I’ve seen a lot of people include diaries on their websites, and I always have fun reading them. Instead, I’m going to put the most interesting entries from my dream journal here, since dreams play a very complex and significant role in my life. Plus I use them as inspiration for my paintings, stories, and poems! Mine typically have at least somewhat linear plots and rich symbolism. They are also sometimes violent, so maybe don’t read if you’re not into that. But if you’re a fellow freaky-dream-haver, maybe it’ll be nice to know you’re not uniquely fucked up. Enjoy!
February 12 2022I was walking home from school, like I used to do every day back in sophomore year. I passed a large pond, where a friend of mine (can’t remember who) was waiting for me. Rising out of the pond was a foreboding concrete structure, about the size and shape of a shipping container. An ox and calf stood still atop the structure, while a mustang and colt ran in frenzied circles around them. In the pond, an enormous white whale and her child rolled in the silt, without enough room to swim. I was deeply troubled by the sight. The cows appeared trapped on the concrete structure, and I feared the horses might leap into the pond and be eaten by alligators. As my friend and I were discussing these worries, a woman driving by pulled over and got out of her car. She looked at the pond for a moment before getting back behind the wheel and flooring it into the pond. Her car rolled on top of the mother whale, which seemed to be the woman’s goal. The creature began to keen in agony, a melodious, visceral wail. Somehow the woman clawed her way out of the car and thrashed to shore. I became certain that she was coming for me, and I started to run away, but my legs felt like they were moving against a strong, deep current. This, more than any other strange detail, made me wonder if I was dreaming. I reasoned that if that were the case, I would be able to do whatever I wanted- I’d run like a greyhound and leap over the parallel-parked cars- yet I kept getting slower. As I ran I could hear the haunting cries of the whale, echoing out behind me.
May 23 2022This dream followed a main character other than myself. She had dark skin and a buzz cut, and she was tall, slender, and very beautiful. She was a famous and well-liked painter, and she was always genuine and friendly. The dream began with the painter trying to decide on a background color for a self-portrait. Uninspired, she took a break to prepare for a party she was hosting. The painter’s husband jeered at her for spending time on frivolous things like parties, which was a common occurrence, even though she was the breadwinner of the household. Just before the party began, the painter decided on a dark mauve color for the self-portrait. She was gracious and talkative at the party, but after half an hour she snuck away to her studio. She loved the mauve color so much that she primed two more canvases with it. Suddenly, staring at the vast field of mauve, the painter had an epiphany. She had always been confident, but only now did she fully internalize the value of her skill and kindness. She realized that she had never deserved the condescension from her husband. She marched back to the party, mauve canvas still in hand, and began screaming at her husband, “FUCK YOU! I HATE YOU! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!” The dream ended there, but I like to think the painter lived happily on.
June 5 2022I lived and worked as a researcher in a college town. My apartment was an old dorm modified to accommodate staff. The ant infestation was the first thing to go wrong. I had somehow received a mysterious spherical package wrapped in newspaper, and shortly afterwards my apartment became infested with ants. I palmed the package off on a colleague, who immediately began acting strangely and erratically. He kept offering me food, which I always refused (even though it was really hard not to eat these donuts he gave me they looked so damn good). I had realized, by that point, that there was something wrong with the package, and I worried the wrongness might have seeped into the food. In the end, the package killed Donut Man. It killed at least three people in the town- whoever possessed it would first experience many misfortunes, then become erratic and violent, and eventually they would die, sometimes in accidents and sometimes in other ways. Donut Man hanged himself. At first, everyone in the town was afraid of coming into contact with the package, but its wrongness quickly burrowed into them, until the townspeople became like a hive mind protecting it. Only I was still lucid. I began searching for the package, to destroy it, but suddenly it was elusive. Then, while walking, I saw it laying in the street unprotected. I knew this was probably my only chance to kill the thing. I dashed it against the curb until a small tear opened in the newspaper. Inside was a thin fleshy membrane covering a mass of blood, fat, meat, and pus. It was nasty, but I knew I couldn’t stop or get squeamish. I squeezed the thing’s guts out of its newspaper skin and stomped until they were just a dark stain on the pavement. I crumpled up the newspaper and took it home. I had a sense that the whole ordeal wouldn’t be over until I burned it. Before I got the chance, a group of my friends who had been brainwashed by the package kidnapped me and drove me to a party. One girl, with a silky blonde ponytail, kept trying to feel me up and seduce me into joining the hivemind. After several of her uncomfortable attempts, I tried to make a break for it back to the car. A partygoer grabbed my shirt, so I squirmed out of it and kept sprinting in only my bra. When I made it to the car, Silky Ponytail was waiting behind the wheel. I got in on the passenger’s side and shoved her out of the still-open driver’s side door. I began to drive, but members of the hivemind kept standing in front of the car, and I had to swerve to avoid them. They even led dogs out into the street in the hopes that I would crash trying not to hit them. Somehow I made it back to my apartment, where the newspaper was still sitting on my counter. I tried to burn it with a cigarette lighter, but it wouldn’t take. Eventually I turned on the gas stove and held the paper in the flame. I burned it, then burned the ashes.
