The Wig (a #dream)

 It was the seventies and the seventies were in the future.

A powerful device was invented and two competing companies wanted it. 

One of them was owned by an alien. The name of the company was something like Evencalibur. 

The inventor wanted to sell them his or her patent but was too eager therefore selling it for too little.

Which made the new owner laugh about it to his assistant who was dressed in white and and looked very much like the partner of his competitor who was dressed in black.

The patent was stored in an old folder which contained dozens of notes and other papers. All signed at the bottom left corner with the date top right in pencil.

He knew he was lucky to have it on paper because all electronic files were lost. When he took it out to have it signed by himself and his assistant and have both their picture taken as evidence that the patent was now his, she tried to kill him. Or was it the wife of his competitor? Anyhow, he was lying on his back when he managed to get hold of a knife and lunged it over his left shoulder, stabbing her in the chest. 

Trying to say something she fell to the floor and he used the invention on himself, getting ready for a press conference. Looking in the mirror he got stared at by a younger version of himself and ran to his study where there was a child who was also his brother/friend/business partner and who told him: "That is the wig my father gave me!"

Little again (a dream)

Paid a vacation visit to a senior great aunt with two adult daughters and a few teenagers (grandchildren?) One of them a special needs kid wearing a loose grey/blue dress. The scene seemed to take place at a camping site or in a trailer park. There was a table holding extremele long hotdogs with ketchup and union already on them. A yellow plastic tablecloth. 

Upon waking up the next morning I wanted to make coffe for the group but some man had just beaten me to it. Two souls, one thought. Smiling at me he walks away and hugs his boyfriend: "Hotdog? Unions?" "Please", he says.

It is still early but already scorching hot.

So I borrow slippers because it's too hot for shoes. Part of the group walks off the terrain and I follow while a few elderly follow me at a short distance. The group takes pictures of the complex. Lined up, all dressed in white. Including a in my dream well known paparazzi. His camera looks like a game controller. Black with an adjustable and curved piece of glass/see through mirror at the handle by his right hand.

They pay no attention to the hillside that is the landscape. That's obviously dehydrated. With a few scattered dead plants.

Every brick building is brand new and there are lots of stairs. I stop to make pictures. From buildings beautifully lit by the bright sunlight. And from curious passersby. One of them glances at me. Brunette with semi-long, curly hair, bright eyes and slightly tanned skin. I take a picture of her and she (Sylvie?) smiles.

We arrive at a playground that is huge. Enormous slides, hanging walkways and a lot of wooden stairs. I loose track of the group and see a few signs: 'Big Way->'. But no sign of the group.

There's a rope way with sturdy BMX-like bikes hanging from it. All blue. The bikes are being pulled up by a semi-automatic pully system. Young folk ride them through a complicated path above the ground. There are solid blue nets to catch them, might they fall while racing down the path. Over walk bridges and planks.

The special needs teen walks towards an attraction. She pushes aside a boy. Roughly.

Next moment I'm 'home'. Where someone turns on the tv-set. No image because there appears to be no power. Some conman pretends to go in a trance and the two adult daughters suddenly act like four year olds, sitting on the floor, holding on to people's and table's legs.

While a voice appears to come from the television. The shadowy figure demands money from my great aunt 'or else...'

Intimidating some vague paper cut-out makes its way from the back of the set to the glass at the front:

"Look, something paranormal is going on because my children suddenly became little again!"

 

Our own phone (a dream)

There's this shop. Not open because there are no goods to sell. Counter on the left, big window on the right. New window and new (white) tiling as if being completely rebuild. Messy floor with a lot  of dirt.

Behind the window and on the outside, angled and 'looking up' a gold coloured dented plate with inscriptions in an ancient text. Mayan maybe.

With the owner - an Asian man - seeing a woman in the far right corner of the shop. Obviously in distress. Going down with her. Meeting people who apparently live below ground. We want to help the (Caucasian) woman. There's a raccoon stuck to her side. 

