Dreams

See also: Chapter List

As of now, All Night Laundry has a total of six dreams. Each of the dreams shown so far involves one of the protagonists visiting their past or future. It has also been shown that dreams can influence reality, i.e retrieving physical objects from them or learning information that could not have possibly been learned any other way. It is possible the dreams aren't truly "dreams" at all.

Each dream has a title card, with the words "My Dream" and the dreamer's name and age at the time the dream occurs. The art style changes in each of the dreams.

Bina's Dreams

Bina's arm covering in her second dream.

In each of Bina's dreams she wears something different around her right hand and forearm, which is the arm that emits green light. The covering changes in each dream, depending on how old she is in the dream as though by being infected with the Botfly it infected not only her present and future but her past too. She also gives further insight to what the Botfly actually is (i.e. "I can't draw what it really looks like 'cause it keeps changing. So I drew a botfly.") If you also add the earlier riddle of what grows in the corpse of a day and the images/insignias on each of Bina's gloves one theory is that this http://www.all-night-laundry.com/post/906 is the Botfly being born.

Bina's dreams also apparently affect her memories of the actual events that they're based on. When Kendra asks her where she learned to pick locks, Bina tells her about Lash's party, which she had recently had a dream about, but can only seem to remember the events that happened in the dream, and can't recall how the party actually ended.

The art style for Bina's dreams reflects Bina's own art skills at her age in the dream, as if she is illustrating them for us.

Piotyr is present in Bina's dreams.

Age 6 - Dream #1

Bina talks to her grandmother and receives her grandmother's scarf. (0039 – 0045)

Plot

Bina and her parents visit Bina's grandmother. While Bina's parents sleep off their jet-lag, Bina and her grandma talk while Bina draws.

They discuss Bina's fear of monsters and her insomnia. Bina says she knows that monsters aren't real but that they still scare her. Her grandmother, however, tells that they do exist. Bina says that her mother and grandmother fight about this, and the fight implies that her grandmother is refering to people who are monsters, and not the supernatural kind. This is theatrically ironic, since All Night Laundry is about Bina's fight against a supernatural monster.

Bina shows her grandmother her drawing of the Botfly, and asks for advice about how to prepare against it. She tells Bina that there's no easy way to win against monsters. Bina tells her she's in trouble, referring to her recent injuries before she passed out, and her grandmother says that she knows. Her grandmother gives her the scarf she had been wearing in the dream, and then Bina wakes up.

We learn that her grandmother is dead in the real timeline, and dies nine years after the dream takes place (although Bina's second dream is about her funeral and occurs only five and half years later.)

Arm Covering and Revelation About the Botfly

Bina has no arm coverings in this dream, as she has not yet removed the wires or bandaged her arm in real life, but Piotyr is shown in the dream chewing on a green rubber snake that later mimics her arm wounds. The snake is a reference to how Bina saw the Botfly while she was under its trance, saying that its tendrils resembled one, but had the wrong teeth.

Bina also shows her grandmother a drawing, which is implied to be one of the Botfly. The drawing is never shown to the audience, but when her grandmother says it's funny looking, Bina tells her she thinks "it's a lot of different things all in the same place at the same time."

Age 11 and ½ - Dream #2

Bina travels to Hyderabad for her grandmother's funeral. (0196 – 0211)

Plot

Bina's family's flight from London to Mumbai is cancelled and delayed for a day, so they arrive late and miss the funeral. They stay with Bina's maternal uncle Moti.

Bina, feeling angry about the fact that everyone is feeling depressed when she believes her grandmother wouldn't want them to be, leaves her uncle's house and goes for a four hour long walk. She realizes that she is lost, and tries to first go to a school that she thinks she remembers passing for help. When she finds a school and it is closed, she tries to find a currency exchange to turn her Canadian dollars into rupees for a cab ride back to her uncle's house.

She finds the location where the currency exchange is supposed to be, but in its place is the 24h Laundromat.

Bina is still 11, and says that she doesn't want to enter the laundromat because she knows that "when [she goes] in there bad stuff happens!" B12 appears as Bina (B13) starts to panic about the laundromat, and she reassures young Bina, who quickly changes into her 20 year old self. B12 tells Bina that she has minutes before she wakes up, and lets her ask a total of five questions. B12 reveals that she was unable to save the Kendra in her loop, and that B13 is likely the last of the loops. She also says that she does not know where the message on Josephine's office door came from, and that it had not been there in her loop.

Arm Covering and Revelation About the Botfly

Bina's arm covering is a long, fingerless arm sleeve with two green flowers over the back of her hand and near her elbow. Inside the flowers is a botfly, which Bina says used to be the maggot from the line "What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of a day?" This is the first time the Botfly is refered to as a botfly.

Age 15 - Dream #3

This Dream is a long one, and includes many changes in setting, as dreams often do.

PART 1:  Memory of Lash's Birthday Party

Bina learns to pick handcuff locks at Lash's party. (0291 – 0322)

Plot

At Lash's sleep-over, Sam makes Lash and Bina search through Lash's parents' room for proof that they have sex, and they find a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs. They take turns trying to pick the locks, which Bina learns she is good at. Sam, who is annoyed that Bina is better at lock-picking than she is, begins to tell Lash a story about a time when Bina nearly got in trouble with some police at the summer camp that Bina and Sam met at when they were thirteen.

