MOOP!

CanyonWalker was talking about anxiety dreams and it prompted some thinking. This is the expanded version of a comment I left on his post.

Content Warnings: Sexual assault mention, non-graphic. Death talk.

I have anxiety dreams fairly frequently --several times a year! This past year was, I think, a bad year for them. I always have a few in mid-late August as the school year ramps up, and a very frequent theme is being unprepared for teaching, which is honestly less anxiety provoking and more funny these days. It doesn't actually happen that I would be forced to teach a third grade art classroom on zero notice (I'm a high school math teacher) so when I wake, it's mostly just funny.

And honestly, of late I've noticed that even the anxiety dreams have me doing my fiercely competent best to keep things humming along even when the circumstances are unideal. This might be because I'm decent at fighting back in dreams --not full lucid dreaming, but maybe my unconscious self thinks highly of what I can do.

I've noticed a similar path in the sexual assault dreams I used to get regularly, starting when I was fifteen or so. Somewhere in my early twenties (after my real life abusive relationship at age 17/18), I began to consistently fight back in those dreams. Run away, look for safety, avoid the people hurting me. I would wake up feeling empowered instead of scared! My dream!self is pretty badass, honestly.

The other thing about dreams for me is that ShadowCaptain used to quite literally be the man of my dreams, in that he frequently was in them. Much more than other people of similar intimacy or friendship levels. This was mostly during late high school, early twenties and then he faded for a long while. Until he got bad cancer and started dying and then suddenly began showing up again a lot.

He showed up once after his death, February 6 2023 according to my dreamlog. Here's what I wrote:

And I asked mom "didn't he die" and the answer was "we thought he did but no" and I'm not sure if he was fae or lucky or if there was something sinister about the whole thing, but it was nice to lean against him and contemplate photographs

I'm a creature who relates very hard to things that Feel Magic, whatever that means. My power over dream definitely counts, that I dream regularly and I dream complicated, and when I dream anxious it becomes mundane and laughable after a while. I wonder sometimes if part of that magic is his, the man of my dreams making things easier to bear. I don't think I've ever seen him in an anxiety dream, but given the way he lives in my unconscious, it doesn't mean he's not able to help.

I dunno. I don't think I realized this entry was gonna get this weird when I started it. Dreams are weird. I should go back to writing mine down every day, I kinda stopped for a while and I've been losing them again. I like rereading the dreamlog because it shows me some of the themes I have. Stuff dreams, types of anxiety dreams (mask anxiety! I forgot that that's been a theme since you-know-when), potty dreams, sex dreams, nightmares.

Anyways, I'll leave you with one other excerpt, because it's funny. Here's the entire text about a particular teacher-anxiety dream:

Teacher anxiety where I'm substituting for a HS science class. At one point to help a student do his research I hand him a video. He looks at it and says "whoa, is this a CDROM?"

I do laugh, because how could you not, but I stifle it quickly and then explain no, it's a video cassette and lead him off to the crt television in the corner to try and get it to work

Can the modern teenager identify a VCR cassette? Not according to my unconscious!

~Sor
MOOP!

ETA: Got to the end of the dreamlog and found an incredibly rare instance of someone else's dream.

upon waking this morning, Austin informed me he had dreamed it was the second dance of the ceilidh and I had called "forty-seven neighbor pass and turn and then a partner swing"

Someone else having dance-teacher anxiety dreams about me that is so fucking funny

Meant to write this down this morning, spent quite a bit of time sleeping through my alarm(s) instead. Well done, self.

Dream fragment: I am sitting in a chair, wearing my princess robe and nothing else. My robe is open, and I am curled up, reading a book. I am not at all concerned that I am mostly naked.

A man (who had been blocking my way with a large van, causing me to choose and sit and curl up? Who was some kind of workman, or claimed to be some kind of workman? These are early-dream details and I don't remember them) pointed his phone at me, briefly, while I was reading. I looked up in time to catch him trying to put it away in a pocket, and understood with a sudden nasty shock that he had been taking a picture of me.

The man is well bigger than I am --my waking impression was "Huh, that was Victor Dubenich¹ but grimier and sleazier²" but I basically get up and shove into him, grabbing the hand holding the phone before he can put it away and clamping down. At which point I demand, without sweetness, that he go into his photo album and delete those photos, now.

He tries to fake me out (including trying to go into the ebay app, maybe to convince me that the only photos he's taken recently are of something mechanical he wants to sell?) but scrolls through his phone and eventually gets to the right app. He seems quite scared of me, even though I'm half his size and underdressed --he tried bluffing that he didn't have any photos, but I clamp down harder, digging my nails into the side of his thumb, and it is revealed that he has, in fact, taken four creepshots of me. I may have threatened to punch him in the head, or murder him, or something in between. I don't recall exactly.

