10 may
a. really jumbled dream I honestly couldn’t begin to restructure in words - thought at one point, I was on a phone call that began as some kind of appointment scheduling.
the woman on the line (who I somehow knew was a decently famous vTuber with a pitched-up voice) started shooting the breeze with me.

she asked me what my favourite punk band was. I panicked and went “um…. uhh. I dunno. um, blondie?” and I vividly remember the tinny, compressed sound of her going “AHAHAHA BLONDIE? BLONDIE???” 'cause I guess she was probably aiming for something, I dunno. a little more obscure and hardcore. and I was desperately going, like, "yeah haha well I know they lean more pop new wave haha", but all the while, she was just like "BLONDIEEEE".

8 may
was about to get in the shower about an hour before leaving the house, when some grocery delivery drivers knocked on my door by mistake. I didn't answer, so they started shoving some things through the letterbox instead, before realising they were at the wrong house and dropping the rest off next door.

I thought to myself, well. I’d better go give them the rest of their groceries. so I dried off and dressed as quick as I could, and rushed out to catch the drivers, who I could see were 2 men.
one got back into the van to sort other things, while I helped the other load the stuff I had in a small crate.

the guy I was helping turned to me and asked, “have you noticed how contagious his laugh is? it’s really nice” I said I hadn’t heard it.
he told me I should listen out, and went on to describe what beautiful eyes he had, too. this started as a stress dream about going to work, but I don’t know what happened to it.

16 feb
went to a concert where the band were playing in huge, mascot-style fursuits. there was a convention hosted afterwards in the foyer of an ostentatious hotel: mosaic tile floors, golden chandeliers, and a conservatory/orangery-like place at the farthest end of the room.

while I was checking out a stand of greetings cards and snacks, one of the band members (an indigo dog) appeared right beside me.
I said hi and told them they were cute, and in response, they took a chocolate bar from one of the stands and gave it to me, followed by another, and another.

a man suddenly jogged up to us, introducing himself as their creator and apologetically explaining that that they weren't people in costume after all, but animatronics.
this one's supposed to cheer people up if it notices they're sad - but as I can see, it's malfunctioning, because A. I'm not sad, and B. it's not meant to rectify this by just stealing gifts for people.
the guy did some hasty rewiring and then wandered away.

the dog slowly took each chocolate bar away from me and put them back on the shelf. good start!
then, it took away a pair of gloves that I was wearing. when it reached for me again, I decided to go elsewhere in the building.

at some hazy stage of the dream, another person approaches me with a warning.


"uhh, the inventor guy won't admit this, but he totally screwed up - the robot can detect sadness now. it removes things because it's looking for the cause of your feelings, and until it finds a cause, it won't stop removing things.
this isn't limited to objects".

he explained that the animatronic couldn't be fooled by smiling, because it would read your temperature/subtle changes in body language to detect fear, which of course is quite hard to repress when faced with legitimate danger. your only option was to hide.


and I'm like "cool 👍", spending the remainder of this dream sprinting and hiding from a 6ft tall dog machine who wants to rip my limbs off.
the convention packed up and people disappeared, but we inexplicably stayed ducking behind things whenever the dog noticed and made for us, all while the inventor was completely adamant nothing was going to happen.

topped this dream off with a false awakening, completely certain I heard our neighbour loudly waking up his son as most mornings, until I felt the heavy weight of something slowly lowering itself on the foot of my bed. scary!

7 feb
just before Valentine's. I was looking at FlightRadar24 and saw the map was covered in little pink icons.
their callsigns were things like LUV4EVER, and the photographs showed aircrafts with hot pink loveheart livery.

in addition to the usual info, there was a new annotation tab with a small post-it note textured background, showing comments sent in by users.
some of them said things like, "YESSS TAYLOR SAID YAOI REAL" and I was like oh god, is this a Taylor Swift thing??? how much pollution is she causing with these??
afterwards, I took photos from my window of a silently-flying plane that was cruisng only 80 feet above the neighbourhood.

experiened another false awakening where I appeared to be checking FR24 on my phone in reality when my mum walked in the room.
I tried to speak and was suddenly overcome with fatigue, thinking to myself, aw jeez I didn't catch a cold from my Grandad did I (which was true).
fortunately, I fully woke up shortly after, totally coldless.

