I have recently learned that people who ramble on and on about their stupid dreams are not generally well received by the public. Unfortunately I am about to become one of those people, so you’ll just have to bear with me. First, however, I wanted to take a minute to memorialize this spam comment I happened to see just a few minutes ago because I really am that petty. I will literally outlive God trying to have the last word.
I don’t know who the hell is writing these things, but they and their spambot can go fuck themselves.
Now that that’s out of my system…
I don’t normally do this, but I promised you a stupid dream and I am a woman of my word. I am also a woman who naps at completely inappropriate moments, such as right after work, and then wonders why I can’t go to sleep when it’s actually bedtime. Today I passed out around 6 and was promptly visited by an insane dream that wasn’t exactly waterproof, though I only realized this in retrospect because dreams and continuity rarely go hand in hand.
Before I attempt to summarize the dream, I should explain that I moved from my parents’ house into a single apartment about two months ago. The years-long battle I’ve had with career-related fears and financial insecurity isn’t particularly important right now, but it does tie into the general theme of the dream. It also reveals what I’ve known for years, which is that, left to its own devices, my brain is a nasty little hobgoblin that produces garbage.
I don’t remember how I got into the dream, which is perhaps for the best, but the gist of it is that my downstairs neighbors came to my door with the news that our landlord had lost all his money because cryptocurrency and we were all getting kicked out of this building he could no longer afford to maintain. We had the space of an afternoon, maybe less, to grab what we needed and get out. Whatever we couldn’t get out in time would have to be left. This would probably be a good place to mention that I was raised in an Asian American household, where waste was considered next door to murder, and even just the thought of this much waste – coupled, of course, with the imminent loss of probably 99% of my stuff, the implosion of my life as an independent adult, and the impossibility of finding another single apartment that I could reasonably afford – is enough to start me on an anxiety spiral. At this point in the dream, I was panicking and trying to get together a bundle that included my writing laptop and the binders with the first draft of my first novel while thinking that I’d have to call my mother and tell her that I needed to come home. My neighbors for some reason went off to get lunch, and I was suddenly in my car pulling into the apartment parking lot. I’m not really sure what happened or where I went during the time skip, except that the dream changed so that I was returning to the apartment and trying to get back in to grab my writing laptop, which I had somehow managed to leave behind. I don’t remember much else after that: I had a hard time getting into the building, I think because I didn’t have keys and somehow it felt like the building was going to be destroyed at any minute, but once I did get inside I ran into some guy who worked with the landlord. I think the neighbors might have warned me about him, and apparently they were right, because he attacked me while the building was crumbling around us. I tried to scream, but I made no sound.
It goes without saying that the dream was ridiculous. First off, I don’t rent from an individual landlord. My apartment is managed by a real estate agency, and they don’t take Bitcoin. I also don’t know enough about cryptocurrency to know if someone could be so completely ruined by it that they would have to dispose of a tenanted property that presumably was making money, though I distrust the stuff on general principle and this dream did not change my mind. And, of course, the apartment in the dream looked nothing like the one that I actually live in. I live in a house; the apartment in the dream was in an apartment building, tall and gray from what I remember, and probably made of either brick or stone. The neighbors who turned up at my door didn’t make much sense either. One of them I sort of recognized because in real life she actually does live below me, but the other one I didn’t know at all. The only thing that was realistic, and that still persists now that the dream is done, is the anxiety. And that’s why, in the end, I decided to toss the dream onto the internet instead of trying to forget about it: because I need to know that my feelings were real, but the dream was just a dream. I need to spell out the sheer insanity of this story I told myself, this story that wasn’t well done or even particularly interesting, so that I don’t get trapped in the details.
So, yeah, I’m giving the dream one star, and I’m going to try to cut out the after-work naps, because I don’t think they’re doing me any favors. 10/10 do not recommend. BUT WAIT IT HAS A HAPPY ENDING because shortly after I was attacked, and after I either fought him off or teleported away or something and made it back into the unpacked nightmare of my ruined apartment, I woke up in my real apartment with all my stuff still right where I left it and no possibility of the walls falling down on top of me. I mean, yeah, some of my stuff is still in boxes and nothing is really organized except for my books, but at least my house isn’t on the verge of destruction. And then I consoled myself with spicy ramen and mandu, and life rolled on.
And now it is 1:09 in the morning, and I should maybe go to bed so I don’t take another badly timed nap tomorrow.