Not that the animal is clinging to her but actually part of her right side. The woman cries: 'Don't kill it, it wants to live and so do I.' While the shop owner and I think of ways to detach the raccoon without killing either one, someone hits the raccoon in the back with an axe. It's detached from the woman now and dying, with the axe still lodged in its back, it crawls towards the far left corner of the underground tent (?) we're in. Revealing a big and bloody gap in the woman's side. 

At the dinner table (still underground) the three of us discover we switched our phones. And decide to switch them back because we all want our own phone.

Inside (a dream)

We decided to move from The Netherlands. It was my family, including my father, and some friends. Since I never knew my actual father, the father figure in the dream was portrayed by a former father-in-law. Who used to smile when I called him 'dad' as his own children stopped doing so when they were still little.

We had a stopover in Belgium, the French speaking part as I seem to remember from the dream. A beautiful landscape with lots of hills and trees and we parked the cars, van and/or truck next to an abandoned farm. What struck me as odd was that there were no animals. Not even birds.

Did the animals all flee because they knew something we didn't? But why did we actually flee ourselves? While some of our group of some twenty people took refuge in the farmhouse and shed, I decided to sleep outside. Apparently on a very high waterbed. That obviously sprung a leak as suddenly I rolled to one side, barely hanging on to avoid landing a few meters down into a muddy pool.

Next moment I stood on a rooftop with somebody - an indistinct woman in mainly brown clothes and some kind of headscarf covering her hair - pointing out some sights to me. Distant trees and hills, an ancient church...She had me point my camera or binoculars to my right side because there was a beautiful - and amazingly clean - window. Or rather a collection of windows. In it was the reflection of a magnificent landscape, adorned with a wide array of very peaceful animals. The reflected sky was of a beautiful blue hue and the clouds looked like they were painted by one of the old Dutch Masters who were famous for painting beautiful clouds. 

Could this be heaven? I never found out because it started to rain and according to my companion the rain was dangerous so we had to make our way inside.

Baseball bat (a dream)

Because he drew the shortest straw, it was now up to him to clear the debris field surrounding the ship.

Looking at his monitor he saw how a living ship, attracted by The Tree, folded itself around the 'tree trunk' of the ship he had called home since his early childhood. Slowly the top and bottom 'hat' of his mushroom shaped ship sneaked up upon the unsuspecting, now almost liquid ship, gently squeezing the life out of her. It succumbed. Its wires and plates withering as if they were dying parts of a once beautiful plant.

A window formed a dew drop and in it, he detected a shape. A small, human shape. The drop burst open and out fell a baby. Which he caught in his arms. Although he didn't have to as the ground of the planet he was standing on, was mostly covered in a soft, dark green kind of moss.

They raised the baby if she were their own. Which of course she was. Knowing she would live a full live in just and exactly 311 days, they decided to skip basic survival training and only teach her the basics: how to read of course. Not only letters but also emotions. From humans and animals alike. Music and poetry, dance and archery were part of the daily curriculum. 

Her brother-in-law acted as her partner in a make-believe Prom they set up for her. Although schools were a thing of the past and there were only a dozen or so of them left. Although scattered around the planet and throughout the universe more groups of people were likely to exist. Resting on her mother's lap with her father next to them, stroking her hair, she realised she was fortunate, as she gently died. Smiling as she had just seen her brothers and sisters run off to play some game involving a wooden or metal stick that looked like it was an amalgamation of a hockey stick and a baseball bat. 

The moon (a dream)

A generic female figure, representing my mother and other women in my life, took me and a friend of hers on a trip. An adventure, really. We stopped over in Belgium. Where I used my phone to take some pictures. Some of the landscape and some of some tall building I was standing right under. It was a modern building. And I aimed my camera straight up to catch a ray of sunlight that was reflecting beautifully on the stained glass windows of the building that had mostly the colour of bricks but was smooth as concrete but also looked soft.

