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the equivalent of this for me would be asking someone if they had nightmares about suddenly being at MAGFest and having not only forgotten it was going on and it’s suddenly Sunday, but no costume, and which was even your hotel room and also how is the hotel 170 stories and only one elevator
(the non-sexual ones)
(and non-“why is the toilet in the living room and not even behind any dividers or anything and also it’s overflowing” ones)
If anyone is having nightmares just about every night, it might make sense to do a sleep study and check for obstructive sleep apnea. Vivid dreams are one of the most often misdiagnosed symptoms of sleep apnea.
Also, getting up to pee several times a night… can often be a sign of sleep apnea. Just apropos of nothing.
Oddly enough, while I don’t tend to get dreams that cause intense feelings of fear, commonly referred to as “nightmares” (the definitional speak is relevant later, I’m not talking down to anybody here), I *do* frequently get dreams that cause intense feelings of frustration or sometimes even rage. I have decided to call them “nightfuries” as they are clearly akin to nightmares but instead of scary they are infuriating.
If I’m not having a nightfury, my dreams are just extremely weird. For instance, while many people get dreams of flight, whenever I fly in my dreams there are really specific limitations, consistently the *same* limitations. I can fly no higher than I am tall (roughly six feet) and no faster than I can sprint (although it is far, far less exhausting than sprinting, so basically I can go my sprinting speed for as long as I could normally walk at a casual pace), but if I ever need to go faster I can take a pole or cane and push off the ground like a gondoleer to go faster, it looks kind of like I’m pogosticking but perpendicular to the stick. I have never flown in a dream without these specific limitations. Also, a lot of my dreams don’t actually feature “me” or any sort of point of view character, often I just inhabit the role of the “camera” and watch the dream play out like a movie. Apparently I have a tendency to get way too interested in the mechanics of whatever weird crap is going on in my dreams and start asking questions or trying to figure things out until I wake myself up from my mind being too active, so I think the movie dream thing is partially a way for my brain to compensate for that and actually get rest while dreaming, and also partially because I just watch WAY too much TV.
I have the exact same flying dreams as you. I think you might be having lucid dreams. I have occasionally had lucid nightmares, those really suck. I also have type 2 narcolepsy.
I am not having lucid dreams, I know that much, as any time I gain too much awareness, I wake up fully, which, as far as I know, runs counter to the idea of being lucid.
Although, interesting that someone else has the same weirdly specific and restrictive rules surrounding their dream-flight. I’ve never encountered someone who had dream-flight with *any* rules, let alone the same ones, and I’ve spoken with multiple “experts” on dream interpretation and none of them had ever heard of it either. I was kind of operating under the assumption that the rules were because of my fixation on hard magic systems and game-rule systems, and the use of a pole to go faster was due to my love of breaking those systems to do things the writers never intended or otherwise get overpowered. Like, it’s literally applying a lever to create an unexpected rules interaction that enables me to do things that I technically shouldn’t.
Honestly, the pole is why I stopped talking to “experts” on dream interpretation, when I had a third one trying to tell me it was a phallic symbol without being able to say what that actually has to do with me, my personality, or my experiences beyond the classic Freudian “penis, penis, penis” nonsense, and frankly all three of them contradicted each OTHER when trying to tell me what having a phallic symbol used in that way in my dream says about me in particular, I realized that none of them actually had any idea what they were talking about.
In the few lucid dreams I had, flying was also restricted. One time all I could do was jump really high (like ~50m) and the other time I just turned into a bird…
My subconcious’s current favourite is “You’re at work and you have no idea what you’re doing and also it’s an exam somehow and are you even sure you’re supposed to be there today?”
Another good one is “You’re in Edinburgh, but it’s your last day there and you somehow haven’t been to any Fringe shows. Or Science Festival lectures, if that seems more plausible at the time.” These usually occur about a couple of months before the festivals in question, especially if I haven’t got round to booking anything yet, but they can also occur entirely at random.
