What did you dream about last night?

[amanda]

A small library was having renovations, all the shelves were empty and the 'returns' was an ever moving thing.

I finally found the next book in a series upstairs.

[amanda]

I was at my best friend's place, they were making a cuppa etc, I said to not worry about one for me.

We then saw movement at the window like two figures moving - friend and I ran into a smaller room and jumped into a bunk bed to hide.

Friend's older sister then said a cat named Nuda had thrown up - I cleaned it up, using the last bits of two paper rolls.

[crissdee]

Quality was lacking, but quantity was way up! So many dreams, going on for so long, that I was surprised it was only 9.15 when I woke up.

[jenny]

I wish I'd slept long enough last night to have a dream I could remember.

[amanda]

Rooms were being transformed into different art spaces and looking out over the ocean, I saw a rainbow on the water, and formed the following poem, even more amazed that I remembered it upon waking.

'Rainbow colours on the water
And a rainbow in the sky
How I do so like to watch
As it passes by'.

[crissdee]

Usual mish-mash of imagery, interspersed with periods of coherence. At one point, I was assistant to Inspector Morse as we began an investigation in my old home town...

[alexanderhoward]

Were you by any chance the previous night watching David Mitchell's latest series, involving a detective in Cambridge (Ludwig)? There was a definite sense of spoofing Morse.

[crissdee]

Nope, the only thing I watched was an episode of ST:TNG "Sarek", with the ever-wonderful Sir Patrick Stewart chewing the scenery as he dealt with Vulcan emotions courtesy of a mind meld...

[amanda]

I was on a street corner and found a real banana, peeled, along with a part of a toy monkey. Then in a garden bed I saw the other part of the toy, big gorilla type arms.

[celebaelin]

Don't worry - that's not at all sexual.

[amanda]

I have no idea what seeing the other part of the monkey meant, if anything.

[amanda]

I was on a long train ride but part way through, we had to go on a coach due to a fire in a house.

[crissdee]

Three strange ones, of indeterminate meaning...

1) I was starring in some kind of TV sitcom, playing a "deadbeat dad". I was supposed to be suffering a hangover in the show, but I was actually experiencing the symptoms for real..

2) I was some kind of Western outlaw who had been saved from a hanging, or at least some kind of capture, but my rescue had left me with a wound to my arm.

3) I was wandering around the shops not far from where I used to live. I was carrying two large and unwieldy pieces of metal, which I had acquired for some unidentified friend, and went into a shop (which does not exist IRL) which was selling airsoft or paintball guns.

[amanda]

The Russian lady at the library where I also volunteer had offered to help me to give my cat a daily pill - they were arranged on the sheet like my birth control ones are and she came to show me how to get it down the throat with little trouble.

[crissdee]

I was given the job of getting rid of some plastic items in the most ecological way possible. This puzzled me so much, that I was still thinking about it when I woke up. I have come to the conclusion that, while it has given us many things that might not be possible (or at least as cheap) any other way, plastic is really one of the worst ideas humans have ever come up with....

[amanda]

A library colleague and I were wearing kilts. My friend of Scottish descent wanted to borrow one but it may have had to be let out since she is bigger than us. She was pleased to see mine had the silver 'pin' thing in it.

Also in a mall, kids photos were being taken but not for something like with Santa, there were a few older kids, even adults with learning disabilities who had their photos taken too.

I saw three small puddles and went to get my roll of paper towels to clean it up - when the photography team gives me their roll.

[crissdee]

Another string of bizarre and meaningless dreams. At one point I decided to write down the details so I didn't forget them. Sadly, I made this decision within the dream, so I forgot it anyway. At another point I was a member of a comedy troupe/ ukulele band, going through the motions of playing along, while the rest of them actually played a comedy arrangement of "Ring Of Fire" by Johnny Cash. I also remember looking at some impossibly tiny kittens and puppies (about an inch long). The only one I remember in any detail is a mildly embarrassing to relate, but here goes.

A small group of us, maybe three or four men, were pursuing Emma Watson through a vast railway station shopping concourse. When I say "vast", remember I spent many hours in most of the largest termini in London, and this was orders of magnitude bigger. We were hoping to dissuade her from leaving the country. The fact that Ms Watson was wearing rather fewer clothes than would be considered seemly added a certain "frisson" to the affair. By the time we had caught up with her, she had transfigured herself into a small flying insect, so we wished her well and she went on her way....

[jenny]

For some reason celebaelin featured in my dream last night. He was away and I was supposed to be looking after his house. However he came back unexpectedly early and I hadn't got around to doing any actual housework yet, so I was embarrassed. Sorry, Cele.

[crissdee]

I was at an antiques fair - not unusual

I was looking at an old air pistol - again, hardly a new experience

Said air pistol had been "decorated" in the most tacky way imaginable, with baby squirrels and birds scampering over it, and the grip made to look like the stump of a tree. Despite all those additions, it still appeared to function properly, and I was wondering how easy it would be to strip it back to its original condition.

