Minivan thug dream

It’s so rare that I remember a dream, but I did yesterday morning because I was in the middle of it when my wife woke me.

In the dream, she and I were out walking, and we saw our minivan pull up in a nearby parking lot. That didn’t seem unusual; it was as if we’d left it with valet parking and this is where they brought it. But then two big guys got out of it, and they were wearing ski masks. We walked over to them, and when they saw us coming they pulled the masks off and stuffed them hastily away in pockets, trying to act innocent. My dream self realized that they had already stolen our bicycles (which we don’t even have anymore in reality) from the van. (Why they would’ve needed to wear the masks for that stage of the heist is beyond me, but there you have it.)

This knowledge emboldened me, and after that point they didn’t seem so physically big anymore. One was kind of squat and out of shape, and the other was lanky. I grabbed the tall guy’s ankles and had no trouble holding them still, and he was suddenly lying on the grass and somehow unable to reach me with his arms. I knew that my wife had the other guy similarly under control, and we were waiting for the cops to arrive when I woke up. I wonder how it would’ve turned out.

Retropost: body snatcher dream

This little blurb is taken from a letter I wrote to a friend who was into lucid dreaming and kept a dream journal. It’s a description of what was probably the most cinematic dream I’ve ever been able to remember. And definitely the funniest.

I just had the weirdest dream. Actually, it was a reasonably disturbing nightmare, but I ended up surviving until my alarm clock went off. (Uh-oh, call the grammar police; I ended a sentence with a preposition. Everybody knows that prepositions are not good things to end sentences with.) Looking back on it, it was kind of cool.

I’m in this big house (not mine, I’ve never seen it before, but I know it in the dream), and there are these body-snatching aliens invading the earth. Nobody knows who can be trusted. There are some kids in the house with me, and I know that they’re all regular human kids (just one of those things that’s given information as the dream starts). The doorbell rings, and one of the children opens the front door before I can stop him.

My Dad walks in the front door. He looks right at me, smiling as if it’s an effort to do so. He doesn’t take his eyes from me as he steps over the door frame and over some toys lying on the floor. I say nothing, but motion to the kids to get away from him.

“So this is [my former address], is it?” he asks me. (Okay. At this point, Dad doesn’t seem to realize that he is my Dad, so it’s safe for me to assume he’s been snatched. Normally he would have let on in some way. Apparently the aliens don’t have access to all the knowledge and experience of their victims at once (only little bits at a time), and my Dad was keeping his alien from knowing that at that time by volunteering my address.)

“Yeah,” I answer as my sister (Megan), my Dad’s girlfriend (Barb), and Christopher Lloyd (from Back to the Future, etc) walk in the door. I keep the kids behind me and the intruders where I can see them.

“Where’s the bathroom?” (In case you were wondering, what they did in the bathroom was communicate with their home planet. Apparently they needed the weird parabolic curve of my big porcelain bathtub to send the signal properly. (Don’t ask me how I knew that.)) my sister’s voice is forceful and she doesn’t seem like herself.

“Maybe we can ask Bryce,” my Dad says, still looking at me but no longer smiling.

Megan darts up the stairs (the bathroom was up there, but I don’t know whether she knew that or not), and is followed by Barb. One of the older kids opens the back door and they all start to scurry off to the neighbor’s house. Dad, looking frustrated, watches them leave, but I stand my ground and he can do nothing.

“Hey Dave, get up here!” I hear Megan shout. He looks at the doors intently. The back door closes, and he goes upstairs. When I try the doors I realize that they’re telekinetically sealed or something, and go to the kitchen to try the phone. Of course it’s dead, so I start with trepidation to go upstairs.

Megan attacks me from behind after I’ve started up the stairs. (She came down to ambush me while I was in the kitchen.) I fall forward onto the higher stairs, and roll over onto my back to face her. She advances, and I kick at her shoulder to keep her away. She catches my foot. I try to kick it free with my other leg, but she catches that one too. I thrash both legs as hard as I can, and her grip holds, but her balance wavers. I push off the higher stairs with my arms, sending her (and my feet) backwards down the stairs to the landing. She’s stunned enough for me to wriggle free, and I scramble beneath the stairs to hide.

I can hear them from my hiding place. From their conversation I discover that the reason I’m so important to get rid of is because I have the ability to place little curses on the aliens. That’s why Dad couldn’t do anything while I stood my ground.

It’s also while listening to them from under the stairs that I become aware of a time pressure. I know that my alarm clock will go off at 8:23, at which point I will wake up. It’s only then that I realize that, hey, this is all a dream!

As if he knows I just thought that and wants to stop me from thinking it again, Christopher Lloyd (who had been up to now playing with the various toys on the floor) looks up toward the stairs and begins crawling this way. While he’s pulling himself slowly across the hardwood floor, getting ready to devour me or something, I dream that I remember pushing the snooze button several times, then just shutting my alarm off altogether. The hope of deliverance from this conflict with my loved ones (and Christopher Lloyd) is snatched from me as I realize that I must stop them before I can wake up.

Fortunately, however, this whole notion, along with my memory of dealing with the alarm clock, must have been telepathically implanted in my mind by the aliens, because just as I throw a curse on the rabid Christopher Lloyd who collapses in an epileptic seizure long enough for me to render him unconscious with a wiffle bat, my alarm clock sounds and I jerk awake. This was the first morning in a very, very long series of mornings that I did not press the snooze button even once.

I knew it was a dream, but it’s still scaring me because they also knew it was a dream and they almost succeeded in convincing me that there was nothing I could do about it.