I haven’t had any postable dreams for a while… UNTIL LAST NIGHT.

Something to tide you over until I get back from New Zealand (where I will hopefully have plenty of Lord of the Rings themed dreams). It’s only a short one, but I can’t help that, complain to my subconscious:

I dreamed that I was wearing a business suit made out of pyjamas material, and that it was my job to sit and read the wikipedia article on Judge Dredd. So that’s what I did; I sat at my computer in the dream and read Dredd’s wiki page. The thing is, I don’t know a huge amount about Judge Dredd in reality, so my brain must have just been making stuff up that I was reading. I don’t remember any of it, but I’m guessing it might have deviated slightly from established Judge Dredd comics canon. 

It’s been a month or something since either of us posted any dreams here, but that’s not because we haven’t had any! They’ve all just been of a nature where other people simply would not find them funny without us first disclosing a bunch of personal information about our friends. Which we’d be totally fine with but I suspect they might not wanna be our friends any more afterwards (laaaame).

But anyway, I finally had a postable dream!

Before the dream-narrative, some dream-world-building:

• In the world of this dream, television isn’t broadcast to tv sets. You have to go outside and stumble across people filming a tv show, then follow them around as the actors and (apparently useless) cameras sprint between locations.
• David Attenborough (in real life one of my personal heroes) is exactly the same in the world of this dream. Except he’s a twenty year old Indian dude, with a voice to match that. But in the dream, I knew he was David Attenborough, because that’s how dreams work. Also he rides a skateboard made out of a fruit box, like the kids in 1950s BTTF.

I was at the park where Robert and I walk (where we used to record those short-lived podcasts) watching a David Attenborough show with a bunch of other onlookers (dream!Attenborough was skating around screaming at a turtle). And I decided that I wanted to be David Attenborough. And so I was!

The real dream!Attenborough was still there doing his show with a crowd of people watching, but I suddenly looked and sounded exactly like him! Which is to say, a twenty year old Indian guy with a 1950s skateboard, not real-life David Attenborough. So I went off to do Attenboroughy things I guess!

But it was not to last. The fame caught up with me.

My friend Jaffit - who you might recognise as the “least flattering Facebook photo” guy from my Starshine Wilderness fundraising video - was apparently a huge David Attenborough fan. And he saw me skating down the street! And he logically decided to beat me to death.

He chased after me with a baseball bat, swinging viciously, all the while smiling pleasantly and yelling “I love David Attenborough! You’re awesome David Attenborough!” He knocked me down, and then hurled rocks at me as I crawled lamely through the mud using my arms, still heaping fanboyish praise upon my amazing portrayal of the natural world in Life of Mammals. I managed to haul myself into a car and locked all the doors.

But that would not stop dream!Jaffit’s fan-assault! He grabbed the bottom of the car and flipped it over onto its roof (“I love you David Attenborough!”) and pushed it down the middle of the road, sparks flying everywhere. Which seems like an inefficient order to do things (why not push the car down the road, then flip it?). But what do I know, because then I woke up.

If the real David Attenborough somehow ends up seeing this post, you met me once when I was just a kid and you signed a book for me! So please rest assured that my fanboyish gushing if we ever meet again is absolutely safe in reality (although I can’t swear for my friend Jaffit).

Last night, I dreamed I and a bunch of other people were at a school camp, and there was an old building that was fenced off that we all decided to live in instead of with the other campers, which had talking animals in it. However, I came to realise that we had to crouch down to avoid people outside seeing us in the building, and I became very concerned with how safe the building was, even though it was vitally important to me (and the others) that we not have to live in the camp.

I did dream something, Martin, so shove it down your gullet hole and die of food poisoning because you didn’t wash your hands before you ate what I dreamt, you idiot.

I pretty much dreamed the first half of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which is not something that’s happened before, then I was fighting giant crab aliens in my old school’s gym. While doing so, nearby there was a fight between Thor and Jane Fosterson (his girlfriend) and the rest of the Avengers over Thor and Jane’s baby, because the rest of the Avengers didn’t want the couple to have it for some reason. Also, Loki showed up, though I don’t think he did much.

This is becoming less of a competitive dream journal, and more of a regular dream journal, which is boring. Come on, Robert! Eat some cheese before you go to bed or something!

Anyway, last night I dreamt I was on my way to a film set, but where I was passing through was made of pixelated blocks like Minecraft. I was on a wooden deck of some sort suspended over water, and there were tiny blue ducks everywhere! Just kinda sitting around, which in retrospect is creepy and unnerving. But at the time was fine and normal!

I didn’t want to step on any of the ducks because then we’d have to fight (like in Pokémon I think? I’ve been playing Pokémon on the train, which might explain this?). So I tiptoed carefully around all the blue ducks to the wooden door at the other end of the deck and tried to open it, but I didn’t have a copy of The Darjeeling Limited on DVD so the door wouldn’t open.

Which is a lie, incidentally: I totally own The Darjeeling Limited on DVD! what the hell subconscious

I won the opportunity to go on a trip on a space station! And so did two of my friends from film school. So we went to the supermarket to get some snacks for the trip, and the only thing in the entire supermarket that I wanted to eat were chocolate-coated chilli flavoured corn chips. But because they were vegan, that was the only thing that they could eat in the whole supermarket, so I didn’t get a single one! (Is chocolate vegan when it has no milk in it? Or is this just dream logic?) Then in the frozen produce isle, a homeless bum tried to convince me to take a cigarette from him (nice stereotype subversion there, my subconscious).

