Nurse Spasm has a talent for dreaming... She dreams in color, she can taste and touch, she can even feel pain in her dreams.
All of us dream, but few of us remember them. Nurse Spasm does remember them. In fact, sometimes she even does "Lucid Dreaming", where she is aware she is dreaming, yet she can direct and control the dream and where it goes.

With her permission, I have begun to make a record of her significant dreams and post them here.
This section may not always be scary. It will rarely make sense. But it will usually be interesting.

As you will see, Nurse Spasm has quite an imagination...

Dream 11: Another short-but-sweet dream, with overtones of Monty Python, for those in the know...

Nurse Spasm is walking through the woods with a companion when she suddenly hears the sound "meep!". Soon "meeping" is heard all around them and she says "What is making that sound?!" Suddenly, out of the underbrush and shrubbery, she sees a frog leaping past, just as it utters another "Meep!" Nurse Spasm turns to her companion, and in all seriousness says "Oh! These are the frogs that go Meep!"

Even in the dream, the Monty Python connection seems to crystallize, as she wonders to herself... "I thought they were supposed to be knights..." And the frogs were huge!... like the size of a dinner plate!

...

Dream 10: A very succinct dream about laundry and poor building construction. Contender for a short film award.

Nurse Spasm is doing her laundry in the first floor laundry room. Suddenly the washing machine goes off balance and begins to rock and dance furiously, making an incredible racket. Suddenly, the machine crashes through the floor! Nurse Spasm leans over the edge of the hole, only to watch in sick amazement as her laundry sinks into the earth, crashing through basement after basement, subbasement after subbasement, until it is too deep to see. No mean feat for a first floor apartment!

...

Dream 9 - Snippets:

Snippet 1: Snippets are the interesting bits and pieces of dreams left on the beach of memory, after the tide of sleep has rolled back... These snippets come from different nights, and both involve wetlands and endangered species, with a few clergy and grocery store owners thrown in for good measure.

Nurse Spasm's dream started off as a traditional "being chased by something big and scary" sequence, but it morphed into something less threatening, and even hopeful. In this particular snippet, Nurse Spasm finds herself speaking with a woman who owns a small grocery store, like the kind you would find in city neighborhoods. (For the purposes of a background setting, it seems that Nurse Spasm and Scuttles received a windfall of some sort, perhaps a lottery award, which provided $80,000 per year income. This does not seem to have any bearing on the dream, however.) Nurse Spasm is surprised at the grocery store owner's complaints about the wetlands that had appeared in her backyard. She tries to explain how fortunate and wonderful it was that such a thing would occur in the city. Suddenly, a small white owl flies out of the wetlands and lands in Nurse Spasm's hand. She realizes that it is a specimen of an endangered species of owl, marvels at it's presence, and pets the small bird...

Snippet 2: This one was dreamed later in the month, but could be considered a prequel of sorts, explaining where the wetlands came from...

Nurse Spasm is on a journey somewhere, when she takes time off from her travels to climb a water tower with a priest, which she further clarifies as a minister of some sort. Somehow, she accidentally knocks over the water tower in the process. The resulting tidalwave of water creates an instant wetlands. With time lapse speed, suddenly birds and other endangered species are flocking to the brand new wetlands, nesting and breeding there at a furious pace.

...

Dream 8: This rather involved and detailed dream includes, mountains and monsters, dumpsters and dread, flying and fear of falling... and a postman.

Nurse Spasm is in a junkyard. She sees a stack of dumpsters about 20 feet high. She decides to climb this stack, even though she is afraid of heights (she likes to confront her fears, you see). Once on top of the stack, she realizes that she is dreaming, and she causes the stack to rise to a height of 2000 feet because she wants to try dream flying. She jumps off the stack in an attempt to take wing, but falls to the ground (unhurt) only to see that dumpster stack is again only 20 feet and she has not dropped very far. She tries this again a few times with the same results, coming to the conclusion that the dream is becoming a frustration dream.

... then we have a classic dream segue...

and Nurse Spasm is headed to the mountains. ... it seems that it is a jumping off point for a sport similar to a cross between bungee jumping and sky diving. She takes a cable car up the mountain, but it soon turns into something more open like a ski lift. Deeper into the dream now, Nurse Spasm is frightened by the exposed height and the 1000 foot drop below her and the trip seems to take an hour or more. Now that she is finally at the top of the mountain, her relief turns to dread when she contemplates how she will get back down. The Bungee/Sky Diving looks suicidal because there is no bungee line and the drop is not long enough to allow a chute to open before you would crash into the rocks at the bottom of the sheer sided valley.

