h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Right, I'm going to start logging my dreams, definitely. They must mean something. I might learn something about myself. Trying to remember them will also improve my memory, and the whole thing will help with the 'conceptual integration' process I've so far used to help me be more 'sane'.

Last night I had many dreams. I can remember some but not all of them. Here's what I can recall.

There was a dream with actors and actresses. Famke Janssen was there ... she played a bond villainness and a superheroine in the X-men movies. She's also from The Netherlands, and I'm of Dutch heritage so that's a connection. We got on well in the dream - just speaking with each other, to be clear - which as far as I'm concerned when a beautiful woman is involved, is good enough.

Ted Danson and Rhea Perlman from the TV show 'Cheers' were also there. Danson turned out to be English in my dream despite Cheers being an American show (and Danson being American in real life). Maybe I was thinking of him playing Gulliver. I spoke with them and asked how many times they fluffed their lines in front of the live audience. Danson told me never and Perlman that she forgot her lines only twice in the entire history of the show. She then shared a mnemonic device she used: a book of French poetry! But she ended by saying that if that didn't work, you could always ad-lib your lines.

That finished the relatively 'normal' part of my dreaming.

Then there was a jumble of dreams I cannot cleanly separate. There was an aspect: I had a brother-in-law who was nothing like my real brother-in-law (he was smaller and younger and a different person). We were in a city. I saw an unusual bird. It was a dream version of a Monal Pheasant with a tail that it spread out like a peacock. And it was HUGE. If you remember the dream of the elephant-sized antelopes … but in this case it was even more extreme. The pheasant was more like Godzilla-sized. But it wasn’t destructive. It flew up on top of a huge skyscraper and sat there, displaying its plumage and fanning its tail (the tail alone was big enough that it would have demolished some of the surrounding buildings if it had touched them). I marveled at the bird … at this point I wondered if I was imagining things because it was so surreal. In my dream, I thought it was similar to the experience of walking in the desert and seeing a huge hand emerging from the dunes and making a peace sign.

At this point I was alone, so I fetched my parents and fake brother-in-law so they could also see the maginifcent giant bird.

When my fake brother-in-law saw it, he either went crazy or became convinced we were trying to drive him crazy. He pulled a knife and stabbed one of us. I then grabbed and restrained him, while we drove to the hospital. The rest of the dream was confused.

Then there was the dream about Cape Town. I’ve never been to this iconic South African city. In the dream, Cape Town was distinguished for having a very low-order beach. The dream beaches were rated according to how many rivers flowed into the sea and by how many rows of dunes there were. Dream Cape Town had only a single river flowing into the sea, and only a single row of dunes on the shore, and so was a very lowly beach. But what the beach lacked in rivers and dunes it made up for in dangerousness. People were attracted specifically by the opportunities for potentially lethal fun. One of which was the wind, which could at any time whip anyone high up into the air and then let them crash down to the ground (this is only a slight exaggeration of the real-life winds for which the region is known). Fun-seekers therefore had to wear extreme protective clothing - padded suits and goggles, among other things - at all times.

I can’t remember what else happened in this dream.

Then there was the music dream. I visited with a girl and we spoke of music. She recommended a bunch of bands to me. She recommended a singer that I recognized as being a member of the group Mediaeval Baebes. I know a different singer from the group, Emily Ovenden, who’s also in the band Pythia, and wanted to speak about her, but couldn’t remember her name in the dream. The girl lent me some music to listen to. I went away, but then she called me back … I remember, I was somewhere and I heard calling and didn’t know who was calling me, but when I looked back I saw her across the street calling from her house. She wanted to give me some more stuff. I walked back towards the house, and then we were all attacked by a gigantic eldritch abomination. I think I resisted it for a while – a giant hand or foot was bearing down upon me but I held it – but I can’t remember what happened next.

There was even more stuff that I can’t remember now. Definitely something about plants ... I found rare plants somewhere, another person who was interested in the same weird sort of things that I like. I'll try and remember more.

Love the Dream Journal, Willem! Thanks! Really inspiring. Your dreams are paintings, of course! I like the way you write them, and your other entry about Dream Keys was great also .... .

Now I will look forward to Willem's Dream Journal.