[crissdee]

Multi-episodic James Bond style thriller last night. Can't recall all the details, but my west end apartment had been broken into by the Bad Guys, which necessitated me getting into my time-travelling Porsche (with a cheery quip of "See you later, or possibly earlier!") and then driving at around 150 mph down a peculiarly wide and empty Ilford Lane, a road which suze will conform is neither wide nor empty, and generally unsuitable for such speeds. At some point I ran over something which wrecked the back suspension of the car, so I contacted my agency (via the ignition key) to collect a replacement car. Why I needed to travel at such speeds in a car that could travel in time was not made clear...

[suze]

Oct 18, 2024 9:18:02 GMT crissdee said:

A peculiarly wide and empty Ilford Lane, a road which suze will conform is neither wide nor empty

Duly confirmed!

The pavements actually are notably wide, but if you tried to use them as an extension of the road you'd soon have problems with lamp posts.

[amanda]

Dream 1: My sister and I took off in a light plane, only for my overhanging foot to make contact with the wires because we didn't go high enough. Then my sister bought a film camera from a shop.

Dream 2: My bedsheet on the washing line blew onto the fence in strong winds, I go out in the night and realise I may have to ask neighbours in the morning if I can go into their yards to retrieve it. Then someone slides down the bedsheet and asks if someone called Olaf is available.

[amanda]

A school's staffroom needed a plumber, so I climb a fancy staircase to the formal staffroom. Two teachers were looking over the railing at me.

Then a girl shows me how to order food - go to the table, write the order down and take it to kitchen staff at the window. For such a fancy staffroom, this lunch resembled a fish cake surrounded by peas.
I didn't have any peas on mine and the kitchen staff told me off. But there weren't any when it was given to me. The girl said she didn't know, she was watching out the window so birds didn't take the breadcrumbs.

[amanda]

Australia's rogue Indigenous politician Lidia Thorpe was showing me how a blue/white metal thing on a fence was an artifact from years ago and needed to be preserved - I was trying to work out how to photograph it to start this process of proof.
Also a tortoiseshell coloured cat was hanging around.

[crissdee]

I was employed to fix computer hardware, a singularly inappropriate occupation for an old Luddite like me. My manager was a young Sheldon Cooper...

[RLDavies]

Still having very disjointed dreams, which is a sign of sleep deprivation for me.

But at one point I was having a struggle trying to think of a nice, typical English middle-class female name. What I came up with was Pedestal, and that's still baffling me. Pedestal and James, nice couple. I'm wondering if I meant Penelope.

At a different point I was playing, or examining, some kind of game where you could change a character's background to alter his personality in the present. The game as it was in the dream was weird and unplayable, but the basic idea is actually pretty intriguing.

[amanda]

School scene - a child had had a bad accident in the toilet - more than usual 'mess on the floor' and a cleaner was trying to clean it all. So these toilets were closed and I had to find another one.

I wandered around in this quest and then climbed up a narrow wooden staircase - then looked down on what looked like the picture book section of a book shop where senior students were preparing their things.
Then I was being told that I was owed a 'grand' total of $1.80 from an invoice and despite the small amount, did I still want it paid?

[crissdee]

On the subject of dreams. Something I was browsing last night on YT suggested that "scientists in Japan" have invented a way to record dreams and play them back as video. As much as I would like this, I very much doubt if there is anything more than the tiniest grain of truth in the report. At the very most, I might believe they could scan the brain of a dreaming person, then stimulate their brain in the same way so that they might "relive" the dream whilst conscious. There is no "video" data there for them to record.

[RLDavies]

Crissdee -- Like most science news reporting at third-hand, there's a grain of truth to it, but they exaggerated it. Dream recorders by your bedside are quite a long way away yet.

Other experiments have already found that it's possible to determine what a person is looking at, based on brain activity picked up in an MRI scanner, using AI to pick out the very subtle patterns of activity. I can't remember for sure, but I seem to recall it's different for each individual, so you have to train the system first by having the person look at a lot of images whie being scanned, after which the AI can match the brain activity and determine what's being looked at, even if it's not an identical picture from the training set.

This is an extension of that. The researchers compiled a list of the most common dream imagery (man, woman, building, car, etc.) by waking up subjects during REM sleep and asking them what they were dreaming about. The AI was then trained by having the subjects (awake) look at pictures of these objects while in an MRI scanner. Once this was done, the subjects slept in the scanner, and the AI was able to tell with reasonable accuracy when they were dreaming about one of the things on the list.

www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11625

[crissdee]

One of the most bizarre, unpleasantly disturbing dreams I have ever had. Given my usual "brain cinema" that is a pretty high bar, but it cleared it with ease. There was some scatalogical stuff which would have sent Freud scurrying for his notebook, but I shall not repeat it here. There were people I knew, at least one of whom is dead, people I didn't know at all, places I should have known but they looked different, places I didn't know IRL, but seemed familiar in the dream. There were aspects which obviously related to issues in my life (mostly money) but also a lot of other "WTF" stuff. At one point I "woke up" within the dream, but also realised it was a dream because of certain "motifs" that often appear in my dreams. It also had that disturbingly "realistic" feel, where I was aware of textures and sounds. I have often wished I could replay my dreams while conscious, but this one I am glad to leave in the land of Nod....