INTRODUCTION

I had five bizarre dreams in a single night. I wasn't the same person in each--not even the same species. In Dream 1 I'm a dog-person, in 2 & 3 I'm human, in 4 a dog again (I think) and human again in 5 (though a bystander, while the dog's a major player). Despite my changes, all the scenes wrestle with the same issues in different settings. Clusters like this make it clear we can debate what dreams mean--I'm no Freudian!--but you cannot honestly claim they're random brain-noise, or mere memory consolidation, or idly exploring associations (or whatever mechanistic theory's popular this week).

THAT MONTH

I've been under stress. No, stresses:

1. I got called for jury duty--and the case involves sexual violence, triggering traumas in my own past.
2. I'm hypothyroid; need thyroxine. My dosage was raised without asking me! Weight loss, severe insomnia, sweats & hot flashes, volatility. Overdose!
3. The City totaled my car and hasn't paid me a cent--not even an offer after nine months of calls & letters. I'll have to sue.
4. The IRS claims I owe them money, but they made an obvious math error. I can't reach a human being, of course...
5. The state tax board denied my senior exemption, and billed me hundreds (again, their error--I clearly qualify.)
6. An insurance company siphoned hundreds out of my account for fees related to a car I don't own.
7. The local bridge district also took hundreds from my account--bridge tolls for this same car I don't own.

THAT DAY

The stock market plunges. My sister Miriel, disabled and partly relying on me financially, calls in a panic about money. I check--can my retirement fund support us both? At first glance--the broker's summary--it dropped 10%. But as I look at the raw numbers and factor in the money I've drawn out this year, it hasn't dropped, over all. Election years usually rise, so I'm going to stay invested and be patient. The fund survived Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and inflation; so despite Miriel's fear, I think it'll support us both (in modest style) indefinitely. If I don't panic and pull out, as short-term investors often do.

Health? Not so sure. My inflamed eye still hurts. Bike to pharmacy to pick up antibiotic goo. Tired, take it slow. Shop for food on the way back. Suddenly, a sore right ankle--did nothing, it just went POP. I limp home. Put gunk in my eye. Ugh--but it improves quickly. The fast response proves it really was infection, not allergies.

I've been cutting up my thyroid pills and taking just half the new monster dose. I'm recovering; almost back to normal. But I really need to get a specialist to correct my GP's reckless, unconsulted change. Or I'll be cutting up pills for the rest of my life.

THAT EVENING

I read The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, by Jennifer Crusie, Eileen Dreyer and Anne Stuart. A fantasy-romance-comedy about three psychic sisters--telekinetic Mare, shapeshifter Dee, and spellweaver Lizzie. Strong feelings (or an orgasm) can trigger embarrassing paranormal oopsies. Trying not to trigger (or at least cover up) their poorly-repressed powers has kept them all shy, single and secretive.

As the book opens, they have worse problems--they're hiding out in a small town from their monstrous aunt, an energy vampire. I don't mean she's overbearing, though she is. A literal vampire--I mean she drained their parents of life-force and now wants their kids' power too.

So, not life, just survival in hiding... I know that feeling.

THAT NIGHT...

Dream 1: GOOD DOG?

I'm a dog person--human-smart, but my feelings are pure dog--a petlike dependency on human approval. Well, in my case, superhuman. A Perfect Couple. Or at least I see them as superhuman. They've let me live my life independently, but at crises they appear, shining angels of success. And I obey them eagerly, craving their guidance. Even with hands, language and a brain, I feel I'm just a dumb dog!

All month, I've been a bit off. Not quite sick, but not right.

Now they appear, and I feel a great fear and sadness that their Visitation means my illness is serious, perhaps terminal. They lead me to a changing room--an odd one, one of many on a long narrow plaza or park. Inside are just pants and a shirt, no furniture. I break into tears and howl: "Was I a GOOD dog? I TRIIIIED!" Hate that I'm so abject, but... sadly, this is the real me.

I wait for them to treat me--or not. Are they about to give me that painless, lethal shot?