June 10 2022Me, J (a close friend at the time, later fell in love with her), J’s boyfriend (fictional), and two other girls (also fictional) were at a football game in my high school stadium. J and the two girls left early to go walk around the cross country trails, while I stayed to watch the game with J’s boyfriend. Afterwards, we walked the trails to meet up with the group. We found them in a field standing around a roughly 3x5 ft rectangular pit with a viscous pale green liquid inside. The girls were pouring nail polish remover and styrofoam into the pit (I believe that makes something close to napalm?), while J was just staring at it. She glanced up, and when our eyes met she gave me a sort of ‘This wasn’t my idea, I’m just along for the ride.’ look. The boyfriend and I started to walk away, and J moved to follow us. Just then, the liquid in the pit exploded. The boyfriend and I were far enough away to escape unscathed, but J and the two girls were killed. The rest of the dream was the aftermath: grieving, talking to first responders. The paramedics told me that the two girls had been close enough to the explosion to die instantly, but since J had started to walk away she had died in agony. I spent a lot of time with J’s boyfriend. I didn’t really like him, but he was the only other person who understood what I was going through.
June 21 2022J, B (guy I work with and loose friend), F (ditto), and I were all hanging out on the cross country trails at dusk. We found a huge mansion with two dobermans guarding the door. One had typical coloration and one was pure white. They both had numbers carved into the tops of their front paws, 4 digits on each paw: 8661 4003. J and I dared B and F to go ring the doorbell of the mansion. They took the dare. The guard dogs were still as statues while the guys walked up the lawn, but as soon as they rang the doorbell the dogs attacked. After subduing B and F, the dogs transformed into humans. The white dog started to strangle F, while the brown dog stabbed B with a vegetable knife. J and I pulled the guys off the lawn and called an ambulance. Miraculously, B and F survived. J and I drove to a random parking lot and sat on top of the car in silence while I smoked a cigarette.
August 22 2022Not a dream, but a hypnagogic hallucination. I woke up after an hour of sleep one night to find a crowd of dark, shadowy figures standing at the foot of my bed. I was afraid at first, but then I became indignant that these people would so disrespectfully barge into my bedroom when I was only trying to sleep.
September 5 2022This was a long sequence of dreams and hallucinations- I kept drifting off and waking up again. When I first fell asleep I dreamt of a beige, somewhat dingy corridor hellscape full of very sharp right angles. When I awoke I saw a very sinister figure, male, elderly, with beige skin just like the corridors standing and smiling at the foot of my bed. I fell asleep and again dreamt of the hallways. I woke up and the hallways were outside my bedroom, visible beyond the slightly ajar door. I slept and dreamt of the hallways. When I woke up there was a face, grotesquely proportioned and so pale it hurt to look at, suspended by two enormous black spider legs at the foot of my bed. The face was smiling so widely that the smile distorted its proportions. It was swaying gently in time with its breath, which was extremely loud. Sleep, corridors, you get the picture. When I woke up next, the old man was back, but he was right next to my face, maybe even crawling onto my bed. He whispered something right in my ear, but I forget what it was.
