Your Mom Was a Marmoset

I had this dream the other night. In it, I was going to an airport with my friend Wil to pick up this other friend of ours, Samantha, or Sam. We’re at the airport, but the airport is more like this open Roman Colliseum type of building. Huge. The only way to leave the airport is to cross this gigantic body of water, which I can see in the distance. I can see all this traffic of people in lanes going back and forth across this enormous lake/ocean thing.

So, we have my friend Sam with us, and she’s all excited to be there. I say something like, “How are we going to get across the water over there?” (I don’t see any motors on the boats or people using paddles or anything. She turns to me, all exasperated, and says, “Uh, MARMOSETS?!?!?!” Like, how did I NOT know this?! She explains that the marmosets walk on the bottom of the lake/ocean thing and pull the boats across by pulling a string that is attached. I mean, DUH! Of course! Marmosets walking under water make the fucking boats go, Margot… Jesus. Are you an IDIOT to NOT know this?!?!

So, we get into a boat, and I have a look down into the water. Sure enough… marmosets as far as the eye can see… in lanes, underwater, pulling boats with a string. EXCEPT… the marmosets have koala faces and muppet/fraggle-like bodies complete with potbellies. They’re really small, like the size of a small lap dog. SOOOOO cute. Oh, and they are lime green. Of course! This is EXACTLY what a marmoset is! (I sort of recall, in my dream, kind of going… “Are we absolutely sure these are marmosets?”… everyone was sure.)

So… going across the water… checking out the scene… we get to the other side of the lake/ocean thing… there are HUGE boulders at the “shore.” I watch as the marmosets crawl up out of the water, over the boulders and shake off the water. So cute. So very lime green. Mmmmm. Marmosets of cuteness…

THEN, I hear this snarky, gruff man’s voice from off to my left. He’s complaining about “All these goddamned marmosets everywhere…” I turn to see who the dude with the problem is. It’s this guy with a dwarf’s head. So there’s this snarky pissed-off dwarf guy coming out of the water… “Goddamned marmosets! They’re EVERYWHERE! Acting out, I say! Not following their natural behavior patterns at ALL!”…. then, with a bit of horror, I find as the dwarf headed guy gets out of the water that HE HAS A LIME GREEN MARMOSET BODY!!!!!

I’m like… “That guy needs to shut up! Talking all this smack about the marmosets…” Then I yell at him, “You’re MOM was a marmoset, dude! Shut up!!!” Then to that, he says, “Yeah, well it’s because of all these damned cameras… People just HAVE to show up with their video cameras, and then the critters all go all SHOWBIZ on us”… (suddenly there are people there doing a documentary on the marmosets, and dwarf-headed marmoset-hater is yelling at them)

No sooner does the snarky dwarf say “Showbiz”, then
all the marmosets crawl out of the water and start singing and dancing in a Fraggle Rock type manner.

Next… we’re suddenly on land, only it’s NYC… and the streets are like Venice, and we have to take a water-taxi. It’s like a regular taxi cab, but it floats. We go down this one “Street” and I see this REALLY ornate Chinese Restaruant that is being built. It’s amazing… Like, 30 stories high… in the shape of a big swirly Hersey’s Kiss… there’s all this Art Nouveau outer decorative stuff on the building… I just keep staring at it. Then this old lady gets into our cab and keeps giving me the Stink Eye… She’s hating on me for some reason, like it’s pissing her off that I keep looking at this Chinese Building…Then, she says, “You know, the mermaids don’t like it when you step on them!”

the end

[submitted by Margot Moulton]

Bear Dream: Part 1

My last year in college I had this recurring dream about a bear. I have had recurring dreams before but this one was different because it happened in episodes… when they came the story would pick up where it left off. I will start with the first episode:

In my dream I found myself by a vast lake surrounded by a meadow with beautiful mountains in the distance. There was a camp set up. Tent, grill, clothes line. I looked around and my mother was there. We were camping in this beautiful place and everything was good between us. We were not fighting or arguing, just having a peaceful time by this lake. My mother was cooking dinner – at sunset. The sky is still blue and light but just about to change color and I can see a star or two and the moon is out already. I am building a fire – getting ready for the night time. We are all alone. I don’t know how we got here – but it is known in my dream that we are really far away from civilization – in the middle of nowhere. Me and my mother.

