Jet Crash

Last night I dreamt I was staying in a high rise hotel in an unfamiliar city. It was heavily overcast, but occasionally planes would dip below the clouds on their way to a landing. I would see their landing lights cut through the clouds before the actual plane would emerge and I would hear the roar of the jet engines.

I could hear this pulsing popping sound, kind of a fwoop fwoop fwoop, and I could see these flashes of yellowish lights through clouds. Then a plain emerged from below the clouds and the engines were shooting blasts of flame intermittently and it was rapidly losing altitude. It crashed into another hotel a block or two away from the one I was staying in.

I've seen a video of a plane doing this before after it sucked a bird, but then only one engine and they still had a good engine and were able to turn around and land. This was both engines, maybe they went through a whole flock of birds.

The plane itself was strange, gave new meaning to "wide bodied jet". Instead of having a cylindrical fuselage, it was tear-dropped shape and very wide compared to even a normal wide bodied jet, but stubbier. The engines were also very wide. I don't know what such a shape would do for aerodynamics.

I went to call 9-1-1 from a cell phone I had with me and I got through, but when they asked me where I was, I couldn't tell them, I didn't know. I don't know if that's because it was a dream and I hadn't invented that detail yet, or because I was in such a state of shock from seeing the crash.

It seems to be a reference to 9-11 too, both that I tried to call 9-1-1 and that it was a passenger jet crashing into a building, though in this case clearly mechanical trouble was involved as both engines were flaming out.

Medical Nightmare Dream

I had this dream that I had severe edema around my ankles, far worse than I had with the first flare-up of gout, and that I also had all of these gross varicose veins in my feet and ankles.

I had this dream when I was in a half-awake half-asleep state when I had to get up to go to the bathroom. I looked down at my feet, before I was fully awake, and saw them in this state. So it was kind of between asleep and awake and kind of between a dream and hallucination. It went away once I was all the way awake.

Anyway, as I looked, I could see my ankles balloon out with my heart beat, and the varicose veins would expand with each heartbeat as well. It was major creepy and really rattled me.

Bear and Dog

I had this strange dream that I had a pet bear AND a pet dog. Currently, I am petless, our last dog died we believe of cancer that probably metastasized from a melanoma we had removed from his lip shortly after we got him. We had two cats but one belonged to my daughter who took him with her when she moved out, the other was never friendly to begin with but got really pissy after the first cat was gone so gave that back to my son who also has another cat.

So currently am without pets but after I get debts paid down will probably get another dog and cat. We have had two Dobermans and one Weimaraner. The first Doberman was a female we got as a puppy named Tia. She was a great dog, very people oriented, an excellent watch dog, but she died from cancer at 14, also from a melanoma metastasis.

In this dream, the dog was really harassing the bear because she wanted to play. The bear seemed to be getting annoyed and pinned the dog down, and I thought he was going to tear it apart but didn't. Just held her there long enough to get across the fact that he'd had enough, then let her go. The bear had massive claws, probably two inches long, could have turned the dog into hamburger in seconds.

I should mention that both pets were indoors in this dream. I've never had any aspirations of owing a bear as a pet or a carpet or anything else so not really sure what influenced this dream.

After the bear let the dog go, there was a fly buzzing around the ceiling and the bear decided to try to swipe at it. I was afraid he was going to take huge chunks out of the ceiling with those massive claws but he didn't. I woke up after that.

Christmas Light Enigma

Some dreams contain literal meaning, some dreams contain symbolic, most a mixture of the two.

I'm not sure what to make of the dream I had this morning. I was in a cabin, not quite a log cabin but something that was primarily wood, maybe knotty pine or something like that.

Hung from the ceiling were miniature Christmas Tree lights. They were the type that are made up of series strings where one bulb goes bad and the whole string goes dark and you spend hours trying to figure out which bulb is the culprit.

They have little devices in that are supposed to short out a failed bulb so that the others continue to function but they frequently fail themselves. It's all kind of a farce actually, the design intent I think is that when one bulb fails, and shorts, that places extra voltage on the remaining bulbs, which in turn fail faster. With each failed bulb the remaining bulbs fail at an ever faster pace. You go to bed with one failed bulb and wake up to the whole string being dead.

If you are fortunate, you can nurse these things to live two or three years before the sockets are too corroded to be salvageable, then you have to replace them.

Well, these type of lights were hanging from the ceiling. There were many of the bulbs that were rapidly flickering, like there was an intermittent connection somewhere in the string and it was vibrating or arcing or in some other manner rapidly making intermittent connections.

I've had my moments of frustration with these things. But this is where it got weird. I found that if I looked at one of the flickering bulbs at an angle that placed it directly in-line with a non-flickering bulb, it would stop flickering, so would all the others in series with it. This would happen just by looking at it, I didn't have to actually touch it to make it work. But I had to look at it in a way that lined up the flickering bulb exactly with a functional bulb behind it, else it would have no effect.

Clearly this isn't a literal dream, so if there is a metaphor here what is it? So far it's lost on me.