Anyway, they’re fine, because I wake up and I’m relieved it’s not real. Whereas with the good dreams, where I stumble across a Discworld novel, comic book event, or Star Trek series that I didn’t even know existed before, I wake up and I’m disappointed it’s not real.
I feel it might be mildly inappropriate to describe a situation where a teenage girl has a sexual fantasy about a man she’s idolised since she was a child.
Yet it’s a reality that people, boys and girls alike, have fantasies about people they idolize from childhood onward; right through into adulthood… and a LOT of the time, some of those people are going to remain the same throughout.
I think that’s a thing people’s brains do sometimes, though. Lots of weirdness goes on in the teenage years, including (for the majority of people) developing sexual interests that sometimes manifest in uncomfortable-seeming but harmless ways.
(When the interest is in a fictional character or unmeetable celebrity, there ain’t exactly any way for someone to act on it in an unhealthy manner.)
My dream stories are sadly quite boring. I’ve got one cool one from being a kid and getting shot in a dream and waking up with a nosebleed, but that’s the only one worth retelling, and even then I’m editing out a lot of boring prelude.
The nosebleed that directly corresponded to getting shot in the head freaked me out and I really really did not want to go to school that day because I thought it was some sort of omen
I live in an apartment building, and the dream I had was that the building was falling over for an unknown reason, and I had the sensation (in the dream) of knowing with full certainty that I was going to die.
Turns out what had happened was my sleep number bed had lost its seal and was deflating, and I strongly suspect that what happened to both of us was our brains trying to craft a narrative around a sensation it was detecting while we were asleep. This conclusion did not help me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that dream for weeks.
Way back in college I was asleep in the top bunk and dreamed about getting into a fight and being hit on the top of my head, only to wake up to find one of the ceiling tiles had fallen and hit me.
I agree it’s our sleeping brains wrapping a narrative around the sensation. The weird thing in my case is that the subjective time was much longer in the dream. The whole thing seemed like an extended sequence, but it all must have actually happened in the flash between being hit and waking.
I forgot that Joyce doesn’t know about Dorothy ignoring the Yale acceptance letter. Wonder how she will react to that, among the other things bothering Dorothy.
I almost get the Grav-roulette thing, but in this kind of situation with multiple retries I don’t get why you don’t just sign up on Gravatar and set the image to exactly the one you want rather than engaging in this much Frederica Bernkastel probability manipulation.
My nightmares are eithet me crashing off a 100 foot or more bridge falling into the water I or ravine or a snake biting me absolutely terrified of heights and snakes so it makes sense.
IMO maybe it’s because i’m still a big fan of Walkyverse era Head Alien’s sardonic hammy manipulator shtick, but i like to think that a Walky nightmare start off as a very silly Dexter and Monkey Master themed romp and then turn into Dream!Dexter viciously repeating all of Walky’s worst fears and anxieties verbatim.
Same tbh. When she said that I instantly thought of the wet dream she had of Ethan that turned into Ryan. It’ll be interesting if that’s what Willis meant and if that’ll play a part in her hang ups with Joe
Let’s see what gravitar I get! (Are they called Gravitars? Is it like “Gacha Avatars”?)
Dorothy hasn’t been very honest with Joyce for a bit, I hope they’ll be able to talk it out. I still feel like Dorothy infantalizes Joyce, but in the end they’re still good friends. Joyce can handle the information you tell her dangit! Let’s hug it out and cry about our feelings or something!
Gravatar, Globally Recognized Avatar. Two A’s. If I used more than this site to communicate with people from outside, it’d be a very handy tool. As-is, I mostly use it to change icons constantly.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/ultimately one of the dreams she’s talking about. that one’s my favorite strip. A lot of complicated emotions go with that kind of realization, hard to describe. Terrified relief maybe.
ya, she did have to work through it again consciously, and she did almost immediately (next chapter is when she skipped church). It was more fraught than this strip suggests out of context, and she’s still not done by the end. But it all is kind of summarized in “Ultimately”, like whatever a thesis statement is called in a narrative.
