Flashlight Nightmare!!!

No this isn't a thread about a light lost in shipping or finding what I just ordered on BST for half of what I paid. It was a real freaky nightmare! Here goes...

I was walking with my wife on one of our many evening strolls and we come upon an abandoned school next to a playground. There is a mother and child there, his name is Brandon and he is about 5 years old. We start chatting and he is curious about the school. We both look inside and we see tools and a flashlight on the floor. I say "Lets go check it out" and pull a 3C Maglight out and we go in. I don't own a 3C Mag. We find the abandoned equipment and in the pile I pick up a 5D Mag but the last foot of the battery tube is all threads. We go up another flight of stairs and find more stuff. I find a 2D Mag that is cobbled together with different colored parts. I manage to get it going when "it" arrives. It is a malevolent force. The room starts going dark and swallows up my beam. I start yelling "BRANDON WE NEED TO GO NOW!" I look over at the kid and he is wearing a hood and where his face should be is a black void. His light is working and whatever Brandon has become is looking at me. I just know if I can get to the holstered L4 on my belt I can use it to get out. But I am frozen in place and the darkness is closing fast. Before it gets to me my wife wakes me up and says your having a nightmare.

Whoa, an evil force using flashlight parts as bait. I need a hug!

Kind of creepy huh?

I think you should stop eating canned beans before you sleep at night.

I've had similar issues, where the reactive methane and hydrogen sulfide byproducts from the digestion of beans churns with ammonia and other reactive components as it flows in the bloodstream...

my M6 has teeth, the L4 throws marbles, maglites rocking and swaying on shelves, anything thats not lanyard'd to something is running on the floor, and CR123As jumping up and down from one shelf to another :candle:

I think after awhile the flashlight part just runs on the mind even under non-rem sleep and pairs with imagination when your sleeping very shallow. I shudder to know what the guys over at blade forums dream of

I'm guessing someone wants a 3C, 2D, and 5D Mag for Christmas

Illum_the_nation said:

I shudder to know what the guys over at blade forums dream of

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I can sympathize with you because I too have had dreams such as:

*dropping lights down large holes where I can't retrieve them (usually exploring steam tunnels from above ground)
*flushed flashlights down the toilet (by accident... don't ask)
*doing a bit of urban exploring which can get really freaky at times especially when underground in school basements/civil defense fallout shelters
*losing my EDC (this happens more than you can imagine b/c I almost always have it in my dreams and well... strange unrealistic things sometimes happen and the flashlight is forever lost)
*having Li-ion batteries explode
*etc...

Yes, these all happen although I don't dream like this every night of course... otherwise I would be a flashaholic

The last bit might have been a nightmare, but the beginning sounds more like a builder's dream; I'm still trying to think of what you could do with the entire lower half of a Mag tube threaded..

The only flashlight nightmare I've ever had thus far, a couple of times, is a battery venting incident while the battery is still in the flashlight. Which is very creative of my brain since I've never actually had a battery vent..

Since I think the 3C Mag is the coolest of all the sizes... Ya better get one now! (Direct drive P7 from 3 NiMh cells)
I have had about half a dozen dreams about the mag85 in the last year or so. It's always outside at night and the mag85 is drilling holes in the dark. That's it. Nothing like the bulb failing or the battery fading, or monsters etc,.

I had a dream about maglites once. I was walking through my house(but since it was a dream, the house was different but still familiar ya know?...) and I came accross a minimag that was all different colors as if someone had cut a whole bunch of them up and threaded them back together. it didn't make it any longer but it was bright! and then I woke up and was dissapointed to not have it and only have my other minimags that weren't nearly as bright...

StarHalo said:

The only flashlight nightmare I've ever had thus far, a couple of times, is a battery venting incident while the battery is still in the flashlight. Which is very creative of my brain since I've never actually had a battery vent..

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trauma incidents might stay with your throughout the course of your life, some call it shell-shock, I just call it trauma

Funny enough I had a dream about flashlights last night too. It wasn't a nightmare though. I just picked one of my lights up and admired it thinking what a nice light it was. I do this when I'm awake, so it was a bit of a boring dream really. :laughing:

The old crappy mags represent your current flashlight collection. The kid Branden represents danger. The light on your belt that you failed to deploy represents your financial situation. The fact that your wife was with you is the answer. Ask *her * to buy you the next light.

I had a flashlight related nightmare a few weeks ago, I was going to post it in the original thread but never got around to it, so it can go here!

