The Dream Vault: A repository for your most interesting and vivid dreams.

[J. Wilhelm]

a dream where I was a 3 foot by 1/2 foot square beam of tofu soaked with too much sea water as it's squirted out onto a carpeted conveyer belt, where the banks that I went by accidentally filled out the paperwork wrong and made me a millionaire. Which I was too scared to use to buy super powers for everyone because I know I wouldn't survive jail on the moon for tax fraud?

fever dreams are amazing.

Yeah. Tax evading millionaire tofu is pretty high up there in the WTF department.

[J. Wilhelm]

Last night I had another dream of dread, being faced with a demon/monster with no escape blah blah etc etc.....

To my surprise 2 of the chimera Alsations from my previous dream came to my assistance and we fought it together, never had that before, people or things in common, transferring from dream to dream, I named them Nip and Tuck because they need some cosmetic work to look anywhere normal.

I'm wondering if they will appear again in future dreams/ nightmares?

I wish I could draw, some of this could make fantastic art.

We shall see.............

Ask Caledonian to draw the scene

[Deimos]

"Crossover character"  dreams are normal for me.
Doesn't happen in every dream, at least not in the ones I remember (and I remember fewer and fewer; typically only fragments, as of late).
But it happens enough that it doesn't surprise me.  
Initially it was  "Oh...what are you doing here?"
Now--when it happens--it's more like different scenarios with the "regular cast", and a few special guest stars / cameos.

[J. Wilhelm]

Just had a dream where I had to go though a written exam, but the thing is that when I sat down on a desk to take the test, a thick bound booklet was brought to me. Upon inspection, the pages of the test were full of satellite pictures of coast lines and geographical features. There were also all manner of sticky tapes, similar to those used in photographic albums and I was having a really hard time understanding what I was being asked to do! After 5 minutes of looking at the rest of the class work on the exam, I couldn't even understand what to do! Thankfully, I woke up and realized that I no longer have to take examinations.

That's another type of recurring dreams for me: somehow I'm far behind on completing academic requirements, like missing many months of classes, or ignoring exam dates and such. After a few minutes awake I still have to convince myself that it's been a while since I was in college. I have no, and likely will never have any academic tests to take!  Why do I still have a lingering "student fear" after all these decades?

[von Corax]

Just had a dream where I had to go though a written exam, but the thing is that when I sat down on a desk to take the test, a thick bound booklet was brought to me. Upon inspection, the pages of the test were full of satellite pictures of coast lines and geographical features. There were also all manner of sticky tapes, similar to those used in photographic albums and I was having a really hard time understanding what I was being asked to do! After 5 minutes of looking at the rest of the class work on the exam, I couldn't even understand what to do! Thankfully, I woke up and realized that I no longer have to take examinations.

That's another type of recurring dreams for me: somehow I'm far behind on completing academic requirements, like missing many months of classes, or ignoring exam dates and such. After a few minutes awake I still have to convince myself that it's been a while since I was in college. I have no, and likely will never have any academic tests to take!  Why do I still have a lingering "student fear" after all these decades?

I have dreams like that as well, which I never did when I was actually a student.

[MWBailey]

Posted this on FB a few days ago.

I had been doing some heavy duty yardwork out in the relative heat. Not really "hot," just around 90 F or so (that's relatively normal for Houston in June). I'm more or less acclimatized for lighter activities. Just not for cutting down, yanking out the little stumps and hoeing up the bigger stumps of shrubbery killed in the recent jetstream-driven arctic weather event. As quickly as possible, beause of things that needed doing right after that chore.

Anyhow,  after finishing all the yardwork chores for the day and coming inside, I sat down in front of the computer to eat my lunch and watch a mine exploration video.

I seem to have dozed off; I awoke (or rather, was awakened by my folks) from a dream about encountering a lady friend of mine and her unidentified, dashing, eyepatched beau, while exploring an abandoned house (Kind of jealous here, and I don't look as good as he did, whoever the !@#$ he was, in an eyepatch. That really bothered me in the dream for some reason). Right before the folks woke me up, my ladyfriend pointed to where our respective cars were parked on the deserted street, and I pointed toward my folks' car, which was speeding off into the distance. I had not realized they were there until that moment.

And then I heard the folks calling my name, and I awoke to Mom poking my knee and telling me I really ought to go get ready for the Bluegrass jam I was going to that night.