I might follow you, with a similar type DayDream Journal.....like a scruffy cousin of SleepDream .... ..

hope you don't me subbing to this journel thread

wishing you always a good nights sleep where ever you may be Willem

Hello Cactuscafé and Peanut, and welcome to my dream journal. Cactuscafé, I'm happy I inspired you with the Daydream Journal! But I won't do that, because once I start daydreaming I'll never stop. With the night dreams its OK since they are necessarily limited and my memory of them is even more limited. Which makes for a challenge.

heheh. Yes I like that, Willem. I know what you mean, sleep dreams somehow have an inbuilt editor, simply because we wake up, whereas the daydream ... I could go on and on with daydreams, till someone knocks me on the head.

And yes! remembering dreams is a great challenge. It's so annoying to wake up sensing the ghost of a dream, and yet not be able to quite grasp it. grrr. I hate that.

I am hoping that reading your dream journal will trigger some interesting sleep dreams in me.

I just had this picture right now, in my mind's eye, of a henge, a pi shaped type henge with two upright stones and a horizontal stone across the top.

One of the upright stones is sleep dream, the other is daydream .... and the stone across the top that links them ... is ... is .... is what? hah! that's a good dream I like that, except I am awake. I think. . Am I?

Hi Cactuscafé! While you think about pi-henge and whether you are or not ...

Last night's dreams. Cannot remember much.

First dream was a military sort of thing. It was a training exercise during which people really got killed. We had to hide in tunnels underground and try to survive as other guys attacked us. Once again I wasn't afraid. At the start, I showed off my weaponry to some people, can't remember who. But there was a shipload of stuff: lots of different guns, grenades, ammo, stuff ... there must have been almost a ton of it I had to lug around. Then down into the tunnels and the exercise started and people were getting killed right and left of me, but I survived I guess because I made it to the next dream.

The next dream I can't remember clearly. There were cute critturs in it. They were dinosaur-like but smaller. There was a formula for them: if you don't have X then you'd better have Y. Unfortunately I can remember only a single instance of this formula. One of the critturs was a dinosaur-like thingy walking on its hind limbs, with small single-fingered forelimbs. Like Mononykus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononykus

But not quite. It had a shorter tail. And ...

It had finger-like tentacles around its mouth for manipulating food.

It's formula was, 'If you don't have fingers on your hands, then you'd better have fingers around your mouth.' It doesn't work like that in real-life of course but that was dream logic.

The last dream I can remember was again about plants. I watered a bunch of plants and then realised I had already watered them a while before, so they were too wet. Then in one bag, perhaps because of the excess water, there had hatched a bunch of caterpillars who started eating my plants, but I squashed them. This dream is certainly related to my real-life concern for my plants. Both overwatering and caterpillars fairly regularly claim plants of mine. I don't like using poisons so I remove caterpillars manually.

Last night's dreams:

First I was walking in this suburb and came across an old friend from school. His mother had a serious problem: she was either in prison or in hospital, I can't remember any more.

Next dream: I was at an important event, a banquet or something. A friend was there and making food. He knows I'm a vegetarian and offered to make me some salad. It looked delicious but I had misgivings about eating it. The guy was working clothed only in his sweaty and filthy underpants which he kept touching, while working with the food with his bare hands. I decided I would eat it just to spare his feelings. But for some reason he crawled beneath a table and started whimpering. I felt sorry for him and wondered how I could help him.

Netx dream was about J. K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter. I came upon a book that was full of very severe criticism of her and her writing.

Next dream there was a party again. But in the same house as the party there was a hospital. A girl at the party asked me to go get her some food from the hospital, as the crowd was so thick that people couldn't get to their food in time. I did so and the hospital food turned out to be very tasty.

Then there was a dream in which I designed a superhero or fantasy creature or something like that. I had designed him quite spectacularly but then decided he looked too much like a design in a book I was referencing. So I erased him and tried again, but got stuck on his face. I made him a cyclops but his face looked very ugly and his head was too big for his body. I wanted to add wings as well but there wasn't room. I decided to call him Griffin. There was a black and white griffin sketch in the book I was using for reference, that didn't really look as a griffin should.

There was a dream in which Daniel Radcliffe (the actor who played Harry Potter) was my doctor. My body was being kept together by wires and things implanted in my bones. I went to see him to get everything 'retightened'. It was quite sore when he adjusted the internal stuff to pull all my limbs tighter in against my torso, but I tolerated the pain because I knew I would heal and get better again.

