At present I am watching video of myself sleeping. Listening, actually, more than watching. I woke up screaming from a dream last night, and I am curious to hear what it sounded like.
In the dream someone pulled a knife on me. I grabbed the weapon from his hand and threw it away. He then pulled a gun and I woke up screaming, feeling cowardly about it for some reason, as if I should have stayed asleep and let the guy shoot me.
The dream encounter occurred in the kitchen of the house I grew up in down in Tampa. The house was alive with activity, though I did not know anybody there.
A man arrived with a small dog, asking a woman who appeared to be head of the household if she had a safe place to put the animal. She took the dog from the man and stuffed it into a kitchen cabinet, closing the cabinet door. Everybody seemed to think this normal, to store live animals in kitchen cabinets.
That’s when the stern-looking snarling dude revealed he had a knife, threatened to stab me with it, and then he pulled a gun. The knife was not a butcher knife or even a steak knife. It was something between a butter knife and a serrated utensil, probably not enough to kill me but sharp enough to puncture.
As I wait through this video to hear the sound of myself screaming I suspect it will be underwhelming. In terms of audio the camera is not a high-fidelity instrument, though its night vision is pretty sharp. I can see myself breathing. But audio is pretty twangy.
Still, this is the kind of thing I got the camera for, to document nocturnal eruptions and explore that part of my life I’ve mostly only heard about from lovers and roommates. I have made audio, some of it memorable; and I attempted video once but the camera was too poor quality for low light.
Instead of listening to the full 4am hour in which I think the scream occurred it should be as simple as dumping the video into an editing software and looking for a spike in the audio waveform. But for some reason Cyber Director did not parse out the audio like it usually does. I thought I’d muted the mic by mistake. But there is sound when playing back in digiKam, so go figure.
OK, it seems the audio of myself screaming did not record, or if it did I missed it, and it’s not enough of a priority to play all that stuff back again. I think the scream was muffled on account of my face being buried in a pillow. Or maybe it just wasn’t as loud as it felt.
I do want to know more about this part of my life, though, the one-third (probably more) of it spent in such a vulnerable, almost infantile state. I frequently wake up in the middle of the night, wandering off out of camera view.
If there is anything eerie or maybe just weird it’s how I sometimes gesticulate in a way that makes it look like I am wide awake when I am not. I also think it’s weird how often my eyes open and the night view makes them look shiny.