As the sun was setting, a couple stopped and asked me to have a look at the picture on my screen. They agreed it looked amazing and sharp. They also gave me tips on how to take better pictures. Next moment my mom, the friend and me were walking through some Asian country. At a local market, we noticed a return of punk. At least I did, for my companions were to busy with their conversation, smiling, and apparently reminiscing on the past.

A small group of young punksters were involved in a heated discussion at a small clearing on the market. Before they walked on I noticed one of them was wearing a kind of backpack, or maybe the shape was just part of his clearly homemade black, leather jacket. Which looked more like rubber to me. The figure/backpack was in the shape of a bat with the wings sticking out just below the man's shoulders. Two female punkers - not belonging to the first group - entered a clothing store on what looked like high heels. But looking more closely it was more like they were walking on 30cm high stilts. With the toes in the high 'boots' (black, with gold tribals and some other painted decorations), aiming straight down. So, it looked like they had no feet. 

We walked passed a small harbour that harboured a few fishing boats. I assumed most were out catching fish. Looking to my right and down a little, I noticed some young boys playing with fireworks. One of them threw a piece at us and it exploded in the air with a not so loud bang nearby us. My companions did not seem to notice and I smiled at the boy who threw it. He grinned. My company went into a shop and asked me to wait outside.

I presumed they needed to use the toilet. I planned using the time to look up - anticipating sharing the night with them - the Indonesian phrase "Good night, ladies". I already knew how to say "good night", so all I had to look up was the word "ladies". But before I could do so they had already returned and we continued on our journey.

Next, we were hiking through a jungle. And my mother's friend asked if we would make it in time to the campsite. My mother replied: "Yes, the mud will come. We will get wet and dirty." I pictured us covered in mud and shivering in our shared tent.

Next thing I knew I was on an operating table in a cleanroom. And subjected to some tests. My mother and her friend had already gone through the process and now it was my turn. Before I could take the final stage of the journey they had to be sure if I was able to withstand low gravity and other harsh conditions. Apparently to live on a base on the moon.

The mat (a dream)

The schoolmaster asked us to gather around Mr. Johnson's Mat. Which was yet unfolded, waiting to be revealed on the floor of the small empty patch of forest. Parents and children alike wondered but also seemed afraid to come a bit closer.

The teacher - a man with short, brown hair in his thirties and cleanshaven - sank down on his haunches, glanced around the group and unfolded the map which was made of some kind of thick plastic and showed no sign of hinches or folds when unfolded.

My first impression - or from the character I played in my dream - was that it vaguely resembled the playing board of Ludo. Because of the different coloured circles. The colours were orange, brown, yellow, blue, red and green. They resembled the different levels of learning from all different children in the school, regardless of age.

The colours matched the different places on the edges of the manmade open place in the woods. Children got assignments from the AI, put their hands on the mat, on a coloured circle that matched the level of difficulty of the question. Thanks to biometrics the software knew which student had answered which question and 'sensed' the answer. The corresponding circle would light up at a right answer and more circles would light up, indicating the number of points the student was rewarded. The student would then walk over to the appropriate spot at the rim of the field. About half a dozen students could simultanously use the mat.

Survive (a dream)

Some sort of giant alien loci had devoured all plantlife on Earth. Unsure if it were the aliens themselves or a genetically engineered lifeform they had unleashed unto the planet. 

Giant tsunami's swept the planet and the largest one hung over Kenia, according to the latest images I had seen on the last available television broadcasts, just before a worldwide shutdown of energy.

The last survivors were packed together in basements, churches, bars, underground stations and other (makeshift) shelters and people started to die from starvation.

All the while I was being tossed around by the winds and water, ocassionaly clinging to flagpoles and lampposts, realizing the end was near but still hoping at least my children would survive.