Then there was a dream where my mom was alive again and both of us wanted to visit New Zealand. We would go just for a day, staying just a few hours and then coming back again. I would love to visit New Zealand ... some of my relatives live there. In the dream they didn't feature, but there were lovely forests I wanted to see.

Holy artistbrains Mr Willem you genius. . You are adding feathers to my wings here. heheh. Wings? What wings? ..My inspiration wings.

The Harry Potter references are interesting. I wonder what is your relationship to the Harry Potter books?

Hi cactuscafé, I'm happy if I'm adding feathers to your inspiratorial wings!

I liked the Harry Potter books, but don't think they're perfect. I'm also writing fantasy books and certainly won't mind if I'm more or less as successful as Rowling was with hers!

Anyways last night I did dream but cannot remember much.

One dream was nice. I was hiking, I was with a girl, it was in a beautiful dream place based on the Blyde River Canyon here in South Africa. We started up in the mountains and then hiked down, through the gorge. Beautiful fresh green grass and forests, cliffs, clear mountain river water. When we were half-way or so the girl with me wondered if we would make it all the way to the end. I think she said we had 18 more kilometres to go. I was a bit concerned about that, since it's a stiff distance. But from then on we were hiking on the flat, and in the event we quickly were at our destination ... I think it was the lower camp. Then I thought that it was actually a cinch, not strenuous at all.

The other dream was about a museum and/or library. The displays were very creepy ... I can't remember any more what they were like, but I get sort of the idea right now that they might have been similar to those hideous monkey mermaid fakes, as well as those creepy deformed embrios kept in jars. There were books too, I can remember browsing through some of them.

I am still finding the remembering of my dreams hard. I wonder if I could get a lot better with practice?

I think you do get better with practice, Willem. One way is to lie in bed for a few minutes when you wake up.

Catch one strong dream image, and let the space unfold in your mind. Try to describe it to yourself, then you'll remember the rest of the dream.

Another thing that I've found happens to me is that, during the day, some event or feeling triggers a sudden memory of the dream.

Yes! You know, that's interesting, mister DG, dreamgenius yourself also. ... Something the next day perhaps, will trigger a dream memory, even a light effect, or a fragment of a song, or a fragrance....

Be a bit weird if you saw that stranger from the dream ..that guy who was wearing the shirt with the white flowers on it .. walking down the High Street... but we won't start that one right now.

How accurately can you draw a dream, Willem?

Hi there folks. Dmitri, I'll try some of that. A problem I have is that I usually wake up in the morning from my cat mewing at me. And she does it so insistently that I find it difficult to concentrate on what I was dreaming. But I'll keep trying, I'll have a go at triggering a memory during the day.

Cactuscafé, I think I'll have a lot of trouble accurately drawing a dream since my memories of them are so vague. But I do know that my dreams often have very vivid images in them. Indeed I often dream I'm creating art ... of the sort I would love to create in real life. So the business of dream remembering could actually help me out if I can only do it better!

I didn't manage to remember my dreams the past few nights. My sister and her family were visiting, it was a long weekend here (Thursday was Women's Day) and my routine was disrupted. I'm getting back to things again now, so I'll see how much I can remember tomorrow morning.

Last night's dreams:

One was a dream in which at some point when I was walking back home, a girl I knew gave me a lift in her car. When we came to my house, the gate (we have a tall metal security fence closing off the yard from the street) was closed, but I leaped over it, just lightly touching one hand to the top. I was so impressed at my own ability to do this, that I leaped back again, this time without touching the fence at all. I then leaped back and forth over the fence, the last time while carrying someone on my back (it might have been my father or mother).

The next dream, I had a wonderfully large house. It had a vast, hall-like sitting/visiting room, with a wine cellar. Some people were visiting me, including a man that was in my parents' old church, and the husband of a woman who takes art classes along with me. They were talking of various folk remedies for complaints. The husband of my classmate then mentioned one: a kind of honey that would cure enchanted dragons.

The last dream I can remember, I was looking for some plant cuttings I had made, they ought to have been in my room but weren't. Then there was a girl and we spoke about music; I wanted to play some of my music to her, but we ended up listening to stuff she liked.

What pleasant dreams.

The thought of you jumping back and forth over your gate made me smile, I like it when I can do things like in my dreams

A kind of honey that would cure enchanted dragons, that sort of detail is so cool

Hello Peanut and Dmitri! Yes, that was one of the nicer bunch of dreams I've had.