Had a great jam that night, by the way...

[J. Wilhelm]

I can understand why some people have regarded dreams as a portal to another existence. The only thing that ruins that perception for me is that I've become aware (thanks to sleep paralysis) that not all of the parts of my brain are working at the same time during the dreams.

The level of brain function will vary from dream to dream. I think that's what makes good dreams: when you have as many parts of the brain active at the same time.

One of the dreams from childhood that I've never forgotten is one in which I was travelling through a great black chasm, mounted on a very large (as in building size) multi-colored monolith. The monolith was one of many monoliths moving at many levels over one another and at different rates of speed, though at that scale they seemed to move slowly.

All the monoliths in this universe were comprised of or decorated with bright colored geometric shapes. If you looked ahead toward direction of motion, you could see countless monoliths fading into small bright spots as far as the eye could see. If you looked down you could see these gigantic monoliths moving underneath the one you were on. There was no bottom one could see, but somehow there was a gravitational attraction that kept all the monoliths travelling in the same orientation (horizontal with the long side in the direction of motion). The dream had no end and no beginning. You just were there.

It does sound like some of the dreams described by HP Lovecraft.

[Deimos]

...It does sound like some of the dreams described by HP Lovecraft.

I've read about a dozen HP Lovecraft stories, including At the Mountains of Madness.
Never again; those were enough to last me a lifetime.
Someone once described Lovecraft stories as portraying human existence perpetually perched on the edge of a screaming abyss.
Can't say I disagree. His stuff is so unsettling that I no longer keep any of his works in my house.
I think that if I began having Lovecraftian dreams I should go mad (which was the typical fate of not a few of his characters).

[J. Wilhelm]

I can't say that I was disturbed that much by his stories. I found some of them quasi comical. His choice for main characters was... Well, they always fainted. I read some of his stories in Spanish when I was in junior high school or high school, and back then I could take the stories more seriously. But when I revisited HP Lovecraft as a (Steampunk) adult, at first I found his peculiar antiquarian language comically dense and actually I had to take breaks from reading his longer stories, because the pace of the text was so dense, it was like listening to a really annoying person talk for hours. After a while, I got used to the pace and density of the text, and I was able to focus on the story, though one absurdity after another would make me pause and wonder if such a wimpy character would be possible in real life.

Lovecraft was trying to mix his dreams into the story during his early period (Search for Unknown Kaddath?) and that is called his Dream Sequence. Then later he deepened into the Cosmic Horror genre, while trying to introduce Satanism and Pagan religion as a human superstition, which was the direct result of successful manipulation of humanity by evil ancient aliens (The Old Ones, Deep Ones, Cthulhu, Migo Race). The aliens had their own mythology and associated (naturally evil) religions, and deities, some of them minor gods or demi gods, like the Prince of Darkness, Nyarlathotep, supreme deities such as the Outer Gods, headed by the Blind Idiot Azathot, supposedly the "supreme god" of all the deities at the center of the universe, and at least one reference to human satanism, the Shub Niggurath, "The Goat with a Thousand Young."

How much this scares a reader... I guess that depends on how young or susceptible the reader is. Lovecraft himself was not too serious about it. I should point out that HP Lovecraft was a consummate, if not militant atheist, and he regarded all religion as a type of superstition in humanity, brought about by fear of the unknown, a trait that in his stories aliens successfully exploited in order to control (and sometimes gastronomically consume) humanity. That is the basis of Cosmic Horror, and you still see that in the Aliens movie franchise and the artwork of the late HR Giger, which was part of the Aliens movies.

HP Lovecraft also was a failed scholar, and by that I mean he was always too poor or disadvantaged to obtain a higher education in college. He dreamed of being a scholar or a tenured professor at a university, hence his main characters were always scholars (Miskatonic University). He was surrounded by scientific discovery on the Edwardian Era and the 1920s, including Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the Discovery of Pluto and later Hubble's discovery of galaxies. The Antarctic was still unexplored completely. So all of those things he tried to incorporate into his stories.