November 11 2022I was with G (my older brother). We were being forced to work in a strange diamond quarry. It was a field of mud, with lots of roughly circular pits, each about 7 feet in diameter and 6-7 feet deep. Each pit had 3 or 4 workers in it, and we had to dig through the mud with our hands to find diamonds. The mud smelled terrible and gave off toxic fumes. I woke up at some point during the night hallucinating that my sheets were covered in blood from wounds in my hands. No idea why I hallucinated so much during this time, I still see things pretty regularly but the visions during this time were just wilder for some reason.
December 31 2022I was an aspiring filmmaker working on an hour-long arthouse type production about addiction and self-destruction. I starred as the main character, accompanied by two other characters: Abel and Cain. Abel looked like a normal man, tall, a little scrawny, with short brown hair. Cain was actually referred to as ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’, and they were a horrific sludgy amalgam of at least two people. The three (4?) of us spent the majority of the film trying to get through a long, narrow beige hallway. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern couldn’t walk, and their loose, fleshy body was wider than the hallway, so I had to drag and squeeze them through. Abel walked behind us, stone-faced and observant, not helping. When we got to the end of the hallway, we were met with an angry God and a small, hunchbacked St. Peter, who refused to let us into heaven.
March 21 2023The dream began in an operating room. Two people, a surgeon and her wife who were my acquaintances in the dream, were removing a patient’s vocal cords. The pair had been gradually losing touch with reality, and had started performing strange experimental surgeries without anesthesia or consent. I’d seen people blinded, amputated, and paralyzed. The patient I was watching was immobilized but not sedated, and they were making horrible whimpering noises. I thought, ‘At least they won’t be making those terrible sounds soon.’ I saw the blood well up from the incision on the side of their throat, then spill out over their neck and onto the floor. It was very dark, almost black blood, and there was so much of it that I had to hop around the operating room to avoid staining my boots. I left to stand in the hospital waiting room. I felt horribly guilty. As I walked through the hospital halls, they shifted and became a labyrinth of old electric appliances and other vintage items, like you might see on Antiques Roadshow. I wandered through the labyrinth, always hearing voices just around the corners, but I didn’t see anyone.
March 27 2023The dream involved three of my real-life friends, who I’ll call V, L, and N. It began with V faking L’s death by drugging her with sleeping pills, to pin it on N. V got the dosage wrong, though, and ended up actually killing L. I found L collapsed in a green field, dressed in a white t-shirt and blue jeans. Her face was pressed into the roots of some shrubs, and her long brown hair was tangled in their branches. After L’s death was confirmed, V continued with her plot to frame N. N came to me asking frantically for my help, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I felt very sick and guilty.
April 3 2023I lived in Japan with my mother, father, and little sister. I also had an older sister (fictional, and not in any way similar to my real older brother), who lived in a different apartment and was mostly estranged from the family. My father was a wealthy business leader and my older sister was an anticapitalist. The dream began with my father preparing for a speech he was giving at a big festival to be held in a week’s time. I discovered that my older sister was planning to assassinate him just before the speech via poison. I had a complicated relationship with the man, and I had to admit that he would be a good person to hit if you wanted to strike fear into the hearts of capitalists, but I knew that my little sister and my mother would be devastated if he died, which was unacceptable. I visited my older sister for the first time in years to ask her to call off the plot. At first, she was excited to see me and welcomed me happily into her home. She seemed disappointed when she learned why I was there. She told me she was sorry, but she couldn’t sacrifice her beliefs for me. I told her I understood and left without arguing, but returned two days later to ask her again not to kill our father. Again, she refused. When I visited the third time, her apartment was empty. On the day of the festival, I waited to see my father poisoned, but he was fine. That evening, my older sister found us at a convenience store. She apologized and told me she had changed her mind. When he learned that I had known about the plot, my father rounded on me. ‘You knew?’ He said, ‘Why didn’t you call the police? I am your father!’ ‘You may be my father,’ I answered, ‘But she is also my sister.’