20 dec
I ordered a They Might Be Giants shirt. when I opened the box, I pulled out an unusually long top that unfolded into a huge chunk of white space, eventually ending in this.

13 dec
a few weeks into my new job, I've started having occasional false awakenings where I'm both in my room and at work.

all the furniture is merged together like a game environment loading in the wrong objects, and I haven't changed my clothes, but nothing seems out of place.

then I’ll notice more familiar objects start to appear around me and think, wait a minute - I haven't even gotten out of bed yet. I don’t have to do any of this. then I’ll wake up for real.

27 nov
found myself laying under the arms of a large horse man, who was dying in a hospital bed (unclear what my relationship to the horse man was).

I went downstairs and entered another shopping mall, where an angry mob were pressed up against a storefront and jeering at a widely-disliked celebtiy royal family, yelling things like "that's a dumb baby! your baby looks stupid!"

24 nov
I took Bart (the Simpson) to the mall because I was babysitting him, but he slipped out of sight. I was searching around a large fountain at the outisde of the building and yelling BART.

2 oct
dreamt about trying to take a nap, because people had been saying you would experience an interesting one if you did that today.
no matter how long I lay there, which felt like half an hour in real-time, I just couldn't fall asleep. then I woke up. OK.

14 sep
some sort of weird stress dream where I was back at uni. once again at the supermarket, we'd been split into several small groups and given the task of shooting experimental short films. the brief stated they had to involve wooden shelving. I dunno.

anyway, after wandering around for a while with no ideas, I got so frustated that I bit into a plank of wood I'd been holding. it was oddly soft and easy to chew.

I looked down one of the aisles to see that the other groups were up to and if I could get any inspiration. they were filming Jerma.

19 jul
standing in a queue with my phone opened to tumblr. a popular post was going around that said, "even lovebirds can sting", with a bunch of notes commenting on how profound it was.
only one person in the replies had added, "is no one going to point out that birds don't sting".

22 feb
somehow, another alien dream. I was walking through a claustrophobically small supermarket. shoppers were crowding in awe the end of an aisle, where a ghostly apparition of a three-eyed creature stared down at them.

the atmosphere all at once became uneasy. as the alien grew opaque, everyone panicked and attempted to flee the shop. somehow, we all knew that this creature could kill you by thinking about it.

if you pictured the alien, or anything that even resembled it for too long, it would latch onto you and you could never shake it off. once it appeared in your peripheral vision that was a sign it was already too late.

it attacked by perfectly aiming a javenlin-like object through the face of its target. everyone ran mindlessley through the streets, screaming, attempting to "don't think about pink elephants" their way out of being brutally killed as people around them dropped left and right.

genuinely a much scarier nightmare than described, or would have been, had it not started with a brief moment of Christopher Walken cutting me off with his trolley every time I turned an aisle. he was smirking and totally doing it on purpose.

6 feb
'70s sci-fi horror movie. a rock band squatting in a dilapidated office building for the night are being haunted by an invisible alien.

only one member was aware of the creepy occurrances that kept happening around them, but no one would believe him. this being was a creature made of pure energy that was not always perceptible, but when it was, had a sort of crimson and silvery metallic coating and basically looked like one of these:

its goal was to become strong enough to grab a solid hold on our dimension and keep this form permenanly, so it could screw with power lines by shooting through them.

it did this through messing with a sleep deprived band for a night I guess.

23 jan
walked through the door of a bar toilets to find myself in this second-hand electronics/collectables store. John Linnell was working the till and I wanted to meet him, so I grabbed some random object from a shelf and went over to buy it.

I had no idea what it was until he picked up this little dog figurine I'd put on the counter, and in a deadpan voice, said "... cool. bark, bark."

the dream then switched to the entierety of the Bojack Horseman episode "Free Churro". never taped over my subconsciousness, before.

14 jan
started a job as a teacher's assistant at a secondary school where my co-workers were Dan and Phil.

