Banquet Turkey Slices

I wouldn’t have predicted that a 1980’s TV dinner would be the antagonist in my most recent nightmare. But yeah, that’s what I woke up from this morning. Near-death by turkey dinner. 😏🤦🏻‍♂️ I’m not sure if you’ll be familiar with this brand and packaging, but the family sized turkey slices came in a cardboard tray slightly bigger and deeper than a typical TV dinner container, and it had a thin layer of plastic covering the entire thing that you peel off before serving and eating. 🤔 Well I managed to forget that important last step in my dream this morning. 😳

We were in the house where I lived when I was in elementary school, but I was my current age or at least close to it. I was the one doing the cooking, and it was Dad, Uncle Jay, and Shannon that were there for dinner. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Unfortunately there wasn’t much plot to this one, because as soon as I served them in the dining room I went outside to my treehouse to eat by myself… and I must have been extra hungry, because I just started scarfing down the turkey slices.

I immediately wondered if there were mushrooms or something else “gross” in the gravy, because there was an odd texture that I wasn’t expecting. 🤢 That texture eventually began to build up and clog my throat, and when I stuck my fingers into my mouth I began pulling out these huge, gravy covered strips of cellophane. 😧 Much like a cat that found a stray piece of plastic bag to chew on, only the very end of the plastic was stuck there at the edge of my mouth – allowing me to pull it all the way out and stop myself from choking. 😳 Good stuff, eh? 😅

Took me a good hour to shake that one off after waking up, but it helped that it had the childhood reminders in it. 😊 Not only being in the Millersport house where I grew up, but also those turkey slices. It’s funny how when you are little, you don’t have a great concept of certain things… and for me, those turkey slices would be one of those things. 😏 Back then, it was like “Holy shit, we are having turkey and mashed potatoes and it isn’t even Thanksgiving?!?!” but now I’m like “Wow, Mom really worked some magic with a $2.99 box of processed turkey and brown goo.” 😄

But seriously, I don’t know whether it was wanting to save money, needing to save money, just liking that particular meal… but that was some basic-ass stuff, and I never thought a single bad thing about it. 😁 (I can’t say the same about the “Salisbury Steak” dinners… oy… but I digress.) It all reminded me of something I saw on TikTok the other day, where it was just a short video of woman saying something like “You didn’t realize it at the time, but when you were a kid – you were actually watching your parents grow up.” 😌

It’s true… and while I’m sure every person’s thoughts and experience with this idea are unique, when I offhandedly think about it, as I’ve grown into the age that I am now – I think whatever my current age is as I’m thinking about it, that’s the age I mentally picture Mom and Dad being at through all of my school-aged years. 🙂🤷🏻‍♂️ Always seeming like they were “grown ups” who had already “figured it all out” and yet here I am, approaching 50, and I feel like I’ve only figured out 1/4 of what I had already attributed to them when I was ten. 😁

*shrug*

I had a bit of energy and wanted to get away from the house for a few, so I went out and locked down a couple more areas in town for the 360 video archive. A total of five different videos, with one being published to the top of the playlist each afternoon starting tomorrow. Nothing amazing, just some neighborhoods to the north that I’ve never really been familiar with.

The above video is just one of the 360 videos that’s going to be published, except I went ahead and locked down camera views and spins and such, to make it a “normal” video despite being shot with a 360 camera. It’ll probably give you motion sickness to watch, but I needed to mess around with settings and modes and stuff to get more familiar with the software.

Here’s something not fun, and unrelated… shitty, shitty dream the other night. It was late at night and I was getting ready to go shopping in some store in the ghetto, and had to park way out in the parking lot, away from the store and lights. I couldn’t find my wallet, so I walked to the passenger side of my car and opened the door to look in the pocket. When I did that, someone snuck up behind me and began stabbing me over and over in the left lower side of my back. Just quick stabs, over and over, before finally leaving the knife in my back and twisting it. When he did that I could feel myself fading out of consciousness – but luckily I realized I was dreaming at that point and purposely pulled myself out of it and woke up.

Didn’t get back to sleep for quite a while after that… heh…

Ball-evator

“Ball-evator” – also known as “I’ll try to stop doing this…” 😏
(It was just so vivid… so much so that I’ve retained all this detail 18 hours later.)

Yes, this is another post about one of my dreams. 🙄😄 (I know, these suck… and yeah, I know I’ve actually still got a second blog somewhere, where I’m supposed to put these things… perhaps I’ll figure out where it was again here soon.) I definitely didn’t have any control over this dream (like I was hoping) though. 😳 Not in what was happening, nor even in the location. This one was all new.