It was late night, and I was upstairs in my room with a malfunctioning piece of equipment (I think it was either a frequency counter, or a modified clock radio). Anyway, it kept losing power so instantly I knew there was a problem with the mains supply in the house. The room light itself was very dim, and there was a 'foggy' presence in the air which made it difficult to navigate. There was no-one else in the house. I grabbed my Fenix L1D, thinking 'this one will probably be the most reliable' and I wondered downstairs, where it was even darker. The same foggy presence was there, and the L1D only just cut through it, but I think my eyesight was also very poor for some reason. It was a very stressful experience! I walked into the corridor that leads to the garage, and noticed that the lightswitch was 'on' but the light was out. I flicked the switch off, and a lamp (on a different circuit) came on on the other side of the garage, dimly illuminating that corner. Approaching it, I noticed that there were 2 ancient lead-acid batteries on charge, without any electrolyte in them! The charger was humming loudly, so I switched it off. This caused one of the striplights to come on in the garage, and the foggy presence started to go ease off. The L1D seemed to be either getting brighter, or having more of an effect. Upon checking the breaker box, I noticed that it had gone into an 'intelligent load compensation' mode, where it can control individual loads on each circuit - and decide what should stay on in the event of an overload. Resetting it caused all the lights to come back on and everything was back to normal! It sounds stupid, but it was quite a scary nightmare at the time... :laughing:

Hmm, so you meet a 5 year old boy, you pull out a 3C Mag, then come across a 5C Mag, then a multi colored 2D Mag? Darkness swallowing up your beam, child frozen. I don't know about this dream.

WadeF said:

Hmm, so you meet a 5 year old boy, you pull out a 3C Mag, then come across a 5C Mag, then a multi colored 2D Mag? Darkness swallowing up your beam, child frozen. I don't know about this dream.

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Neither do I!

Illum_the_nation said:

I think you should stop eating canned beans before you sleep at night.

I've had similar issues, where the reactive methane and hydrogen sulfide byproducts from the digestion of beans churns with ammonia and other reactive components as it flows in the bloodstream...

my M6 has teeth, the L4 throws marbles, maglites rocking and swaying on shelves, anything thats not lanyard'd to something is running on the floor, and CR123As jumping up and down from one shelf to another :candle:

I think after awhile the flashlight part just runs on the mind even under non-rem sleep and pairs with imagination when your sleeping very shallow. I shudder to know what the guys over at blade forums dream of

Click to expand...

so this is what i get to look forward to?


man, i'm getting another hobby.. atleast during the summer i can dream about running my car at the drag strip. :thumbsup:

Dude! You people need to lay off the coffee before going to bed!

I keep telling y'all, it's the narrow little frequency range that suppresses melatonin production -- you use ordinary white LEDs after 9pm or so, your brain's not going to start letting itself make sleepystuff until two or three hours after you put those lights AWAY.

Switch to amber, for the last couple of hours you plan to be awake.

I've got my 4D M@g with four emitters (from Mike Boyd, InReTech: http://www.inretech.net/
for when I need BRIGHT evening light -- it's room size illumination for power failures -- and various smaller amber lights (and the evening amber/yellow house lights) for ordinary use -- and by the time we're ready to go to bed we can barely keep our eyes open because that old melatonin cycle has had its couple of hours to time out and has started to ramp up. Just like nature built us to do.

Remember -- for a couple of hours after the last exposure to blue-green light, your _brain_ is awake. Computer monitor, fluorescents, white LEDs -- all have a lot of it.

No matter how tired your body is. No matter how much you want to sleep. Even if you go kind of unconscious in bed, your brain doesn't have its melatonin and it's sure that outside the cave there was blue sky just minutes ago so the big predators are damned sure still up and walking around, and your being in the cave in the dark isn't going to save you. It's gonna keep you awake for those crucial three or four hours til all the predators are snoozing themselves.

Well, I warned ya. Watch out for sabertooths and cave bears there in the dark.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071214031605/www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060527/bob9.asp

"... the biological clock is most responsive to a narrow band of wavelengths from 466 to 477 nanometers (nm), which are close to the blue of a clear sky.

"It's not something we would have predicted," Brainard notes, since these wavelengths aren't ones to which the eye's vision receptors—rods and cones—are most sensitive. The receptors called blue cones have a maximum sensitivity of about 430 nm.

Brainard says that an explanation for the biological clock's blue sensitivity soon emerged in "a landmark paper that stunned the world." ... a new class of light receptors in the human eye. These receptors' sensitivity peaked at 480 nm...."

Nightmares? That's just your brain in normal operation, sensitive to the blue light that told it when the sun was last up, so how much longer you need to stay ALERT in the dark.

Hey, amber LEDs are _lovely_ things. Get some today!


Okay, rant over, happy Solstice ....

The most inteesting part of the dream for me is the abondoned schoolhouse you began to explore. Do you dream about buildings often?

Hey Nikon,

No I don't dream about buildings often...

I got excited there for a minute. I dream about buildings a lot and always find them fascinating. Oh well, back to flashlights...

They must have been incandescent mags, and your batteries must have died. Some people live that nightmare every day! :laughing: