There is often music in my dreams. I was never trained in music. I can't play an instrument. I can't read music. I don't know the terminology.
Since I have no words, no way to frame it or remember, its often the first thing I forget when I wake up.
Sometimes the music is based on real world songs and I try especially hard to remember those.
This morning, I was in the basement of a brothel where they were playing a song over the sound system that sounded like TLC's "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" but the lyrics were "Ain't Too Old for Sex". That's the only line I remember. I wondered who their clientele might be.

I had a dream I was living in a castle with family and friends. At one point I started to wake up and then fell back to sleep which led me to realize it was a dream.
I started going around warning everybody it was a dream.
Some folks didn't believe me and thought I was joking or playing a game.
I was doing things like levitating giant rocks like Luke Skywalker and saying, "big fucking deal, I can levitate a fucking rock".
I know I force ligthninged the crap out of someone who told me "you'll always be a boy".
But the reason I'm tooting this at all is because of the person who had been like my lifelong nanny or something. She'd known me since birth basically.
She was lamenting loudly. I know she said, "I have a lifetime of memories! What will happen to them?"
And all I could say is, "I don't know."
There was someone else who had a new toy that was like a remote controlled car but was a living thing. They were so excited and showing it off and telling me all about it. I was so taken by their innocent joie de vivre, that I only smiled and nodded and decided not to tell them it was all about to end.

First paragraph is a short story based on an apocalyptic dream where I was a prophet who could see how people would die or, if relevant, undergo radical, unplanned changes. I know of the coming apocalypse because everybody I saw was either dying soon or being severely altered. I couldn't see my own future, is course.

"The artist", as I call him, recognized me within moments while simultaneously mesmerizing and repulsing the crowd with lurid stories borne of too much alcohol, too many mushrooms, and too little sleep combined with exaggerated sadomasochistic occult rituals and the ensuing possessions, hauntings, visitations, and night terrors. He recognized me with not so much as a nod, grin, or wink in my direction, just a gentle stab to the medulla oblongata.

Had a dream where I was back in my childhood neighborhood only it had roving evil spirits from the national cemetery across the street who used their ability to see into your soul to discover your darkest secrets and use them to construct the sickest burns and cut downs.
That's all they did. Wander around offering devastatingly personalized insults while exchanging ghostly high fives.

In a dream this morning, I followed a couple of dudes into the wall. I'd checked earlier and nothing was inside of it, but now there was a little dorm sized room with a couch and a mini-fridge and a little TV on the wall.
They were surprised that I was able to follow them, surprised that I even saw them in the first place. I was just excited to find other wall walkers who knew about the In Between. It's a boring place, but you can obviously make it your own.
The TV was a CRT and I asked why it was so small. I had a feeling this room was a reproduction of a room they'd once shared so it was set in the past. Still, I pushed and pulled the TV into being a older model LCD TV, like a first gen 720p HD TV.
That made them nervous and they kept looking at the window to the left of the TV. I didn't open the flimsy curtains because I didn't know what was out there, but a golden light was spilling around the edges and middle.
I said they needed blackout curtains and "drew" a new, dark and heavy roll-up curtain on top of the existing ones.
They told me about the mystery the resident boogyeman. He's tall and thin and drives around in a bright silver semi-truck like a phantom out of Bachman's "The Regulators" with blinding yellow headlights and wears a reflective, wrap-around helmet like the TMZ dude from "Nope"
He grabs people, seemingly at random, throws them in the truck, and they are never seen again. As a result, they try to lie low and not give any reason to be noticed.
I stayed inside.

My subconscious told me some deep truths in a dream this morning.

In the back tents of a demonic circus, I saw a light shining on a tapestry made of human flesh hanging on a wall with a crude human face in the middle.
I knew it was an oracle and approached it, asking if it could help me understand the darkness and evil in my soul.
I have always felt like an abomination. I have always had inner conflict as if I am fighting to keep something at bay.
The tapestry looked at me briefly and told me that I was not evil.
It told me that the only problem I have is that I am trying to be the best, happiest version of myself while also trying to satisfy what the world wants me to be.
I asked it to look again and it did only to reiterate that there is no evil in me and my "conflict" is entirely with myself. My only "evil" was being too ignorant to admit that I cannot satisfy both myself and the world in which I live.

That's good advice.
I can either be myself or be who I am expected to be. I cannot be both.
Trying to be both is foolish and self-destructive.

This applies to my neurodivergence, my bisexuality, my being transgender, and so many other things.

I had a "nightmare" yesterday because I took my APAP off and fell back to sleep. It wasn't quite full sleep paralysis.
It all felt very real.

I was paralyzed from the chest down and a cross between a bird eating spider and a trapdoor spider was crawling up my torso.
But I just laughed and said, "you think this will scare me? I like spiders!"