After that my friends bickered about whether they needed to climb into cardboard boxes to get posted to the space station and then because my subconscious doesn’t wanna wait around it just cut to the good bits and we were suddenly on the space station!

It was basically just an apartment painted grey with the cable trays showing on the ceiling? But hey, it was floating around IN SPAAAACE miles from anywhere, in the middle of a stereotypical cartoon asteroid field. The others were asleep, so I snuck out onto the balcony, which apparently was protected somehow because I could breathe just fine even though the asteroids (round chunks of polystyrene-weight rocks the size of brown, cratered basketballs) were bumping gently into the sides of the house/space station/apartment.

Now, I knew with magic dream knowledge that we’d been told to just push the asteroids away. But I wanted one. So I grabbed one out of the air (Air? Vacuum? Luminiferous aether? Magic dream medium?) and shoved it under the persian rug on the balcony, planning to collect it later, which I did not because then I woke up.

My subconscious apparently plays it pretty loose with those little things like gravity and vacuum exposure, good to know all those physics classes didn’t take or anything

I did not have an interesting dream that I can recall recently, although I think at one point I dreamed about the song Hotel California.

So I was too busy directing my movie to write any updates, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have any weird dreams! They were all somehow moviemaking-related, so it feels thematically sound to go through them in one post.

Dream One

I had this dream after the first day of filming. I dreamed I was on set, working. That’s it. There was nothing weird like butterflies shooting out of the camera or the sound recordist transforming into an ice-cream or anything, but in a way, that’s what makes the dream notable.

I hate dreams like this. Now don’t get me wrong; I love being on set making movies. But it’s still really exhausting work and highly stressful. My brain needs downtime while I sleep, and these dreams stop me getting that.

I used to have these dreams back when I worked in retail. I don’t know why, but that job had a devastating effect on my mental health. I ended up quitting before I even had another job lined up and it was the best work decision I’ve ever made. So back during that time, to waste my precious dreaming time by dreaming about being at work was awful. I’m always aware in these dreams that I’m dreaming, too, but unable to influence it. It’s like being stuck watching a bad movie on an aeroplane; the screen is right in my face on the chair in front and I’ve already memorised the in-flight magazine. My eyes have nowhere else to go, so unfortunately there’s no way for me to avoid watching Superbad until we land in Sydney.

So I’m dreaming about being on set, all the time thinking “aw geez, I just finished doing this in reality, and I’m about to do it again when I wake up”. I suffered night terrors until I was a teenager and I’m deadly serious when I say that I’d rather have a night terror than dream about working between work.

I had these dreams as “filler” spaced out between the other dreams listed here for the whole shoot.

Dream Two

Now onto a lighter dream! But like my Elephant Man/Hitch dream, this one was a nightmare at the time.

I was trying to get to the location for filming the movie that day, which in the dream was inside a restaurant carved into the top of a tree. It was owned by one of my friends (named David, also a filmmaker). All the crew and gear had gotten up there alright, but David wouldn’t let me up because I hadn’t been to church that morning! (Despite the fact that the real David is, to my knowledge, an atheist.)

So all the crew were yelling at me because they didn’t understand. “Get up here, Martin!” my cinematographer was calling. “We’re all waiting on you! Hurry up!” But David was adamant. There would apparently be no heathens making movies in his giant tree restaurant.

Dream Three

Another nightmare, but this time not a funny one even in retrospect. I had a false-awakening dream where I “woke up” and found my girlfriend Lore had died in her sleep. I wouldn’t normally include this type of nightmare on this blog, but since I am listing all the dreams I had in order I feel like it would be ‘cheating’ to leave it out, somehow.

I woke up after this dream, and of course she was fine. But this is the only dream that I would rank worse than the “dreaming about work” dreams. I never thought I’d find a dream worse than those.

Dream Four

When I went to sleep on the night after we wrapped filming, I dreamt that the entire shoot was all just a dream and we were only on day two of the shoot! And not only that, but my entire cast had died in a giant bus explosion that morning (even though none of them took a bus to set but hey dream logic)! So, to replace the lead actress, my (male) cinematographer just wore a big hat and kept his face turned away from camera the entire time. He insisted nobody would notice!

So to close out the filming, I effectively dreamt I was a poor man’s replacement for Ed Wood. That is a new low.

I haven’t been posting because I’ve been too tired from moviemaking! Plus all my dreams are just about me being on set, and are not interesting. Seriously I can summarise all of them right here and they all lose to Robert’s, even when he hasn’t dreamt anything:

- I am worrying about movie stuff while lying in bed
- I go to sleep
- In my dream I am on set
- Where I worry about movie stuff

I am counting on Murphy’s Law to give me some extremely bizarre dream tonight because I posted this.

Ha! I have finally had a decent weird dream, so I can take over this tumblr! Like how the Kamen Rider Birth suit has various users, or James Rhodes wearing the Iron Man suit or Miles Morales taking over being Spider-Man and I’ll stop now.

Anyway, last night I dreamed I was playing a Harry Potter video game where you had three attributes to level up, though I only remember two. One was, logically, “Magic”, and the other was, less logically, “Kung Fu”. I was levelling up my Kung Fu (and I distinctly heard someone be called Mumbledore rather than Dumbledore for some reason) when I suddenly stopped playing that game.

Then I was in a shopping centre looking at Simpsons lego sets, which regrettably do not exist. Once I was done looking at them, I found out that I could jump super-high like I was John Carter*, and so I ended up leaping through the shopping centre fighting Therns.

*Note: Martin and I are two of the six people on Earth who both saw and liked John Carter.