amiwakawaiidesu

In the first dream I recall from last night, was amongst a group with other people and a friendly dog being chased by a hostile dog down a path amidst hedges to a garden gate I tried to close behind us. However, I was unable to secure the gate without help from a nearby girl who fiddled with various machinery, and it turned out the hostile dog was a big friendly brown dog after all.

A later dream reminded me of something from "The X-Files" with two men driving a car through thick fog while wearing weird transparent plug-shaped plastic helmets. I felt they were driving too fast for conditions (while a camera seemed to be filming the car through the fog from just ahead). A large truck with a bulldozer blade then passed the car on the right before a bright canary yellow rain hat and likewise canary yellow flattened french fry holder fell on the road and the truck turned around to pick them up with its dozer blade. A tall fellow in a suit (who vaguely reminded me of the Cigarette Smoking Man, except younger) then looked at the "camera" before the dream ended.

I don't often have WW2 dreams, but this one began in either a school or concentration camp full of women, children and infants. (Perhaps because the infants looked healthy in their carriages I assumed this was early in the war before much starvation.) At first a bunch of goons were sent in to kill everyone, then the bad guy leader gave a speech and it seemed the first attack hadn't done much. So instead a nurse (or nun, she wore a habit) went around with something like a black needle on the tip of her finger, touched it to the various women and infants and they all fell dead. Assuming I was just an observer, I was surprised when she approached and poked my forehead; I thought I would likewise immediately fall dead but just fell against a person to my right and then woke up.

The first dream I recall from last night began with clearing off the dining room table to work on a large sketch of some peculiar cartoon characters with capsule-shaped bodies; after accidentally erasing the outline, I wanted to re-do the outline in pen but realized I couldn't make such straight edges without a ruler. One of my sisters then came to the table after letting out our dog (this was all in the middle of the night) and then a man and woman I didn't recognize also sat at the table to play a game with an immense blue-and-white six-sided die. My sister chuckled when the man muttered that he might finally win a round (of whatever they were playing). Perhaps thus inspired, I selected a small die from boxes of dice suddenly at hand and planned to use it to randomly assign characteristics to a cast of students and teachers in a manga I was apparently working on. The setting then changed to a small Japanese tea house (but the same table) with doors open to the left and right from my point of view. Four huge burly strangers then appeared ~ two men from the left ~ and one man and a hulking sort of monster in a kimono to the right; after telling me that they knew each other, the men on the left attempted to pluck patterns of the creature's short kimono (or perhaps it was his skin); I thought there would be a fight (and indeed one fellow was thrown the length of the table at one point), but instead one of the fellows on the left then obligingly let the monster and friend pick patterns off his short kimono. In a later dream, my sister returned home with a massive roast beef sandwich in gravy (plus extra beef on the side) so big I wasn't quite sure how to eat it; also curious was that there was no side dish or even chips, although my sister's sandwich did come with a tall stack of cheese slices (not actually put on her sandwich but just served separately).

The last vivid dream I recall was at night, looking at the stars past trees in the backyard and observing what appeared to be a TARDIS lit from inside drifting at random. In the dream I assumed this to not be a real time machine yet I wondered how it remained aloft without a balloon or something else to keep it aloft. One thought was that it might be very light and filled with helium, supported by observing something dark like ballast hanging underneath the police box to keep the police box upright rather than tumbling about randomly.

In the same setting, an ultraconservative (white) friend of mine stormed into the backyard and seemed upset about not being invited to a liberal event, even digging through a storage trunk for proof that he was a "card carrying" member of the NAACP. Even in the dream I found it far-fetched.

Although I like to think that I'm pretty laid back and casual, did notice just now (after blocking a user) that I have 56 users blocked, which amounts to about 2.67 per year over 21 years. With few exceptions, these were people whom I felt made unreasonable or inflexible requests and I preferred not to interact with them.

I don't know if any potential requester will see this, but I am generally open to requests. However, I do not take requests lightly; I currently have no aspiration to sell commissions but my standard for a request is that it should be something I would be proud to have in my collection. (Accordingly, I can think of at least two examples where I drew rough sketches for people that I never posted in my collection ~ subjects just too strange for me.) Keeping in mind that I'm not the world's greatest artist, my general rule is that a person requesting art gets at least three strikes. You tell me what you want, we narrow down the particulars, I prepare a rough draft and we move from there. For people who want highly polished artwork with extremely particular details, I would suggest coughing up a few dollars for a commission artist.