“I have nightmares about the time Becky kissed me and I made her cry, because as close and affectionate as I am with her, I’m just not into ladies that way. You can tell me your nightmare, I’m sure nothing bad will happen.”
Honestly if that’s where this is going, Joyce hearing her terror and doubt and realizes that presidency for her is like going to heaven for Joyce, then that’s actually a pretty great way for them to bond. Joyce knows what it’s like to have to let go of things you hold dear and self identify with.
Actually, I’m asthmatic. (The sperm whale is because I was thinking of a certain novel, when I had to change my avatar because another site used radial symmetry, and it kind of went, um, really, really, really wrong.)
My sex nightmares involve someone i feel no desire for, and they’re not forcing me to do anything but i mysteriously just accept everything they want. It’s pretty awful and often pretty much ruins my day.
Well shoot, that’s unfortunate. Why do brains have to be like that? You’d think they’d get with the program and imagine things they actually want to think about.
well, there’s a whole psychoanalysis dedicated to this question. (although they don’t really deal in brains, their subject is the psyche, but colloquially those tend to be considered synonymous.) in my understanding one important idea is that of repression, and the idea is that dreams exist in part to help process experiences (trauma and such) in ways that are presumably less debilitating than straight up confronting the thing consciously?
Random thunderstorms that frequently reflect exactly what a person is going through, either in a literal sense or by strong symbolism that happens to be very consistent in the dreamer’s culture. Like, I’m not even a tarot-cards-and-dream-catchers type of person, but there’s definitely logic behind enough dreams that we can’t just dismiss them as fully random electricity.
My dreams are not at all subtle. Like books purporting to be dream dictionaries with “butterflies represent a new job, for everbody, across all time” are bunk. But I knew what it meant when I dreamt at 17 about not being able to climb my backyard fence and get to Independence/Liberty (two suburbs that got combined into one through dream-logic).
I wonder what part of her nightmare troubled Dorothy the most. She’s right not to want to tell Joyce. But it would be really fun to see her reaction hearing about the first part, involving they riding a horse.
Pain dreams. During the worst years of my experience with chronic pain, my sleeping brain came up with various recurring explanations for the signals it was getting. Large dog biting down on my hands. Sitting at a picnic table, picking shards of glass out of my hands and arms. Lying in the street with a collapsed building on my legs. I’ve gotten better at pain management so it’s less often now.
I once had a nightmare in which I was a member of the Allied Control Commission, charged with enforcing the terms of the Versailles Treaty on sullen and balky Germans.
Joyce is an absolute hot mess who has no idea what she’s doing, and I am SO HERE FOR her accidentally pratfalling into a way to finally get Dorothy to actually open up emotionally.
I very very rarely dream, or at the very least I don’t ever remember dreaming, even as I’m waking up. I also don’t get as much rest from sleep as I should. There was one dream that would reoccur where I was trying to save someone who was trapped and being hunted. It started somewhere in 2nd grade and lasted up until I finally had to do something about being trans, some time in my 40s.
it would be funny if they released it but it was just a cinema painted on the side of a cliff
DiscussingFilm@discussingfilm.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
‘COYOTE VS ACME’ has been officially saved by Ketchup Entertainment, who bought the film for $50M
They plan to give the film a worldwide theatrical release in 2026.
do y'all remember when they found all that tf art in Osamu Tezuka's drawer post-mortem because I think about it often
anyway keep chasing your bliss and draw weird shit, god knows we need that right now
Today in #9ChickweedLane I learned that I have to weigh which is worse: the cartoonist already forgetting what this guy looks like one daily strip later, or that, yes, he's actually meant to be an old man, not a victim to an older cartoonist forgetting what young people look like
Like any average American, I’m for universal basic income and abolishing the police. I can’t get on board with these ultra-leftists calling for the universal hive mind, though!
maura quint@mauraquint.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
going to start calling myself a centrist and then listing all my leftist views as proof, just going to start moving the overton window by force
I've spent the past few days reading through the entire archive of @damnyouwillis.bsky.social's Dumbing of Age and this has been stuck in my head for about 90% of that time.
