Insert Credit’s Collective Dream Diary

creative
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This is not a Yume Nikki thread. It‘s the Insert Credit’s Collective Dream Diary, ICCDD for short.

I know there is already [I dream of games](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/77-i-dream-of-games) and even though the thematic kind of fits, I decided this idea deserved a space of its own.

Let's do a collective dream diary! My idea is each of us who wants to participate picks a dream that for whatever reason feels special, relevant or important to you, and write it here. Literary embelishments are allowed and encouraged as long as you feel like the substance of the dream and the logic (or the lack of) is still there. This is not a contest or a competition and I want everyone to feel welcome sharing something that I understand can be very personal, so please be sensitive while commenting on other's dreams :)

The one I'm going to share happened when I was going to high school, and was (is) so clear and intense I have not forgotten it to this day. What I'm presenting is actually a translation of the transcription I wrote years ago in Spanish, as a keepsake for myself, with some minor tweaks (very minor, I swear!) to make it sound as natural in English as it was in my own language.

It's called **_The girl and the observatory_**

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It's already dark and I’m inside one of the numerous astronomical observatories that were built over the cliff’s of El Teide, Tenerife’s local volcano. The whole building is made out of transparent glass, like an empty cup of wine with me inside it. The night is so clear I can see almost every spot of the island from inside the construction. The architecture feels immediately strange, the place is a big gallery with two big corridors looking over a central patio inside the main hall, with balconies at the sides. It seems closer to a mall or a supermarket than an observatory, but the feeling is that this place was made to look and study the stars. The only element of the building which is not transparent are the two mechanical stairs that connect the two levels of the building.


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After spending a while walking and exploring the place and looking at its walls, and the island behind them, I decide to leave the place and I see a car with someone waiting outside. It’s an anonymous face and I don’t know who the person is, but within the dream logic I recognize and identify them as some kind of assistant or person in charge of helping me, a chaffeur or driver of sorts. I enter the car and ask him to take me home and we slowly descend the volcano through the narrow roads that connect them to the more populated areas in a scene that looks a bit like touge. We arrive at Santa Cruz, the island’s biggest city and the place where I live.

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The very moment we start moving through the streets I identify a distinct feeling of menace, that specific type of anxiety that happens when you suffer a domestic accident or there is a natural catastrophe (a flood, a burning, a very violent storm) coming down on you.


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I see people on the streets and feel the pressure and the tension, the gravity of the situation quickly increasing. Then we enter the street connecting to Don Quijote park, the one which stands in front of my room’s window. I then leave the car and approach a bar that is at the other side of the park. There I see a big amount of people surrounding the place, emanating in a radius that comes from the TV that is set up inside the locale. I manage to squeeze between the crowd and reach a spot where I can look at the image that is being broadcasted by the TV that is inside. It’s an emergency news program which is showing a live image of something that is going on in the middle of a nondescript field, in a place that is near the observatory where I was coming from.

[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/kRiyHsG.jpeg]
_(actual photo of the view from my window)_

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The image shows a huddle of cars that mirrors the huddle of people of which I’m currently a part of. In the middle (where the TV should be) there is a small girl. It’s a surreal scene of a drive-in cinema of sorts, with each driver and each car neatly organized around the girl that is in the middle, instead in front of a screen.


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Suddenly the image makes a harsh cut and the female anchor of the news program starts speaking, announcing something that I either don’t understand or can’t hear is «going to start in brief moments». Then I have this overwhelming feeling of urgency and push over the crowd to return to the car running. I reach the person that brought me here and I give them instructions to bring me towards the girl.


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We drive as fast as we can to the place of the scene and strangely enough, there is enough space in the middle of the formation of cars so we are able to move through and fit in. I then realize all drivers are male and all of them are alone, and our car is the only one with more than one person in the whole formation.


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Then the girl starts spinning and moving like in a dance. She spends a while doing the motion, spinning, while we silently observe her. It’s in the middle of the night, a clear night, around 10-11PM, the sky is completely without clouds and the stars are clearly visible. The girl keeps spinning and after an inordinate amount of time there are purple rays of light that start shining and dancing with the motions of the girl and coming from the clear sky. The lights keep moving like in a theater stage or a live concert, until they start narrowing, focusing, looking more and more like concentrated laser pointers. The lasers surround the girl, who disappears the very moment one of them touches her. Then the lasers break formation and start snaking towards the cars.


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Every time the laser touches one of the drivers, the person disappears, vanishes into thin air. The men are disappearing at a quick pace and then I feel a powerful discharge of dread and anxiety, and start wanting to undo my belt and get the hell out of that place, but the door doesn’t budge no matter what I do or how strongly I push it. The lasers start converging onto our car and I’m trying to escape with all my strength, but it‘s completely useless. The driver on my car doesn’t make one single move, in fact they have been completely still the whole time, until they turn around to me and calmly say:


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“Don’t worry, they’re not going to pick you. You are crossbreed.”


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Then one of the lasers touch the driver and they disappear.


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There is a skip now.


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My brother must have tried to wake me up, without completely doing it. When I fall asleep again I see the last image of the dream: I’m in a hospital room looking at some X-rays of my body, there is a neat vertical line going through my skull to the end of my pelvis. One half is a human skeleton, the other is a mass of purple light, exactly the same color of lights that took away the girl, and all of the drivers.


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And by the way, do feel free to comment even if you don't feel like sharing any dreams!

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i've had many dreams with this thread in them:

i was waiting in line at Wall Street. in the dream, Wall Street is like a giant gray Costco. the line i'm waiting in goes on down the street past where i can see and it's moving slowly. i can see the building now, however, so even if i'm frustrated with the wait, i can soothe myself with the fact that i'm almost inside. but as i'm soothing myself, the side of the building i can see explodes. through the dust and debris i can see that an enormous snake, which had been held inside Wall Street (the building), has just broken out.

the snake is killing anything it can reach, and it can move shockingly quick. everyone who had been waiting in line has scattered, and as i'm running for my life i'm filled with a bitter, burning anger. i'm angry with myself, because i should've seen this coming. i was a fool to think it could've happened any other way, and now my life was at its end.

that last part is the common thread with a lot of nightmares i have. a different story, but many nightmares end with the feeling that i should've foreseen a bad outcome.

another common thread in my nightmares:

i'm in a field. where i am, it's safe. i need to go across the field for some reason that's more important than my continued living. i *know* i _can_ make it across, but my chances are very small. i can do it only if i make no mistake. between here and there, i can't describe in words:

https://youtu.be/QottP8ECMkI

i take off. i get pretty far. i make a false step. the dream ends.

it's not always literally that, but sometimes it is. it always has that structure. i've had a million of those.

i've had a few nice dreams that were memorable too. in one, i was in a grocery store and saw a group of people trying to kill a rat. i come running down the aisle and slide like a baseball player, scooping up the rat as i pass. the people start chasing after me, and i duck out a back door that leads to an ally, and as i run down the ally the rat turns into a dragon with a deer's head, and as we fly away to saftey, pink concentric circle start eminating from its eyes, accompanied by the ringing of a bell. and i'm filled with the feeling that i've lived up to something.

my wife and i concieved our second child while i was dreaming, but i don't feel like sharing that right now.

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This one happened within the past year or so: I don't remember the contents too well, but I do remember being so frustrated with how stupid this dream was and how it was preventing me from getting any sleep* that somehow, my body force-rebooted itself awake.

*Preventing me from getting any sleep in real life, I should clarify. I am not a lucid dreamer.

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@“Video_Game_King”#p49446 when i was first learning calculus i would have dreams of differentiating and integrating but never getting anywhere. they were exhausting.

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@“pasquinelli”#p49443 Really interesting stuff to read about all around! The snake dream really surprised me because if one wanted to read or extract symbolism from it's almost too on the nose with the wall street exploding and a giant monster emerging from it!

I relate to the feelings and more abstract aspects of a dream too, kind of what @"Video_Game_King"#p49446 was saying as well. There was this very short one I had once in which I was playing with one of these small bouncing balls. I was playing with one and then I dropped it and it went bouncing into a back alley then suddenly a strange and dark homeless person emerged from the shadows and very violently grabbed me by the arm and started stabbing me with a used syringe.

I remember very distinctly the absolute panic that went over me, I didn't feel pain at all, it was just pure and raw fear of contracting a disease because of the syringe. I remember the feeling of extreme powerlessness when I saw the strange man continously stabbing while watching passively and feeling that it was too late. I had this very raw and strong sense of doom: the harm was already done and I couldn't do anything about it.

There is a very famous scene in Mulholland Drive that is so similar I'm almost sure it's what my brain drew from to make experience this thing.

https://youtu.be/UozhOo0Dt4o

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@“JoJoestar”#p49473 i love that scene. the atmosphere leading up to the reveal is so oppressive that when the man is revealed, even though it shouldn‘t be a jumpscare, it is, but it isn’t. it's hard to say what happens to you at the end of that scene, but it feels like getting hit in the head with a frying pan.

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Or in my case, stabbed with a used syringe! Not a great feeling I gotta say!!

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i had a dream a few days ago that has stuck with me. i was a guest in someone else's house, a woman with two small children. it was evening, after dinner, the older kid, 5 or so years old, running around like a maniac, the younger one, a toddler, trying and failing to keep up. the mother was in the bathroom washing her hands or putting away towels or something like that and i was in the hall talking with her.

she steps out of the bathroom and in passimg hands me a small paper, saying, "if that happened to me you couldn't tempt me to stay in this world."

at a glance the paper looks like one of those valentines that kids pass out in class in gradeschool, and a closer look shows it is like that, a little card manufactured to pass out to all the kids in class with perferations splitting the sheet of cardstock into individual pieces for sharing, but instead of a valentine it's announcing the death of a child.

i have no idea who this kid could be-- the older one brought it home from school, they're not my kid, i don't know anything about the kids in their kindergarten class. but the idea that a child so young died, and the implications of a mass produced death announcement to be shared with a kid's class, make me well up.

i'm in the hall squatting, looking at the scrap of paper, trying to compose myself but crying just the same. the older kid walks up to me and says something along the lines of, "i'm sorry you aren't feeling good" and hugs me. this makes me laugh despite crying. i hug them back and tell them, "thank you very much."

while i'm hugging them i feel that they're half the size they should be.

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you ever have a dream that makes you laugh as you're waking up from it? like actually lolling at your own dream? that happened to me a couple of nights ago. and then, last night, i had a very scary dream.

dream 1:
i was having a prelude to a >!sexy!< time with someone, and we were just getting to _the good part_, when it sounded like someone else was going to open the door and interrupt us. well, my counterpart, without missing a beat, just said in a confident tone, "it's okay, we can just pretend we were going streaking." and that, friends, made me have a good lol

dream 2:
i was running for my life on a steep snowy mountain that had the kind of red-and-yellow chevrons which, in a racing game, would give you a speed boost. but in this dream, when i ran over one of those speed-boosters, i was instead plunged deep beneath the ocean, where i could continue running, and whenever i went over another one of those boosters (which still existed, under the sea) i would pop back up onto the mountain. eventually an utterly gigantic manta ray began descending from the sky toward me, and come on, of course i woke up in a terror. anyway i'm sharing that here because i think that would make a cool video game (level) probably.

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last night i dreamt i was a waiter at a fancy dinner party. robert downey jr. was one of the guests, and while i was helping him with something he asked my why i was so anti-intellectual.

"i don't know that i'm anti-intellectual, it's just that 'intellectualism' is just humans flattering themselves, making themselves out to be more than they are...", and as i was saying that i noticed my shadow projected onto the wall to my right. the shadow acted as a window looking onto a forest, and in the forest was a chimpanzee looking back at me.

then the dream zipped to a garden scene. insects swarmed around one flowering bush, and they were debating politics, not insect politics, but human politics. i say they were debating, but really they were all shouting slogans; there was no real back and forth. i noticed one that was trying to get a chant going, "NO MORE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE." it didn't have any success, because all the other bugs were just trying to shout their slogans over everyone else. i wondered what a bunch of insects chanting, "NO MORE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE", could possibly do to actually prevent domestic violence.

then the dream changed again, and i was on set with robert downey jr., but he was changed into a different actor, not jamie foxx but i can't think of who it was, so i'll say he was jamie foxx. he was doing a stunt wherein he was chained up in a metal cylinder that the crew was filling with water. he kept on making jokes while it filled up, even when it covered his mouth and nose he burbled out one more joke, and then drowned.

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I dreamed I had gotten a job at a community library. My first task was to dig graves in this dusty, steep slope that rose to the Iibrary‘s entrance. There was a documentary film crew there filming the process: me planning and digging, the landscape, the library patrons. It was hard work and slow going. The crew was getting angry, I didn’t understand why but it felt like part of my job to keep them happy so I scheduled a zoom meeting to talk about it. One of them is an old coworker who I think dislikes me irl. The rest of the crew I learn are students who paid $1100 dollars each. I don't understand the source of their anger or how I can make it better, but they keep bringing up that figure, $1100.

I work late into the evening digging these graves at the library. An old timer, someone who used to have my job or something, approaches me with some practical advice for the digging. Equipped with the knowledge I finish my first grave soon after, look up the hill towards the library and see all the plots left to dig.

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Brings me a bit of joy every time I see this thread resurface after a while. I thought it was kind of unsuccessful when I created it but it's really nice to keep seeing people sharing their experiences here.

@"RubySunrise"#p84173 I really like the juxtaposition between the library and the graveyard, it feels so eerie for some reason. Very different activities, moods and function involved with those.

Also that particular type of dream where I'm tasked to do something specific but I keep encountering obstacles that prevent me from actually doing the thing is something strangely common to me. At least one out of five dreams I'm able to recall are some variation of that, weird enough, and I can't imagine the reason why that happens.

Also apologies for being so late to reply, I saw your message as you posted it and meant to respond but I was doing something at the time and then forgot ;_;

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@“JoJoestar”#p84785 Also apologies

Seriously no worries! Here at IC, I've noticed it's generally acceptable to reply to posts no matter when they were posted, which I love.

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I had a dream about my hard drives and them running out of storage space. there may be something wrong with me

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Perhaps prompted by recently inviting my actual friend to the forum, I dreamt last night that I‘d also invited my brother (who’s greatest ambition is to become a professional meme designer (this is his meme account)). When I checked into the forums there was a 600-response thread he had started that was locked and presumably he‘d been banned. I tried to figure out what his thread was about, but I guess because of various dream-world barriers, it was really hard to. I remember seeing screenshots of a homebrew Mario 64 level he’d presumably made, but beyond that it gets hazy and impossible to put into words.

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I've just woken up from a dream involving seeing a demo of a Diddy Kong Racing clone but this demo had the Diddy model sans vehicle floating in the air whilst sitting on his butt around the track and using a ridiculously long, Chameleon Twist-esque tongue to pick up fruit along the track.

There was also music playing that sounded like someone had heard music from Banjo Kazooie exactly once and played a single, extremely simplified two-bar melody of a heavily synthesised tuba over and over again.

I'm going back to sleep.

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I mistakenly made two posts in the I Dream of Games thread because I forgot about this one. Oops!

I had a dream the other night that Tim Rogers was talking about Splatoon except Splatoon was in this case about squids turning into fucked up anthropomorphic feet and spitting like drain scum at each other.

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And this I dreamt, and this I dream

I'm enrolled as a student at a school (university-level). For our final project of the semester we're tasked with making a film. During the last week of class, each student has the option to either screen theirs or else pick an existing film which inspired them to show to the class instead.

I have a professor friend (dream-only) who is from Ukraine, and whom I would like to make the subject of my film. I want to document his experience during the war (the real one going on right now), as a civilian living away from his home country during this terrible time. The film would not be completely documentary—my professor friend tells me about some experiences he has already had, for example conversations he's had with friends and family on the phone, during this period (not sure how long it's been going on in this dream) which he remembers and would like to recreate for the film. This is essentially a one-man play, so we decide to shoot it all in one room to save on location costs, and decided to use the lecture hall where I'm taking this class as our location (which features floor-to-ceiling windows for two of its walls, with a view out into the city and its neighboring skyscrapers). We're planning to shoot it in black and white (maybe misguidedly, I made this decision in a dream give me a break) because the room doesn't look very interesting beyond the amount of light that's coming in from these huge windows.

In any case this student film has professional Hollywood producers working on it, you see, and they're not even the 21st century kind who would gladly exploit some Important Issue of contemporary life to make a syrupy drama with Mark Rylance (or you know, whoever). Instead these two come straight out of "the 1940s" and bear the interests of "everyday Americans" in mind: "Look kid, I mean this story is nice and all, but nobody's gonna give a rat about this, uh, this egghead main character of yours. He needs a little something extra. Let's make him someone normal people will care about."

I have no say in the matter anyway, so they go ahead and rewrite the whole script in order to incorporate their new main character, a casually (parodically?) racist Welles-in-Touch-of-Evil-looking detective who will be investigating _the murder_ of my professor character; any insight we gain into the professor's personal experience or thoughts come second to the murder mystery. It's still all in the same room, but the producers also demanded we shoot in color, because according to them nobody wants to see one of these black and white pictures anymore, it's old hat. But instead of using any kind of contemporary color process they have us shooting on old (1920s) Kodachrome, so all the colors look pretty washed out anyway. They want the detective character to wear this baby blue sport coat which seems to show up well on our film (no idea if true to life), but which I think looks horrible and clashes with the tone of the story (not that everything wasn't already an affront to the story). The one scene I remember watching in the dream features this character talking to a woman who knew the professor, and instead of talking about her murdered acquaintance he has a monologue about his coffee. He's holding up a demitasse of what looks like off-white custard: "Look Martha, you see this? This is how the Turks make coffee." Instead of holding it out to Martha he walks up to the camera, holding the cup right up to the lens. He sticks his thumb in it and swirls the semi-solid matter around. "Yup, this is how they do it in Tunis. I love it. I love my coffee."

Anyhow the movie gets made and I can't bear to show it to the class, the rest of whose films of course haven't been subjected to the ridiculous mandates of these producers. I ask the class if they wouldn't rather watch the cutscenes in Metroid: Other M, which they say sounds appealing in its own way, but they think I'm just being modest and say they want to watch my movie. So we do, and it's embarrassing for me, but I woke up before I could hear what any of them thought about it.

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@“captain”#p87124 that‘s a very funny dream. genuinely, this whole dream: i think you’ve got yourself a picture here. i'd watch it.

i can even see the last scene, you've finished screening it for your class, we're looking at them from your point of view, there's an uncertain silence, then finally someone in the front takes a breath to speak, raises their index finger slightly, then it cuts to black and the credits roll.