the dream:
on the night o’ may 10 & the morn o’ may 11, 2025, I had several interesting dreams:
most o’ them tied round an imaginary surreal dark comedy cartoon mostly revolving round a young child heavily inspired by nasrin, including wearing sweatpants, but far braver & with a childlike lack o’ any sense o’ morality beyond their own desires, exploring seemingly infinitely sprawling surreal architecture probably inspired by anthology of the killer. i think this series was called “dollhouse” or something, but it’s fuzzy. they are part o’ a family o’ 20 kids — 10 boys, 9 girls, & the aforementioned young child, the youngest o’ the family, who also like nasrin rejects being gendered, but unlike nasrin, also claims to have infinite dna & infinite chromosomes that no existing computer has the memory to process for some reason, whate’er relevance that has — who mostly do their own things: the father is always out “working” or @ home sleeping, & the mother spends all her time trying to clean the e’erexpanding home or passed out after spiking on some drug with a name that sounds like “animephidesinal”, which she gets by essentially prostituting herself to dealers ( dreams, i think you’re trying too hard to be tritely edgy here; ¿why can’t she just find the animephidesinal in the e’erexpanding home? ), she takes to try keeping herself up to clean the house. the kids mostly take care o’ themselves, entertaining themselves & feeding themselves on what they find in the e’erexpanding home. save for the youngest child, my dreams didn’t focus on them much. for the parents, there were the following exchanges:
[ both sitting in bed together, staring straight into the void, not looking @ each other ]
mother: husband, I truly do not feel comfortable with you going out “working” all the time. we do not need the money: the e’erexpanding universe provides us with infinite resources. i wish you would spend mo’ time @ home not sleeping helping me clean this e’erexpanding home.
father: i understand your concerns, but i am afraid my need to go out & work is a boundary o’ mine that i cannot just drop. with full honesty, i do not understand why you feel the need to clean our infinitely-sized home, when this is a clearly impossible endeavor &, to be fully honest, i am not comfortable with your reliance on pharmaceutical drugs in order to facilitate you in your task, tho i understand why you feel the need to do so.
mother: ok, i understand, & i hear your concerns. but nobody can say that we do not communicate with each other.
i don’t remember the context o’ this exchange ’tween the father & the youngest child. i think ’twas seeing the child reading or maybe after learning o’ the child’s explorations thru the e’erexpanding universe:
father: child, do not think that you must strive to be a rich inventor or sexy celebrity. it is perfectly ok for you to have an ordinary job & an ordinary life.
the dreams mainly focused on the youngest child, who unlike their lazy siblings who mostly sat around in the center o’ their e’erexpanding home watching tv or playing with toys, would oft venture out into the outer realms o’ their e’erexpanding universe. i remember there being 3 episodes:
1. the pilot, which, weirdly, had multiple variations, & was quite different from the rest, including the lack o’ siblings, them living in a normal home, not an e’erexpanding 1, & them not being trans yet. it’s a snowy day & the youngest child walks down a suburban sidewalk to some neighbor’s house to complete some challenge. i think the neighbor somehow realized the youngest child’s precocious brilliance & invited them o’er. the neighbor has a creepy aura to which the youngest child is oblivious. ( indeed, there is an unnerving pattern o’ adult men creeping on the youngest child, including while they’re exploring the city in the 3rd episode, tho thankfully nothing e’er happens to them & the youngest child themself is ne’er sexualized in any way ). the youngest child is challenged to race thru the neighbor’s house full o’ bizarre architecture trying to collect all 70 orbs on the way. @ the end they reach an open town square & when coming up to a large temple, a lion statue comes to life, jumps in front o’ the youngest child, & offers them a ride. they take it & race thru the inside o’ the temple, ending with them dismounting & meeting back up with the neighbor, as well as their parents, the former o’ whom lets them know they won. there are mo’ variations, — including 1 where the youngest child goes inside a different temple without the lion statue or riding the lion — seemingly attempting to beat earlier records, but failing, presumably ’cause they’re rushing too much & missing orbs & having to suddenly turn back to get them.
2. probably the most characteristic o’ the series, & the longest. the youngest child explores the outer realms o’ their home, with bizarre architecture going in seemingly e’ery direction. the youngest child begins fearing for their own life & is immediately met with absurdly coincidental circumstances that seem aimed @ harming them, including 1 man suddenly rushing in & spraying a pump into the air while crying out, “¡it’s poison spray time!”, causing e’eryone to drop to the floor, tho with bored expressions that indicate a lack o’ concern with their impending demises. the youngest child, howe’er, manages to crawl away under desk, guarded from the poison. the youngest child then vies to find an isolated corner by themself, away from anyone who could harm them. howe’er, when they think they find 1, a seemingly innocuous hippo balloon tries to follow. wanting to be alone, the youngest child keeps shoving the hippo balloon back, only for it to morph into a stocky gremlin, who, annoyed @ the youngest child’s rejection, tries to attack the youngest child. howe’er the youngest child manages to escape.