We could (a dream)

There was a street performer who played a blind character in mime, singing a song with the word 'see' in it. And it was hilarious. In another act he would drink white cava whine. He had black, curly hair and was a Belgian student who also played the trombone in a well known orchestra, as an investigative reporter found out by looking at images at a viewing screen in a studio. The performer told me he had some wine left in this old delivery truck he had painted himself with colourful graffiti. Later he would ask me to film him while he was smoking a cigarette in the back yard of his old university. Which suddenly was my own back yard and on the camera I saw images of my son as a child. 

There was a party we attended. With a lot of young people. My girlfriend in the dream had given me a (black) car she had poorly parked in the garage underneath the venue. On our way to the party (a national celebration, it seemed) we met a couple of which the woman was wearing almost the same outfit as my girlfriend. Including the same keffiyeh. And they both had grey eyes with light grey eye white. Which looked rather unsettling.

The party was no fun as a lot of people were under the influence of different substances. So we decided to leave. When we entered the garage we just saw my car leaving in the distance. It went straight and left and disappeared into the daylight.

We had no choice than to go by bike. My partner had a pillow and a small child on the back of her bike. I asked her for her old slide phone to call my now ex-girfriend. 'No, you can't have more than 1000 sheets of printing paper!', she yelled. I told her that was not what I was calling for. I found out she was driving my car and asked her why. At least she could have called and tell me. No reply.

Later we (my girlfriend? My son? My new friend the performer?) sat in the back of the car of an unknown but in the dream familiar man. He directed our attention to an old and expensive housing project that was never finished and left for Mother Nature to slowly demolish. 'What if we had no jobs, no hobbies, no family. In which would lie life's adventures?', he asked. And I replied: 'In visiting the nearby (I forgot or may have never known the exact name) 'Old white house of Mr. Grey'. At least we could have a pee there.' The driver smiled, put his hands more firmly on the steering wheel and his foot deeper on the gas: 'Yes, we could.'

Surprise (a dream)

To everyone's surprise I literally jumped at the change to be the bike taxi driver for a friend of mine. While she sat in the back of the homemade tricycle (one wheel in the front, two at the rear), she asked outloud who was willing to take the rider's seat and take her wherever she wanted to go. 

Pushing people aside, I grabbed on to the side railings (?), leaned on my arms for a few seconds, defying gravity, dropped unto the seat and started pedaling. Much to the bemusement of my passenger who cried out: 'Yihaw!'

We rode through busy streets, avoiding market stalls and pedestrians. Until we ended up in a quiet neighbourhood of the foreign city. There was a swimming pool. Actually three basins in one building. All not very crowded. I picked one and started a conversation with an elderly lady. She was smoking and simply tossed her finished butt in the water. Much to my surprise.

Thusfar (a dream)

People appeared in a big glass container with brass ribs. They were all different but at the same time all the same: a white male in his twenties with blond, almost white, hair. Apparently covered in a powdery substance that made his skin look even more pale. Wearing some kind of off white loin cloth and a sad and surpised look on his face. 

The container filled up fast and handlers had to work increasingly harder to shove them deeper and deeper into the container to make room for more of them. Pushing them from the back towards the front that was facing the viewer.

People in the marketsquare were disappearing like magic and reappeared as the blond, white males in the container. Workers were frantically building more 'prefab' containers to house all the new 'guests' but the containers - and the whole system - started to collapse. It started with the prefab brass legs of the glass containers collapsing. They consisted of three brass, square 'sticks': two vertically and one - supporting the glass container - horizontally. Quickly welded together and with bad quality hinges attached underneath the glass. I was surprised the system had worked thusfar.

Never seen before (a dream)

There were no humans left on Earth. Future robots that came to look saw some lost predecessors working to maintain the structures left by mankind. And failing. Off white buildings that were looking like mushrooms build on mountain slopes broke into pieces and collapsed unto heeps that slowly got integrated in nature. Next moment after watching that on a big screen, I was drawing. The paper was black and on it were elephants outlined in silverish grey. I found myself sitting at a bar, having a drink with a friend who was also drawing. 