He could not comprehend the Lorentz Transformation used by Einstein in the Theory of Relativity too well, so he interpreted that as "Non Euclidean Geometries" and "Higher Dimensional" geometries which formed the basis of his lost alien cities and were a natural environs for Cthulhu and the Hounds of Tindalos. He may even have dabbled unwittingly into Dark Matter (that was not considered in physics back yet), when he described chronological eras when certain higher dimensional beings like Cthulhu would become visible "when the stars were right."

In The Dreams at the Witch House, you see a little bit of everything, Non-Euclidean angles, Nyarlathotep, satanic witchcraft, interdimensional transport to other planets, including a description of the environs of different planets, like higher gravity, multiple star systems, aliens and alien cities. All unlocked by human sacrifice, of course  

Personally, I thought Lovecraft was most interesting when he was mentally travelling to other planets, and that's the part I found most interesting. His description of a planet with higher gravity, for example. The alien civilization in a triple star system. I would have liked to read more about that. It took me a long time to remember which story of his I had read as a kid which talked about space travel... It was the Dreams at the Witch House story, which includes that sequence with the giant monoliths which I had dreamt as a kid before I even read the story. The story made an impression in me as a teenager, because Lovecraft described that monolith dream so vividly, though his geometric shapes are smaller than mine by a good margin. But I forgot all about it for decades. It would be many years later (very recently actually) when I would finally find which story it was which talked about the monoliths.

I would have liked Lovecraft's writing better if he had dedicated his writing to pure science fiction. You can keep the Goat with a Thousand Young out of it, IMHO.

PS I'm still looking for a Hound of Tindalos plushie, but apparently they're collective and extremely difficult to find 

[Deimos]

I can't say that I was disturbed that much by his stories. I found some of them quasi comical. His choice for main characters was... Well, they always fainted. I read some of his stories in Spanish when I was in junior high school or high school, and back then I could take the stories more seriously. But when I revisited HP Lovecraft as a (Steampunk) adult, at first I found his peculiar antiquarian language comically dense and actually I had to take breaks from reading his longer stories, because the pace of the text was so dense, it was like listening to a really annoying person talk for hours. After a while, I got used to the pace and density of the text, and I was able to focus on the story, though one absurdity after another would make me pause and wonder if such a wimpy character would be possible in real life.

I could be wrong about this but I seem to recall something about a modern day publisher abridging HPL  stories; i.e.cutting down on all the "extraneous text."
(Who determines what parts are extraneous and on what criteria?)
Or maybe that only applied to the audio books.   

Lovecraft was trying to mix his dreams into the story during his early period (Search for Unknown Kaddath?) and that is called his Dream Sequence. Then later he deepened into the Cosmic Horror genre, while trying to introduce Satanism and Pagan religion as a human superstition, which was the direct result of successful manipulation of humanity by evil ancient aliens (The Old Ones, Deep Ones, Cthulhu, Migo Race). The aliens had their own mythology and associated (naturally evil) religions, and deities, some of them minor gods or demi gods, like the Prince of Darkness, Nyarlathotep, supreme deities such as the Outer Gods, headed by the Blind Idiot Azathot, supposedly the "supreme god" of all the deities at the center of the universe, and at least one reference to human satanism, the Shub Niggurath, "The Goat with a Thousand Young."

How much this scares a reader... I guess that depends on how young or susceptible the reader is. Lovecraft himself was not too serious about it. I should point out that HP Lovecraft was a consummate, if not militant atheist, and he regarded all religion as a type of superstition in humanity, brought about by fear of the unknown, a trait that in his stories aliens successfully exploited in order to control (and sometimes gastronomically consume) humanity. That is the basis of Cosmic Horror, and you still see that in the Aliens movie franchise and the artwork of the late HR Giger, which was part of the Aliens movies.

It was mostly his short stories. After reading The Rats in the Walls I slept with the light on.
I recall The Dunwich Horror unsettled me. The Mountains of Madness has to do with the Old/Deep Ones.
Also The Shadow Over Innsmouth comes to mind, but I think I blocked a lot of that story from memory. 
Rod Serling said that Lovecraft had an early influence on him.

HP Lovecraft also was a failed scholar, and by that I mean he was always too poor or disadvantaged to obtain a higher education in college. He dreamed of being a scholar or a tenured professor at a university, hence his main characters were always scholars (Miskatonic University). He was surrounded by scientific discovery on the Edwardian Era and the 1920s, including Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the Discovery of Pluto and later Hubble's discovery of galaxies. The Antarctic was still unexplored completely. So all of those things he tried to incorporate into his stories.

