So I dreamed a movie trailer last night... ( cut for account of dream, for those not interested in it. Which is probably all of you, really, although you'll TOTALLY MISS a hilarious image if you don't read it SO MAKE YOUR CHOICE WISELY )

Remember quite a lot of my dreams from this morning, mostly because Sora was demanding attention and kept climbing on me, so I kept staying at the outermost fringes of sleep instead of falling deep and coming back out. (Fun fact: you actually dream during almost every stage of sleep, not just REM, scientists are finding. Citation: a book I read a few months back which I am too lazy sleepy to be arsed to fire up the Kindle and get the name of.)

And I'm not cutting it, so you are forced to scroll past it if you don't care about other people's dreams! Hahahaha!

I'm not going to bother recounting most of it, as what I remember is really fragmented, but the bit that really stuck in my mind, possibly because I recounted it *in the dream* to someone else, was that as I was sitting down beside the side of a road in a store (hey, dream logic), a guy sits down next to me. He grabs the tag on the side of the hood of the grey hoodie I am wearing and says "Hey! Are you bood?" I say "huh?" He says, " bood! Is bood your gamertag?" I say no, I am Telophase. He insists that I am bood and that I should just admit it. Seeing that he wasn't going to leave this alone, I just lied and admitted I was bood. At this point, the dream went on elsewhere (involving coworkers and canoeing down flooded streets and such). I then recounted the bood part of the dream to someone else, as if it had happened. I also looked at the tag on my hoodie, and while it didn't say "bood," the font was such that you could read it as "bood."

I told this other person that the gamer asked my favorite games, and I said "I play a lot of CoD and WoW." He asked what I thought of Mass Effect 3, and I said that I didn't like it very much, that I thought the ending sucked, channeling Toby at this point, as I'd heard him rant enough about the ending that I could appropriate it for myself. He said that was odd, because he'd seen me (the gamertag 'bood') lots of times on ME3. I then borrowed from a friend of ours, Damon, who is not just a gamer but a GAMER and told the guy that when I said I gamed it was on a whole different scale than when he gamed (insinuating that his "played quite a lot" was my "play occasionally").

There seems to be a small theme of people not believing me when I tell them something: at a previous point in the dream, I met a father and his two young boys, and he was trying to remember the name of Darkwing Duck. Seeing me as someone who obviously knew something about cartoons, he kept describing Darkwing Duck to me, but wouldn't believe me when I told him it was Darkwing Duck. I eventually told him "Look, you are remembering one of three things: Darkwing Duck, his evil opposite Negaduck, or his secret identity Drake Mallard." And then the dream went elsewhere, something involving a backpack with my clothes and an external computer battery with a light on it.

I am amazed that Darkwing Duck apparently impacted my mid-20s enough that I can remember all that in the middle of a dream.

Dude, I had an awesome dream last night. Involving James Bond. Sort of.

Anyway, in my dream I was a female, gay, cross-dressing James Bond. Nobody knew I was a woman except for my (male) tailor--because you can't fool a good tailor--and the tailor's hot female assistant (because you need Bond Girls, apparently). I owned two suits, one a most excellent, perfectly tailored, expensive black suit, and another one. For the other suit, I told the tailor to give me the worst suit he had and the worst tie he had and to tailor the suit so it looked badly tailored but was in fact tailored to allow me to do lots of martial arts and such.

The reason I, James Bond, needed this suit was because I was undercover. The Joker was running a casino in a high-rise building, and of course it being the Joker, nefarious doings were happening. I managed to obtain a job as a high-ranking security person there to infiltrate the establishment and Do Stuff. Alas, my dream was far more concerned about the suits than the plot, so I cannot tell you what was going on there.

In addition to the tailor's assistant, I also had a hot female assistant because you can't have a Bond without at least two Bond Girls, apparently. At the end I met her in a cafe in the high-rise next to the Joker's casino, at which point she inexplicably changed into Toby, which didn't faze me one bit, and I explained to her/Toby how to get out of the situation as Stuff Was About to Go Down. I was in my good suit now and gave her/Toby the awful one, and told her/him to take it to this one pawn shop and pawn in. She/he would receive a large triangular token*, which s/he was to bring to the tailor, who would redeem it for cash, which s/he was then to use to get the hell out of Dodge.

Aaaand then I woke up. Too bad it didn't last longer!

So there you go. My chance at being a glamorous international spy and my subconscious worries about the clothes more than anything else. Well, I suppose it also worries about getting innocents out of the line of fire, way more than Bond typically does.

I quickly emailed myself notes on this dream as I knew I'd forget them if I went straight back to sleep, and I went into a dream where I'd accidentally sent the notes I'd made to the magazine The Economist instead of to myself, and they thought it was amusing and posted it on their website and people were making comments on it. I woke up enough to realize (and be relieved) that I couldn't possibly have done that for real because I don't have The Economist's email address in my contacts.

( Cut for adding a bit more )

Last night I dreamed that I was part of a group that was creating a musical making gentle fun of RPGs. During the dream, I wrote several verses of various songs to be sung by stock characters, the innkeeper, the barmaid, the fighter, etc.

