wall

holy crap, I punched a wall last night. In my sleep. I punched a hard plaster wall near my bed. I just remembered. And punching the wall made me wake up, mostly, about 80%. And I felt so lucky I didn’t break my hand. I thought over and over how lucky it was that my hand didn’t seem to be broken, as if I had to be grateful to prevent it from being retroactively broken. And I didn’t turn on the lights, but I moved my hand for a while to see if it was injured, and to keep it from stiffening.

I don’t remember who I meant to punch in the dream, but I think it was a human. Just now I remembered punching the wall, and then I looked down at my hand to see if it was cut, but there is no visible sign of injury. So then I briefly wondered if it was a dream within a dream, and maybe I only dreamed I had punched the wall in my room here, but I’m pretty sure I actually did. Now I remember thinking a little about padded rooms, and wishing I was in a padded room so I wouldn’t have to worry about punching the wall again in my sleep. Those thoughts weren’t a dream.

In one dream, last night, I was in a fenced-in yard and a dog was trying to get inside to attack me. But the fence was too high. Then I started to think I should check the opposite fence, to make sure I could climb it in case the dog got in somehow. And the dog saw me climbing it and ran around to that side. Then I wondered if I had accidentally showed it how to climb the fence, and I became conscious of a third gate on the other side of the yard and I went to that gate, and saw it had a gap large enough for the dog to get in. And it was about to get in when I woke up.

In another dream, last night, I had built a tall wooden structure with some friends, but I was in the lead role. I’m not sure what its purpose was, but I think it was mostly recreational. Maybe something like a deck, but taller. We built it on someone else’s yard, and didn’t necessarily have their full permission. We built the basic skeleton of the thing, and then I pushed on it a bit and saw that it wasn’t entirely firm, but I told someone that we could add some more bracing to make it stronger. That person wasn’t convinced, and thought we should ask another person nearby who we thought knew about these things. I didn’t mind the idea because initially I expected this expert to tell us the structure was OK, but he soon identified a major problem, that much of the wood we used wasn’t lumber, but was dead tree branches that in some cases were splitting, and he didn’t even have to tell me why this wouldn’t work. Rain was going to get into the cracks of those branches and degrade them over time, and anyone atop the structure would be endangered. It was just a matter of time before the structure failed. It was a little painful to acknowledge, but I realized in just a minute or so that the pretty much the whole structure had to come down, that all our work that day was pretty much wasted. When I came back the next day to work on it, someone had already removed the branches, perhaps the owner of the property, because it was so obvious the existence of the structure posed a risk and couldn’t remain there even long enough for me to return the next day and rebuild it.

In another dream, I was living in a basement area, what felt like a basement, temporarily, and there was an indoor swimming pool in the next room, but it needed to be rebuilt. There were people coming and going in the night as I tried to sleep in the dream. I would wake up and greet them, and could barely keep track of who was sleeping there in the same room with me, or nearby rooms, and who had left. At one point I realized I was alone there and had no access to any kind of assistance at all if someone tried to break in, so I looked around a bit for things I could use as weapons. The next morning I had to contact some kind of real estate agent about related plans for the swimming pool and so on, but it was very difficult to contact them. Difficult to dial the numbers and so on. At one point I got through but to the wrong extension, and someone was very angry at me. Then he found out my mom was his coworker so he felt bad, like he shouldn’t have yelled at me for calling the wrong number if I was my mom’s son.

Oh, and then I was involved in some kind of DIY movie theater project, setting up a cinema with some friends. And Orville Redenbacher showed up to offer guidance! At first we were like, uhh, I don’t think we can really learn anything from Orville Redenbacher. But then we all silently agreed it was nice of him to offer help, and we should be friendly to him and make him feel like we valued his participation. He stayed for a while, and it was like, wow, Orville Redenbacher is still here. Doesn’t he have anywhere else he needs to be. He was very kind, and had long thin arms and legs that had the same cross-sectional diameter.