Last night I dreamt a lot but remember little.

One dream I can remember featured a young girl, as in 10 or 11 years old, who cut herself while shaving! I think she might have been a pirate. I dream from time to time of girls with over the normal degree of facial hirsuteness. There was once a pair of twin girls both of whom had luxurious, rich reddish-brown hair, beards and mustaches.

The next dream was one of my back-to-school dreams. I can't remember the details, but generally in these dreams I am again ... or sometimes still ... in school, sometimes high school, sometimes primary school. I am the age I am now, but somehow never managed to graduate. Also in these dreams many of my old school friends are still there as well. There are some story themes that continue from dream to dream in this school setting ... but I'll really have to work on the memory to try and remember them.

The last dream was out-and-out fantasy ... can remember pretty much nothing of it, but it was so weird that even if I could remember it I would be hard put to describe it.

What I can remember from last night:

I had a little bird, I'm pretty sure it was inspired by the African Piculet I've spoken of yesterday. I had this little bird in my hand, then set it free ... it flew off, and I worried I wouldn't see it again, but then it came back and landed in my hand! But when I look at it, it was covered in black grainy thingies ... fleas!

I also dreamt of a Hyrax. See here:

http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/A87739645

This hyrax ran around the swimming pool and also jumped in and out of it. The pool currently has very little water in it and in the dream had none. The hyrax was more like a little antelope than like a hyrax. I speculated that the reason was because it was running in the open, allowing it to stretch out its legs. When clambering on the rocks, I hypothesized, it would move in a crouching position making it seem more dumpy. In the dream, on different occasions, it had three different faces: an antelope-like face, an aardvark-like face, and a cartoonish face with eyes very close together, and a huge, wide grin with way too many teeth.

I then saw some hyrax fossils. One of these had abnormally long forelimbs, making it look like a chalicothere:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ChalicotheriumDB1.jpg

Subtext: I have long been searching the 'net as well as books for good photos of fossil hyraxes. They're very hard to find. Prehistoric hyraxes were very diverse but there's simply not much by way of accessible visual material portraying this diversity.

Next chunk of dreams I remember only very poorly. I can remember we were in a huge hall and I was making a presentation ... both in the form of detailed diagrams I had drawn and was rather proud of. The first was a huge building complex, the other was a military tank, but what they were for I had no idea. At a point there were two Cape Eagle Owls in the hall as well, perching in the openings in the walls just beneath the roof.

Now I'm thinking about that Hyrax. especially with its grin. These are some dreams, indeed. Forever an artist, even in dream. Incredible.

Thought of you last night, Willem. Saw the film Searching For Sugar Man, about the elusive songwriter, name of Sixto Rodriguez. He came from Detroit, no one in the States had ever heard of him, but his name was bigger than Elvis in South Africa, in the 70s!

No one had seen him. No one knew who he was. Some said he commited suicide on stage. No one knew who he was. He made this album called Cold Fact. Somehow it arrived in South Africa. Perhaps someone brought over a bootleg, and all the young people in South Africa were crazy about it, helped them through the trauma of apartheid, even though some of the tracks were scratched out , so they couldn't be played on the radio.

Anyway .. what happened was ... oh, can't tell you ... case you see the film. heheh. I recommend it.

Sorry to divert your dream journal. Back to the grinning Hyrax! ...

Hello Cactuscafe! I'm glad you find my dream journal interesting. I wish I could get a kind of dream recorder (those might actually be a reality in the not-too-distant future ... imagine what kind of art one could produce with something like that!) I'll reall keep an eye out for that Searching for Sugar Man film, sounds very interesting!

I did very poorly with remembering last night's dreaming. I know it was totally action-packed and eventful but I can't remember anything specfific! I know there were nice girls in it again, and more happened than usually does, but nothing that would be unsuitable to describe in public. Well there was some huge public event, but what it was I can't tell for the life of me. Only ... there was a guy, Roland Kickinger there, I don't even know what he did. He was a bodybuilder (don't know if he still is, or even if he's still alive) that back in the nineties the high-ups were trying to turn into a second Arnold Schwarzenegger. It didn't work. What he was trying to achieve in my dream, I wonder.

Will try to do better next time.

Dream recording someday, you say? Take a look at http://www.cracked.com/article_19978_5-mind-blowing-ways-that-science-has-done-impossible.html