To sleep...

How many times do you wake up from a dream, only for the memory of it to fade away once your brain gears up and starts processing the morning? Redundant question, I guess. As ever, Randall Munroe articulates the process as well as anyone.

Regardless, I read somewhere that the easiest way to train your mind to remember a dream is to write them down as quickly as possible. In doing so, not only do you keep a record of that dream, - and indeed the fact you had one at all - but it actually helps you recall subsequent dreams more frequently and in better detail.

For the past two years, whenever I wake up from a dream, I quickly jot down as many key details as I can on my phone before falling back to sleep. The next morning, I remember that I drempt something and have a read through my notes (sometimes pages and pages of detail; occasionally a small collection of nonsensical gibberish - see the above quote) and it all comes flooding back. Then throughout the day, I translate it to English and tweet what I can under the hashtag #LastNightsDream.

Nowadays, I find it slightly too limiting to compress everything down into bite-sized 140 character chunks so I figure I'd find a place to document them all in as much detail as I can, and without my sporadic rants and compulsive pop-culture refferences clogging up the spaces in-between.


The whole experience has tought me that my subconscious is a strange, strange place.

Magic Gardening Tool of Mass Destruction

Night of Friday, 06/06/2014

This one is a bit patchy, but I remember getting my hands on some kind of strange weapon. It was kind of like a scythe, but with a longer staff and much shorter, more hooked blade. I'm in a large stone hall with pillars supporting the roof, and there are loads of people trying to attack me. So I'm chopping them all up in the face with this scythe thing - and slashing at the pillars too, breaking them down so sections of the roof begin to fall. At some point, I realise that some of the people I'm slashing are civilians, not the guys trying to get me. Furthermore, it turns out that I can control anyone I hit with the scythe.

In the ensuing chaos, the thing snaps in two; making it more sickle I guess. And then it breaks a second time and I'm left with a small piece of the blade attached to a lump of wood that fits neatly in my hand. I exit the hall as it begins to cave in on its self and end up outside Woolworth's on Worksop's high street. I pull my hood up over my head to conceal my identity and shuffle up Bridge Street in the rain, magic gardening tool of mass destruction concealed in my pocket.

Worried I'll eventually be followed by the generic bad guys, I see some of the younger MOB kids and use the blade to recruit them into my resistance. At this point, I don't need to actually use the blade, I just have to show them it in order to erase their will power. They take me to an old shop that seems really familiar - I might have come here as a very young child, or perhaps visited it in another dream? In the back room of the shop there's four people lounging around of sofas, three of which are the same girl from my year at Portland, whose name escapes me.

And them I'm in Nonna's living room, which has been repurposed as a mad scientist's lair. There's a Frankenstein type monster lying on a table that's part of a machine that I can only describe as a large CT scanner, with a particularly wide bore, made of dark stone. Wires and dark grey metal everywhere. I try to wake the monster up without letting its creator see me, but when I do, it goes mental and attacks me. The monster's creator seems pissed off too. At some point, the scene reverts back to the start and I'm stealthily trying to turn the machine on to wake it up, but again when I do I just end up getting berated and attacked. On the third reset, I try using the computer in the corner to turn the machine on; all the time, slowly moving around the room and hiding from the scientist. I load up six or seven aspects of the patchwork brute's programing (for lack of a better word) - the name of each on spells out an acronym which I've forgotten, but have an inkling might have been D.E.N.N.I.S. This successfully wakes the monster up. One of the radiography students that was in the year above me walks past the door to the utility room.

And then I woke up.

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