Abent mindedly I traced the outlines of the elephant and noticed it was standing on half a dozen smaller elephants. When my pencil reached the starting point, the paper started to change and hovering above it colourful, moving (in more than one way) pictures appeared, 'exploding' into different images. Of butterflies, rainbows, unicorns, flowers and animals I had never seen before. 'Wow!', a woman looking over my right shoulder exclaimed.

Our Ways (a dream)

My favourite guitarist, Mick Box from Uriah Heep, and me worked together on the sheet music and words for The Easy Road, probably in his home studio, and admired eachother's creativity and writing skills. In the dream he was some twenty years younger than he is today. 

We laughed at a pun we came up with at the same time and I found myself laughing with new found friends. On a hot day we enjoyed some unexpected cooling in the form of a broken waterpipeline over our heads. It was at a beach or at least a large slab of sand and soon our clothes were soaked and we took them off. Laughing and naked but clothed at the same time, we introduced ourselves to eachother and when it was time to leave we decided to exchange clothes, including underwear and still laughing with joy parted our ways.  

Threatening (a dream)

We were at a kind of theme park that was either closed for years or open and about to close. 

We (me and four or five other people. Not necessarily people I knew) entered a structure. 

Which was a rollercoaster. But also a ghost house and a (apparently not so) hidden cave.

It was dark and there was fire but not as hot as you'd expect. 

And some of the 'fires' turned out to be cardboard and paper with lights shining through them.

As we climbed the stairs it became clear that my child-version needed help. 

So I picked him up and put him on the shoulders of my older me. 

So, there were three versions of me present, each representing a phase in my life:

my past, present and future. 

We encountered an enormous devil-like creature that looked very menacing. 

Until he got attacked by a raven and looked more terrified then threatening. 

Unfortunately that's the point my alarm went off.

Over a year (a dream)

Because I wanted to walk my pet goat (perfectly normal in my dream), I asked my niece to hold open the door for me as it was blocked by the bike of one of my neighbours. It was one of those modern black mikes with electric power. A friend helped push aside the bike. Suddenly I was back home again. With the goat. Who started feeding my goldfish: standing on its hind legs and with its front legs over the edge, it fed my goldfish some kind of grass. And smiled as the fish happily started eating it. 

The aquarium filled half my living room and the water looked brackish, dirty. As if it hadn't been refreshed in over a year.  

She agreed (a dream)

My (in real life deceased) mother and I were on vacation in an unknown city. Wandering around we decided to visit a local museum. As usual in my dreams it was a huge building with lots of stairs and doors. The artwork around us seemed all to be examples of tribal cultures and most of it was very colourful. For some reason (siesta time?) there were not many visitors. Just a few people, dressed in all white.

Going up the stairs to the second floor I looked at my watch and asked my mother - who was a few meters ahead of me - to hold so I could ask her a question:

'Shall we go find a place to eat after this? It's four thirty and we'll be ahead of the restaurant rush.'

She agreed.

A few days later this dream continued: while my mother was seated on some park bench, she had sent me out to get something to eat from one of the many stands and restaurants in the area. My order got mixed up so my mother got what I had ordered for myself and I got her eggroll. Which tasted as if it was at least three days old and just a few seconds heated in a microwave. I woke up with a dirty taste in my mouth.

Left (a dream)

It was in the future. There were not many people left but those who had survived had it pretty good. I was one of them and at some kind of Olympics. I was thrilled to see athletes have a go at a sport I can describe as a cross of skateboarding and snowboarding. Imagine snowboards with wheels. And no snow as no one alive at the time had ever seen any.

People were apparently competing in two different categories: yellow (easy) and blue (hard). There were poles put in the sand. At least I think it was sand. It was pure white and glistened. Nets were stretched from pole to pole and after every couple of nets there was a platform that could sometimes double as a trampoline but was sometimes just a flat, hard surface and sometimes really slippery. 

Competitors had to jump, skip, slip, ride from one platform to the next as fast as possible. With points being added for style and tricks and points being distracted for touching the nets with their hands. Falling meant disqualification. 