While she is contemplating her decent options, Nurse Spasm finds herself at the top of the mountain in a cabin with three doors. She sees a record album, similar to the trifold Beatles White Album. When she opens it, in the center section she finds candy... lots of it. Nurse Spasm collects the candy and begins to prepare to get down the mountain. In the process of closing the album, even more candy that she missed falls out, and this seems somehow quite mysterious and important.

All of a sudden, there is a sound at the door... a sort of clawing, scraping sound. This soon turns into a pounding and rattling of the door. There is some sort of a monster outside the cabin! It goes around to the other two doors testing them as well. Nurse Spasm is horrified to see long thin claws slip around the edges of the door frame, exploring its construction. Suddenly there is a knock and a human sounding voice at one of the other doors. Without thinking, Nurse Spasm open the door and finds... a Postman! She lets him in, slamming the door... and suddenly realizes that the monster could take human form when it wanted to...

Then the alarm went off. Damn!

...

Dream 7 - Snippets:

Snippet 1: Talk about interesting friends!

Nurse Spasm has a friend named Maribeth. In her dream Maribeth has three eyes. The middle eye does not have a pupil. Nurse Spasm is amused to watch as Maribeth scares people by taking the third eye out and putting it back in again.

(Keep in mind that this is close to Halloween... and Maribeth is one of our favorite ghouls...)

Snippet 2: This snippet may or may not be part of a larger dream, and involves a compound, Reeses Pieces, and a bad bus driver.

Nurse Spasm is in a compound of some sort, something like a heath club, except in this case, she is happily eating Reeses Pieces. An interesting feature of this compound is that it is surrounded by a glass-block fence. Nurse Spasm and her friends are horrified when they witness a bus driver, who apparently does not notice the glass block fence and drives right into it. Then, disoriented from the crash, the bus driver continues to drive his bus down the road, sideswiping several cars in the process. Nurse Spasm recalls wondering aloud with her friends why they don't use a regular cyclone fence instead of the glass block.

(I do have to point out that in this dream, Nurse Spasm reported that she actually tasted the Reeses Pieces... showing that not only does she dream in color, but she can taste too!)

Snippet 3 This snippet appears to actually be a very short but complete dream, complete with a bicycle built for five and a fable-like ending.

Nurse Spasm is at the head of a bicycle built for 5. She and her 4 friends have been trying to ride up and down a carpeted hallway, but they keep falling over. The guy at the back of the bike starts complaining that he doesn't have anything to hold onto. Nurse Spasm tells everyone to turn around, and now the guy at the end has handlebars to hold onto, but Nurse Spasm does not. They are a bit shaky, but they manage to successfully ride down the hallway without falling over.

(This little snippet is so complete that it reminds me of some sort of fable or morality play. Fascinating...)

...

Dream 6: OK, this one involves cherubic pixies, animals wearing clothes, Scuttles, a gender change, the power of cheese, and a good goosing.

This dream starts in Nurse Spasm's girlhood home, looking out the kitchen window into her back yard. Two of her girlhood friends are their with her and they all get excited when they see what appears to be a cherub flitting about the back yard. Comments like "What is it?" and "Where did it come from?" are delivered with the same level of excitement one would expect for the siting of a rare bird on one's property to elicit, and they do not seem to think it odd to discover this being exists. One of them declares it to be a Pixie. (Although it was described as a "fat little baby with wings".)

Now this leads to a rather involved discussion between them about whether Pixies can be socialized into human society since they seem to resemble us so much. Nurse Spasm affirmed this by recalling a friend in school who used to be a Pixie, was adopted and raised by humans, and it was said she still sported a Pixie haircut.

Nurse Spasm returned to the activity that the spotting of the Pixie/Cherub interrupted... washing the cat. It seems that this cat was not very happy about being washed, and Nurse Spasm was suffering assorted scratches as a result of it digging in with it's claws. Her efforts were further hampered by the fact that the cat was wearing a T-shirt, which Nurse Spasm was contemplating removing to wash separately.