And it's true. I do like spiders.

I had other nightmares that were kind of gorily NSFW but I told everybody torturing me, "some people pay good money for this kind of thing!"

Do better, subconscious.

I wrote a story about a dream I had recently.

In the dream, I felt a deep sense of alienation. I felt like I would never belong anywhere and that I was never truly accepted, only tolerated. It was borne of a combination of being neurodivergent and also transgender. At the end of the dream, I swam out into the lake next to the little boutique where the rest of the dream had taken place. I felt its icy cold on my body. I saw the dead reaching up from the bottom, other women who had gone before me. In the dream, I hoped that drowning was a fast and painless way to go.

I didn't dream my death, but I did dream of an afterlife. There was a golden light and a silvery platform made of crystal or glass. I saw them up there, hugging, rejoicing in being reunited. I tried to join them, but I wasn't able to reach them.

Again, I was ignored and excluded because I didn't fit in.

Another person at my level got my attention, someone else down beneath the floating platforms. She told me she was my mother. She looked like a very poorly passing transgender woman in a bad wig. That's where I belonged.

I wrote a story based on the dream. The dream took place over multiple short vignettes that were only loosely connected.

The story does not follow the dream exactly, but most of the beats are there.

By the Lake

I had a dream where I saw a Yith-mas Tree, that is, a member of the Great Race draped in garland boas, tinsel, and ornaments with a star on its head tentacle wandering around drunk on egg nog.
I wish to Shub-Niggurath I was a decent artist because the world needs to see it, too.

Edit: okay. This is close.
Finally! Lovecraftian Christmas Cards!
Cthulhu Christmas Greeting Cards

Had a dream this morning where I was about to do something cool and fun. It involved a sympathetic, non-binary Tzimisce vampire with advanced Vicissitude / Fleshcrafting abilities, but that's not important right now.
In the dream, emergency lighting came on and an alarm klaxon started blaring.
I told the dream "no, I will not let you take this from me" and told everybody else in the area to "get the fuck out". I willed the alarms and lights to turn off and used telekinesis to close all the mini-blinds so it was dark and quiet.
The vampire zoomed up the steps using celerity like the Flash and we were talking in the stairwell.
My wife was in the dream and she was concerned that I was being so mean. I told her that the dream people wouldn't remember so it was fine.
Then, within seconds, my alarm clock went off IRL and woke me up anyway.
I like to think my subconscious somehow knew what time it was and just fucking with me.

I watched so much Star Trek that I think Q has taken residence in my subconscious.
It would explain so many of my dreams.
Often they have a "the trial never ends" vibe where things are cool and good and the the dream is like "but what if we changed things and now it's difficult and you have nothing" and then I have to find a way to get around the new problem.
This often involves "waking up" in strange places with no memory of how I got there or who I am.
Or like this morning where I had a very pleasant dream about a trip with my family to Iowa.
Then, after I dreamed we'd made it home, the dream ripped me out of the house with great force, taking my entire room with me, injuring other family members along the way, and dumped me back where I'd been with family.
It was a "not so nice when you have no money, no ID, no family or friends, no place to stay" type of situation.
In this particular dream, I kept being bounced around in time, too. I was an orphan in the 1920s for a while, I protected a building from an atomic blast in the late 1930s, I was in a hippy brothel in the 1960s, a military research facility in the 1980s. I just kept getting yanked from place and time to place and time.
Anyway, my subconscious needs to get over it's "Q" complex.

I had a dream this morning that I was an accountant working for Hell. I was part of the team responsible for the 2008 real estate collapse of which we were still quite proud.
I was worried that we hadn't done much since then so we were going to get recalled to the lake of fire instead of the retiring peacefully in the scorching desert.
We also complained about how slowly time passed for humans and how 70 years hadn't sounded like much time to be stuck here when we volunteered but actually living it felt like forever.
Then the mail lady came in and said she'd been stuck here for over 2,000 years so we had no room to complain. She wasn't quite human, more of an overweight reptilian humanoid.
We all had letters from the main office. thick scrolls with gold gilted edges and delicate calligraphy written in gold ink. You had to turn the paper just right to read it.
We were being invited back home. They were going to have a ceremony for us and everything. I thought we were being trolled, but everybody else jumped at the chance to return early.

At the beginning of the dream, we sang a team building song that I can't remember at all which is unfortunate. I didn't sing along because I didn't know the words and because I was feeling depressed.

In my dreams, Hell's goal is to get people to reject the authority of government and religion and think and fend for themselves. They are the true collectivist anarchists but a bit accelerationist.

I had a dream I was visited by a rep from Hell. He looked a bit like Randall Flagg from The Stand miniseries, the older one.
He knows I plan to spend eternity there and was trying to talk me out of it. He showed me the apartment I'd get. One room, with a single bed, a chair to sit in, and a window. He implied it was dirty and had bugs and vermin.
I thought it reminded me of the home I grew up in because we were kind of poor and I came out of that fine. I also thought that if they were giving away free housing for all the people coming down to stay, I could do way worse than a roof over my head and a bed.