April 27 2023I was doing anthropological field research in a remote rural area. I was staying in a hut by a river with lush green banks- everything was beautiful and dewy and verdant. At some point over the course of my fieldwork, an unknown person began ritually mutilating animals. I was asked by the area’s locals to untangle the ritual purposes behind each killing and find the culprit. In total six animals were sacrificed before I discovered that a girl, around 15 or 16, was behind the killings. She kept a journal documenting her sacrifices, which I read. She was doing it because she saw parts of herself in the animals, for example she might be furious like a wolf or freeze when she was afraid like a deer. By sacrificing these animals, she felt she was reclaiming and nourishing these parts of herself. The most important animal she killed was something like a dog, wolf, or coyote in appearance. I called it the ‘wrong wolf’, because the girl’s diary said of it: ‘And there was another animal. It was like a wolf, but not a wolf. And I knew this animal encompassed me perfectly, more than any of the others- it WAS me.’ To show her special connection with the creature, the girl cut off its head, hollowed it out, and started wearing it like a mascot head. After I found the girl cutting out the heart of a deer in this costume on the riverbank, I revealed her secret to the locals and left town. As soon as I had cell service I called J and told her the whole story.
May 11 2023It was dusk, and I was walking along the cross country trails behind my high school with my friend P. We were talking about an urban legend centered on a girl who’d been murdered on the trails, because we’d seen her name spray painted on a bridge we passed. There’s a somewhat wide stream running through the trails, and in the dream it was clogged with jagged rusted metal and broken glass. P fell into the stream and got terribly lacerated. Her blood flowed downstream, almost black near her body but turning bright red as it leached into the water. I called an ambulance and paramedics pulled her out of the stream. I followed her to the hospital, and waited in a beige room while she was whisked to emergency surgery. An old man, either a cop or a detective, took a seat opposite me at the shitty fake wood hospital table where I was sitting. He was smiling. He handed me a small square slip of white paper mounted on a slightly larger piece of black paper, with about 4 words printed on it. I read them and then looked at the ceiling. ‘Gotta make sure I’m not dreaming!’ I joked. (This is actually something I do in my waking life pretty often.) To my horror, when I looked back at the paper the words had changed. I looked away again, and the words changed again. I kept re-reading them and they kept changing, making less sense each time, until there was just a gibberish keysmash. I remember one of the iterations was ‘Gomorrah Gomorrah Gomorrah’, which is a sinful city in the Bible. Finally I looked back up at the man across from me, who hadn’t moved or stopped smiling. The dread I had been feeling all focused on him. I stood up from the table and asked, ‘What are you going to do to me?’ When he kept smiling, I sprinted out of the waiting room and kept running until I left the hospital. It’s weird that I dream about so many horrible things happening on those cross country trails lmao, I have only fond memories of them. Maybe there’s some bloodthirsty entity living there.
May 13 2023I lived with my parents and my little sister, S. The house had become infested with demons due to not being properly secure, so my parents told S and I to go wait in my room while they performed some sort of supernatural fumigation. I did as I was told and S and I lay side by side in my bed. There was a mirror directly across from the bed showing what was behind it. Realizing I might have to protect my little sister from demons, I retrieved the camping/ hunting knife from my dresser and put it under my pillow. I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke up I could see a man holding a tablet as if he was filming behind the bed. The man looked normal aside from an awful blank inhuman expression. When I turned around, there was nobody behind the bed, but the tablet was floating in mid-air, exactly as it showed in the mirror. I didn’t know what to do, so I just grabbed the tablet and smashed it as hard as I could with the butt of my knife. After a few good blows, I broke it in half over my knee and continued to destroy it until it was nothing but glass and metal shards.
June 5 2023I was sitting in my bedroom, getting ready for an early night because I had work early the next morning. My friend P (same P as earlier) showed up to hang out unannounced, which was actually a pleasant surprise. After P left, other people who I didn’t know as well kept showing up. They all congregated in my room, spilling dirt from my potted plant and looking through my drawers. I was angry and started screaming at them to get out. When everyone had left, I was still too furious to sleep, so I went for a walk to calm down. I walked farther than I meant to, and turned around to go home, when I noticed an enormous black cat, the size of a panther, perched on a fence. I started walking home and the cat followed me. I secretly hoped it might attack me, but when the cat finally pounced it simply landed on my back, curled around my shoulders, and started purring. I walked home with the cat on my shoulders and by the end of the walk we were homies. I even took a selfie with him lol. This was a good dream.
