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

Hi Cactuscafé! Interesting what you say about the dog. And it makes me wonder if my dreams might not feature things that are meaningful to *other* people rather than to myself!

I think I should draw a picture of that guy.

Last night there were a whole bunch of dreams.

I was on my way back home from somewhere, with a school friend. He was carrying me. (IRL I once carried this friend on my back up a flight of stairs for six stories of a building.) He was getting lost and I said to him my home was in another direction. Anyways we were accosted by hooligans and we floored them.

Next, back in the city of Pretoria, back at University. Once again I got a bit lost in town. There were a couple of pretty girls, walking in front of me at some point, but from their conversation I was disappointed to learn that they were heavily into drugs.

Next, a plane crash-landed in the city. But it was a fairly gentle landing in a place where somehow there was room for the plane, and not many people died.

I can remember little of the next dream. Our old spike-thorn tree was back (it died years ago) and I was climbing and hanging around in it. I sort of remember something about camouflage ... was I trying to hide?

There was a dream about a big movie theatre complex, very bright inside, whereas the actual theatres in my dreams are usually pitch dark.

I dreamt somewhere in between that I was training with weights again and did some T-bar rows ... again this is an exercise I haven't done in twenty years or so.

Then I also dreamt about gardens ... my own dream garden (which is a lot bigger than my real garden) but also the neighbourhood gardens. We were attracting a lot of big spectacular wildlife but I can't remember just what ... antelopes or deer, maybe?

Last night's dreams:

First I dreamt of a method or a system called "The Long Shot" that enables people to attempt things in a fairly safe way that otherwise would probably kill them.

I next dreamt I looked at myself in the mirror and saw I had defined abdominal muscles, especially my lower obliques. This is a dream of a dream come true, because this year for the first time in my life I leaned out enough to show my abs.

I then dreamt my dad was alive again, but in this dream he did something to make me very upset! I was using the sink to wash some dishes and only when the sink was full, I noticed that some of my potted plants were in the sink! And they were flooded! Not good, because my succulent plants generally don't like a lot of water. I tried to drain them off, but I was very angy at my dad. I wonder why he did that? In the dream there was a reason but I forgot it!

Then I dreamt of an Amiga emulator. Back in the day (late eighties) this computer was also for me something like a dream, unfortunately never come true. Even though the computers of today are far more powerful than the Amiga ever was, I still wish I could have had one back then ... or even could have one now! I sort of am nostalgic about old-time computers, I started in 1983 with the Commodore 64 and still have fond memories of the things we did with it. We skipped to IBM-compatibles from the mid-nineties and onwards.

Anywas what I did in the dream with the Amiga emulator was to simulate clouds! I sort of a while ago have been thinking of how one could create and animate clouds with computer graphics. But in the dream, the simulated clouds were not on a screen, they were in the actual sky.

There was more stuff that I can't remember any more.

Hey Willem! Dream garden. Interesting! I was having these daydreams the other day about a garden that I never saw before, with the strangest statues in it. And my mother left poems about a dream garden ....

Be so cool if you drew the guy with the hair like dog ears. Wish I could see that, but a dream drawing might be private.

That would be a good story, about someone who has all these amazing dreams. They don't know what they mean particularly, but they tell them like they are stories, and often someone else will respond to the imagery and it will really change their life or something. Perhaps that relates to the role of the shaman, the healer. To have dreams for other people. Be a great story.

That was a long paragraph. An entire story, in fact. .

cc

I like the dream cloud-making, Willem.

Hi Dmitri and Cactuscafé! I will see if I can find time for drawing some things from my dreams.

I have a sort of system now ... I wake up a couple of times and quickly jot down what I can remember. The system is not quite foolproof as you shall see ... sometimes I am not very clear-headed in the middle of the night, and sometimes my handwriting is almost impossible to decipher.

Last night (the dreams of which incredibly feel like they happened months ago):

I was in art class. The teacher was rather sadistic. I made a contraption of Lego-like bricks. It didn't really work ... I was trying to make something spontaneous, without any plan, and it came out really lousy, not beautiful or interesting at all. There were joints that couldn't flex because of the way the thing was bound together, and there were transparent 'windows' that didn't show anything, there were even transparent bits in the centre of it where no-one could see anyways. The teacher mercilessly criticized my useless creation. Then I tried making something else, and at least got to the point where one of its joints could actually flex, enabling it to change shape ... then that dream ended.

