Living with your eyes shut

Dreams are weird, okay?

I frequent various blog-type websites, and whenever I hear something about dreams pop up, tend to click on it for the heck of it. Want to know what they reveal?

Absolutely nothing.

There's arguments ranging from dreams being a replay of the day's events to it even being some kind of portent of the future. I'll hang onto the latter because I know that that one happens to be true. It's happened before. In the case of the former, I shake my head.

Because I'm pretty sure that nothing was said about The Fridge yesterday to make me believe that for some reason I was driving it again last night.

Now, The Fridge was the second Tarago our family had. We're onto the third now, and sold the car a little while after I began driving. This means that the first car I actually drove was the '88 Tarago. I called it a fridge for a reason. It looked something like this.

The main difference being that ours was white, and had hubcaps with a Holden badge on them. Note the enormous forty centimetres of crumple zone. The car was a sod, but it was enough for Dad to teach me the concept of a gearbox.

Wait.

Now I know where it came into conversation yesterday.

I had been telling Prue about how I had 'chucked a doughie' before. [Read: donuts.] It was probably our second or third outing to the industrial area down the road. It's basically a really big loop, with a grass-topped middle-bit where people park their cars.

It was the end of my lesson, and there were no cars parked on the grass. So Dad had me mount the kerb and tear up the grass in an effort to learn about the tachometer. It succeeded, sort of. And just for the record, it is possible in an old Tarago, whose poor handling is only exceeded by its descendants, which for some odd reason feel like I'm driving a blimp.

But go figure. I drive an old sports car from the eighties with sports suspension and no understanding of concepts like 'electric windows', 'central locking' or 'power steering'. But I love that car to bits.

Hmmm.

Well, writing as I am thinking is fun. What else can I tell you about the Fridge?

It looked like a fridge. It certainly had the handling of one. Oh. It was nearly impossible to lock.

We had some weird system that used its sliding windows to unlock the car. Because the sliding door couldn't lock unless it was closed or something.

This fact seems inconsequential. But it is important. It was important last night because I had to lock the car and couldn't. Damn theta waves.

And Zombies. If I have a nightmare, I can guarantee that if I have a nightmare, it will have zombies. Sometimes they are your stock-standard shufflers. Sometimes they are the rage-virus type (watching even parts of 28 weeks later was a bad idea). Sometimes they decide to get steamy with some other type of villain, producing such odd offspring that in all seriousness, I found myself fleeing zombie daleks. Whose weakness was orange juice.

And then we wake up and examine the facts in rational daylight and laugh. What? Zombie Daleks? Come on.

They were terrifying while I was asleep, honest.

So sometimes. Wait. Most of the time. Dreams might have some tie with whatever happened during the day. Most of the time it makes no sense because it gets mashed into other things that happened during the day or you're all running away from Zombie Daleks while looking for the Maccas orange juice because it's the most acidic and therefore super effective.

Half of the time you've discovered something amazing and then you wake up disappointed because it doesn't exist. Half of the time you wake up relieved that it doesn't, usually because whatever it was came at some great cost, or you accidentally hit someone with it and that made no sense either, because the person was in Switzerland at the time.

Maybe I'm the only one that this happens to. Hmm. No. Surely not.

And then, there's the one percent of dreams that you wake from where you not only remember what went down with perfect clarity, but they were completely brilliant in more than just the one sense. Because there was enough of a mashup of everything that you couldn't trace the original source. And because it would make a pretty good story.

I've had this happen a grand total of three times. One of those became the basis for my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or simply NaNo) project. It was fun.

Could it have been a portent? I guess.
I mean, not in the 'you are going to use this time travel device to stop a gang leader from committing terrorist acts', but in the 'you are going to write a story about a guy who uses this time travel device to stop a gang leader from committing terrorist acts'

The novel was called 'Shift'. Incidentally, it was also the reason why there was no new material posted to the blog during November and early December. I've got excuses for the other months I've been away too, honest.

I guess to a degree, I enjoy dreaming. Sometimes. It makes sense at the time, and then refuses to gel correctly with reality upon waking. Sometimes you wake up completely bewildered. Terrified.

And then your mind wipes itself and you go back to doing real life stuff. Weird.

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