He could not comprehend the Lorentz Transformation used by Einstein in the Theory of Relativity too well, so he interpreted that as "Non Euclidean Geometries" and "Higher Dimensional" geometries which formed the basis of his lost alien cities and were a natural environs for Cthulhu and the Hounds of Tindalos. He may even have dabbled unwittingly into Dark Matter (that was not considered in physics back yet), when he described chronological eras when certain higher dimensional beings like Cthulhu would become visible "when the stars were right."

In The Dreams at the Witch House, you see a little bit of everything, Non-Euclidean angles, Nyarlathotep, satanic witchcraft, interdimensional transport to other planets, including a description of the environs of different planets, like higher gravity, multiple star systems, aliens and alien cities. All unlocked by human sacrifice, of course  

Personally, I thought Lovecraft was most interesting when he was mentally traveling to other planets, and that's the part I found most interesting. His description of a planet with higher gravity, for example. The alien civilization in a triple star system. I would have liked to read more about that. It took me a long time to remember which story of his I had read as a kid which talked about space travel... It was the Dreams at the Witch House story, which includes that sequence with the giant monoliths which I had dreamt as a kid before I even read the story. The story made an impression in me as a teenager, because Lovecraft described that monolith dream so vividly, though his geometric shapes are smaller than mine by a good margin. But I forgot all about it for decades. It would be many years later (very recently actually) when I would finally find which story it was which talked about the monoliths.

I would have liked Lovecraft's writing better if he had dedicated his writing to pure science fiction. You can keep the Goat with a Thousand Young out of it, IMHO.

PS I'm still looking for a Hound of Tindalos plushie, but apparently they're collective and extremely difficult to find 

[J. Wilhelm]

I hope no one abridged his works, but I do know that his archaic use of English didn't survive translation. That's an aspect I discovered when reading the stories in English. The Dunwich Horror was the first story I read in high-school. Another one was the Music of Erich Zann, and the Dreams at the Witch House. There were many anthologies put together after his death, so it depends on which one you read. Later a few years ago, I found an online source with a number of his stories, and that's where I read most of the stories.


This is the source I found:

http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/

[Hurricane Annie]

My sleep patterns are very disrupted. I sleep in blocks with stretches of wakefulness  in the night. The best dreams are in the shorter sleep in the morning around dawn.

2nd hand shops have occasionally popped up in my dreams. I currently voluteer in a charity shop. Which may have inspired this particular dream.

  In the dream the store  had amalgamated to a larger store. It was like a big 1960s /70 furnishing / department store. It was in a larger town or city than I currently live in. I went in, it was vast.  It was full of racks and shelves of amazing retro treasures.  Every iconic trend of the era  was in there.  Cane furniture, bark cloth, jungle prints, art, lamps, furniture, old House & Garden magazines vintage clothing, bold patterned bedding.

I wanted to buy a few things. Furniture bric a brac etc.. The clothing and furniture I wanted was there in front of me. When I reached out to grab it, the pieces of furniture came apart as I reached for it. The clothing disappeared as I reached out for it.

[Sorontar]

Did you tumble into the back of the wardrobe and end up in Narnia?

[Hurricane Annie]

Did you tumble into the back of the wardrobe and end up in Narnia?

No I didn't.!!! I was totally ripped off!!!

[Hurricane Annie]

Did you tumble into the back of the wardrobe and end up in Narnia?

Something or someone is censoring out the bulk of the body of my post

[Hurricane Annie]

Did you tumble into the back of the wardrobe and end up in Narnia?

Did you tumble into the back of the wardrobe and end up in Narnia?

No I didn't.!!! I was totally ripped off!!!

Just got a dusty nostalgia  trip back to 1976 among the dust and cobwebs.

missed out on the peacock bedhead, drawers and matching screen... and the shower curtain I can't recall but it had something amazing on it...