Steve Williams @skillagesteve.bsky.social ⋅ 17h
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the equivalent of this for me would be asking someone if they had nightmares about suddenly being at MAGFest and having not only forgotten it was going on and it’s suddenly Sunday, but no costume, and which was even your hotel room and also how is the hotel 170 stories and only one elevator
(the non-sexual ones)
(and non-“why is the toilet in the living room and not even behind any dividers or anything and also it’s overflowing” ones)
… okay, it’s kinda scary how close that is to, like 80% of my nightmares. Except replace MAGfest with any of half a dozen other anime or game cons.
well, we only go to the one these days, or I’d say Anthrocon
(lack of interest in driving solo for a 4-hour-one-way trip)
My nightmares are too fucked up to explain. The safe explanation is: bloody, guilt wracked, and highly illogical.
Just as a general PSA:
If anyone is having nightmares just about every night, it might make sense to do a sleep study and check for obstructive sleep apnea. Vivid dreams are one of the most often misdiagnosed symptoms of sleep apnea.
Also, getting up to pee several times a night… can often be a sign of sleep apnea. Just apropos of nothing.
CPAP babes FTW!
https://www.cpapbabes.com
Hey, it’s better than the alternative explanation:
(“One morning, Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams…”)
Getting up to pee several times a night appears to also be a symptom of getting old.
Maybe both!
Definitely both.
And per below, yeah, get checked for apnea. Couldn’t live without my CPAP now (well I could, but it’d suck).
Damn, a Kafka reference in my comment section?
How Kafkaesque!
And sleep apnea will take years off your life and life out of your years. Get checked if you or the person you sleep with notices the symptoms.
Cost me a job. Thought I could handle it, didn’t; fell asleep, got fired and diagnosed in that order.
Oh, MAGFest…somehow read that as MAGAFest. Can’t say Ive ever had a dream about MAGFest.
MAGAfest would be a true nightmare!
that’s just a rally =p
Oddly enough, while I don’t tend to get dreams that cause intense feelings of fear, commonly referred to as “nightmares” (the definitional speak is relevant later, I’m not talking down to anybody here), I *do* frequently get dreams that cause intense feelings of frustration or sometimes even rage. I have decided to call them “nightfuries” as they are clearly akin to nightmares but instead of scary they are infuriating.
If I’m not having a nightfury, my dreams are just extremely weird. For instance, while many people get dreams of flight, whenever I fly in my dreams there are really specific limitations, consistently the *same* limitations. I can fly no higher than I am tall (roughly six feet) and no faster than I can sprint (although it is far, far less exhausting than sprinting, so basically I can go my sprinting speed for as long as I could normally walk at a casual pace), but if I ever need to go faster I can take a pole or cane and push off the ground like a gondoleer to go faster, it looks kind of like I’m pogosticking but perpendicular to the stick. I have never flown in a dream without these specific limitations. Also, a lot of my dreams don’t actually feature “me” or any sort of point of view character, often I just inhabit the role of the “camera” and watch the dream play out like a movie. Apparently I have a tendency to get way too interested in the mechanics of whatever weird crap is going on in my dreams and start asking questions or trying to figure things out until I wake myself up from my mind being too active, so I think the movie dream thing is partially a way for my brain to compensate for that and actually get rest while dreaming, and also partially because I just watch WAY too much TV.
I have the exact same flying dreams as you. I think you might be having lucid dreams. I have occasionally had lucid nightmares, those really suck. I also have type 2 narcolepsy.
I am not having lucid dreams, I know that much, as any time I gain too much awareness, I wake up fully, which, as far as I know, runs counter to the idea of being lucid.
