I'm not the most avid fan of "Rick and Morty" (it's alright?) but it factored into this goofy dream as a roomful of alien creatures loudly complained about the fact that the aliens worlds on "Rick and Morty" just weren't as interesting as real alien worlds.

The entire dream then cut to a scene I knew was intended to demonstrate this claim.

A pale figure, resembling a crudely fashioned humanoid whale, stood in the foreground over a snowy tundra, holding one arm out as if reporting on a news story.

Something massive, a little squid-like, a little crab-like, arose in the background from behind a mountain of snow.

The whale man spoke, in a deep and firm voice:

"If you came here looking for a buffalo, all you'll find is a godless beast."

My dreams over the past year have been awfully media-based. Dreaming about watching television shows. Dreaming about playing video games. A little underwhelming, I guess, but some of them get interesting. In this one, I was reading a collection of old black and white comic strips, and in some of them, three blobby creatures called "plant men" were bullying and pranking local human children.

The children complained about how much they hated monsters, as if monsters were just an everyday irritating facet of life. The plant men boasted, rather menacingly, that the children would never be rid of monsters because monsters "weren't created by the same god as everything else."

Suddenly the "comics" had become a more animated sequence, and far in the distance, you could a thin, almost Seussian critter swaying on a mountaintop with a single huge, stalked eyeball: the source of the world's monsters.

The plant men named this god, but I can remember only that this name began with "Professor" and ended with "Bumpbump." The rest in between was needlessly long, fancy, and English, something like Professor Reginald Artemis Hubert Johnson Bumpbump or perhaps Professor Archibald Mortimer Quincy Bumpbump.

Whatever his name, I somehow knew that Bumpbump would one day be slain.....by Charlie Brown. The "Peanuts" Charlie Brown. I knew that these were actually the comics I was reading, but once Charlie defeated the creator of all monsters, both our world and his cartoons would revert to the monster-free version we know now.

No wonder everybody hates that kid.

In yet another "Media Dream," I was watching an anime series with a complex, convoluted plot and way too many characters. One of these was a one-shot villain who sounded like and vaguely resembled The Laughing Salesman. This man, however, was apparently a "cyborg," and one of his eyes was embedded in a deep, concave, metallic pit in his face.

The man spoke Japanese, though I don't really know much Japanese, so it must have been gibberish, and he had a speech quirk in which he deeply, eerily dragged out every "oo" sound in his words.

The man's special power was to shrink people down to microscopic size, then suck them into his body...forcing them to fight against his immune system and microfauna. Two "germs" were seen, including one resembling a foot-shaped amoeba with hair and a twisted umbrella, like the yokai Kasa-obake, which I understood to represent a spirochete bacterium.

Sadly, this is one more dream I knew to be mere fiction within the dream. Why has this kept happening? Is my imagination in some way "jaded" now? I always used to have a lot of these "dream movies," but they've really taken over since I began getting treatment for my ADHD. I just no longer have fantastic dreams that feel real, but already know they're my imagination...and yet, I still can't seem to control them lucidly without immediately waking up.

Regardless, this one was a "movie" featuring a puppet with an elaborate name I only dimly remember as something like "Prellelldielle." I'm certain that isn't actually what it was, but it's the closest approximation that feels right. In her film, she was portrayed by a very crude, shoddy marionette puppet with a smooth, naked, plastic doll body and disproportionately enormous, dark, hairy limbs with bird-like talons. I knew that she had "spider powers," but she didn't demonstrate them.

Sadly, this is all the dream ever informed me of Prellelldielle, but allow me to invent a little lore for her in my waking life:

I'm going to declare that the reason I feel I "don't remember" her "real name" is that Prellelldielle is only her first, and she has a long string of middle names she tried and failed to convey to me.

Every time another of her names is discovered, Prellelldielle can escape another layer of fiction, by which I mean she's currently just a puppet in a movie in a dream..but if anyone figures out another piece of her name, perhaps she can become only a puppet in a dream. One more, and she becomes a puppet in the real world. Another, and the puppet can move on its own...but at least it isn't "really" alive, like, at least it doesn't crave sustenance of any sort or have some capacity to reproduce. That takes one more name...and just maybe that still isn't all of them, either.

Can something become "more" real than our own reality? Maybe so. Maybe the results of that would be catastrophic...or maybe it's the only way for us to get rid of her and make her some higher reality's problem.

This one actually isn't my own, but was dreamed by my mother! She lives clear across the country, and the Halloween season makes her sad I'm not there. She dreamed she discovered a haunted house attraction that she thought I would like to see, and when she went inside, a funny little being was walking around and shouting.

She says that she knew this being to be a "witch," but that it looked like an upturned, "Tim Burton style" candlelabra, clomping around on its three saucer-shaped metal feet, and atop its stick where the base ought to be was something resembling a large, fuzzy cockroach or pillbug with hundreds of little, twitching legs, almost making it look like a walking toothbrush.

The "witch" had a high pitched little voice, but all it kept saying were things like "There! In there! Over there! That way!! Over there!!!"

This was all she clearly remembered from the dream, but, I think it's already more than enough. A good witch.