21 nov
another animated movie!
it began with a travelling montage of a teenage girl, around thirty feet tall, traversing various landscapes. she was wearing a bonnet and a long dress.

she reached a gorge with two cliffs connected by a single long rope. the girl continued unperturbed, and used it to climb across to the other side.
it was then that she noticed an average sized, terrified woman, who'd been hanging blankets from the line and was desperately clutching it after being shaken.

the girl stopped until the woman could safely make it back to the ground again and wait for her to pass (I guess it was fine dangling a hundred feet above the ground to do laundry, but only if the rope wasn't being jostled).

they both a realise a third person had been there all along. a younger, anthropomorhic green bird is grasping onto a thinner rope that had snapped.
the giant put her hand underneath her feet to steady her, then said, "it's a wishing song. I'll sing it so you won't get hurt."
a vision surrounded by pink haze appeared in the bird girl's head of her swinging the rope towards the clifface and scaling it. she leaps forward, copying the vision - she doesn't make it far, and starts to fall.

in the present, the girl - now a young adult - is walking around a colourful market with her family: two older sisters, an older brother, and a younger one.
she hadn't thought about the giant encounter in years, recently, things had been happening around them that had made her start to wonder. they all know a myth about legendary heroes who were aided by a giant. a mural is painted on the wall of the very market they're in, depiciting events that seem to have been occurring lately.

she tells her siblings, who brush it off as coincidence.

"you still think about that story?" the eldest sister asks. "I always thought that was something you made up as a kid, to make us jealous".

undeterred, the girl lines them up against the wall. "don't you see it, though?" she insists. "we look just like the mural!"
the siblings squint and exchange looks. "eh. I don't see it."

7 nov
the latest craze sweeping tumblr was a novel with a choose-your-adventure-type format. the main selling points were that it came with scratch and sniff cards, and claimed to be printed on very compressed cat hair.

a friend and I were talking about it and they were like, "why would anyone want that?" and I shrugged and said "people do like cats."
then I said, "hey you know what the only video game to advertise itself with smell is?"
they replied that they didn't, but I couldn't remember it either, so I woke up - then thought to myself, "wait, it's EarthBound"

4 nov
I finally sat down to start Breaking Bad, but I'd actually put on a movie from 2004, which the series was apparently based on.
instead of a dark comedy/crime drama, the source material had been a National Lampoon-esque straight slapstick. goofy, non-diegtic sound effects, zany injuries. they still cooked meth, tho.

halfway through watching, I started posting how weird it is that nobody talks about the movie, and is this where all the tumblr jokes come from?
I woke up fully convinced it exists for 5 seconds.

29 oct
this one was pretty cool.
a demon was knocking on people's doors in various disguises in order to kill them. this was a known event that happened around sunset. everyone had to keep their house locked and stay inside until it was safe.

I'd ran into my home but had not closed the door properly, so it blew open in the wind. during that time, the demon wandered inside in various harmless forms: a cute little kid; a lost person; an animal. they knew I was there, but I was safe so long as I didn't interact.

I stayed crouched silently on the landingwatching the golden light streaming though the window grow darker as I waited for night to fall.

after a while I heard people on the street. one by one, the neighbours came out of their houses, asking how everyone was and what disguises they saw. a middle aged woman and her adult daughter (who acually existed in reality) caught my eye from across the road and waved. the older woman came over and asked if I was alright because she saw my door was open, then gave me a hug.

after a few moments, I pulled away and looked up at her. she smiled, and closed the door behind us.

19 oct
someone told me they joined a service that promotes NFTs.
when I explained how bad those things were, they got really morose and asked, "would Mr Krabs promote NFTs?" I said yes, Mr Krabs would promote NFTs.
they were mad, and immediately unsubscribed.

25 sep
a new character was revealed for the Smash series. he looked like this:



the internet's reaction was split between people screaming GOD FINALLY, YES, and people wondering who the hell this was.

he was, apparently, a beloved character from a hugely popular comic book and video game franchise - yet many had absolutely no awareness of him whatsoever.

"oh, so is he like, more popular in a certain region like Japan maybe?" people were asking. others responded that no, he was pretty internationally famous, like Mario.
this is nowhere near as funny written down, but I wish I could express to you how hilarious it was to experience people going "I've LITERALLY never heard of him, who is that!!" to which people were repying, "IT'S HIM!"