Clockwork orange in marine greens. It was vivid technicolour 

There were carved wooden salad sets. Politically incorrect paintings and artworks. Tacky  Ethnic tourist souvenirs. Standard lamps and curio bric a brac. Faux art nouveauBlue, turquoise and green floral patterned curtains and sheets. Candlewick and jacquard  bed beadcivers. Polyester suits and frocks, walk shorts and socks. Brightly coloured bras n knickers. Panama hats  floppy sun hats. Tennic shoes and cricket whites. Leather jackets and pants. Vinyl lounge, dining and bedroom sets

In New Zealand  back in the day we had Farmers, Irvin  & Stern,  Smith & Brown's, Smith & Cougheys, George Courts to window shop in for household goods

A Biba and Liberty would have been a fabulous dream...




 

[J. Wilhelm]

I couldn't sleep well this last night. Ended up sleeping all morning instead (day off). I can't quite remember the last dream... But I know it involved a lawsuit claiming emotional damage by way of ukulele!

[J. Wilhelm]

There's a couple of dreams, one I had a few years ago, and one I experienced just last night, where I dream that I am in the near future and climb into some sort of transport technology which is both impressive and horrific, due to the speed or distance it travels.

Future Elevator

I was inside an elevator going down. The inside of the elevator was finished in brushed steel panels and featured pneumatic sliding doors in the front and back of the interior. I was standing by the front door next to the left side panel, which was a black computer screen with some graphics on it.

The elevator accelerated downward at incredible speeds. As the elevator accelerated downward you could feel getting lighter. Your body would become near weightless until the acceleration ceased and the elevator traveled at a constant speed, however fast that was. Over the screen top there was a number display, a large LED styled display pane with the floor number. The only thing is that the display had many digits, it featured more that 6 significant figures, but I couldn't tell how long the number panel was because the unlit digits were hiding behind black-smoked glass.

The left panel featured a moving computer graphic, like a "tree," not unlike the graphics used for the British Underground or the Mexican Metro system, but also resembling evolutionary branches in biology. The vertical trunk of the tree featured many perpendicular branches of many colours with a great deal of names written in small letters. It dawned on me that each level of the vertical trunk of the graph had horizontal levels as well. The number of levels would appear and disappear as needed, because the number of floors traversed by the elevator was not a few hundred or even thousands, but more like hundreds of thousands of levels, and maybe a few hundred horizontal locations per level.

Every now and then you'd experience a prolonged deceleration, after which the elevator would stop and either would change direction to travel horizontally or would come to a full stop and someone would get off the front or rear door. The landscape outside of the elevator was always fairly alien. The doors would sometimes open to an exterior landscape like a desert, a jungle or a mountainous environment. A few opened up to hellish locations like a volcano or a river of lava. Through the back, the elevator would open to the interior of some futuristic habitat. The interior of some building or perhaps even a spaceship, I imagined, but I couldn't tell. All I saw was many lights, humans and robots running about when the back door opened. No alien lifeforms I could discern, which perhaps meant that I was on Earth.

As hours passed, I became alarmed that my destination was perhaps too far underground, if that was the right word, for really, I didn't know where I was going. Not knowing gnawed at me. Was it a level underground or was I travelling in time to some geologic era of earth? The most foreboding landscapes I saw when the elevators opened at some given level scared me into thinking that maybe these were the many levels of hell some people had talked about. But I wouldn't know if I was traveling through time, space or the afterlife, as the letters in the graphic were completely unintelligible to me. The multi-colored display was not much help to me, as I didn't know my destination. At that time, as I pondered my destiny, downward pointing diagonal lines appeared on the graph, and the elevator began to accelerate diagonally.

I'm afraid that was the end of the dream. I don't remember if I ever got to my destination...

The Airport Bus

As I got off my connecting flight at the airport terminal, I knew I had to walk fast to catch my next flight. The ticket did not indicate which terminal I had to go next, and instead it pointed to a public transport system within the airport, which was of considerable size, similar to the Dallas Ft. Worth system.

Finally, I sat inside what looked like a futuristic electric tram. The interior was covered in carpet and dimly lit. The windows were smoked so you couldn't see the exterior landscape too well. Sometimes these trams will cross the interior of the airport, sometimes they'll move about the exterior of the airport before reaching the terminal. As the tram began moving a computer screen on the inside next to me displayed all sorts of information. It naturally listed arrivals and departures, but also other information on hotels and taxi and public transport. In front of me another screen displayed broadcast television.

