Light over Dark

I’ve been holding onto an unusually intense dream that’s appropriate for today.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, was leading a very small tactical team including me on a covert mission deep within the Kremlin. We all were incredibly silent and the living quarters were eerily vacant as we breached them, so I figured there had to be help from the inside — which just got me even more worried that our mission was to, you know, take a certain someone out, quite possibly for the greater good of humanity but perhaps at a cost to my own since I was new to this stuff.

Once we arrived in a long, ostentatious dining room, a signal was given and a bunch
of children filed in. Then a film projector started up and unspooled Star Wars on an expanse of blank wall space to the kids’ delight. I can’t say if it was meant to be humanitarian relief for a group of hostages, soft propaganda to win over sheltered, indoctrinated young minds, or what, but it was apparently successful as the scene jumped to a few of us sitting in a dimly lit parlor with a woman who might have been the late Madeleine Albright offering congratulations on a job well done.

My Brain in Wayne

A recent dream that found me in the heart of lovely Wayne, PA, where I resided for a couple of years much longer ago than it seems, reminded me that I’d jotted down another one set there several months back.

The newer one: I’m walking on a side road that feeds into Main Street when I hear Dido singing “Thank You” during an outdoor photoshoot. I approach her because she’s an old friend and we catch up a little but she’s busy working — so after confirming that she still lives nearby I tell her that Em and I have a place in Manayunk now and we should meet for lunch.

Zero idea who Em’s supposed to be.

The older dream: I’ve gone to Minella’s Diner with someone whom, per my notes, I couldn’t place upon waking and in hindsight I would very much like to believe was the mysterious Em. Bruce Springsteen, the E Street Band, and their entire touring entourage are there and have taken up several tables. I hear another patron tell his server that any drinks they order under $55 are on him and, dear reader, I’m at least as curious about how my subconscious came up with that cutoff point as you are. Once my friend and I have been seated, Lex Luthor turns around from the next booth to speak to us — not a generic version, but Lex Luthor as voiced by Clancy Brown in the DCAU Superman and Justice League animated series, fleshed out in real life and threatening us with something I can’t recall.


Related: Of Was and When • REM Brands • HIVE Minded • Fight and Flight

Neuro Diversions

So there he was, Richard Dawson, in all of his ’70s glory — with a dark blazer and medallion over gray turtleneck — seated behind a large, ornate desk in a room lined with bookshelves. The camera pulled in on him as credits appeared on-screen announcing that I’d found my way to some kind of documentary series or infomercial on talk shows that he was hosting.

I came upon this sight while seeming to browse television channels in a dream.

Waking up, I got the sense that I hadn’t actually been flipping channels but rather watching the results of artificial intelligence tasked with creating such a program. It was still a dream, of course, no matter the rationale behind what was on that monitor in my unconscious; as I rapidly became conscious, though, I found myself intensely musing on similarities between dreams and imagery generated by omnivorous algorithm.

54 Favorites: #18

I’ve mentioned before on the blog — 15 years ago, granted — how much I loved Shazam!, Filmation’s live-action series based on the original Captain Marvel that aired Saturday mornings on CBS in the mid ’70s.



Not very long ago it was incorporated into a dream of mine. An immortal Elder from the show appeared to me but (a) he looked more like Batman foe Maxie Zeus as drawn by the great Don Newton than Zeus himself or any of the other legendary figures making up the acronym that is Billy Batson’s magic word — yet still in the style used to illustrate those figures in the ethereal vision sequences in which they appeared, unmoving — and (2) he freaked me out by lifting his arms up instead of remaining static. I think he was giving me a mission that had something to do with cats.

Unlike most dreams, I could trace the components of this one quite clearly to stuff
from my waking life. It came as Matt Re’s look at the stretch of Batman and Detective Comics written by Gerry Conway, which ran throughout 2024 on his blog Not a Hoax! Not a Dream!, was drawing to a close; a fair number of those stories were penciled by Newton. And more germanely to the post I’m writing now, I’d begun playing the intro to Shazam! in an act of self-soothing on an almost daily basis to center myself before getting down to this or that task amidst my latest health crises and the general insanity of life.

