In the last couple of weeks I initiated a switch in ISP from a landline + DSL plan, to a naked DSL + VOIP plan from Orcon to remove the cost of having a landline that I barely ever use. Let's just say that it hasn't been the smoothest transition I've ever experienced; in the 3 weeks since I was switched, I've been without internet for 2 of them.

The first time, the new router (supplied by the Orcon - you can't use your own) simply broke and started emitting a clicking noise that reminded me of an electronic heartbeat, a dying one at that, which in turn evoked imagery from The Tell-Tale Heart. I was sent a replacement router soon afterwards, and that incident left me without internet for 4 days.

The second time, which is happening right now, the router is fine, but the problem I think lies at Orcon's end in that I can't get an internet connection because I believe I actually don't exist in their system anymore (my account information has all gone missing from their customer account pages). This incident so far has left me without internet for 8 days.

In the interim, I've been doing most of my browsing at work (hell I'm blogging from work right now) and just adding videos to my 'Watch Later' playlist which is backing-up pretty significantly - I'll need a good afternoon to myself just to get through them all. When I'm not at work, Facebook and Gmail are done through apps designed for my dumbphone.

8 days so far without internet, and I'm not actually missing it as much as I thought I would.

For one, I've had some sort of activity on every day/night - work (obviously), birthday dinners, comedy shows, out-of-town-friend lunches, watching My Kitchen Rules, and catching-up on all my TV shows. So I've been keeping pretty busy.

Secondly, I've noticed a beneficial side-effect: my vivid dreams have returned.

Looking through my site, I've only mentioned my dreams in one post, and in one story e-mail. To summarize, my dreams consist of several of the things I've come across in previous days, and are very heavily influenced by visual media like TV, movies, and video games. For example, I remember telling someone about a dream I had where I had to track-down some intergalactic criminal in a spaceship shaped like a pyramid (Stargate). And just last night, I had a dream involving dragons (Game of Thrones) and large-scale battles viewed from a top-down/isometric angle (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer 4).

No matter what the setting, there is a recurring theme in my dreams in that they're always as action-packed as a Transformers movie (with a plot that's probably on-par with Transformers) and involve me trying to save the day or save the world for reasons I don't question except that there are bad people out there screwing things over for people who don't deserve it.

When I was younger, I remember trying to get some interpretations, any interpretations, about my dreams. There were so many "answers" from sources about falling dreams, drowning dreams, being-chased dreams, and so on, but never anything about performing ridiculous heroics. I've tried formulating my own ideas, but what the heck am I supposed to make out of fighting vampires/gargoyles with my friends while the village they attack is being evacuated, or rescuing another friend from a mist-filled ghost dimension with the help of 50-cent and the G-Unit?

I would like the internet back though - I feel very disconnected from the world right now and the narrow view of it that my phone provides just isn't enough. But can I keep my dreams too? Pretty please?

While not my exact words, I pretty much said the title of this blog post to somebody yesterday.

The day before, that somebody and I were talking over Facebook chat about food, lots of it, and so the dream I had that night was basically a rerun of our conversation. However, instead of the 2 of us sitting behind our respective computers using the internet to talk to one another, we were sitting at a table together eating all of the food that we were talking about. I relayed these details to her the next time I caught her on Facebook chat, and her response was: "That's scary Em".

Reflecting on that line, I have a bit of trouble trying to understand what was so scary about my dream; it's not as if we were eating in the dark while a serial killer was lurking in the shadows. The thing is, this isn't the first time I've got that reaction out of people when telling them about the dreams I have.

I can trawl through some of my old e-mails from work and find one where I told a friend she was in dream of mine where she found herself lost in some weird dimension and had to be rescued by a crew that consisted of her husband, myself, and the rappers from what I believe were 50 Cent's G-Unit. Her reaction: she thought it was scary. (Re-reading that paragraph, I think that one qualifies as scary in the 'horror' sense of the word.)

I can also remember telling one of my mates about a dream of mine he was in (can't remember the dream unfortunately) to which he responded by telling me that that's pretty scary, before telling my my head's all fucked-up.

Dreamscape... whoa what the hell?

Thinking about those and other incidents, I'm not really sure what constitutes the 'scary' part of my dreams. Is it scary in the uncanny sense that I can recall my dreams or put people I know into such strange scenarios, or is it scary in the sense that I should be admitted into a mental hospital for what my mind is capable of coming-up with when I'm asleep?

Seeing as my dreams are often influenced by the things in my day I'm not too surprised to find my friends or others who make up my day in them. I've also always had a pretty good imagination, and after hanging-out with anybody long enough I can imagine them in any situation with almost any expression or emotion (I once had a school friend cry in my dream even though I had never seen them cry before). I mean, we all have that ability where, when we read some words from someone (either in a text or an e-mail), we put their voice to the words and imagine it as if they were reading to us. I'd like to think my dreams are just an extension of this ability.

This ability of mine does seem to fall short in one department however: Scottish accents.

I've always had trouble replicating the voices of Scottish actors/actresses in my head. This is particularly annoying when there's all those great Sean Connery movies and there's Scotty from Star Trek with all those great lines. I fail in this department because, when trying to recall their voices, they always end-up sounding more like pirates.

That's right. Pirates.

What's even worse is that now I've made a Scottish friend (previously dubbed 'laundry lass') whom I e-mail more often than I actually see in-person, and my imagination always makes their reading-to-me voice devolve into pirate 'arrs' and 'yarrs'. They even featured in a dream of mine several weeks ago; their voice, after a while, became too hilarious in my own dream that it caused me to wake-up in a fit of laughter.

Avast!

So much for nightmares forcing a person awake to escape a frightening situation; here's me being forced awake to escape a terribly imagined accent.

Maybe I am a scary individual after all.