However, before she could act on that thought, the cat turned into Scuttles, who also was wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Unlike the cat, Scuttles seemed to enjoy being bathed, and was observed to raise his ass in the air in a very catlike manner, to facilitate better washing by Nurse Spasm. Nurse Spasm obliges and begins to was the nether regions paying particular attention to the hairy crack. She is mildly surprised to find that Scuttle's genitalia has switched from male to female in this instance, but continues her cleaning.

Before this can get more interesting (or maybe to avoid that idea), Nurse Spasm remembers that she has an appointment with The Cheese Council, presumably to discuss designing a new web site for them. She rushes off to the meeting dressed in cat-bathing attire of shorts and a water-stained T-shirt. She suddenly realizes that she is dressed inappropriately to meet with the Cheese people, and, to make matters worse, she has also managed to schedule a second meeting with another important client at the same time.

She arrives outside the room where the Cheese meeting is to take place, and asks someone to make her excuses and tell them she will be with them shortly, as soon as she changes clothes. She then runs back to the bedroom to change, with the intention to tell the people in the second meeting she will be a bit late.

Before she can complete these plans, she stops to use the toilet, which is behind a screened area in the bathroom. Suddenly two strangers walk into the bathroom, moving the screen aside, and before she can react, one of them reaches down between her legs and gooses her!

She then reacts as you would expect, screaming at them to "Get out!"

That was the end of the dream because Nurse Spasm woke up.

(I do have to mention that this dream occurred the night after we just saw one of the scariest movies we have seen in years. In the movie "Jeepers Creepers", the monster is quite the opposite of this cute little Cherub/Pixie creature, so I have to wonder if perhaps this was Nurse Spasm's counterpoint to the nightmare creature. Hmmm... Also, it was little Nurse Spasm who actually wore a Pixie haircut in her school days, so perhaps she has some Pixie blood? It would certainly explain a few things... It was my turn to change the equipment it seems. Sounds like I was enjoying it until she had to run off. One wonders how long I was expected to leave my ass in the air. We have been harking back to a number of those amusing "Behold the Power of Cheese" commercials, so I imagine that explains the Cheese Council. The two meetings at the same time is a variant on the anxiety/frustration dream, but I am also reminded of a "That's My Bush" episode we watched that has the hapless Bush trying to attend two meetings at the same time. The goosing was quite a surprise, and Nurse Spasm actually accused me of goosing her in her sleep, which I did not. Now that's a powerful imagination! I am a little disappointed that this dream ended when it did... I wanted to see how she handled the two simultaneous meetings... kinda like a "I Love Lucy " episode.)

...

Dream 5: Here's an interesting dream including Prison, Sunday School, endless stairs, and John Houseman.

This dream starts in a prison. Nurse Spasm is a new prisoner, but another prisoner who is willing to play tour guide takes her under his wing to "show her the ropes". (Apparently it is a co-ed prison, since this second prisoner is a guy.) She is shown all the facilities and where to go to do what.

As part of her orientation, she is taken to the prison church, which looks oddly like a church Sunday School class, complete with little kids. At one point, one of the little kids stands up and sings a Sunday School song.

It seems that last week's assignment was for everyone to create an "angel" out of craft supplies. All the projects, kid's and prisoner's alike, are on display on the bulletin board. The prison psychologist comes in and starts evaluating and grading everyone's project, including one created by the Sunday School teacher.

Nurse Spasm's "tour guide" is ashamed of his project, and he turns it over so no one can see his name. However another pain-in-the-ass helpful prisoner says "Hey, where is your project?" which draws the attention of the psychologist. Even though Nurse Spasm liked the prisoner's angel, the psychologist proclaims that the tour guide's project is "childish" and "doesn't meet approval". Nurse Spasm thinks to herself "Glad I'm new here! I wasn't around for last week's assignment."

Jump cut to another scene, somewhere in the prison. Nurse Spasm is laboriously pushing a bicycle up a flight of stairs, encumbered by her books. A black dog follows her and the tour guide prisoner has been replaced with John Houseman, who is lecturing her on something.

At one point, Nurse Spasm drops her books to the floor and leaves them there, continuing to manhandle the bicycle up the stairs. After a couple of landings are climbed, she notices that the dog is having trouble keeping pace, and it keeps dropping back. John Houseman sternly admonishes her that the dog will continue to fall behind unless she picks up her books.