As we are doing our activities separately we do not talk or anything… I think my mom is humming something… some Irish lullaby to herself. Peaceful. Quiet.

As I finish the fire I go to get something from the tent. When I look up to start walking I catch a glimpse of my mom who is standing up straight in total fear. I look where she is looking and in the bush near our camp there is a huge bear… rummaging for berries. I freeze. Terrified. What the hell do I do? I have never seen a bear before and have no idea. And furthermore I am freaking out that I am going to witness my mother’s demise at the jaws of a bear. She is closer and tastier than I am… she had just been cooking and smells of food. We do not move. We do not make a peep. We just stand there fighting with every ounce of our beings to not be noticed. I think to myself… “Just turn around, don’t see us, don’t see us.. just go just go…”…

The bear catches our scent. His head turns towards my mother, then he looks at me. We stay perfectly still. The bear studies us for quite a while. Like he had never seen our kind before… deciding what to do with us. My heart feels like it is going to jump out of my ass.

My mom finally can’t take it anymore and says, “Sasha, don’t breathe, it’s going to be ok.”

As soon as she let out her voice it was like a trigger for the bear who starts to move towards us with a “don’t fuck with me or i will kill you” type of air. The bear moves very slow towards us. He is very close to my mother and could easily pounce on her. He then stands on his hind legs. Show off.

I don’t want to look. But I do. And when I look I notice that the bear has a placard around his neck. He is standing on his hind legs as if for us to read the sign.

It reads like this:
(picture of bear with this text below)
- BEWARE OF BEARS
-WHAT TO DO IN CASE YOU ENCOUNTER A BEAR
(picture of a ferocious bear eating a person)
- do not look the bear in the eyes
(picture of person staring at a bear with laser beam eyes – bear getting pissed)
- make lots of noise
(picture of people dancing in the fashion of “where the wild things are” banging pots and pans, one guy is even blowing a whistle)
- make yourself BIG
(picture of a little old lady stretching out her limbs (starfish style) – eyes wide – tongue out)
- do NOT offer food
(picture of man offering a bear a sandwich with one hand, bear eating his other)
- do not run away
(picture of people running a screaming…. ferocious pissed off bear on their tails about to kill them all)
- and NEVER EVER think that the bear is your friend
(picture of a little golden locked girl handing a bear a present… behind her another bear is about to eat her)

He stood still as we read. And as soon as we were finished he let out a HUGE growl. I have probably peed in my pants at least 5 times but this time was the shitter. What the fuck were we doing here? What the fuck are we going to do? I start looking around… for ANYTHING… SOMETHING to save us… then I see the cooler with our food. Steaks…. yes Steaks…. then I look at the lake… yes Lake… but the sign said to NOT run and NOT feed the bears… but what the hell else are we going to do? Fuck it.

I slowly go into the cooler and remove ALL of the meat and food and whatever I think the bear would like and start throwing it far away from us and the lake. At first the bear is pissed. My mother at this point looks like a scared little child crying and shriveled and lost. I keep throwing and then I start screaming… this “wakes” my mom up and she starts screaming as well… we are jumping around and screaming and i am throwing food… the bear is a little confused… who is in control?… what happened? dumb bear…

he gets a whiff of the food and starts to slowly go for it… still keeping his eyes on us. But as soon as he eats a steak and then a peanut butter sandwich he is engrossed in the food.

I look at my mom. We stare for a half a second and it is known what we are going to do.

We run for the lake. Run into it… run as fast as we can to get out of the shallow parts where the bear could still get us. The bear notices our escape and starts after us. Never run from a bear. We are far enough out to start swimming. We swim and swim and swim… The bear tries but is too clumsy to go any further.

Finally safe in the water we look back to land. Our camp in now the bear’s. He is sitting eating our food… by the light of the fire. We are cold and wet and it is dark. But we made it away from the bear.