The next dream: a friend of mine wanted to play a practical joke on someone with a fake or cap gun. I didn't like this and caused it to 'backfire' on him (not sure exactly how that worked?), scaring him.

Then I dreamt of a group of trees planted at a school. The centre tree was a 'dragon tree' ... I must have been thinking of dragon fruit but this was a palm-like tree rather than a cactus. It had spiky leaves though. Around it were a couple of smaller trees, and there was the suggestion of it being a forest, but I thought a proper forest should have many more trees.

Another friend had a broken hand. Something worked for him. I can't decipher my writing to make out what it was ... nor can I remember any other detail of the dream.

Then there was a dream of carrots from my garden making people who ate them or just looked at them and perhaps smelled them violently ill.

I also had some trees that I wanted to water, I ended up overwatering them, flooding a part of the lawn.

Then there's a really cryptic note about children being angry and not having any patience. I have no idea what that was about.

The last dream ... well so far I've not needed to censor any of my dreams (except for not mentioning the names of personal friends appearing in them) but in this case ... well, I applied for studying at a university, and there (part of selecting students, or was it when I already was busy with my studies? I've no idea.) was a whole lot of fairly violent fighting involved in which there were folks with bits of their anatomy hanging out that ordinarily would be covered up. Not *me* this time ... Totally no clue what could have inspired that.

Not much to report of last night's dreams. Only one I can remember clearly: I was driving back home from University. My dad and my sister were very angry with me because I returned to them without a girlfriend. They called me 'Blaffie' ('Barky'). They were under the impression I did have a girl there and could easily have brought her along, but the truth is 'she' hardly existed. Maybe as a kind of imaginary girlfriend rather than a real person.

I can only vaguely remember a single element of another dream: very grotesquely fat birds, so fat that their bills didn't protrude from their faces.

Sorry for not reporting yesterday ... I was injured and feeling down for other reasons also. So I'll report yesterday's dreams first.

I dreamt of a wonderful trip ... a visit to the Magoebaskloof region. The dream version of this region is even more beautiful than reality ... the dream nature is unspoilt whereas in reality it has been very badly messed up, though there are still pristine patches. In my dream there were mountains, forests, waterfalls and wonderful scenic vistas.

In this dream the Dutch band Epica also toured this region. Their lead singer, the beautiful Simone Simons, got entirely lost in the forest! The band even gave up trying to find her and drove away. But I kept looking and called the police to try and help find her. But the police didn't believe me and ridiculed me! She never turned up again (in the dream).

There was a dream of me in a mall. I'll have to censor the description. There were men running around nude and also a whole bunch of people doing stuff in the nude in the 'show' part of the mall complex.

That's pretty much what I remember dreaming the night before last.

Last night I dreamt of weirdness happening in a supermarket. There were to be simulations ... one was where there were supposedly a serial killer in there, and I remember dodging behind the stacks a lot ... but didn't actually see the killer and didn't feel much danger.

But the next 'simulation' was horrendous and had obviously gone totally out of control. This time it was of a cult or something, and it appeared lots of people had been killed for real! The cult members were black ... not in terms of their race ... but because their skins had been scorched pitch black. Their faces also were burnt and shrivelled ... their heads seemed shrunken. They had slaughtered and burnt a very large number of people, but there were survivors ... I can remember a bunch of us forming a circle with everyone facing outwards, we had weapons like knives or maybe swords to defend ourselves. I think we managed to get out alive.

There was then a dream about a small island near Japan, where Winnie Mandela (Nelson's estranged ex-wife) went so as to disseminate propaganda. Can't remember what for, or what else.

I also dreamt of a new Tintin adventure I had discovered in a library or bookshop. Actually it wasn't new ... in the dream, it was actually an old book fitting somewhere around the Tintin in the Congo and the Blue Lotus period, but it was unknown to me. This adventure took place in Mexico or South America, but I can't remember the details of it.

Then there was another dream in which I was worried about my plants. Weather predictions said there would be '90% rain' ... I interpreted that as it raining on 90% of the days of Spring and Summer which would be much too wet for the small succulent plants I love to grow, specifically the carrion flowers. Worriedly I gazed out at them growing in their beds and hoped they would be all right.