Although, interesting that someone else has the same weirdly specific and restrictive rules surrounding their dream-flight. I’ve never encountered someone who had dream-flight with *any* rules, let alone the same ones, and I’ve spoken with multiple “experts” on dream interpretation and none of them had ever heard of it either. I was kind of operating under the assumption that the rules were because of my fixation on hard magic systems and game-rule systems, and the use of a pole to go faster was due to my love of breaking those systems to do things the writers never intended or otherwise get overpowered. Like, it’s literally applying a lever to create an unexpected rules interaction that enables me to do things that I technically shouldn’t.
Honestly, the pole is why I stopped talking to “experts” on dream interpretation, when I had a third one trying to tell me it was a phallic symbol without being able to say what that actually has to do with me, my personality, or my experiences beyond the classic Freudian “penis, penis, penis” nonsense, and frankly all three of them contradicted each OTHER when trying to tell me what having a phallic symbol used in that way in my dream says about me in particular, I realized that none of them actually had any idea what they were talking about.
In the few lucid dreams I had, flying was also restricted. One time all I could do was jump really high (like ~50m) and the other time I just turned into a bird…
My subconcious’s current favourite is “You’re at work and you have no idea what you’re doing and also it’s an exam somehow and are you even sure you’re supposed to be there today?”
Another good one is “You’re in Edinburgh, but it’s your last day there and you somehow haven’t been to any Fringe shows. Or Science Festival lectures, if that seems more plausible at the time.” These usually occur about a couple of months before the festivals in question, especially if I haven’t got round to booking anything yet, but they can also occur entirely at random.
Anyway, they’re fine, because I wake up and I’m relieved it’s not real. Whereas with the good dreams, where I stumble across a Discworld novel, comic book event, or Star Trek series that I didn’t even know existed before, I wake up and I’m disappointed it’s not real.
see, I’m pretty sure the “toilet in the middle of the room” nightmares don’t fall into the non-sexual category
at least not for me
Look, I ship them forever. But, at same time, it will be awkward Dorothy starting to weep and telling that Joyce is the reason of her nightmares.
“It’s you. You’re my anxiety.”
“WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME? AM I ANYONE ELSE’S ANXIETY?!?”
Becky: “Not, like, currently?”
You’re always someone’s anxiety.
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There you go bud.
Finally, Dorothy and Joe can bond.
Dorothy: You think you’re hot stuff.
Joe: Do you know who’s hot stuff?
Dorothy: Joyce?
Joe and Dororthy: Ya…
Joyce: The…mostly non-sexual ones anyway.
(Hey a man good with a hammered dulcimer has nimble fingers, Joyce couldn’t help but take note)
That’s a new development for her, though.
What?…Nimble fingers would be great for repairing washing machines, that’s all. Joyce’s naughty dreams are all about washing machines.
(And Rich Mullins dressed as the Maytag Repairman)
I feel it might be mildly inappropriate to describe a situation where a teenage girl has a sexual fantasy about a man she’s idolised since she was a child.
Yet it’s a reality that people, boys and girls alike, have fantasies about people they idolize from childhood onward; right through into adulthood… and a LOT of the time, some of those people are going to remain the same throughout.
Huh. Interesting.
If it’s only mildly inappropriate, you’re doing it wrong.
I think that’s a thing people’s brains do sometimes, though. Lots of weirdness goes on in the teenage years, including (for the majority of people) developing sexual interests that sometimes manifest in uncomfortable-seeming but harmless ways.
(When the interest is in a fictional character or unmeetable celebrity, there ain’t exactly any way for someone to act on it in an unhealthy manner.)
My dream stories are sadly quite boring. I’ve got one cool one from being a kid and getting shot in a dream and waking up with a nosebleed, but that’s the only one worth retelling, and even then I’m editing out a lot of boring prelude.
Ooh, I’ve had the being shot one, except it was just my brain deciding the alarm going off sounded like gunfire.