Neither of us say anything. We just lay in the middle of the vast lake – safe, looking at the stars.

TO BE CONTINUED…

[submitted by Sasha]

Kangaroo Prison Break

I dreamed I was a flying kangaroo who had just escaped from kangaroo prison. It was hard to fly (kangaroos not being particularly aerodynamic) but I could do it.

[submitted by mercurygirl]

Sleep Experiments for Kids

There are some Sleep and Dreaming Experiments on the Neuroscience for Kids website that look like they’d be interesting for adults, too. For instance, try the following at home to measure how long it takes you to fall asleep:

Write down the time you get into bed. When you are in bed trying to get to sleep, hold a metal spoon over a plate on the floor. When you fall asleep, your muscles will relax and the spoon will fall out of your hand. The noise of the spoon hitting the plate should wake you up. Write down the time you woke up. The difference between the time you got into bed and time you woke up is your sleep latency.

If the spoon misses the plate, you may not wake up. You could substitute a large metal cookie sheet if this happens.

In college, I had a physicist/sculptor/installation artist friend who would do something similar to this when he was pulling all-nighters. When he couldn’t stay awake any longer, but didn’t have time for a proper nap, he’d sit upright in a chair, holding a metal pen in his hand as loosely as possible, then close his eyes and relax. The moment he fell asleep, the pen would drop onto the floor, waking him up, and he’d go back to studying.

Austria’s Finest Lobotomy

I dreamt that I’d saved up a lot of money, and was going to cure my cyclical depression once and for all. My plan for accomplishing this was to get Sigmund Freud to see me as his patient.

Freud looked pretty much the way you’d imagine Freud to look, but he was wearing these very weird, angular, novelty sunglasses.

Time moved very strangely in the dream, and it seemed like the next moment I was strapped to this chair with Freud poking around in my brain. He’d removed the top of my skull, you see, and was just prodding my brain and muttering to himself.

Before I knew it, I was wandering around with my girlfriend, who was holding my hand and warning me to watch my step. We were in Prospect Park, and people were playing Frisbee and running about, and we were afraid that someone would knock into me, causing my head to unhinge and my brains to fall out.

My vision was sort of blurry and I was seeing double, and everything seemed very confusing. I couldn’t tell if this was because of the anesthesia or because Freud had craftily lobotomized me. I feared it was the latter, and kept trying to explain to my girlfriend that I should have refused treatment, but the words wouldn’t come.

[submitted by R.]

I dream in Morrissey’s Singing Voice

We watched Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep before bed, so I don’t know if that cancels out my dream or what.

All I know is I was returning from a long trip (not sure where), so there was a period of time where I was separating out clean vs. dirty shirts. I also took a jet lagged shower and tried to rest. Maybe it was a dream within a dream?

Anyway, then I was at a radio station with lots of punk rock alternative rock/ indie rock cred, and they were playing a really obscure Jerry Garcia cover of a Smiths song, and in reality I hate Jerr Bear, but in the dream it was a beautiful, melancholy cover of a song that doesn’t actually exist. It was heartbreaking and lovely.

Then Cindy Lauper was there, asking me what kind of music I like, and I was explaining that normally I like just about everything BUT the Grateful Dead, but that I really liked that cover. Then the Morrissey record I was trying to play kept repeating itself and started getting heavy interference from somewhere so I was forced to turn it off.

Suddenly the radio station was actually in a cove off the coast, but, while the water was cold, it wasn’t freezing, and Cindy and Madonna were kind of hanging out in the shallows. There was still music playing equipment and stuff everywhere. Madonna was talking about how she was really working on meditation, and so far she was okay with her stomach and (something else, I forget what). It was unspoken but implied that she needed to work on fear of death, and Cindy said, “well, you’ve got like 15 years, yeah?”. We all got bummed at the realization that everyone must die and that a lot of the heros (and parents) of my generation are coming towards their last years.

[submitted by Jessamyn]

Peeling Off the Face of Popeye the Sailor Man

Somehow I had stumbled upon a special power/technique which allowed me to peel a person’s face off. The face would come off top to bottom, like a wound string, leaving them unharmed.