I woke up right after confirming that he had the photos, so I didn't get resolution that he'd deleted them, but I've no doubt they'll be gone. And if he didn't make them gone, my dreamself would've quite ended him.

It was a very empowering dream! I like that kind of creeper-dream, where I am in full command of myself and I will destroy you for damaging me.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Okay, fine, Saul Rubinek, except I'm sure Saul's a totally nice Hollywood guy, and Dubenich is a classic -*the* classic- Leverage asshole villain. I definitely don't wish to tar him by my dream filling him in for "eh, kinda scummy working class dude?"

Unrelatedly, apparently Saul Rubinek played the rabbi in "Oy Vey! My Son is Gay!!", which I have never heard of and _must watch_ because what? Thank you IMDB.

2: This word very much feels like it should be spelled sleeze instead. Sleeze just feels/looks sleazier than sleaze.

I dreamed about spiders!

( happy details cut for the arachophobic )

~Spider Monarch
MOOP!

TW: Allusions to rapist/sexual abuse

My dreams last night were long and had an impressive narrative, where I (and so many others) were trapped in a prison-slavepen-hunger games potential-space of doom. Most of the dream dealt with me running about, trying to avoid the evil overlord and save everyone.

And then at the end, I had returned home -to my parents home! I walk upstairs to my bedroom, with maybe someone like Veronica at my side, a close friend who I'd rescued, and all I want is to just flop about and relax after my ordeal but no, sitting in my room is my asshole rapist ex.

I raged. I ordered them out of my room, despite their pleas to be heard, despite their bullshit apologies --at one point they were apologizing for something that was awkward between us (they had stood me up on a date?) and I pretty much exploded at them and told them I didn't hate them because they stood me up that one time, I hated them because they had routinely raped and abused me.

I remember in the dream the idea that my parents would come help me kick them out, and I also remember deciding (lucidly?) that no, my parents would wait, and have my back, but I was more than capable of doing my own kicking out.

And that's how it went. The dreams are getting stronger, so am I. I've never said pointblank to my rapist "you raped me" --too much emotional abuse tangling the wound. But if they ever forced their way back into my world, oh, you bet those words'd be out of my mouth, directly after "fuck off" and directly preceding "bye now".

(and to end this post on a nicely dark note, isn't it ironic that the one person I've ever had who most wanted me to think of them every day got their wish?)

~Sor
MOOP!

TW: Allusions to rapist/sexual abuse.

So, among my various friendships and moreships and relationships and pirateships, I have one friend who, for almost a decade now⁰, I've had some minor-to-major degree of crush on them.

(This is a little unusual. My crushes tend to be VERYSTRONG...and then fade, and once they fade, they're pretty much gone forever. I almost never keep having a crush on someone over a period of years. Note that I count crush in a very different category from "person who I've built a romantic relationship with" --love is not at first sight, love is the fifty years you spend together afterwards.)

I've mentioned this to them in the past, they're not interested, that's cool, whatever¹. We're still friends, in sortof that slightly tenuous high school way where when we're actually in the same place it's awesome, but neither of us puts significant effort into keeping up with each other online. So, it's admittedly been a couple years since I last saw them, and a few months since I last spent thought on them.

And then they showed up in my dreams last night. Wearing ~*~glasses~*~² which are basically my number one sexy kryptonite^{3, 4} forever, and so dream!me was SUPER RIDICULOUS SWOONING over dream!them. And then in the dream, they rejected my advances again, and I just...yeah.

So I woke up kinda frustrated and amused-annoyed, and hoping that this isn't some sort of ill portent regarding my current short-term crush that I'm trying to make something happen with.

~Sor
MOOP!

0: I entered the ninth grade ten years ago this August. WHAT. THE. WHAT?!

1: One of the best-ever things about being me and or poly is that when people reject me, I can go have mind-blowing sex (or whatever) with one of my established partners and it pretty much completely kills any pity-party for being rejected.

2: It turns out, thinking about it later, that they already wear glasses, so my swooning in the dream was slightly more ridiculous than it already was. But the dream!glasses were very distinctive! I guess that makes them squeeworthy?

3: Assuming "sexy kryptonite" means things that you find so jaw-droppingly appealing that your brain crawls out your ears and replaces itself with an extra drool gland.

4: Other sexy kryptonite for Kat: biting, boys in dresses or skirts, (sometimes) kilts, other...stuff? Yeah.

Currently faffing instead of going to the local party. Is okay, I'll leave the house soon. Theoretically, I am supposed to be cleaning my room, putting away laundry, making the bed, and packing for *tomorrow's* party (Or at the very least, writing something, bobspamit!) but meh. There exists tumblr, and fascinating conversations, and me being neurotic and obsessive about information organization.