Then the stairway becomes something out of an M. C. Escher drawing, for she comes full circle and encounterÕs her books where she left them lay earlier in her climb. She picks them up and continues to struggle upwards, with John Houseman lecturing, and the dog faithfully following.

...

Dream 4: This one involves cool gadgets, video games, artificial intelligence, another prison, and a bad dog.

Nurse Spasm and an unknown companion are wandering around in a building, poking into rooms they are not supposed to be in. One darkened room in particular grabs their attention because it is full of cool looking electronic equipment and quite a few machines that appear to be video games. Nurse Spasm has a pocket full of quarters, so she and the companion play some of the games.

She comes across this one machine that is different than the rest. It has a superficial resemblance to the "Dance Revolution" machine, where the player has to match steps with what is shown on the screen. Upon closer inspection, however, she realizes that this machine is much different. This machine has a flat screen display with what appears to be a bald human head displayed on it, with a strong resemblance to a baby in the placement and size of it's features. When she activates it, she is surprised to find herself having a conversation with it, in what sounds like a human voice, not a recording or synthesized voice.

She examines the machine and discovers that instead of electronic speakers, this machine speaks by passing air over a chamber in a construction that resembles human larynx. Nurse Spasm is growing to suspect that this machine is an artificial intelligence because of it's ability to speak with her on any topic she brings up. It starts to hint that there is a larger, darker story behind it's existenceÉ

However, at that point they are interrupted by the unwelcome arrival of an authority figure with a strong resemblance to a teacher. The teacher seems to think that Nurse Spasm and her companion have been "corrupting her students" and chases them out of the room.

However, instead of the hallway that they entered from, they see that they have somehow ended up in a prison. They look left and right down the hall and see cells as far as they can see. They walk down the hall to another door and open it. As they step inside, they see a large dog eating a bowl of kibble. The dog growls menacingly. They step back slowly, and the dog steps forward, still growling. They step back again and the dog advances again. Nurse Spasm knows she should not turn tail and run because the dog will instinctively chase them, but she can't help herself. They run.

Somehow, they evade the dog and get outside. But now they start to plan on how to get back inside and find out more about what is behind the creation of the strange artificial intelligence machine. (Unfortunately, this is the end of dream.)

...

Dream 3 - Snippets: These are snippets from other dreams over the last couple of weeks. Although they are incomplete, they each have an interesting element of their own.

Snippet 1: Nurse Spasm woke me with a burst of laughter. I rolled over to see her smiling beatificallyÉ in her sleep. A minute later she opens her eyes and asks if she was laughing in her sleep, to which I reply yes. She then goes on to explain that she dreamed of a pair of trick sunglasses, which, when you put them on, they squirt the person you are looking at with water. Except that when she put them on, they squirted someone with ÔpoopÕ. The resulting mess turned out to be chocolate pudding.

But the most interesting part was the fact that she was lucid at the time. She recalled that she knew she was laughing in her sleep, and how cool it was that she knew she was dreaming. She also wondered if her laughing would wake me. Then she woke up to find out, and was not surprised to see me watching her face.

Snippet 2: Nurse Spasm dreamed about a revolutionary new kind of sneaker, orange ones with independent suspension for the feet that gave complete flexibility and made you feel like you were walking on air. She dreamed she tried them on and they were incredibly comfortable. She recalls knowing all the details of construction, as if she had x-ray vision and could see to the bracings and elastic structures inside.

She proceeded to draw the shoe for me later when she woke up, and it had an interesting forked heel. Perhaps we will patent it and sell it to Nike for big bucks. Be on the lookout for the Nike Spasm, soon to be in a store near you.

Snippet 3: Unfortunately, most of this dream is also lost to the mists of memory, but it too had an interesting, if not funny, aspect to it.

Nurse Spasm and a companion are "tomb raider" types, who have entered a tomb of some sort. They encounter a number of sarcophagi, presumably full of treasure or mummies and the like. However, upon trying to open one of them, Nurse Spasm encounters what appears to be an ancient practical joke. For as she opens the lid of a sarcophagus, she finds another lid waiting, and below that, yet another lid, and another and another and so on.

