appeared to be a horizontal, polished wooden pole that was a good three or four feet longer than the eel itself, and supported on two wooden "Y" shaped posts that stood at least five feet from the ground, and proceeded to pull it back and forth (a physical impossibility, when viewed from the conscious perspective) along the pole, not unlike how "The Gods Must be Crazy" portrayed the Kalahari Bushman curing a snake skin. The man rubbed it with butter and flour, and suggested Zimmerman put a little flour on his own face, which he delightfully did, saying it was the second time he'd done so that day.
(Original Post Below):

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Dreams

Dreams come and go, most times with naught but a trace recollection of mood or imagery. But sometimes more remains behind, a lingering remnant of what the subconscious portrayed while the conscious mind slumbered. This marks my first recording of such in this forum, at least as much as I remember.

There was an ocean; which particular, I've no idea. I swam in the ocean with others, but then my vision became a distant perspective, looking down upon it. There was a ladder, a red ladder, dipping down into the water where I'd swum, leading up and out from that water, that darker blue water, into the slightly lighter blue water of the ocean beyond the boundaries thereof. The boundaries were as a still amoeba, and but a mere contrast of the lighter and darker shades of blue. I became aware, through no prompting, that the swimming area was some how "fresh" water, and it donned an almost plastic, board game appearance. The vision faded, and the sequence ended.

A new sequence began, and water is still present, though somewhat distant from me. I stood near a relative's beach house in Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay. Not far from me, perhaps 10-15 feet away and besides the tall tree on the left border of the grass-lined parking space stood two girls, anywhere from 15-25 years in age. I did not recognize them, but they seemed in some way familiar to me, and I gained the impression that we shared an affection for one another. But before I could learn who they were, I found myself in an underground cavern of sorts just below the surface. Someone spoke to me about something I no longer remember, and there was an understanding that we were parting company out of necessity of a mission of some sort perhaps, and I was left on my own to breach the surface and escape. I reached my hand through a small opening in the earthen ceiling, and began to wonder that if someone were to see it, they might think the dead were rising from their graves. As I pulled myself up and out, I began to fear that I'd best run and hide quickly, lest any observer take me for a zombie and try to shoot me. Then this sequence faded, and little else remained.

In the third dream sequence, I found myself in an implied "fancy" restaurant, presumably while on vacation I think. The owner, or perhaps hostess was a woman of 40-50 years who wore a blue puffy gown and on her head was something like a blue turban with a single pink feather on the left side. There may have been a silver clasped blue jewel as well, but i do not remember clearly. We, that is my extended family and I -- around 10-12 people, were seated at a single long table, parallel to three large windows on the left, with smaller tables with other patrons seated at them. I've no idea what was to my right, as once I became seated it was to my back, and the dream did not reveal any of those particulars. For some reason I kept getting out of my seat, or maybe just suddenly appearing out of my seat, and at least twice I found myself seated at the wrong table and a little groggy.

At the last recollected instance of such, I rose and started to return to my proper place, and as I passed by my grandmother I noticed she had been served a rather enormous bit of charred meat, roughly the length of a large turkey, but no where near as high off of the dish, and from the position of the leg sections (four in total) I knew it was not turkey. [In reflection as of this writing, I want to point out that in no sense did I even remotely suspect it to be canid or any other animal of Earth for that matter. What came later is an interesting coincidence]. In peripheral I only partially noticed my grandfather had received nearly a full sized 9" by 14" casserole dish (if I remember the dimensions correctly, which I may very well not) of lasagna-like pasta, although it was not lasagna. As I sat down my mother informed me that she had ordered for me, apparently since I was out of my chair so often. It appeared to me that those at my table seemed to be receiving their food one person at a time and of poor quality, which reminded me of something from "Kitchen Nightmares".

Then a waiter arrived. He was an asian man of average height, wearing perhaps a tuxedo, and carried a pad of paper and a pencil. Oddly he spoke in French, or with a french accent, and asked me what meat I preferred for the main entree: fox or "strip steak," and he recommended the "strip steak". Moments later he spoke again in French, and my sister, who was seated across the table from me and a chair to the left, translated that he recommended the fox. I looked at her with an expression of shock and grief, and emphatically stated that I would never eat fox; and yet, a small part of me considered ordering it anyway, as it was "exotic," and had been recommended as the superior choice of meat (even though moments earlier the opposite was true). So I looked at a menu I apparently had, and realized it was not actually fox meat, but rather the dishes were apparently named after "famous explorers," Martain Fox, Desmond Wolves, and possibly one or two other I either do not remember, or were never clear to me.

After that, I found myself once more returning to my seat, and discovered a "salad" had been set for me, which consisted of an array of spinach leaves lining a plate. Next to it was a conical bottle of vinegar, and a cylindrical bottle of oil -- both covered in an "edible" lettuce-like (but not lettuce) greenish sheath. I picked up the vinegar, but then a server appeared and dressed my salad for me. But then it wasn't a salad anymore, as there were green grapes, peeled green grapes on my immediate left, and suddenly I noticed a machine on my right that resembles something like a soft-ice cream dispenser, from which my server spigotted out a pale-green substance into my bowl (formerly a plate). I got a better look at my server, who is a mildly plump hispanic gentleman, somewhat on the short side, and resembling a former pal of mine from Elementary School.

He offered a suggestion, indicated it to be somewhat unusual, but recommended I add banana to my "yogurt," which was now the implication of what he was serving. I began to say that I would like banana slices in my yogurt, but suddenly there was a deafening pounding of someone very loudly banging on drums. Presumably, a band had started playing, but the drums drowned out all other sound. He quickly steps away, and returned with a microphone that had a decaying black wind screen, and I started again to say that I would like banana slices in my yogurt, but my first word erupted from the speakers with such amplitude it knocked over several things and caused everyone to hold their ears in pain. The volume was adjusted without notification or cue, and I said once again, rather self-consciously and for all to hear, that I would like banana slices in my yogurt.

The owner or hostess appeared, apparently rather displeased with the server, and made him stand on her right as she stood on the opposite side of the table. She made him look in my direction, but not directly at me, and instructed him to keep looking. Suddenly the room glows red for two or three seconds, and as it returns to normal, the server is gone. The memory fades at this point, and I do not recall anything beyond it.