Peer Pressure, or, I'm only doing this because several of you asked nicely.

Names in Dreams

Some of you probably know that, when I have a good or interesting dream, I write it down. I have over a hundred typed pages of recorded dreams, dating back to 2008. The other day, I was looking over those records, and I noticed that my subconscious mind loves to come up with names. I have lots of dreams where characters, or places, or even ships, have names. And some of the names are, well, nuts. Here are a few that I thought were amusing, silly, or in a few cases, unsually good. Let's take a look . . .

Places:

1) A seaside, suburban neighbourhood in California - "Mongolia" (seriously, brain? You conflate Mongolia with a seaside town?!)

2) A pseudo-medieval village - "Bree" (clearly, I have spent far too much time reading Lord of the Rings)

3) A location which can be reached using the Toronto subway – "New York Chinatown" (I . . . I have no explanation for this one. For the record, the dream-location so named had no chinatown-ish characteristics)

Ships of the Napoleonic-Era Royal Navy:

1) "HMS Defiant" (finally! Something cool!  Good work, subconscious)

2) "HMS Cephalopod" (No, this ship was not captained by Cthulu)

Animals:

1) A horse - "George" (This strikes me as an oddly dull name for a horse. Don't all horses have long, complicated names?)

2) Various cats and kittens - "Niqanor", "Mr. Grumpy", "Meowy McMeows Loud" and "Milo" (yes, with that specific spelling for Nicanor . . . .)

Royalty:

1) A European (!!) fairytale king – "King Yoshitoshi" (My only explanation is too much anime. That's all I can come up with . His sons and grandsons had names on the same theme - "Yukio", "Mitsukuri", "Takatoki", "Yukinari")

2) A good-looking prince - "Prince Hal" (No, not that Prince Hal, though he did wear a doublet)

3) A not-so-good-looking prince - "Joe". (just Joe. Yeah.)

Other people:

1) A pompous ass - "Ashkebab Ashkebab" (Male, if you were wondering. First name Ashkebab, last name Ashkebab. Another peice of bizzareness for which I have no conscious explanation whatsoever).

2) Two police officers - "Chief Inspector John DeHavilland" and his sidekick, "Police Constable Olivia Roncesvalles" (I really like these two names. I mean, okay,  I must have watched an Olivia DeHavilland movie the night before or something, but the names sound really good to me!)

3) The baby of an English-speaking family - "Jean-Chrysostome" (I think I was reading about the French Revolution that day).

4) An infant adopted by Indiana Jones – "George Nutley Jones" (aka 'Nut') (I believe his original surname was Nutley, but when his parents died and Dr. Jones became his guardian, Nutley became a middle name)

5) An actor who looks exactly like, but definitely is not, Matthew McConaughey – "Matthew Conaughey" (Proof positive that I am in no way creative)

So there you have it. I am . . . weird. Do you ever have interesting names for people or places in your dreams?