The nosebleed that directly corresponded to getting shot in the head freaked me out and I really really did not want to go to school that day because I thought it was some sort of omen
Sounds scary! Wise choice… these days, going to school can be so scary!
I had a dream as a kid that my teeth were falling out… and then woke up in the morning with a newly chipped tooth. Weird!
I had what I think is a similar experience.
I live in an apartment building, and the dream I had was that the building was falling over for an unknown reason, and I had the sensation (in the dream) of knowing with full certainty that I was going to die.
Turns out what had happened was my sleep number bed had lost its seal and was deflating, and I strongly suspect that what happened to both of us was our brains trying to craft a narrative around a sensation it was detecting while we were asleep. This conclusion did not help me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that dream for weeks.
Way back in college I was asleep in the top bunk and dreamed about getting into a fight and being hit on the top of my head, only to wake up to find one of the ceiling tiles had fallen and hit me.
I agree it’s our sleeping brains wrapping a narrative around the sensation. The weird thing in my case is that the subjective time was much longer in the dream. The whole thing seemed like an extended sequence, but it all must have actually happened in the flash between being hit and waking.
I had a dream just last night where I was in a suburban neighborhood and there was this giant swarm of ducks and geese that knocked down a fence.
🪿
Coincidentally, I am working on a game about dinosaurs for all of November. 🦖
What’s Rich Mullins’ opinion on pants?
“I can fix her!”
I forgot that Joyce doesn’t know about Dorothy ignoring the Yale acceptance letter. Wonder how she will react to that, among the other things bothering Dorothy.
Once again, wrong sibling.
Relevant, but not Sal.
Few more tries tonight.
Hell no.
Acceptable for the evening.
That was like watching you shop for clothes.
Unlike shopping for clothes, I actually enjoy Grav Roulette.
For a sec I didn’t realize this was all one person and was very confused by the conversation.
Yeah, I like the sneaky way better. (Just change it for every post you’d make anyway.)
This thread is gonna read completely differently the next time the Gravs are inevitably re-rolled, and I kind of love that.
For the unaware.
There’s an article about Grav Roulette on the Walkypedia.
I almost get the Grav-roulette thing, but in this kind of situation with multiple retries I don’t get why you don’t just sign up on Gravatar and set the image to exactly the one you want rather than engaging in this much Frederica Bernkastel probability manipulation.
What? And miss all the adrenalin surge of risking your very identity on a random process? Where is your sense of adventure?
If things get out of control, a strong argument will be ahead and rest assured there will be serious wounds for both.
My nightmares are eithet me crashing off a 100 foot or more bridge falling into the water I or ravine or a snake biting me absolutely terrified of heights and snakes so it makes sense.
grav roulette time
Jason suits me.
You’re a British TA with questionable ethics?
Fussy English major (
with a bit of a thing for green-eyed gingers … preferably less evil).Grav roulette season gotta be one of my favorite genders.
You’re saying it engenders much amusement?
“In song terms my nightmares are much more, uh, centered around…well, Animotion, in particular ‘Obsession’. Also, you’re there.”
Wonder what Walky’s nightmares are about. Math grades and zombie Nachitos?
Getting a box of 20 McNuggets that only has 19 McNuggets in it.
Walky only gets McNuggets in batches of 50, though.
then only getting 19 really is a nightmare
Truly horrifying
IMO maybe it’s because i’m still a big fan of Walkyverse era Head Alien’s sardonic hammy manipulator shtick, but i like to think that a Walky nightmare start off as a very silly Dexter and Monkey Master themed romp and then turn into Dream!Dexter viciously repeating all of Walky’s worst fears and anxieties verbatim.
Oh that last panel made me sad. I know it probably just meant regular sexual anxieties but I immediately thought of Ryan.
A national treasure, I approve.
Same tbh. When she said that I instantly thought of the wet dream she had of Ethan that turned into Ryan. It’ll be interesting if that’s what Willis meant and if that’ll play a part in her hang ups with Joe
heard there was a grav change, let’s roll these dice
hmm.