After about 15 minutes I noticed that the ride was becoming less smooth. "That's strange" I thought. "I thought we were riding on rails." I tried to look out through the smoky plastic windows, but I couldn't see the airport buildings or terminals. Suddenly, it dawned on me that the tram has left the airport and it was riding on the city roads! There was no one in the tram besides me as far as I could see, so I figured this tram was automated. But where was I going? I needed to connect to my next flight!

Somehow amidst my desperation I saw that the television screen was playing an episode of Star Trek TNG. Captain Picard was barking orders in the middle of some battle with Romulans or some such alien race. Captain Picard then screamed "Computer," ans proceeded to give instructions to the Space Ship Enterprises all knowing all seeing on-board computer.

So I thought "these are modern times, the tram is probably computer controlled." I was worth a try, so I stood up in the middje of the tram looking to the ceiling and shouted "Computer, where is my destination? Where are you taking me?!"

At which time a bloke's head emerged from one end of the tram. Apparently I hadn't been alone. "Settle down mate, and sit down! Your next flight departs from another airport. I'm taking you there!" I sat down in utter embarrassment.

[MWBailey]

I hope no one abridged his works, but I do know that his archaic use of English didn't survive translation. That's an aspect I discovered when reading the stories in English. The Dunwich Horror was the first story I read in high-school. Another one was the Music of Erich Zann, and the Dreams at the Witch House. There were many anthologies put together after his death, so it depends on which one you read. Later a few years ago, I found an online source with a number of his stories, and that's where I read most of the stories.


This is the source I found:

http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/

I don't consider it "abridgement" (hopefully I didn't coin a corny new word, there  ), but Lovecraft is where I got most of the Schtick and Shlock for my Brantley and Eddie Beltane RP characterizations.

Truth be told, though I'd still like to write a novel or short story about Brantley, A.U.N.T.S.A.L.L.Y. and all of that, I'm actually kind of glad to have stopped writing such things. You kind of have to put your head into the same universe where Lovecraft's was, and mix it with Dr. Who-like tweakings of fictional realities  in order to write that kind of thing, or at least I do.

"Strange Latitudes" only scratches the surface of the kind of mental weirdness that ensues when I do that *shudder*.

[J. Wilhelm]

It can get rather monotonous to have to immense yourself in that world. I don't know if I'd ever finish a long novel, precisely because of that. The best I've done is to slowly build up a backstory so I can use that as a template later on. That's why it's so much easier to write about dreams, because you're literally working on autopilot and then you wake up; the only battle you have to fight is remembering the dream.

[von Corax]

I just dreamt about getting my second Covid vaccination. That's all the dream was: I got the shot, then I told people about it.

[Synistor 303]

I just dreamt about getting my second Covid vaccination. That's all the dream was: I got the shot, then I told people about it.

That's exactly what happened to me!! Only in real life! 

Last night I dreamt I was offered a job by the Wiggles. The job offer came in the form of a child's jigsaw puzzle and was really funny. It was a really high paying administration job (2mil plus per annum), but it was based in Chicago, so I decided not to take it...

My brain is weird.

[J. Wilhelm]

I just dreamt about getting my second Covid vaccination. That's all the dream was: I got the shot, then I told people about it.

That's exactly what happened to me!! Only in real life! 

Last night I dreamt I was offered a job by the Wiggles. The job offer came in the form of a child's jigsaw puzzle and was really funny. It was a really high paying administration job (2mil plus per annum), but it was based in Chicago, so I decided not to take it...

My brain is weird.

I had to look up who the Wiggles are. That's an interesting job test.

[Sorontar]

And here I was thinking that the Wiggles were one of Australia's greatest exports since a man with three legs. I just like that their previous band's name was the Cockroaches.

I am glad I don't dream about entertainers in skivvies or formidable insects.

Sorontar

[Ceir]

I typically only remember the really weird ones, at least long enough to jot something down. I'll have to dig up that notebook, because they get really bizarre - but they typically involve impending pain or death of some kind.

The other one I can usually remember is nothing so strange - just frequent enough that I can parse "oh another one of these" as I'm waking up. They're my "failure" dreams - I'm back at an old job, or an old house; trying to find something or do something. And of course, per standard dream tropes, nothing works - I can't find the thing, I can't make something work, people don't listen to me. Everything just...fails. And about the time I start getting super upset in-scene is when my brain kicks over and I wake up.

If dreams are your brain trying to defragment itself, I'm not sure I want to know what's going on up there.