Sam and Bina heard a scary story told by one of the camp counselors about a strange industrial bakery near the camp. In the story, which was true according to the counselors, the owner of the bakery killed thirty other people, including his family, by locking them in a large oven and burning them to death. He then committed suicide by lighting himself on fire with lamp oil. Sam, trying to prove another camper wrong, brags that she is brave enough to go to the bakery and take pictures. She also volunteers Bina to go with her, who is too nervous to say no.

They walk to the bakery, which is located along the same lake that the camp is, the next night. When they finally are in view of it, Bina says that it feels out of place. She says this not just in the sense of it being creepy or feeling scared of getting in trouble, but also that its location doesn't make logical sense and that the buildings felt incomplete.

Bina’s dream begins to dissolve here. She says that “something is .. very wrong with all of this,” and that she wants to stop Sam from telling the rest of the story, but she can't because she didn’t in the past. Bina’s narration also appears to get confused about which version of herself is real. She says that she is all versions: the thirteen year old in Sam’s story, the fifteen year old at Lash’s party, and the twenty year old that is asleep and having this dream. She also says that she is “twenty-one years old and [she is] speaking to a dead woman,” but the text flashes and glitches, as if this statement has yet to be determined or is conflicting with her previous understanding of the event (similar to how Bina sees the writing on Josephine’s office door).

The story continues, and Sam and Bina make it inside the bakery through a hole in the fence. They explore the insides of the buildings. Bina says that even though she wasn't afraid of monsters, she should have been afraid of wolves or other animals that might have found a home in the abandoned bakery. This is again theatrically ironic, and reminiscent of Bina’s first dream where her grandmother implies that only people are monsters.

Still of the Hound that appears in flashes in Bakery.

Bina starts to hear two voices which Sam later confirms she hears, too. Bina looks for the source and finds nothing, except the Hound appears in flashes that are not acknowledged by Bina or Sam in the story.

Bina says that she couldn't understand the voices at the time, because they had been speaking French and she didn't know French yet, but because the twenty year old Bina that is dreaming does know French, she is able to understand what they are saying. One of the voices has a Parisian accent and appears to be Josephine Dubois, while the other sounds like Bina, except she sounds “so tired” and “too old.” The voice that sounds like Bina identifies herself as the fourth one, but she is uncertain. They discuss moving the factory, and the repercussions that this will have on the overall entropy. They also discuss how each of them views cracks in space-time.

Bina and Sam argue about what to do next and whether or not they should seek out the voices, until Sam realizes that they should have been interrupted by the police at this point. In Bina’s memory and according to Sam who researched that night later, someone living nearby called the police with a noise complaint, and the responding officers found Bina and Sam while they were arguing. Both Bina and Sam tried to run from the police, but Bina tripped and Sam left her. Bina was able to talk the police into not calling her parents and convince them that she had gotten lost while looking for the bathroom at the camp and tried to find a phone in the factory to call for help.

However, in the dream the Hound shows up instead of the police, and this time both Bina and Sam acknowledge her existence. They both run, but the Hound manages to catch Bina. Since in reality this particular outcome never happened, the version of Bina in Sam’s story cracks into pieces. The Hound uses the pieces to make a door--a door to the memory of Lash's Birthday party.

Piotyr has been barking at the door to Lash's room for a while, and now Bina knows what is out there. Despite Lash's and Bina's efforts to block the door, the Hound bursts in. Bina escapes by turning the window in Lash's 16th-story bedroom into a portal to her first kiss.

PART 2:  Memory of Bina's First Kiss (0323 - 0342)

PART 3:  Piotyr's Memory (0343 - 0355)

Arm Covering and Revelations About the Botfly

Bina's arm coverings are an all-green stretchy glove and a sweat band on her upper forearm. She explains that she used to be afraid that the Botfly was in her arm and would crawl out if she took them off, but now she feels that the Botfly is already in many "broken places," so she is also in Bina's broken places.

Age 19 - Dream #4

Bina has a panic attack and throws up on an airplane.  

Plot

Prior to the take-off of her airplane flight, Bina worries about her decision to leave Laashya in order to attend college in Montreal, Canada. Her worry escalates into a panic attack, and though she tries to keep control, she snaps when her well-meaning seat mate asks if she is ok. She runs to the airplane bathroom and vomits. The dream changes from a memory to something new when Bina hears scratching at the bathroom door, and opens it to see Piotyr.

Age Undefined (20) - Dream #5

Bina catches up with Lash a couple months from now and tries not to eat the goop.

Piotyr's Dream

Age 2

Piotyr wants to play the game with Gregor.

Kendra's Dreams

Kendra mentions dreaming about her father. Bina is interested, but Kendra puts her off because she wants to learn about what's going on. (ASIDE: Does she ever tell Bina more about it???)

She also "has a dream": http://www.all-night-laundry.com/post/911