Case in point, I can tell you that I have averaged exactly 10 miles/day since getting my bicycle on the fifth. That's with two days this week where I didn't bike at all, because I was in NYC, and it seemed silly to drag Ellie down there. I can also tell you that I hit mile 100 sometime on Tuesday (the eighth day of biking), and I can even get as specific as "within half a mile of the Randall Munroe Sweet Ass-Park".

I like being neurotic and obsessive about information organization, even if it leads to things that I, and no one else, care about.

***

( Under the cut, I mention horrifying and triggering things )

Anyways, because wikipedia is addictive, even (especially?) when it's horrorshow, I had nightmares. Thankfully, I don't remember any of the technical details, but as is common with me and dreams, I wake up recalling the emotions, none of which were remotely pleasant. On the plus side, I got out of bed with only one hitting of the snooze button, which is shockingly low for me. When my alarm went off the second time, I reached for the snooze, recalled I had experienced nine minutes of REM-reboundy nightmares the last time I did that, and got up for the day instead. New strategy for getting out of bed?

***

I should possibly turn the conversation I was having about age-discrepencies in relationships into a real post sometime, since I feel like I was actually saying some interesting things there. In the meantime, Genni and I ought to go par-tay. In apologies for sharing awful awful things with you, I gift you this SMBC comic, which I have essentially been giggling about for two days straight. Ta!

~Sor
MOOP!

So, dream last night, which got very complicated toward the end.

I was in a school (I got to say hi to my old kindergarden teacher!) and there was some form of emergency evac going on, meaning that everyone was gathered in the cafeteria. Me and some other folks were running around, trying to get games going --I wound up with a group of pre-sorority bippies, and a deck of Werewolf. So I try to start them on that, but while I'm dealing out the right number of cards, one of my werewolf cards becomes a "Bananas" card.

I am naturally suspicious of my sister.

A bit of frantic searching through every other werewolf deck in the building, all of which are so saturated with other designs (I remember a series of hand-drawn Cthulus with different hats) that they hardly have villagers, much less werewolves. But then I somehow find what I'm looking for, and I'm setting down the deck and explaining Dungeon.

(This sort of thing makes sense in dreams)

At any rate, I tell them each to find some totem to represent themselves, paraphrasing from the instructions to the We Didn't Playtest This Board Game. (Though in waking, I know I was referring to "A note about playing pieces" off the human game board) and then I start to launch into an explanation of how to deal damage and proceed around the board.

I get confused and start flipping through the rulebook, and poof, my entire table of players has scampered off, presumably to gossip and do things more interesting than play games with crazy older girls. And I wake up.

(The dream before *that* was a space mechanic epic, where I had to repair the top of our spaceship with duct tape before it could be considered airtight, and there were also so many stars!)

~Sor
MOOP!

I just got woken up with *the* most amazing kiss I've had in aaaaaages.

It was long and sweet, and made me start to squirm, and as I did, my eyes fluttered open. To reveal me alone in my bed, alone in my room.

I don't think my brain can yet register frustration, because it's still, ten minutes later, going "buh?" and trying to pull away from the shivery-squirmy-goodness of that all, not that I particularly *want* to pull away from such.

So that's me. Do me a favour and go kiss the sin out of someone you love. Have a great day!

~Sor
MOOP!

This is further Balticon con-reporting. Also, if you haven't bothered to click on the cut from my last entry, it's probably worth it. Slutty but Sweet and all that.

Part One

( Tweets are still in italics )

And this last tweet has nothing to do with Balticon at all:

23 days. Twenty three days, two hours five minutes. Oh my god. This is suddenly actually Real.

It is. It is absolutely positively real. And it is also 21 days 23 hours and 51 minutes.

~Sor
MOOP!

I...think I just had a nightmare.

I am lucky enough, blessed enough, that I do not get nightmares often.¹ Actually, this paired with this dream from the summer makes two in about eight months which is...a lot, for me. Luckily, this one does not have such a vivid imprint of what happened, instead, it has the lasting mental side effects, the clearest and worst of which is that I am right now decidedly touch-negative.

The really *really* impressive part of this, though, is that I can now legitimately say that Stevan Moffet has given me nightmares. There was a heavy sci-fi bend to the whole dream, and I think parts of it had the same feel as one of the scary episodes of Who. Other themes I remember? I was a prisoner, trying to escape and not yet good enough. I was being trained or watching someone be trained who was Just Not Good Enough to please her/my master. I...feel like there was an undercurrent of (sexual?) child abuse as well, as a feel, but I just don't remember well enough.

And yet, the traces fade. I think I am okay to go be held, and feel safe. Safety is, after all, key.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I get disturbingly sexual dreams once in a while, which tend to leave me feeling off, but are not nightmares per se.