Can remember very little about last nights dreams, except the overall impression that they were very epic. There were gigantic mosquitoes and other flying insects ... my mom was addressing a crowd in disguise ... there were strange buggy critturs manifesting in pools that even in the dream seem to have had symbolic value ... and I can't remember the rest.

Hi abbi, I see you there!

Last night there were lots of dreams but again I can remember very little.

The one was where I had ... I'm sure ... a dog as well as a cat. They were both very cool and sleek looking and very adorable. The dog might have been a Weimaraner, the cat a Havana Brown. Anyways at one point the dog got lost. And I put the cat in a cat hostel (is there a better word for that?). Then more things happened, and I returned to get my cat, but suddenly it wasn't there! There were a bunch of look-alike cats but not *my* cat.

Can't remember anything more of that dream.

Then there's a dream where I sat on some swans and they liquefied. Not in a messy way, they turned into clear water droplets.

There was more ... maybe I'll remember in a while.

Last night’s dream was a great one! At least, the dream I can remember.

It was of a girl who I think worked for a newspaper or a magazine. She had a colleague who was around part of the time, but I can’t remember if it was a guy or a girl. Anyways I visited them, I liked the girl a lot. And she was very nice. Now … I wish I could find real-life girls as nice as these dream girls. And by this I mean … my real dream girls are not stunningly beautiful or sexy, but they EXIST (in the dream-world that is) first of all, and second of all actually are willing and it seems to me eager to talk to me. So I had a wonderful time with the dream girl, just talking and doing a few things. She amazed me … there was a bee’s nest somewhere inside the house, with lots of honeycombs, and she did something in the nest with her bare hands and no protective clothing, and didn’t get stung. I sort of think she went entirely into the cavity in which the bee’s nest was. I was very concerned but when she came out she assured me she knew precisely what she was doing.

I also had a chance to show off … they had a board or something with screws in it, or screw-like gadgets, that they were having trouble getting out. I don’t know why they needed to remove the gadgets from the board, but they had tried with all kinds of tools and couldn’t get them out, so I said let me try, and I pulled them out with my fingers. The colleague looked at me, amazed, and asked if I worked out.

I also at some point lifted a very heavy beam that was in the scrap yard or some other such place where lots of machinery and building material and such was sitting and lying around.

So … I spent a lot of time with this dream girl, talking and doing a few things … and she honestly seemed to like me, and she was single … but I still didn’t have the nerve to actually ask her out!

*fingers crossed* perhaps if you dream of her again she'll ask you out then! Or you could invite her over to see your bee's nest, that would impress her

This time I had an h2g2-relevant dream! Figures … I’ve been logging them here after all, so some feedback from here back to there is to be expected. Anyways this time I ended up in big trouble! I was doing a bunch of pictures for The Post … lots and lots of dinosaur pictures (and interestingly that was last night, before Elektra put that link about the dinosaur art here … so maybe there was some feedback from the (then) future involved as well). Well anyways at a point I was fed-up with drawing dinosaurs and said I was going to ‘throw the book at Dmitri’! In the dream what I wanted to say is I would give him the ‘book’ of my finished work to look at but he and many other people interpreted it as an insult and were outraged, and my entire reputation on h2g2 went down in flames!

Then I woke up and was happy that it was just a dream. Then I went back to sleep and *then* dreamt that the waking up part was just a dream, and that in reality I *had* accidentally ruined my h2g2 reputation and that trying to explain what I really meant would be of no use at all!

So when finally I did wake up fully I was doubly happy.

Then there was another dream … it featured a forest that only exists in my dreams, in a range of mountains to the east of the dream version of my hometown, Pietersburg/Polokwane, and in this dream there were plans to build a coca-cola factory there about which I was very shocked and sad.

Oh sorry, Hi Peanut! It very rarely happens that I dream of the same girl twice, unless she is a dream version of someone I know in real life ... which this one was not.

Heavens, I sometimes leave extremely cryptic notes for myself in the middle of the night having just woken up and trying to remember what I was dreaming, while still being half asleep! Last night's notes ... I think I've managed to decipher them. I seem to have had a Dark City (movie from the nineties) dream, and there were brains in it ... cow brains, chimp brains, and human brains. In the dream I remarked that actually the simpler brains of the non-human animals look neater and more elegant than a human brain. The enlarged cerebrum of the human brain looked to me like a malignant growth.

Anyways I don't know what the brains were for, but it seems there was a quest to find out whether there's life after death ... what happens to the soul, the individual? Unfortunately I can't remember the rest of the dream.