Still 9.8 m/s^2 here.
I wish I had a like button.
Hello, fellow person who lives near sea level.
you think you’re sooooo funny
(you are)
OK there’s no way I’m the only one picking up this energy rn:
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/magic-2
That was also my first thought just looking at the pictures before reading the words.
I thought about it before, during, and after reading the words.
That nightmare had a white horse, why was it WHITE—
yeah she was disappointing someone in it alright
Did we see this nightmare?
well there was the one where joyce and her were on a horse?
Which turned into Toedad’s death…
Yeah major TW for the last panel of the nightmare
Let’s see what gravitar I get! (Are they called Gravitars? Is it like “Gacha Avatars”?)
Dorothy hasn’t been very honest with Joyce for a bit, I hope they’ll be able to talk it out. I still feel like Dorothy infantalizes Joyce, but in the end they’re still good friends. Joyce can handle the information you tell her dangit! Let’s hug it out and cry about our feelings or something!
I am Joe! I accept this.
Gravatar, Globally Recognized Avatar. Two A’s. If I used more than this site to communicate with people from outside, it’d be a very handy tool. As-is, I mostly use it to change icons constantly.
Oh! I see! Thank you for telling me :DD
I have a WordPress account that defaults to it so I can’t use something too silly here. I set it to be just silly enough.
Gravitar would be like, GRAVITy-Augmented Reality
or a shortening/portmanteau (shortmanteau?) of “gravity star”, which is probably a black hole?
that’s how “pulsar” (and “quasar”, sort of) got named, so
https://www.dumbingofage.com/ultimately one of the dreams she’s talking about. that one’s my favorite strip. A lot of complicated emotions go with that kind of realization, hard to describe. Terrified relief maybe.
She also pretty much forgot about most of the details of that dream, aside from Rich Mullins and Becky being there.
ya, she did have to work through it again consciously, and she did almost immediately (next chapter is when she skipped church). It was more fraught than this strip suggests out of context, and she’s still not done by the end. But it all is kind of summarized in “Ultimately”, like whatever a thesis statement is called in a narrative.
And here’s the start of one of the other ones
Oh no I broke it! https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/know-2/
She’s asking about Joyce’s Nightmares! :p
“I have nightmares about the time Becky kissed me and I made her cry, because as close and affectionate as I am with her, I’m just not into ladies that way. You can tell me your nightmare, I’m sure nothing bad will happen.”
HAPPY POST-HALLOWEEN, EVERYONE!
Folger’s Brew Season ahoy! :p
National Half-Price Candy Day
Ahh, the day between Halloween and Dia de Los Muertos…
Accepting help when you have a self-image of competence is REALLY difficult.
Takes a shitload just to open up to others.
I think there’s also a reason she doesn’t want to share this one with Joyce specifically right now (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-14/01-everybodys-looking-for-nothing/stateoftheunion/)
Honestly if that’s where this is going, Joyce hearing her terror and doubt and realizes that presidency for her is like going to heaven for Joyce, then that’s actually a pretty great way for them to bond. Joyce knows what it’s like to have to let go of things you hold dear and self identify with.
…dammit, you’re trying to make me laugh, but I’m physically incapable of laughter.
Being a sperm whale and all.
Actually, I’m asthmatic. (The sperm whale is because I was thinking of a certain novel, when I had to change my avatar because another site used radial symmetry, and it kind of went, um, really, really, really wrong.)
aw sorry about that. (and sorry about that, lol)
Man, sexual nightmares sound even more terrifying than normal. You think you’re about to bone down in a sexy dream, then bam! Horror time.
Yeah, no kidding! Ugh!
I think the other way around might potentially be more terrifying.
The real horror is the boning we did along the way.
My sex nightmares involve someone i feel no desire for, and they’re not forcing me to do anything but i mysteriously just accept everything they want. It’s pretty awful and often pretty much ruins my day.