NOTES

• Dependent: how my sister must feel right now?
• Superhuman figures may kill me "for my own good":
  1. Aunt Xan, that energy-vampire in The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, brilliant at justifying the soul-sucking that killed their parents.
  2. Kaiser doctors, casually prescribing a serious overdose of thyroxine. A week after this dream, I saw an endocrinologist and listed my symptoms of hyperthyroidism. She dismissed it all as "subjective", said I didn't know what I was talking about--I'm just a dumb dog patient. Shut up and take your pills!
• ACTION, short-term: keep cutting your dosage to something sane. Switch to a another GP and report that specialist. Irresponsible.
• ACTION, long-term: Beware rationalizers! They'll help you--to death.

Dream 2: STRETCHED TO THE LIMIT

I sewed a life-size plushie--a tiger-mermaid, front end stripes, back end fins, furry all over. I call her the Mertiger. Now I find myself dragging the Mertiger with me to a doctor's appointment, through the long corridors of Kaiser Hospital--at least 3-400 meters. But I'm held back by a strong drag; the Mertiger's reddish shaggy tail has a loop of coaxial TV cable attached, trailing out of sight. And I'm not just pulling loose cable; somewhere back there's a spring-coil of the stuff--I can feel an elastic tug. But I'm nearing its limit of stretch.

Go back a bit and find a tangle--including several spars or big connectors, aluminum rods up to 3 meters long. A broken-up TV antenna, maybe? Untangling it frees up yards of cable. Drag the Mertiger farther down the hall. Near my goal now, but I doubt I can reach it with the tiger.

For there's just no more stretch left.

NOTES

• The Mertiger: is real. Added on to a big stuffed toy, and she grew bigger than me. Now she sprawls on my bed where she'll shade my eyes from street lights, improving my sleep...

  Mer-tigress: a thrift-store toy tiger + old foam mattress + fake fur; c.2 meters.

  From this angle, dreadlocks hide feather crest.

• So the Mertiger: probably means sleep & dreaming. Sleep deprivation kills! No stretch left.
• Wire around cetacean tail: read about North Atlantic whales, all with fishing line caught on them, scarring them. Slow extinction--death by a thousand lines.
• TV cable: If it was the tiger's tail overstretched, I'd have guessed it meant I was financially overextended? But when it's co-ax cable, electrical but low-voltage, transmitting an analog signal? That sounds more like my nerves. At their limit. Possibly from thyroxine poisoning. Years of different levels, from 50-100 mcg, under healthplans with various standards; I found ALL of them tolerable; my system's quite elastic! But this doctor pushed it to 137. No stretch left.
• ACTION: cut my thyroid dosage. Don't wait for some expert! My system's at the limit. This is how critters go extinct.

Dream 3: MYSTERY INNARDS

A librarian gives me a computer to test--can I draw with a mouse? No! Every stroke is jagged and glitchy.

My friend Mark's a techie; he opens it up. Dusty, sooty guts. No, not soot. Every part is charcoal gray! Full of bulging, transformer-like modules, like a dozen organs in a torso. And that's it--no boards, chips, strip cables, fans, no visible metal, no labels, no color coding--unlike any computer I've ever seen.

He's an expert with normal computers, but can he really fix this... thing?

NOTES

• Internal organs: hints my stress has a medical source, perhaps the endocrine system.
• Weird-looking, unlabeled innards: my metabolism may be nonstandard--not that that surprises me, I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. My joints, digestion, immune system and neurology are all abnormal. Why expect the rest of me to be plain vanilla?
• ACTION 1: see a specialist! But even then... be critical of their advice. I may be out of their zone of expertise.
• Weird computer guts: literal, predictive! Over the next few months SEVEN different surplus computers came my way. Most were obsolete, but a couple, with some surgery, were actually usable. One's now my main web searcher. Anyway, this dream element looked like pure metaphor, but I soon really was evaluating computer guts...
• ACTION 2: Take dreams literally first, like the stupid, primitive shaman I am. If that doesn't work, THEN go all Freud or Jung on them; sometimes that's useful. But first, go by Bradbury's maxim: "They sound naïve, your Martians." "Only when it paid to be naïve."

Dream 4: SCOTTISH DOG SOCCER

I'm given a questionnaire with weird riddles I don't understand--full of pop references and names I don't know. Sure not an intelligence test--no way to reason the answers. A general knowledge assessment? If so, with a huge cultural bias!