Snippet 4: This was once part of a much larger dream, dreamt a few weeks ago. However, all that remains to recollection is the following compelling image:

It is night. You are in a city. You look up into the overcast sky and you can make out the skeletal structure of a 50-story skyscraper under construction, with naked girders crisscrossing in the damp air. Your eyes continue upwards until you see points of light at the top. You realize that you are looking at windows gleaming with light on the top two floors of this unfinished structure. You now realize why the hotel suggested booking far in advance, since there are only 6 rooms available on one floor, and a penthouse suite taking up the entire top floor. And you realize that to get to your room for the night, you will have to take the open construction elevator dimly perceived in the maze of girders. That's it!

Bummer, sounds like the start of a good story.

...

Dream 2: This is a complicated dream involving chase scenes, gender disguise, and punishment.

It seems Nurse Spasm is on an assignment to infiltrate a quasi-religious cult. The leader is the bad guy from "Bless the Children", a fairly recent horror film. (He has a distinctive lazy eye.) For some reason, it is important for her that she be mistaken for a man, so she is in disguise.

At one point, she is in a meeting and feels she is being observed by two other male cultists. She tries to throw them off by heading for the restroom, but they follow her. She has to pee, and it is at this point she discovers just how good her disguise is... it seems she has a penis!

Nurse Spasm is somewhat inexperienced at using this organ for the process of urination, and feels concerned that the other two cultists will be able to tell she is a spy by how bad her aim is. This apparently leads to the logical conclusion that she must therefore pee in the sink. (remember... this is a dream and it has it's own sense of logic).

Jumpcut to a new scene where Scuttles joins her in a escape attempt, where the two of us are rollerblading on the southbound shoulder of I-95, a superhighway. However, we are really flying, being quite agile and fast. (Then her Lucid side kicks in and marvels "Wow, when did I get so good at rollerblading?") We are attempting to get to a Westbound road before our pursuers can catch up with us. However, we spot them and try to hide between some cars parked along the side of the road. She remembers having her face buried up against the side of a van, listening to the pursuit car stop and hearing them get out. We are busted by two female cultists who have the faces of women Nurse Spasm knows in real life.

Jumpcut back to the compound. Nurse Spasm is not really in much trouble it seems (although there is no sign of me at that point). She asks to go to the bathroom and gets to use a penis to pee in the sink again, which seems to elicit no surprise from the others. However, on the way out, she pops a Starbucks Minimint into her mouth. She is immediately grabbed and hustled in front of the cult leader who screams at her for violating the "No Candy" rule of the cult.

Nurse Spasm pleads ignorance, saying she didn't realize that mints would be considered candy. She also temporizes that she never really east much candy anyway, and since it was her first violation, please forgive her and just let her go with a warning... In the mean time they have removed her pants and put a grass skirt on her instead, and they start tying her arms and legs to a frame in preparation for a beating.

By now, Nurse Spasm is getting scared, and begs for the cult leader's forgiveness. He replies that "Even now, I would forgive you and let you go, except for the fact that your are not sorry!". Nurse Spasm realizes that this is a power play, and she says "I'm sorry!", but even to her ears it sounds lame.

So the beating begins. Nurse Spasm feels the "thwhack!" of a belt on her behind, and after a couple of very painful whacks, she wakes up to escape the pain.

(I wouldn't have been surprised to see red marks on her ass... the power of the mind can be so strong that it can fool the body. Another interesting point... Nurse Spasm actually woke up to use the restroom in the middle of this dream (all that peeing no doubt), and was able to jump right back in as soon as she fell asleep again. A two-parter. This is an interesting dream that has lots of room for interpretation. I asked if any of the gender switch or B&D had any overt sexual connotations, but she felt it did not. More like power and control issues. What a fascinating mind...)

...

Dream 1: Nurse Spasm has a minor dream with one surreal element.

She is in a pastry shop, looking over the delicacies. She sees many wondrous pieces of food art, including a cake made to look like the cross section of an orange, complete with the white areas of pulp. The whole thing is edible, though. Then she looks into a freezer case at the back of the bakery. She looks down and sees that it is about 50 feet deep, and it is almost empty. Just a few packages of frozen food of some sort on the bottom. For some reason, this is unsettling, and she wakes up.

(Nurse Spasm is quite the cook, and she is able to take dream ideas and make them reality. I will not be surprised to find a "orange" cake on the table in the near future.)

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