Of Was and When

I’m plodding through a marshland canal in a Colonial Era village at dusk. Muddy and wet, I stop in a cabin to warm up, strip my clothes off, and grab some new ones that had been left there to dry by the fire. After stealing into the night once more, I enter another house by the back door with hopes of making it out the front unseen — only to discover a youthful fortysomething David Bowie, in appropriate period dress and with his sandy blond hair rakishly tousled, cooking over a stove.

“Are you leaving us, then?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him, or perhaps I simply nod, and I exit. I pause with second thoughts, however, then head in again. Extending my hand, I say, “I’ve been a tremendous admirer since I was a kid. I just wanted to thank you.” He is gracious. I wake up.

New Dream Titans

One fringe benefit to migraines — which to be clear, I would gladly do without if it meant the migraines would stop too — is even more, and more vibrant, dreams than usual.

Two weekends ago I had a nasty, persistent episode come on that meant by the time I crashed I’d been awake for well over 24 hours and then ended up sleeping for close to 12 hours into the evening the next day when I needed to get stuff done. At least a couple of memorable experiences resulted from the ordeal: First, I had an adventure in outer space during the Blackfire / Gordanians arc in Marv Wolfman & George Pérez’s classic New Teen Titans run (not the only time it’s figured into my dreams). Later, I attended a dance recital where someone was attempting to fix me up to the frustration of my good friend Nick Offerman, in character as Ron Swanson, who had accompanied me and thought I was going to show him around Philadelphia.

After sharing the above on Facebook, I received sympathy, of course, along with suggestions on dietary changes that might alleviate migraines, a Little Nemo in Slumberland reference, and the revelation that a certain friend never dreams when enduring migraines — except for infrequent ones in which she has a splitting headache and wakes up with, naturally, a splitting headache. That’s happened to me too but thankfully quite seldom.


Related: Head Space • REM Brands • HIVE Minded

Head Space

I had a neat dream last night. Since content might be light here for a spell, I’ve
written it up along with a couple more I scribbled down from earlier this year.

The one from last night involved the work of Nikki Stafford, author of books about Lost and other cult TV, whose blog was among my select re-entry points to online activity when I finally got a working computer a handful of years ago now. Co-starring in the older dreams were actor/filmmaker Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series Girls, whom I’ve never met, and comics scribe Kurt Busiek, creator of Astro City, whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with online and in person a fair amount over the past couple of decades.

In the snippet of last night’s dream that left an impression, I was mostly running around from table to table in a large dining room with a gravy boat of salad dressing.
At a certain point that scene, which I vaguely associated with a college dining hall, transitioned to me teaching a class on Buffy the Vampire Slayer that drew from Nikki’s work as well as my own blogposts. The real-world irony of the latter is that I’d hoped to publish a series of relevant posts during Nikki’s year-long rewatch of that show but I had to suspend that plan. (I did earlier share thoughts on my first exposure to Buffy
on television and review the original movie.)

Fight and Flight

I dreamt the other night that someone who’d offered to subsidize my blog to the
tune of about $20,000 wanted to back out.

My blog in the dream wasn’t quite this blog; it focused more heavily on analysis of TV series the way I’d actually like to but don’t have time for, episode by episode, as Nikki Stafford has done most notably with Lost. This benefactor was upset that I wasn’t covering an obscure-to-me British show — I want to say Time Bandits, had there been
a spinoff of the movie, although it might have been something similar that really exists and which only my subconscious remembers. I countered that what I was covering, Fringe and stuff, was the sort of thing, as with Lost and X-Files and Star Trek in past years, that people seriously glommed onto and discussed. We fought a bit, physically, and I told him that I was happy to return his money.

Just then, naturally, Johanna Draper Carlson approached me on behalf of a group of her friends who, based on a movie they’d seen, needed to acquire both a longsword and a dagger hidden far away. She knew that I could fly in my dreams and she wanted me
to fly her to the dagger. I obliged.


Related: HIVE Minded • Dream a Little Dream of Meep • Of Was and When

HIVE Minded

The other night I had a rather strange dream.