Mom and I were in the lobby of a fancy hotel somewhere… 🤔 looked as if it may have been a casino / hotel, if I’d have to guess. Mom stood at the front desk, talking to the clerk about something, as I made my way over to the elevators and got into one of the cars. At this moment it was normal… and I had gotten in it alone. But right as the doors were closing, some woman stuck her hand in between them and opened it back up and jumped in. 😠 And when she did that, the entire elevator lurched as if it had crashed into something. 😧

She immediately looked terrified and ran back out, and when the doors closed (with me inside) the entire elevator car morphed into a hollow sphere shape, just big enough for one person to fit. And as I heard a loud cracking sound, I felt that the ball had started to freefall – like, really, really felt it 🥺 – and the floor indicator said we were on floor 492, and that I was falling at around a dozen floors per second. 😭

Since the inside of the sphere was relatively small, I was able to use my arms and legs to brace myself inside – where I wasn’t actually standing or sitting on anything, but sorta floating in the middle of the sphere like BB-8 did in that one scene on the Falcon where he stopped himself from bouncing around. 😏🤷🏻‍♂️

The freefall continued for a long time… and I thought for sure that when I hit the bottom, that it would be over. 😣 But nope, for whatever reason when the sphere hit the bottom floor (which was immediately apparent as a dimly lit basement area) it just smashed open and dumped me out into the room. And the room was full of little ramps, pipes, chains and ropes hanging from the ceiling… and there were several small cows resting in different corners of the room. 😐 (I have no idea… heh)

It smelled like cows too. 🤢🐄 It was hot, the ceiling was leaking water, the lights were flickering, and I was itchy from the bits of straw that were floating in the air after the ball-evator smashed into the ground. At this point, since I didn’t know what was going on and it seemed rather sketchy, I immediately started climbing up one of the narrow ramps, and used one of the hanging ropes to climb the rest of the way up and out.

In the floor above the basement, I started recognizing things on the wall. 🤨 It turns out that I was now in the hallways of a Starfleet ship, but one that had been taken over by Borg where they had also increased the heat and humidity to suit their needs. 😥🤒 I knew how to use the computers on the walls, so I began entering the codes to self-destruct the ship and I got into one of the escape shuttles… and unfortunately, that’s where I woke up. 😕 Just when it was getting good.

Fin. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Dream Manipulation

I’ve been dealing with weeks and weeks of nightmares. 😟 Not every night, but pretty damn close. It has effed with my sleep in a serious way, so I figured I should start trying some things that might change how things go during the hours that I’m asleep. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Last night definitely counts as a success. You know that cloudy time when you’re not quite asleep but not really awake? I’ve been working to inject things into my thoughts at that time, basically hoping to “seed” my dreams with things that don’t suck. And I say “inject” but honestly it’s about pulling good things out as much as trying to stick them in. Like conscious thoughts acting as a key to unlock the more detailed subconscious ones.

Doing that, I was able to re-remember four different locations that I have already visited in my dreams years and years ago. 😃 One of the locations had to be from well over a decade ago… but once it popped into my head, it was instantly familiar, like I was just there the night before. 😯 And prior to last night, I can’t imagine that there would have been anything that someone could have said or done that would have brought these locations back as regular memories of past dreams. 🙂 They were buried.

It’s not that complicated, or at least it wasn’t last night. 🤔 I just set my mind to think of thrift stores, or similar small shops, and somehow they just all came to me one at a time. First one was a dirty old “hole in the wall” type store accented by glow-in-the-dark paint and black lights, with the front room having a bunch of magic supplies and huge dirty mirrors on the walls, and the back room (through a small hallway) having lots of fish tanks with neon tetras glowing along with the painted accents of the store. 😊

The next store location even came with some “outside area” with wildly curving freeways heading to it, like a grown up “Hot Wheels” track. 🏎️😁 Those roads, exactly like years ago, took the very same route to a mall which had the same identifiable stores that I had interacted with before. A candy store that you have to go through to even get into the mall, then the 70s themed record store, and once you went up to the second floor there was a retro video game store… 🤓🕹️ appearing exactly as it was all those years ago.

It’s so strange to experience, because they weren’t quite dreams, and not quite memories… because as I was recalling each of these locations, I wasn’t “dreaming” anything with other people or a plot or anything like that. It was more like I was operating as a floating camera that could just go wherever I wanted in that world in order to examine things. 😴😊

Third location was a little more vague, but it’s always been that way. It also had a long, flat stretch of road to reach it, located at a somewhat desolate intersection where another long road met it at an almost parallel angle. 🏪🌵 I’ve never seen what’s inside this store, but the outside has always remained the same. And like last night, it usually just serves as a stop before going to the final location that also came to me.

