Dream 1c: ARM IN THE POND

Whew! I'm safe. The attack is long past--though I'm a teen now, not an adult, so only five or ten years passed, not a generation. We're at a film festival back in England, lying on a grassy bank. A pond's to my left, my dad's to my right. He's showing a travelog of our trip to a dozen people.

As it shows the worshipers at the impromptu roadside shrine I inadvertently started, I'm distracted by a disturbance in the pond to my left. An arm floats up. A body in the lake? No, just the arm--not bloody, but severed. It floats.

I fish it out, and poke my dad, hissing "Hit pause--look at this!" He ignores me. I poke and speak up--"Stop the film, you need to deal with this!" He ignores me. I WHACK him with the arm and yell "STOP!"... and he ignores me.

I shake him, in alarm now, and he lies there inert. Unconscious or dead?

I wake up at 3 AM. Rare for me to get nightmares strong enough to wake me before dawn. I think Wertz inspired my dream gremlins to lay it on thick...

NOTES

• Recurring nightmares: Julia Wertz again.
• England, story filmed: I've been watching the BBC TV series of Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials. Today I walked by an empty lot where I once heard Pullman read & answer fans' questions; the hall was torn down. Memory outlives steel!
• Pond: unsure. The floods in Pullman's La Belle Sauvage? The Lady of the Lake giving King Arthur the sword?
• Teenage girl: Julia Wertz in her teens, or Lyra in His Dark Materials?
• Severed arm: Started an exercise program today. Tried pushups; found them exhausting. Tried a chinup, and couldn't! During Covid, I stayed in... & apparently got weak, especially my arms. Bet they hurt tomorrow [they did].
• Dad inert: kinda true. Not someone I could go to if I was in trouble: his help could be worse than the problem.
• ACTION: Go slow on exercise; you're starting from weaker than you thought. Walking's OK, but give arms a day's rest.

Dream 2: DICK DISCARDS

I feel horny in the night, and sleepily fuck my girlfriend Ailura, a talking leopard.

I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, so my connective tissue is weak. After I come, rather than my cock shrinking as blood withdraws, the erection buds off at the base, sealing instantly to create a detached, erect cock! Happened several times recently--not too alarming, as a new one grows on my blank crotch overnight, looking normal by dawn. But it's creepy to find these discarded dicks in bed.

Is this normal for EDS? I dunno, since it's a rare genetic mutation and few live to my age.

I composted the first castoffs quietly, blushing & burying them like bad sausages deep in the bin, but the last time I put the erection in a drawer next to the condoms, and this time I do the same--and compare.

Notice how different they are. The older one's short and thick, 15 by 5 cm (6"x2"), while this one's very long but skinnier, almost 30 by at most 3 cm (12x1"). Like two different men. You'd never guess they had the same source. Wait, maybe the shape varies (by mood, position, what?) but the volume stays constant. No, volume of a cylinder's length times the square of width; the short one's way more massive. Yet the skinny one's... really long. Pornstar long. Odd.

I'm not much worried about the phenomenon, weird though it is--the cocks regrow so fast. But it's one more secret I feel I have to keep. For when I tell doctors even the most basic truths of my condition--like my steady growth in height over decades of adulthood, not stability or shrinkage--they dismiss it. "That can't be right, you must have mismeasured." So I never proceed to tell more exotic basics--like my (weak) magnetic sense and (stronger) aura-sense.

Tell them about my weenie collection, and they'll decide I'm really an octopus budding off spore-packets, or I'm a sleepwalking dick-thief (eek!) or... who knows?

It occurs to me shedding and regrowing my cock nightly could be a weight-loss program--a few ounces a day, but steady. Wasteful though; lots of iron & protein being lost, not fat. If this goes on, I'll need a higher-protein diet!

NOTES

• Cock gets fragile, breaks or buds off painlessly, dicks in condom drawer:
  1. Several condoms recently broke. Too old! Not a major problem with my lover in the dream--Ailura was a catgirl, almost certainly not cross-fertile with humans. Still... Oh! Wertz's lover cheated on her, and didn't use a condom. She had to get checked for STDs. Again not a risk with a dream lover, but...
  2. I do have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, weakening my connective tissue so I often get dislocated knees & ribs. But not so weak that bits fall off...
  3. The budded-off dick echoes the detached arm in the last scene, AND the arm-size snake in the first scene.
  4. Is there a horrible pun here on "budding sexuality"?
• Similar volume, different shapes: different conceptions of masculinity? I'm reading a book on longevity by Peter Attia, Outlive. He's a chunky weightlifter, I'm a bony noodle--might as well be different species, and I'm getting even taller and skinnier with age. The long skinny dick may symbolize my build.
• Hid/trashed them, now saved & studying them: maybe... Wertz's frankness is letting me look at sexual stuff I previously hid, embarrassed. But what exactly?
• ACTION 1: replace condoms! And what ELSE in my room is... expired? No one visited during Covid, so I let junk just collect. Clean up & chuck it out!
• ACTION 2: EDS means I can't do all Dr Attia's favorite exercises. No carrying weights or squats--just too risky for back & knees. Customize; be wary.
• ACTION 3: Up protein and iron in my diet, as dream suggests. Need more if I'm building back lost strength.

Dream 3: THE SMARTFIELD

I inherit or find (ethically, I think) a magical device that generates a limited field, just a few yards across; not a smooth curve but a knot or dome, steady in strength for a yard or two from source, but then a fast drop-off. Inside it, brilliant logic. Powerful enhancement to the mind.

I need to keep quiet about it. Lots of twisted thinkers out there crave clarity; they'd love this enhancement and might do nasty things to get it.

I convince a college on Monterey Bay to sponsor a small research project by a beach near Sand City, on the former Fort Ord--there's an old beach shack we can use for a lab. Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil is used to kooky projects, from growing up with her mad-scientist dad Ray Kurzweil, so she agrees to help cover up--pretend it's an oceanography project. I trust her not to bump me off and steal it... she already HAS a clear head, and if she were greedy, she'd never have turned... cartoonist! Dedicated to the least lucrative profession in the world...

NOTES

• Generator and field: about the size of the stone and islet-shrine earlier. Same thing in a different dress?
• Collaborate with college on Monterey Bay: reminds me of Calvin Hall's "Dreambank", the earliest online database of dreams--crude but still running, at UC Santa Cruz.
• ACTION: try to get WDB settled at UCSC next to the older Dreambank, so it'll stay online when I die?

LAST WORDS

Hypothesis confirmed! Artists really do have more bizarre dreams, on average, and in predictable ways--more sex, surrealism, creatures, magic... A night of dreams making me live through Wertz's Thing About Dreams seemed a bit scarier than my usual. But overall... our dreams are weirdly similar.

Though not our art. Wertz, like most indie cartoonists, works with and publishes ink drawings--color's too costly. So I stuck to black and white, as she does. But even switching from ink to pencil to digital, I felt limited--crippled! I see color before I even see shape. Born to paint, not cartoon.

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