Well shoot, that’s unfortunate. Why do brains have to be like that? You’d think they’d get with the program and imagine things they actually want to think about.
well, there’s a whole psychoanalysis dedicated to this question. (although they don’t really deal in brains, their subject is the psyche, but colloquially those tend to be considered synonymous.) in my understanding one important idea is that of repression, and the idea is that dreams exist in part to help process experiences (trauma and such) in ways that are presumably less debilitating than straight up confronting the thing consciously?
Psych(o)analysis is pseudoscience, though, and dreams seem to be random “thunderstorms in the brain”.
jennifer lawrence.gif
Random thunderstorms that frequently reflect exactly what a person is going through, either in a literal sense or by strong symbolism that happens to be very consistent in the dreamer’s culture. Like, I’m not even a tarot-cards-and-dream-catchers type of person, but there’s definitely logic behind enough dreams that we can’t just dismiss them as fully random electricity.
My dreams are not at all subtle. Like books purporting to be dream dictionaries with “butterflies represent a new job, for everbody, across all time” are bunk. But I knew what it meant when I dreamt at 17 about not being able to climb my backyard fence and get to Independence/Liberty (two suburbs that got combined into one through dream-logic).
It makes me sad how little Joyce knows her best friend
I don’t see what this has to do with Becky
Oh man if only this conversation has happened a few days ago. Gosh darn it Dorothy— let Joyce hug it out!
Joyce is just trying
re: Alt-text: …Having nightmares about Rich Mullins not getting into Yale?
Oh no, that dream came true!
Yes! Hug! Hug! Hug as you talk about the dream of pantslessly riding a horse with Joyce!
She doesn’t HAVE to mention that part, it doesn’t seem like a particularly relevant detail to the nightmare portion.
This immediately pops into Dorothy’s head, in panel 5…
Sha-la-la-la-la-la.
My oh my!
Look like the girl too shy,
Ain’t gonna kiss the girl!
You know i think Dorothy might learn something from somebody else trying to Dorothy her
I wonder what part of her nightmare troubled Dorothy the most. She’s right not to want to tell Joyce. But it would be really fun to see her reaction hearing about the first part, involving they riding a horse.
Grav roulette, Go!
Not quite Carla tier, but I’ll take it!
Grav roulette time!
Ops, wrong Jaques
Alt-text beat me to it! I don’t want anybody having those kinds of nightmares.
Just realized that for Dorothy, large white horses = white laundry equipment.
Ya work with the horses ya got.
Pain dreams. During the worst years of my experience with chronic pain, my sleeping brain came up with various recurring explanations for the signals it was getting. Large dog biting down on my hands. Sitting at a picnic table, picking shards of glass out of my hands and arms. Lying in the street with a collapsed building on my legs. I’ve gotten better at pain management so it’s less often now.
I still ship JoJo big time, but Dorothy/Joyce are absolute unquestionably endgame OTPlatonic.
lol okay i had to go back and remind myself what dorothy’s nightmare was and uh. wow yea maybe talk to somebody OTHER than joyce about that lmao
I once had a nightmare in which I was a member of the Allied Control Commission, charged with enforcing the terms of the Versailles Treaty on sullen and balky Germans.
( no more history before bedtime )
Is Dorothy BLUSHING?
(You keep our shipping heart skipping, Willis! Never change)
As Dorothy slips from a self-confirmed Kinsey 0 to a “Huh, I guess that horse really did mean something” Kinsey 1.
Joyce is an absolute hot mess who has no idea what she’s doing, and I am SO HERE FOR her accidentally pratfalling into a way to finally get Dorothy to actually open up emotionally.
I very very rarely dream, or at the very least I don’t ever remember dreaming, even as I’m waking up. I also don’t get as much rest from sleep as I should. There was one dream that would reoccur where I was trying to save someone who was trapped and being hunted. It started somewhere in 2nd grade and lasted up until I finally had to do something about being trans, some time in my 40s.