I have strange dreams often, as I’ve mentioned here before — you can see all of my dream posts if you’re intrigued by what follows — but the strange thing about this one was how of-the-moment it was. Upon waking it would be the 4th of July and my blogging buddy Teebore’s next installment of his issue-by-issue X-Men analysis would be published; both figured into the dream. Sometimes I’m more surprised by dreams that relate to my actual everyday existence than those in which I’m playing for the Phillies or meeting Queen Elizabeth or hanging out with the Avengers.

When this dream began I was drawing, an activity in which I rarely engage anymore
in waking life as it’s a lot harder physically than it used to be, yet one that I occasionally find myself pursuing in dreams — perhaps to keep those creative muscles limber, if
only inside my head. That drawing, centered on Superman, was getting to be rather intricate, too, I realized as I was inking it (n.b., “inking” = the stage of applying black ink by pen, marker, or brush to finish line artwork for reproduction once it's been drawn in pencil).

Dream a Little Dream of Meep

Although my dreams continue to be vivid and enjoyable, I haven’t shared here lately.

The other day, however, I put together such an interesting vision in that odd twilight state between dreaming and waking up that I can’t help but write about it. While I tried my best to stay in it, I was aware that I was beginning to come out of it and I probably have my emerging consciousness to thank for its being so brief as well as having an ending — a pretty rare thing for dreams, which in my experience tend to slide into one another or quickly slip away. It was also rare in that I wasn’t actually in the dream, neither as myself nor even as a POV character.

Just so that I don’t bury the lead any farther, I’ll mention now that the dream starred the Muppets.

REM Brands

At least part of the origins of a dream of mine from last night are obvious: I’ve had Lost on the brain due to peeking in on Nikki Stafford’s Rewatch of the show and lamenting that I still don’t have time to participate.

The context of the dream was me reading about an upcoming film in Entertainment Weekly — yet instead of seeing the words on a page, I was seeing the action described
in my mind’s eye, as if I had peered into Dumbledore’s “pensieve” from the Harry Potter series. And that action was Matthew Fox, in his role as Jack on Lost, standing
on the turret of a castle while a storm raged. Oddly, Julia Roberts was playing a version of Evangeline Lilly’s Kate or someone connected to her, but she was inside. Jack, in a suit and tie, shouted amidst the wind and rain about something being unfair; at one point he dumped the contents of an old-fashioned physician’s bag over the wall of the turret. I believe that the name of the movie was In Absentia.

I have vivid dreams and tend to remember at least one upon waking. Sometimes I’ll recall others later when actual events jog my memory. They’re usually not completely mundane or completely gonzo, but there are exceptions. On rare occasions I’ll have dreamt a slice of life so ordinary that only later when reality contradicts it will I both remember the dream and realize that it was a dream. Last year during a nasty bout of the flu I dreamt of nothing but thick, syrupy pitch-black shapes moving around.

Most often, however, the dreams are entertainingly improbable if not impossible scenarios like me going to a Survivor reunion after nearly forgetting that I’d been on the show, or Jim Eisenreich giving me a pep talk in the Phillies’ locker room before we take the field, or an acquaintance of mine getting me to introduce him to Marlee Matlin after I’ve moved into a new apartment. Yes, I’ve gone back to college and even high school. Yes, I’ve been embarrassingly naked. Yes, I’ve had sex, which to me pretty well belies the old saw that says when you dream that you’re flying you’re really thinking about having sex. I’ve also dreamt that I’m flying, which is utterly amazing and probably my second favorite recurring activity in dreams; first is spending time with one of my family’s dearly departed cats. The following is representative of the average levels of reality and unreality of my dreams as well as their tenuous segues.

A childhood friend whom I shall call Gary looked not entirely unlike Bill Hader of Saturday Night Live, and while I’ve not seen Gary in ages a dream from the other night began with the two of us more or less as adults in a classroom where Hader stood at the chalkboard. I was telling Hader that, like him, Gary did a killer Vincent Price impression, and Hader responded with the news that he was preparing to star in a film that Price had been working on before his death, portraying the main character as Price would have. From there the scene dissolved to what at that moment I clearly felt was supposed to be Hader’s description of the film, via the whole rubbing-the-chin, “it seems as though it was only yesterday...” trick; in this new setting, a bunch of teenagers were lying around waking up from one heck of a party the night before.