In my hands the string would unwind, leaving a mask that weighed nothing, had no mass or volume, and was permeable to light. Excited, I busied myself building something out of the faces, some bullshit art thing, although this is very unclear now.

At some point I decided to pull my own face off. It came off easily and painlessly, but was the face of Popeye the Sailor Man.

I remember thinking that it was strange that he had appeared complete with his trademark pipe, because technically that was not part of his face or mine. I immediately knew what to do. I rotated Popeye’s face 90 degrees to the right and the silvery specter took on the unmistakable appearance of the snout of a rat. Then, instantaneously, it transformed into a fully 3 dimensional rodent; its jaws opening and closing in slow motion.

I am left with the feeling that this rodent was very ancient and somehow both amusing and powerful. I repeated this process several times to test it; pull off my face: Popeye. 90 degrees: rodent. Pull of my face, Popeye, 90 degrees, rodent, pull off my face, Popeye, 90 degrees, rodent . . .

[submitted by T.D.]

Dream Machine

Brion Gysin (1918–1986) was a British-born artist and bon vivant who, amongst other things, invented a device called the dream machine in the 1960s.

Like many intellectuals of the day, Gysin was interested in experimenting with his consciousness. Gysin theorized that flickering light, viewed with the eyes closed, can affect the brain’s electrical impulses.

Flicker may prove to be a valid instrument of practical psychology: some people see and others do not. The Dreamachine with its patterns visible to the open eyes, induces people to see. The fluctuating elements of flickered design support the development of autonomous ‘movies’, intensely pleasurable and, possibly, instructive to the viewer.

—Brion Gysin

Construction of the dream machine was simple—a cardboard cylinder, with holes cut in it at specific intervals, is placed on a revolving turntable, and a light is lowered into it. The viewer sits in front of the dream machine with their eyes closed. In theory, the flicker provided by the revolving cylinder provokes the brain into producing alpha waves.

From Wikipedia:

Alpha waves are . . . predominantly found to originate from the occipital lobe during periods of relaxation, with eyes closed but still awake. Conversely alpha waves are attenuated with open eyes as well as by drowsiness and sleep. They are thought to represent the activity of the visual cortex in an idle state . . . Increased alpha activities have been reported in persons practicing both Yoga and Zen

If you would like to contruct your own dream machine, instructions for a 45rpm version are available here, in both Mac and PC versions, thanks to www.permuted.org.uk.

Please note that we at Idle Brains lack the arts and crafts skills to construct one of these ourselves, an as such cannot vouch for the efficacy of the dream machine. Please note that the dream machine produces flickering light, and may therefore be unsuitable for those with epilepsy.

You can easily find a lot of information about Brion Gysin on the internets, and a fascinating interview with him can be found in this RE/Search book, which also includes interviews with Gysin’s long-time friend and collaborator William S. Burroughs.

Green Pills and Pink Pills

I am somewhere on planet earth, minding my own business, when it becomes apparent that some force, aliens perhaps, have infected the entire human race with a incurable virus that will kill everyone sometime within the next 24 hours.

There is no cure, no possible way of finding the cure, and no one knows exactly how you’ll die. In short, there’s no escape. After running around trying to confirm this, I am somehow convinced that it is true.

An old man approaches me and offers me the choice between two types of pills. They both look like liquid tablets: one is green, like Advil liquid tablets, the other pink, like bleached Dayquil tabs. The green pills will kill you, quickly and painlessly, and the pink will make you immune to any anxiety you may feel.

The old man wouldn’t tell me which ones he himself had taken. But I looked at the pills in his hands and then took the green ones from him. He walked away and I looked around for a bit and then swallowed the green pills. I crawled under a hedge similar to the one my grandmother has at her house and quietly died.

There was some floating consciousness of myself watching as the rest of the world passed away, but it was unempathetic. Being dead, it seems, was just as effective of an anxiety cure as those pink pills.

[submitted by Anonymous]

Man On Wing With Gun

This image was submitted to Idle Brains without explaination.

[submitted by Nate Jasper]