That last location was a regular thrift store. Nothing that remarkable, other than never having seen the location or any buildings like it in real life, but having visited it repeatedly in my dreams. 🤨 It’s located next to some strip malls, although it is set back in an odd way which makes it difficult to see from the road. The inside of the store is actually based on something in the real world though. There used to be a store called “Hecks” on the edge of town, and the inside of this thrift store is nearly identical to what I remember Hecks looking like. And as I went through the automatic doors and through the entryway, it even had the same vending machines there as it did the other times it was featured in my dreams.

So yeah, I’d say that was some pretty remarkable results considering that I was just thinking “thrift store, thrift store, thrift store…” as I started zoning out. 😏 It makes me wonder if I’ll be able to do it again, and as well, with different locations or set pieces. It would sure make it a nicer experience, preparing to go to sleep each night. Hell, if I get really good at it I could see where being asleep is genuinely a better prospect than being awake. 😅 That sounds bad, I know… but being able to have some control over your dreams… it’s like virtual reality without the big helmet, and way more real.

Different Even From The Norm

It’s gonna be a long day. I’m not grumpy, just grumping… couldn’t manage to finish off my day yesterday with a decent night’s sleep, once again because of a mix of weird dreams and nightmares. Just makes it tough to get out from behind the eight-ball when you’re asleep for two, awake for two, asleep for two, etc.

The worst one from last night featured me and a few unknown traveling companions. We had just gotten off of our plane and were trying to find the area in this little abandoned airport, where we were supposed to go in the middle of the night. Nobody there but us… no staff, no other travelers, so we were on our own.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but apparently they used guard dogs to protect the airport during the night time hours when people weren’t expected to be there. And not just typical, big, angry guard dogs. There was something wrong with them too. Weird faces, way too many sharp teeth sticking out of all their mouths…

It’s making my chest tighten again, just thinking about this dream, so I don’t think I’ll go into a ton of detail. But I got separated from the group, and each time I’d escape one set of dogs in a hallway, it would be because I went into rooms that had their own dogs in them, and all of them were fast, biting, barking, attacking. I kept the other people safe, but only because they saw what was happening to me, how I was attracting all the dogs, so they were able to be more sneaky and avoid their attention.

But yeah, I got tore up all over… stomach, neck, face, arms, ear… and no matter where I’d turn, there was no getting away from them. Definitely not the type of dream where, once you’ve been woken up, where you can just easily fall back to sleep again. I might have to try switching my sleeping routine, and rather than letting the TV play maybe I should try peaceful music or something, ‘cuz this shit is wearing me out.

That’s Just The Way It Is

Weird day. 😐 Spent about 45 minutes at the pharmacy, trying to get WC to actually pay for the two WC meds that I had to pick up… but nope. Not completely unexpected. There’s one more that I need to get, but I’ve banked a few days of it here at the house so I can give it a little while to sit, to see if that helps it make its way through the approval process. 🙄 It wasn’t outright refused, like the others, so maybe… who knows…

Among the things that I sent to my lawyers was an update on how the medication situation was going, along with a request for the forms that I can fill out and submit into the system, which will show that they’re not being paid for, and which will hopefully result in reimbursement. 🤷🏻‍♂️😒 Of course, that is, if the settlement isn’t near. I’m still leaning 50% on being able to eventually get paid back by “paying myself back” out of that check, if / when it ever comes.

If I don’t hear back from someone there by mid-week, I guess I’ll have to start calling until I reach someone. I’m not complaining about my team. They’ve been great… but COVID restrictions and then an apparent relocation of their office seems to have really slammed the brakes on my shit. 😕 I really thought we were getting close… months and months ago now.

Despite the bullshit, somehow I made myself stay in town and do some more running. 🙂🤷🏻‍♂️ Had to go to the bank, so I decided to go in rather than going through the drive through. Something soothing about standing in that old ass building… heh… makes me think back to when I was a kid, going there with my grandparents or my aunt, where they’d often score blankets or toasters for putting money into a CD. 😊

Went to a couple thrift stores… only because they were nearly empty. Of people, that is. I guess it was because it was very early in the afternoon, most people still at work or doing whatever… but yeah, grabbed a couple new (to me) shirts, some new bowls and a huge coffee mug – typical thrift store stuff. It was nice just being out somewhere, but also not surrounded by a bunch of people without masks.

Then in the late afternoon Cassi and Steven made it down to handle the bushes for me. He borrowed a gas powered trimmer from a friend, and then I had the electric one as a second trimmer. 😎👍🏻 (One for the bulk cutting, one for going along afterwards and applying the finesse.) We knew that there was no way they’d get done done before we lost the sun, so while all the bushes got hit – probably half of them still need the detail work done, or the harder to reach stuff snipped. 🙂🤷🏻‍♂️ So we included it as part of the plan, to not worry about it, and the next time they come down (probably within the next week) we’ll go out and finish it all up to where we can stand back, look at what was done, and declare it all to be good. 🌳🌳😇🌳🌳

I helped some, so I’m sure I’ll be feeling it a bit tomorrow, but I didn’t push myself to where I’m gonna be out of order for a couple days again. 🙄🤞🏻 But yeah, I was impressed that they made it around the entire house before it got dark, so I’m already happy with how things went. The upcoming finishing touches are basically just gravy. 🙂 Glad to have some muscle and finesse that could help me out with this, for sure. So now I’m feeling optimistic about doing a couple more things tomorrow that I’ve been thinking about, but we’ll see how I’m feelin’ about all that once the sun rises, eh? 😏

(Oh, and I picked up a reasonably thick blank journal while at the pharmacy. I think I may have mentioned in a previous post how I used to scribble down my dreams after waking up, and sometimes even draw some illustrations… so I’m hoping to get back into that habit. Lets the brain focus on (usually) non-shitty stuff for a little longer after sleep… heh)

Glad It Was Just My Shoulder

Just woke up, and I’m having an interesting after-effect to my dream. I’m pretty sure it was because yesterday evening I was watching an episode of Doctor Who with Genesee, and it was the one where Martha was walking the earth, avoiding capture, after it had been taken over by some alien race… so in the show there was lots of ducking and running and hiding and all that.

My dream was similar, except it all took place in some sort of abandoned village, where there was a gang of people who were “in charge” of it (even though it wasn’t theirs) and me and a few others were running from building to building, house to house, and I eventually found one place where I was able to go in and lock the door, giving me a moment to rest and catch my breath before moving on.

One of the women in the gang found the shack where I was hiding though, and although she couldn’t get in – she stood outside with a big knife, taunting me that I wouldn’t be able to get out and that her friends were coming. But then she picked up a brick and threw it through the window in the door, smashing the glass, and allowing her to reach inside and unlock it. Before she could make her way in, I picked up that same brick, threw it, and hit her in the head.

It took her a second to get back up, but she grabbed the brick again and threw it at me, hitting me in the right shoulder. And since she was now inside the shack and still had that knife, me and a couple other people ran to the back door and escaped into the woods. I woke up at that point, but for the first five minutes of being awake I couldn’t lift my right arm. 😳 And it’s about 20 minutes later now, and my right shoulder still friggin’ hurts. I’ve got some “Nightmare on Elm Street” shit goin’ on… heh 😏

Get A Hobby

Bad dreams ended up waking me last night around 3am, and I’ve been up ever since. Kinda doesn’t matter what sleep schedule I keep these days, given that I’m not going anywhere and I didn’t even realize what day it was today. Not meaning April Fools Day, just meaning that I didn’t realize it was Wednesday. 😐🤷🏻‍♂️😏 Point being, anxiety filled sleep, waking up early… it didn’t lead to much of a day for me. I did text with Dad and Genesee a bit, and she got me thinking about playing the keyboard again. 🤔🎹🤷🏻‍♂️

I forget what she said, but it reminded me that thanks to the YouTube Music app searching my own videos for music to add… I ran across this old video of me playing Don’t Wake Me by Skillet. 😎 And when I did, I realized that if you put that keyboard in front of me now I’d have no idea how to play it. Elton John made a comment on his Melbourne Symphony album, that he was playing some songs that were so old that he had to re-learn them as well for that concert. 🙂 So that’s one thing I’m gonna try to make time for… “keyboard dickin’ around time” every now and then.

And then thanks to NASCAR and iRacing running these virtual races on the weekend… and apparently a dirt track / winged-car race tonight… that’s got my mind back on video games. 🤓🎮📺 I’ve got an XBOX One and a Playstation 4, yet it’s probably been at least six months since I’ve even turned either of them on. 😕 Once I got into a funk a while back, my brain just never seemed interested in reminding me that I’ve got kewl shit that I could play. So I’m gonna go through my games tonight and figure out which system I’ve got the best racing games for, and I’ll probably try to re-familiarize myself with all that. 🤔 I used to be good. Years ago I was really layin’ ’em down at the road courses, or at least it felt that way. (Wow, that was from 2013…)

I don’t wanna get ahead of myself, since I’ve already got a couple options there, but I’m probably gonna play around with time-lapse and long-exposure phone photography like I usually do each spring… plus I’ve got a couple new photogrammetry apps for creating 3D models from a series of regular digital photos, so that might keep my attention as well. Meh… we’ll see, I guess.

Don’t mind me… just doing a little more “talking out loud” to hopefully burn these ideas into my brain a little more effectively. 🤯 It’s not like I’m making valuable use of my time otherwise, so I might as well be doing something that I used to consider fun, eh? 😏 All this time stuck in the house might help me figure out where “old me” went. 🙂🤞🏻