I was so disappointed when I woke up that I didn't remember any of the lyrics. :(

Last night I had a dream in which I had a big building with three rooms in it, all full of Star Wars costumes and toy lightsabers, blasters, etc. All of my friends were there*. I was telling them that we got to play with everything, and that the rules were you could not hit anyone on the head, not on the face, not on the back of the head, not at all, and that you couldn't hit anyone in the neck, not on the throat, not on the sides, not in the back.

After that we all dressed up and started shooting each other, etc. It was fun - everyone was overacting and hamming it up. I remember having a toy lightsaber that was the kind that was just a flashlight, and I play-fought against two opponents who had Darth Maul-type toy lightsabers with plastic bits for the laser bit. I lost, but I put up a good fight. :)

After that, I found a big bazooka-type thing that shot foam missiles, but I woke up around that point.

*shoots you all with foam missiles*


* Not that I recognized any of them, but I knew that all my friends were there, so I expect you were, too.

I believe my subconscious wants me to go ahead and read Jasper Kent's Twelve already, as this morning as I was swimming in and out of consciousness while listening to NPR go on about the Libyan uprising, I started dreaming about being dragged around in Libyan war zones by vampires very much like the one on the cover of Twelve.

As he woke up screaming, he knew the cat in his head was dead.

Dream: started with the italicized sentence. Set in some sort of spaceship, main character woken up from something like coldsleep, apparently on the way to colonize a planet. The people had something like an AI in their heads - I don't know whether it was to help them, to control them, or both. It wasn't working for the main character ... and I'm not sure whether the people In Charge knew it or not. He was woken up with several other people, a cohort if you like, and none of them had a problem with their cats/AIs. Theyw ere all wearing clothes like grey tracksuits. And a bit later, he walked into an arena of sorts, with a bunch of bleachers stretching up, on which were sitting other ex-coldsleepers. Some were talking to each other, others were reading - one guy was reading a book about agriculture - and a few were sitting there, staring into nowhere with that thousand-yard stare, and he knew their cats were dead, too.

I told Toby about it, who was reminded of Cordwainer Smith's The Game of Rat and Dragon, and I was reminded of John Scalzi's Old Man's War.

There were two other dreams, more faded, that had something to do with trying to write code under pressure that was switching between ASP and PHP, and in the second dream it had to do with a DVD that had a picture of Big Bird on the main menu.

...when I wake up, I have a weird sentence or phrase floating in my brain, either from a dream or from my brain auto-firing. To my knowledge, I don't usually talk in my sleep, but I assume it's related to the phenomenon. And like dreams, I don't usually remember the phrase floating in my head for longer than a few minutes, unless I make a special effort to remember it.

Today's phrase, which I specifically tried to remember so that I could post it, is:

I am trapped in a Fauvist Christmas.

Why Christmas was floating around in my head right now is obvious, and the Fauvism bit comes from a crossword puzzle I did in the last day or two that had "Fauvism" as one of its answers. (Which I am surprised I remembered as I was filling it out - if you'd asked me about art movements that's one that would never have come to mind, and I had to look it up to see what, exactly, it was.)

It involved janni peripherally, and yhlee. It was set in a large library* crammed to standing-room-only with people. yhlee had made a rather large chocolate cake, and when I say "rather large," I mean "four feet high and more across." I remember that janni was standing between me and the cake, and I was reaching past her with a sort of rake-thing to spread the frosting on the cake** and explaining to her that she was saving me from myself because if she wasn't between me and the cake I'd be there face-first in it eating.

And then the dream changed somewhat - I was looking through cosplay publications that looked like doujinshi, but I can't tell if they were doujinshi or official publications. I was trying to find photographs of cosplayers in them, but kept getting frustrated because they mostly had official art of the characters in them instead.

I found one for this anime called Adventures in Mathematica, which starred three people, two guys and a girl, but not at the same time - it involved three different stories set in slightly different times that were loosely connected. The doujinshi/book thing contained cardboard props you could use for cosplaying them - rulers, a protracter. I went over to yhlee and told her about the series, and she was all "I MUST WATCH THIS ANIME," and I was trying to figure out where to get it.

And then Sora decided it was the perfect time to flop down on my feet and overheat me, so I woke up.


* Gosh, I wonder where that comes from?

** I bet that image came from seeing the road guys spreading tarmac on the road I drive to work: they spread something that looks like gravel, then these GIANT TRUCKS that have FIRE underneath them drive slowly over it, melting the gravel stuff, and the guys use these rake-like things to spread it out evenly. But GIANT TRUCKS WITH FIRE.

...I woke up out of a frustration/anxiety dream this morning that incorporated the piano! I was in a house with someone and was going to practice on this old piano and then people kept coming in to the room (possibly to shoot a film?), and I decided to practice anyway and just subject them to my awful playing, but then it turned out to be not a piano but a keyboard and I kept flipping switches on it but couldn't get it to work. :)