Read one question aloud to my sister Miriel, with long phrase-names I've never heard of. She laughs and says "Those are just Scottish teams of prizewinning sheepdogs, who organized to play dog football. There's a whole league of professionals now. You just don't follow British sports."

True. I don't. But should I have to? Just because I'm a dog?

NOTES

• Questionnaire, bias: two weeks ago I had to fill out a long weird stressful questionnaire at the Hall of Justice under oath--part of a new jury-selection system. It probed unconscious cultural biases, not sensory or cognitive differences like I have--that is, their assessment of bias was itself so biased (toward neurotypical TYPES of bias) that I could barely answer some questions. Soon as they read my answers I got excused, since the case echoed domestic abuse in my past; but it was hell to recall and explain that. (The old way was even worse--days in court, being grilled in front of an audience!)
• Scottish: PBS showed trails in Yorkshire, on the Scottish border.
• Dogs: echo dream 1. Maybe I should number these 1a, 1b, etc--are they scenes of one big dream?
• Miriel has a clue: so rather than being the source of the stress she's part of the solution. Like dream 2, this suggests money's not the problem, but shot nerves from multiple stresses this month.

  Dream 5: HIDE HER KINK!

  A little girl runs a big corporation. She's brilliant and precocious, but we staffers must hide HOW precocious--both from the public and the cops. She's an adult soul in a child's body. With adult sexual desires. Specifically...

  Her favorite thing is to be licked all over till she comes. Her dog does it enthusiastically. But... she insists on getting her clit licked on the job. While she's on the phone with corporate clients, negotiating deals.

  They can hear that she sounds very young, if not how young, and a little distracted, if not by what, and that she's having a very good day...

  ...but not how good.

  And we let her do it. Because she does a fantastic job with no problems--as long as no outsiders can see what's really going on. And we really, really, really need to keep it that way.

  NOTES

  • Adult sexuality, child's body: inverts the premise of the film Poor Things, where a mad scientist transplants a child's brain (and her relentless, innocent logic about social conventions) into an adult body. With adult desires. And (I think this is what offended many viewers) she turns out pretty decent and pretty happy... especially considering it's set a century ago when women were treated like dogs. Unlike now.
  • Hide shocking sex from clients: The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes. Big sister's shocked that little sister's having sex. Come on, you're both adults! Frustrated adults who all have furtive sex in risky places--cars, city parks. Can't commit, can't even open up and share who they are--because they're in hiding. Like this prodigy.
  • ACTION: hiding who I am has big costs, but as with the Miss Fortunes, it's a survival tactic. If I bare the real, autistic me, all these agencies and experts (who can't even add right!) just hassle me. So stick to business, keep my private life private, and when authorities and experts clash with my autistic experience, reject them.

  FIVE MONTHS LATER

  I chipped away at the institutions hounding me. I got off jury duty, and first the IRS and then the state tax board conceded I'd done my taxes right. I finally gave the City a deadline, and on literally the last day before I filed suit for squashing my car, they caved in. I still get threats from a collection agency for bridge tolls that aren't mine, and I'm still cutting up my thyroid pills. But the list has shrunk to... manageable.

  ---

  
  LISTS AND LINKS:
  Day: money - siblings - dreams of Miriel - doctors & medicine - book-inspired dreams - siblings & family - vampires & parasites - hunted!
  1: Good Dog? I'm Just Not Myself Today! - species-bent dreams - animal people - dogs - fear & grief - dying? - euthanasia again in Suicide Track
  2: Stretched to the Limit: the Mertiger - diagnostic dreams? - more dreams of towing heavy emotional baggage: Tarot: the Sulky, Angerhelm, Invisible Sulky
  3: Mystery Innards: computers & the web - my friend Mark - surgery - diagnostic dreams - expertise & mastery - predictive dreams? - ESP in general
  4: Scottish Dog Football: questionnaires & exams - what's in a name? - animal people - dogs again - sports - teams - my sister Miriel - autism
  5: Hide her Kink! business - leaders - kids - prodigies - phones - exhibitionism vs. privacy - taboos: child sex & bestiality - oral sex - sex dreams in general - dogs again - phones - film-inspired dreams? (Poor Things) - pencil & digital dream art

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