I dreamt of Cory Everson next ... she was Ms. Olympia a couple of times in the eighties and subsequently appeared in a few films and TV shows. In my dream she had the reputation of being a 'wuss' because of not regularly measuring the circumference of her thighs.

The next dream I noted to myself as follows: "Parade - strangers: makes sense?" No, sorry Last Night's Willem, it does not make sense.

But the next I remember a bit better. There was a device that someone invented, a portal-maker using an EMP device (in reality EMP's can't do anything of the sort). I think we were in the back of a truck. The guy with the portal-maker was going to deploy it ... at first I thought it would be a portal going through the walls on a slant, one that would be high enough that you could walk through it like a tunnel. But then he made the portal straight down through the bottom of the truck. I saw the other end of the portal was the street a bit ahead of where we were. I jumped feet first into it, and came out the other end head first (again not the way a portal like that *should* work), my momentum carried me up into the air a short distance, but then I fell back into the portal and emerged back in the truck once again.

The last dream was a nightmare. I came out of (or maybe TO) the house to see a couple of my trees had been cut down! They were very special trees too. Then I looked about and saw *all* my trees and big shrubs had been cut down ... and the folks who did it were still there and smiling, as if they'd done me a favour. Of course I was heavily angry because of how special those plants are. But those guys did not understand. They were cutting down almost every tree in the neighbourhood, because they wanted to discourage the cats ... rehy really didn't like cats. Then of course I was concerned about my cat Poplap. I had a bit of revenge by sabotaging their cars and bicycles.

Shame on those people.

My, my, you're really on a roll here, Willem...I would never make notes to myself, I'm sure I wouldn't be able to read them afterwards.

Me neither. I thik I'd rather have a voice activated tape recorder but my dreams are't that memorable.

Hi Elektra and Dmitri! I am trying to figure out how the feedback between real life and my dream life works. Freud said dreams were the royal road to the unconscious ... well Freud was probably wrong about many things but this idea could still be investigated. I'm not sure if my dreams really reflect my unconscious but they do seem to be influenced by my daily activity and ponderings. But ... most of all ... I want to become better at remembering my dreams because there are some genuinely artistic and creative visions and ideas in there ... if for example I could reproduce some of the paintings or just imagery I've seen in my dreams ... or recreate some of the spontaneous dream poetry ... or remember an idea that has potential for being turned into a story ... it could help me greatly with my art and writing.

Last night I dreamt a lot and again made very cryptic notes to myself. But as far as I can figure out ...

First dream. Mom and Dad still alive, we went on holiday, but it was a bit of an unpleasant experience! Well ... we did all right sightseeing and so on, it was based on a nature reserve excursion ... but then we were rushed to leave when our time at the resort was up! We packed hastily and consequenly I left a bunch of muscle magazines behind about which I was sad because the dream magazines were very much better than any magazines I've seen in 'real life'.

Also because of the rush my mom drove back with a car that was unlicensed and was fined R1300 (I can remember the exact amount ... now why can't I remember other details as easily?). Meanwhile I drove back using a different car, it was a VW Beetle. I stopped along the way to look at a tree with a strange, fibrous bark. I gazed up into the crown and there sat a white peacock.

The next is sketchy. There was Mr. Sulu of Star Trek's supposed son ... who soon became a cute kitten in Japanese Anime style! Can't remember what the kitten did. Then there was a monument, like the Voortrekker Monument in my birth town of Pretoria. But this was a monument to ME! It was MY dream world after all. I (and someone else who was with me but I don't know who this was any more) climbed the staircase inside to the top, where one could enjoy the view. Though it was a city view, there were some weird buildings, one of which looked like a big blue refrigerator or ice box.

There apparently was a dream involving a chameleon, and three spiders. The spiders at first were something else, then they were spiders. The chameleon shot its tongue out, picking the spiders off their web one by one, and then sat beside the web, waiting for insects to approach or get ensnared so he could get them too.

Hey Willem!

I'm still reading your incredible dreams...

The chameleon again! Hullo chameleon! Who are you, little fellow, scuttling through Willem's dream brain?

Remember you had the dream about the book of all the chameleons in the world, illustrated? I keep thining about that.

Willem, do you know paulh? Maybe you can ask him how he remembers *his* dreams--he's been chronicalling them for awhile, and sometimes records them in his journal on here.