June 8 2023I picked up J to go hang out, and we drove to a big retention pond with a steep concrete ramp running into it. The water was completely hidden beneath a green layer of scum and algae. We were hanging out on the ramp when I heard a rustling sound from underneath a pile of dead leaves. I cleared away the leaves to find a rattlesnake. I told J we should probably get out of there, but instead she tapped the rattlesnake on its head and went down to the water. She waded in until she was about calf-deep; her movements disturbed some of the pond scum so I could see that the water was actually shockingly clear and beautiful underneath. I could also see the crocodile slowly swimming up to J’s legs. Just before the creature attacked her, she leapt out of the water and back to safety. A second rattlesnake slithered down the ramp and into the water. J went back to the first rattlesnake, picked it up, and flung it into the pond. The two snakes swam to each other and began twisting around each other in the water. J seems very out-of-character in this one; usually I’m the one doing stupid shit. I do associate her with crocodiles, though.
June 11 2023I was walking in a misty cemetery with thick forest all around me. I found a goose egg by a gravestone and put it in my pocket, then left to meet up with my dad in the city. While we were hanging out, the egg began to hatch. The chick that came out was yellow, fluffy, and adorable. It imprinted on my dad, which I was slightly irritated by. The chick transformed into my little sister back when she was an infant, which made me terribly sad for some reason.
June 25 2023I was in the mountains with my little sister and my older brother. We were in a lush forest near a cave, about to hike down to a waterfall. Within the mouth of the cave there were three bedrolls, one large and two smaller ones. They were very worn and threadbare but clean, without a speck of dirt. While my siblings and I were examining them, the air pressure dropped and the wind started to get wilder and wilder, until leaves were being ripped off their branches. The forest became dark, like dusk, in the way that means the coming storm will last for hours. “Looks like a big one,” my brother said, and I agreed. My siblings and I decided to wait out the storm in the cave, and soon we were all asleep on the bedrolls. We woke up a few hours later when the storm had passed and began our hike. The waterfall was roaring and torrential from the storm rains, cloaked in mist at the bottom. I was nervous about my little sister slipping on the wet rocks and falling under the pounding water. The three of us stayed for a bit then walked back to the cave. When we got there, a small crowd had gathered around the bedrolls where they were standing or kneeling with their heads bowed solemnly, speaking in low voices. My brother asked one of the crowd why they were gathered there. They told us that the beds had belonged to a mother and her two sons a long time ago. They had gone down to the waterfall and died there. The dream ended abruptly after that.
June 28 2023The dream began in mundanity, with me doing laundry. I opened the lint trap of my dryer to find a colony of red ants had infested it. I dropped the lint trap on the floor and backed away. My father silently appeared behind me and watched the ants scurry over my shoulder. The ants began to build an anthill at lightning speed. It got bigger and bigger, then the dirt they built with turned from red to black and began to coat the walls of the room, with labyrinths running through the soil. The ants built and destroyed large structures that looked like snail shells, wasp's nests, the tube hives of mud daubers. Finally the soil changed again to wood and plaster, and the ants built a new interior for the room. It was sumptuous and tasteful. The walls were cream and the roof and molding were brown. Behind me, my father said "The ants feed on humanity's knowledge of the world, spiraling, fractaling, until finally we feed on them."
July 8 2023I was standing with several other people on the roof of my old high school. We were all trying to get down, and there were two ladders next to the ledge for that purpose. One of them was a blue mobile ladder, which was sturdy but slightly too short to reach the edge of the roof. There was also a very rickety silver ladder, which was bent and twisted in odd places. These are both distorted versions of ladders I use every day at work, in real life. For some reason, no one wanted to use the blue ladder, but the strange silvery ladder wasn’t a great option either. Some people were brave enough to take the silver ladder, and they made it to the ground unscathed. Others were too afraid and simply leapt from the roof, landing badly mangled on the pavement below. Eventually the ladder became so shaky that people began falling from it halfway to the ground. I was able to descend without incident, and once I was on the ground I realized that the ladder was not being properly footed and supported. I showed a few of the lucky people who had gotten down unharmed how to stand on the ladder’s feet and support it, which made it much more stable. After this I woke and hallucinated that my pillow was caked in tan dust.