It was around the time that game L.A. Noir first came out. I ended up getting really sick with the flu and I was having these really vivid dreams where I was a detective investigating gruesome crime scenes and questioning suspects.

Anyways, my girlfriend at the time worked a lot of odd hours and she had a late shift on one of the days I was sick. So I crawled in bed around 6 or 7 pm hoping I’d get to see her and be feeling a bit better when she got home at 11. I’m exhausted so I immediately fall asleep.

So, I end up having another detective dream where I’m going over this murder scene where this lady was butchered in her kitchen. It’s even in black and white. I’m gathering evidence, questioning the neighbors and other passers by and talking with my partner who reminded me of Robert Stack from Unsolved Mysteries.

While all this is going on I start hearing someone calling my name. Real light and slow like it’s far away. At this point I feel like I’m obsessed with the case and really closing in on a suspect. My partner and I stop to take a smoke break and go over some ideas when I hear my name called again only louder. At this point it’s been escalating louder, closer, and clearer for what seemed like an hour.

I look at my partner and he’s reacting as if he heard it. So I ask him if the stress of the case was cracking me up or if he’d heard someone calling my name too. He just kinda wryly smiles as he looks down stamping out his cigarette under his polished black leather shoe and then just sort of chuckles to himself. He says, “Yeah… I heard it… I guess we’ll have to finish the case some other time.”

I start to argue with him asking him what he means. We can’t stop now… we’re getting too close to an answer! That’s when he finally lifts his head, sort of tips his brimmed hat back, and looks me dead in the eye as he puts his hand on my shoulder. We stand there in silence for a second when we hear someone call my name again only louder and closer this time. That’s when he squeezed my shoulder and calmly yet sternly tells me “None of this matters, none of this is real… It’s time for you to wake up now.”

I instantly shot up wide awake. It felt like I was pulled back into reality, like a rope literally tanked me upright in bed. Now, I’m sitting there just heavily breathing and sweating bullets when my girlfriend walked in and asked me how I was feeling and that she’d been trying to wake me up for like 5 minutes because she’s gotten some soup and crackers ready for me to try and eat.

The whole experience was just so odd I couldn’t shake it for like a week. She’d been the one calling me but that 5 minutes in dream time felt so much longer. Also, it felt surreal how my partner seemed to have real agency and how it all felt so real.

In the end, I never ended up having another detective dream or finishing the case. It’s like the facade of the dream world was shattered in that moment and my partner was kind of saying goodbye. I don’t know why I dreamed of a good man, friend , and partner like Stanford McCallister but I still wish I could thank him for waking me up.

I used to have very intense, vivid dreams when I was younger, some of them were like watching a movie. I remember most of them still, but one in particular sticks with me.

I dreamed about these monsters called blood-bats that were ~3’ tall, squat, red-skinned, winged monsters with 3 big black claws on each hand. They would claw people and leave long, white lines on their flesh, draining them of blood and also the will to live. I dreamed I had gone to Marrakesh (for some reason) and the streets were filled with people who all had these marks on their arms or chest or whatever, and they were all just shuffling around like they were zombies, staring at the ground, etc. They were all kind of moving in one direction, so I pushed through the crowd in that direction and eventually discovered a palace that appeared to be their destination. Inside the palace was this long, wide great hall that was lined by these little booths that each had a priest of some religion or other in it. The people were all lining up to go into the booth of their choosing where they would kneel on a small carpet, the priest would bless them, and they would collapse and a pair of orderlies would put them in a body bag and carry them away.

I was determined to find out what was really going on here, why all these people appeared to be grimly shuffling off to their ultimate demise, so I skipped out of the line and found myself in an elevator. As the elevator started going down one of the creatures came in through the hatch in the ceiling and attacked me, but I managed to fight it off without getting clawed and it fled. Pretty soon the elevator stopped and the door opened and I found myself in this vast open warehouse-like structure filled with thousands of hospital beds, each one with one of these creatures on it. There was an old man pushing a cart around from bed to bed checking on them. I approached and asked him what the shit was going on and he explained that these creatures were from another dimension, that they traveled between dimensions hunting sapient life to drain as a food source. The way they hop dimensions is they make someone where they want to go dream about them - usually only a few at most - and then when that person wakes up the ones they dreamed of would exist in that reality.

As soon as the old man finished telling me this I realized that I was dreaming and was about to wake up, only I wasn’t dreaming about 3-4 of these guys, I was dreaming about the entire race. In those hazy few seconds between being fully engaged in the dream and fully awake I was frantically searching around both the dreamscape and my bedroom for anything sharp that I could use to kill myself before I woke up and brought all of them here. Fortunately reality reasserted itself in pretty short order, but that handful of seconds might’ve been the most scared I’ve ever been.

There’s a bunch that I don’t remember, but I got bit by a spider and the bite turned into a mushroom and it grew and changed into a bunch of rainbow colors. We caught the spider and it was a clown recluse. I guess even my sleeping brain makes dumb puns.

It wasn’t the content of the dream, but the nature of the dream itself. Ever have a dream that seems like it’s years long? I woke up a little disoriented and feeling like I had lived another life.

Having dreams. :(

This is a joke. I’m fine.

I was a penguin. I was waiting in line at the Harold Washington library in Chicago to get an autograph from Neal Stephenson. I had to keep looking over my shoulder, because there were wanted posters up everywhere with my penguin face on them, because I was being hunted for a crime I didn’t commit.

In my 20’s I had three dreams. The first I was at my parents house preparing for a zombie invasion. I knew we would be fine if I found “it” (no idea what it was) but was unable to in the dream. The second dream I was at the office trying to find “it” again and knew I only had three chances. The third dream I was in the desert at the mouth of a skull shaped cave. I had a shovel and knew it was my last chance to find “it”. I failed and awoke knowing I had lost something important but undefinable. The dreams were all about a month apart and so vivid they felt real.

Another interesting note on my dreams is almost all of the really intensely real dreams I’ve been able to recall take place in different parts of the same “world”. Sometimes in the dream I can recall other dreams and where they are in relation to the current dream, most often I make the connection after waking.

I was involved in a very vicious street fight. It was incredibly violent and frantic, with blood everywhere. It was more of a free for all instead of me taking on like nine dudes. I’m not a violent person at all, so it was really distressing. Some big guy lifted me up and slammed me against a wall, so I reached out and gouged his eye with my thumb. It was awful. I could feel the shape, and it was all clammy. It was so against my regular self that I burst awake. I thought it was still going on though because I could still feel it on my thumb. Turns out my hand was in my shorts, and the clammy eyeball shape was a part of my male anatomy.

I couldn’t even begin to describe my weirdest dreams. I just sit there holding my coffee mumbling “what the fuck was that?”

I once had a dream where I was a soldier fighting in a war (as a pacifist sort of person, this was very scary) and all the moving objects were solid black, no shading, and the background was a solid blood red. The dream ended when I got shot.

The one time I’ve ever had a lucid dream I decided to try flying. It worked out pretty well so I visited a wizard and learned to shoot fireballs. Sadly I woke up shortly afterward.

I don’t remember my dreams more than a couple of days back let alone immediately after waking up most of the time, so the most recent one I remember was 2 nights ago. I was singing Still A Friend of Mine as a duet with Maysa Leak and while singing, she was scratching away a piece of dry skin on my forehead.

I was 15, and had a dream of my girlfriend standing on the side of the street in daylight, and somehow her belly button somehow turned into something like a black hole, but still flesh colored, and she got sucked into oblivion.

Hey, dreams can definitely be weird like that. 🤷‍♂️