It's really hot down there, but it's a dry heat and you get used to it.

And if you work a job in Hell, you can earn a nicer place to stay. It's not like I'd just sit in my room and read forever. I'd get bored.
It's a better life than people are guaranteed in most countries in our world today.

Sometimes I read things I wrote a few months ago or years ago and I am impressed with how good it is.
I'm not bragging. I'm not trying to puff myself up.
When I wrote the thing, I know I thought it was mediocre, at best. I know it barely captured what I wanted to write. I know it's half or one third what I hoped it to be at the time. I know I had so much more I tried to pour out and just... couldn't.

But in retrospect, what was written still tells its story, even if it's not exactly the one I intended.
I save everything I write. I have things I wrote in highschool 30 years ago. My mom has a copy of a poem I wrote in first grade. I broke up with girlfriends and asked for my letters back.

All of it matters. All of it is important because it is a snapshot of a time that I can barely remember. It is a reminder of my growth, in spurts, as a thinker and a person.
I can read where I came from, what I've gained and what I've lost.

And some of it is really good because it makes me remember that dream or that feeling or that obsession or that heartbreak. It might mean nothing to you but it wasn't written for you. Nobody pesters me for pages but myself.
My stories are my diary.
I wish someone else could understand them or cared to try. I wish they weren't going to die with me. But they only ever mattered to me. So I guess it's appropriate.

I write because that's how I remember.
Because I have to.
Because I want to remember.

Because of how many times I've said, "I can't believe I wrote that." But there it is, in my hands.

Why do you write?

In my dreams, I'm "part waterborne on my mom's side". That means I can breathe underwater, talk to fish, and have very limited elemental control over water. In dreams, breathing underwater feels "better" than breathing air.
Anyway, I'm only part waterborne. There are entire underwater cities and kingdoms that are hidden from view. Magick, I guess.
I'm desperate to visit them.
I saw one from far above once in a magick fountain. The inhabitants had vanished during a festival. Music was still playing, tables were set with games and food. It was like a ren fair at a life-sized fishbowl castle.
I saw one from underneath another time, just for a moment. I swam on my back at the bottom of the sea looking up. The sun was visible all the way down here because the city was glowing. Everything was bright shells, towers, walkways spanning distances. And the "people" were like humanoid versions of every sea life. I know I saw rays and seahorses pulled into humanoid shapes. It was beautiful but I only saw it for a moment before I'd swam past the gap where it was visible.
Another time I was welcomed into what looked exactly like a lower class teniment block. It was mostly dry ground by way of forcefield. This is where half-breeds who weren't fully adapted to the water were sent.
I find doorways and portals to these places on occasion.
But I'm almost always denied entry for one reason or another.
"Too volatile"
"Too much surfacer blood"
"Not enough humility"
"You're ill and we can't risk anyone catching a surfacer disease"
"Not enough time"
"Oh look, you're waking up, sorry"

I'm starting to think my subconscious just doesn't feel like creating an entire satisfying fantasy city for me. My brain is just, "do you know how much work that is?"

When I say, "may I dream of deep water", I'm wishing to return there. If I say "may you dream of deep water", I'm hoping you find the place where you felt most at peace, safe, welcome, and loved.

I had a dream I was getting reprimanded for not leading enough people astray.

So, uh, be gay and do crimes.
Always question authority.
Fuck the Zionists.
Be kind in a cruel world.
We are stronger together.
Forgive, if you must, but never forget.
Your actions outweigh your beliefs.

Etc.
Think for yourself but really think. Don't just do it.

Lucid dreaming. I'm not even sure what I do counts.

When I "realize I am dreaming" it becomes sort of like a video game where I do not know the rules. I have to figure out what is allowed.

• Can I conjure the elements from my hands?
• Can I make the clouds swirl and storm?
• Can I cause earthquakes?
• Can I fly?
• Can I talk to insects?
• Can I walk up walls?
• Can I walk through walls?
• Can I use magick by making hand gestures and spouting gibberish?
• Can I breathe underwater?
• Can I stop bullets with my mind?
• Can I just face tank a shotgun blast without breaking my skin?
• Can I survive a nuclear blast at ground zero?
• Can I eat a bowling ball?
• Can I throw out my veins like grappling hooks from my wrists and pull people toward me?
• Can I peel off my skin and look at the machinery underneath?

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no.

• Can I have sex?

No. Never. I always wake up and I have always woken up when it comes to trying to have sex in dreams.
Spit out streams of maggots while its raining blood? Sure! Keep on dreaming.
Try to get laid? Immediately wake up.