(no subject)

It amazes me how much my brain still knows while I'm asleep. I expect it to know things like the layout of the house I lived in longest as a child, and that being at the shops naked is embarrassing, and that zombies are scary and very persistent; I don't expect it to have such a firm grasp of real-life facts, scientific things and the sort of stuff that you get asked in quiz games. Not that I dream strictly factual things, but sometimes while still dreaming there's some part of my brain yelling out while watching, "That aeroplane's got to be well below its stalling speed, physics doesn't work that way!" or, "That theory was taught as fact for several decades but has since been disproven!"

The other night I dreamt that two English police officers discovered a mouse getting into the groceries on their kitchen table, and they drove it away by what, in the dream, was the well-known technique for getting rid of mice: singing the national anthem at it together VERY LOUDLY. Only I knew that these two people ought to be singing God Save the Queen as THEIR national anthem -- and I couldn't quite dredge that song out of memory while asleep, so I had to have them bellowing out "God Defend New Zealand" instead. I was not pleased with this piece of factual inaccuracy but grudgingly accepted that some national anthem was necessary and the dream had to work with what was available.