3. the parents go out & the youngest child uses this opportunity to sneak out into the big city, only to be frustrated as they try to explore. for whate’er reason, their movements are sluggish, especially while trying to cross the street, & the traffic lights are erratic, changing from green to yellow to red to yellow to green to red without any warning. luckily for them, the cars seemed to have become sluggish, too, & they are able to make it to the other side before the cars race thru. the youngest child discovers that there is a game going on — a kind o’ easter egg hunt, but for teddy bears, strewn thruout the buildings. howe’er, as they try to climb buildings, they are frustrated. all they want to do is go from rooftop to rooftop. then they remember they know a way to mix together chemicals to give themself the power to make great leaps &, after doing so & drinking the vial o’ green liquid, they begin leaping from roof to roof, snatching up as many teddy bears as they can. howe’er, they start to see rooftops without any teddy bears. soon after, they run into a man on a jetpack, who, seeing the youngest child collecting teddy bears, also, tries to attack them, grabbing their bag in mid jump & flinging them @ another building’s wall in the hopes o’ killing them. before their new foe looks down to see if he achieved his goal, the youngest child clings tightly to the wall & scrambles round to the other side before he can see them on the wall. while behind the foe, they jump up & knock him from behind, causing him to crash down to the pavement to his demise. they then climb down & take their teddy bears & take them to the content attendant, who is surprised by just how many teddy bears they were able to get, & they are declared the winner.
analysis:
while people like to focus on the surreal aspects o’ dreams, what most fascinates me are the logical parts — not in terms o’ trite freudian implications o’ the dreamer’s emotional or psychological state, as the only psychological state most o’ my dreams imply are those o’ a storyteller wanting to tell an interesting story, but the seemingly conscious thematic aspects that my subconscious manages to compose.
there is a clear theme o’ domestic satire to this series’ family, with the parody pharmaceutical drug name or the absurdly cliché way the parents act in their traditional gendered roles, despite neither being useful in the postscarcity world in which they seem to live, where the father’s “work” offers nothing for the family — &, in fact, seems to be implied to not be real work, but just a ’scuse to escape his family, or perhaps escape the ignominy o’ being a stay-@-home father. indeed, it seems that the parents’ fixation on following traditional parental roles, ironically, causes them to neglect what emotional roles they may still offer their children, with whom they seem to ne’er interact. it’s hard not to conclude that the children would thrive just as well without their parents now, which makes me wonder if their absurd clinging to their traditional gendered parental roles is a desperate way to force themselves to fit a role & justify an existence that seems redundant in this scary postscarcity anarchy o’ infinite expansion & change.
contrast that with the youngest child, the main character, who doesn’t seem to find this new anarchist universe scary, but exciting, embracing it in a nietzchean way, exploring this infinity for the pleasure o’ fulfilling their just-as-infinite curiosity & will to power for success by taking advantage o’ their precocious brilliance greater than e’en most o’ the adults in this radical world o’erturning social hierarchies. contrast that with their complacent siblings, so incurious & dull-minded that they stay in their same normal center o’ the home, mostly sticking to their traditional form o’ entertainment in the form o’ tv. unlike their parents, they do not seem to be clinging to tv out o’ any conscious yearning for getting back tradition, but out o’ thoughtless default: they’d been getting satisfaction from tv for as long as they’ve remembered; ¿why stop now? ¿what do they need outside their small, safe center? if the youngest child is the nietzchean übermench, their siblings are the poster children for nietzche’s “last men”.
&, ’course, the youngest child goes to the other extreme o’ their parents’ insistence on keeping to traditional gender roles, rejecting gender completely with the boast that they are too infinite to be any gender — as nasrin would say, paraphrasing nietzche emself, being “above male & female”. i love the brilliance o’ my dreams starting by splitting the children into an even 10-10 male-female, like an e’en mo’ exaggerated version o’ the brady bunch, but then going back & breaking that evenness by making the youngest child be nonbinary. the rebellious youngest child clearly refused to submit to their father’s appeal for them to get an ordinary job & live an ordinary life, e’en if it their supernova expansion intruded on their family’s orderly pasture: the rest o’ their family can want order all they want; they insist on chaos. interestingly, i don’t think anywhere in my dream ’twas e’er specified what any o’ their family thought o’ their transition & whether or not they respected their pronouns; they certainly ne’er showed any concern for what any o’ their family members might think o’ it.
despite this labored analysis, hardly any o’ these themes or satire required much thought, which is how my dreams managed to compose such themes — & i don’t e’en know if the breakage o’ the gender balance was intentional or just my dreams forgetting 1 thing & rushing forward into the next idea. indeed, much o’ it is cliché & obvious, sometimes falling into needlessly gruesome trite forms o’ sexist sexual violence gainst those traditionally interpreted as women that my conscious mind would avoid composing. it’s notable that despite how seemingly anarchic this e’erexpanding universe it is, the need for women to give up sex to buy material needs still exists, as do child predators going after who they think are li’l girls. these by themself could be an ironic commentary on the uglier side o’ traditional gender roles that reactionaries prefer to ignore; but mo’ damning is the implications o’ the youngest child needing to give up their gender to liberate themself, to be “infinite” — they themself frame it mo’ as escaping the millstone o’ gender rather than a positive affinity toward nonbinariness itself. ( then again, given the pathetic model their parents provide for masculinity & femininity, having to go out & pretend to work to be a “real” man or drug oneself up to be a “real” mother, it’s not surprising such an impressionable child would see nothing worthwhile in either being a woman or a man ).
&, ’course, some o’ it is just lazy rehashing o’ images imprinted on my mind with questionable relevance: the youngest child being clearly heavily based on my consciously-created character nasrin ( i should note that i don’t e’en remember if the youngest child doesn’t share any other features, like hair color, with nasrin, nor that they use “they” as a pronoun instead o’ “e”: i just didn’t want to make up similarities that didn’t necessarily exist in my dreams ), the infinite expanse being inspired by anthology of the killer architecture, the prominence o’ the city in the 3rd episode probably inspired by my constant travels to seattle, the seemingly arbitrary focus on collecting things to “win” in episodes 1 & 3 being inspired by my fixation on collectathon video games, — they strikingly run on logic that only makes sense in video games, despite ostensibly not being a video game itself — & the focus on a loner exploring strange environs, also a fixation o’ mine.