"WHO IS HE"

23 aug
there was a big new show everyone was talking about: some guy's life was being slowly rewritten by someone who’d obtained a book-like tool to it. who exactly that was is the show's overarching mystery. there were theories/hints over whether the person was recreationally destructive and picked him as a random target, someone seeking revenge, or if it’d all turn out to be a metaphor for memory loss/daydreams to cope with regrets.
basically, random details and events were being dropped from his life. he’d occasionally re-experience whole days as if time-travelling, but with drastic changes.

the guy somehow learnt what was happening to him. he remembered exactly how things were meant to play out, what objects were there before, the time of day just a few minutes ago, etc. but had to not let the “writer” catch on that he knew. one thing they apparently couldn’t follow was his inner monologue, or at least, never showed any indication that they could. the only other piece of information he had is that anything he drew too much positive attention to would be what was picked to be altered. there was a clear pattern of the writer taking whatever he enjoyed most.

so midway through, the focus shifted from fear and confusion around being gaslit to trying to keep himself and others safe, while figuring out how and why all this was happening - all while having to prevent the writer from becoming too suspicious.

sometimes the guy would be “locked” into certain actions for a length of time. for example, being unable physically wrench himself from sitting on the couch, even though he wanted to. it was as if the writer had ended on a sentence and the rest of the page was blank, meaning it was impossible for him to perform anything.

there was one episode where he was suddenly dropped back into his regular life, albeit a few years previous to where he’d started.
he began to remember the events of day - conversations, travelling, meals, and such were flooding back to him all as they should be.

by the end, he was looking out from an upper-story flat window at a night city skyline, finally letting his guard down. it had been normal. the longest it had ever been since he began to notice the change.
in various rooms, his partner, their young child, and another relative who had been stayed with them peacefully slept. exactly how he remembered it.
but then, there’s a growing realisation of horror on his face, as he notices something is still very wrong with this picture.
and that’s where the episode/dream ended!

17 feb
pretty cool one. and the first of many signs I spend too long on the internet.

there was a gifset on my tumblr dash displaying the climax of a Ghibli-esque film. four characters were hanging mid-air from a rope. they were alternating between these triumphant wide shots of them in the bright night sky, and close ups of the camera panning down them all vertically, grinning in relief. like super detailed, right.

it switched to me looking at reviews, about how it was so charming it. one of those great hidden gems. for a moment, the dream became half-lucid, as I thought to myself - "oh, I've heard of this in real life. somebody told me about it once and I forgot all about it."
no I didn't. it isn't real. :(

28 feb
my first lucid dream.

I was in a room that resembled a mixture of mine and the spare one at my grandparents' old house. it was triggered when I was gazing into my TV and realised it was displaying my own art.

that shouldn't have been possible - and I don't have a TV in my bedroom anymore. so it couldn't be real. I looked at my hand and counted 5 digits. then I counted again, and got up to 7.

I could have had fun with this, but instead, I immediately started to panic about how long I would be trapped in my own head and forced myself to wake up.
weak.

16 dec
watched a documentary on a famous artist who seemed to be an 80 year old 8 year old girl. she was small, with bright silver hair in a thick, stern bob; pale, deep-set eyes; very old-fashioned drab clothes; babyfaced, with an inexplicible smoker's voice. it felt like a film from the early '60s. the incidental music was unobtrusive, soft piano and woodwinds.

she was showcasing a cabinet of the surreal stuffed animals she makes, all looking very moth-eaten and dressed like Sylvanian Families, in a dull British school with cream plastered walls and those stiff wooden chairs. she made various tableux with them, all in quite disturbing scenarios. she spoke in a similarly dark way.

her name in the dream doesn’t really exist so I don’t remember it now. it was something similar to Agatha, something dusty. her last name was Lake.

later I looked up the artist thinking she was many years dead, only to find out she was 15 years old. the documentary was relatively new, and she had a deviantart, where she posted her furry doodles with captions like, ‘lmao i drawd horse’.
I think the shock woke me up.

9 nov
creeping on the stairs at night like a child past their bedtime, I was eavesdropping on Chris Fleming on the TV.

he was doing a stand-up routine about how Mrs Fillyjonk from Moomin was a sexually unsatisfied housewife.

?
coming soon when I find my old journals lol