The lower poles - with the yellow nets - were for mostly teenage riders who couldn't fall more than two meters while the athletes - mostly adults - riding the higher and blue nets could get seriously hurt after a seven meter fall. 

I didn't see any elderly people during my time in this future, by the way.

There was loud cheering from some speakers (people watching from home?) as the dozens upon dozens of riders started to go down the parcour simultanously. From right to left.

I want more (a dream)

Once again I was standing on the Edge of the City of Tomorrow, a reoccuring place in my dreams. Friends on The Other Side were waving at me but were too far away for me to make out if they encouraged me to stay on my side or join them on theirs. 

There was a rather wide gap between us and while I was contemplating on a decision, a boat sailed into the crack that was suddenly a canal. It was an antique wooden barge and on board it was very crowded. All aboard wore a pirate hat from the partyshop. 

A few of the passengers/sailors recognized me and waved enthousiastically: 'Join us! It will be fun!' but I had no idea how to get down to them. There was not a ladder or anything in sight that could help me to overcome the distance. It looked like a few hundred meters down, so jumping was not an option. 

Instead I climbed into some construction that was attached to the roof I was standing on. A flagpole? A radiomast? An antenna? For some reason I did not wish to stay where I was and took a risk: would the construction take my weight? I climbed it, it bent under my weight and I held on in disbelief and fear as it had almost bend over far enough for me to jump across the...er...rift? safely but it suddenly jerked back to its original position. Leading me to hang on for dear life and wait for the afterswing to stop. 

It did stop and upon opening my eyes again - tip: even in your dreams: if you get dizzy from swaying too much, close your eyes - I found myself at a balustrade inside a large office building. It was alongside a large corridor with every four meters or so un unmarked, and white, door. 

It was all white, the top part of the balustrade was glas and it had a chrome railing. I held unto it as I looked down and saw a friend (not one from real life but I have seen her in more of my dreams) in a red dress and with brown hair standing in a life size glass chamber/cell in which she could hardly move.

Being down at the reception desk I asked the receptionist why he lied when he told me before that he would free her soon. He started sweating and stuttering, clearly uncomfortable with having to lie again, stating she was a witch and had to be contained.

Apparently the look in my eyes made him decide not to follow the orders he had received from 'them' and freed my friend. Although the dream did not show me how.

Grateful she offered me liqorice: 'Try them. These are new!' Unwillingly because in my dream I didn't care for liqorice, I took one out of the little bag, put it in my mouth and bit it. They came in white and black and had a greenish/greyish filling. 'These are amazing!' I shouted out in surprise. 'Where did you get them. I want more!'

Musings (a dream)

In a post-apocalyptic world, I was one of the chosen to drive trucks with supplies through a rough and radiation invested area to an area where the remains of human civilisation tried to survive. At every stop along the way, me and my co-drivers were assisted by local volunteers to jump into big iron tubs filled with a liquid to decontaminate us. From the footboards of our trucks we would simply drop backwards into the cold liquid. As was adviced and instructed 'because you don't want to see what you jump into'.

While - fully clothed in my protective gear minus hood and helmet - submerged I wondered if our efforts were worth it. Wouldn't we make the same mistakes all over again? Could I hold my breath for at least two minutes? Would she be waiting for me at the final stop? Would it really be the final stop or would we have to move on? But where to?

My (real life) alarm woke me up from my musings.

Real life (a dream)

Standing in the remnants of a party, 

I told my colleague I had put his (empty) beerglass

outside, in a dark corner at the bottom of the stairs.

Climbing those stairs (suddenly in- not outside the building)

was nog easy with my arms full of cups and plates

and other party leftovers.

It became even more difficult because I couldn't stand upright,

the last couple of stairs;

the ceiling was too low for me.

I had just told someone behind me on the stairs

that I would try to open the hatch above us

with my head

when my alarm went off.

In real life.