Batch

06-13-2014 -- Very strange shifting dream. I am at the Hickory House, probably back to being a kid again, because I am running around the house in the alley, and interacting with Dave and the DuFours and the house is exactly the way it has always been. Then as I walk the couple of doors back to my house, I kind of age, and I am showing up for a visit. I wander a couple of doors down and am talking with Jeff and his parents, and it is pretty late in the evening, something like 9:45 or so. I am telling them that I have to go back home and get something, then come back and speak with them, but I promise it will only take about 15 minutes. They say no way ... too bad. I had bought them a valuable necklace worth hundreds of thousand dollars, that is a very powerful piece of magic, and may save everybody in the area or something. And now that they will not allow me to talk with them about whatever dangerous thing is happening, they will lose out on the protection.

So I walk back home, and it is now the middle of the day, instead of late at night, and as I walk up, the UPS guy or someone has just finished leaving a package. Melody has also just pulled up, and has boxes of stuff. And there are several other boxes and things waiting at the door as well. Turns out it is just a day or two before Christmas, and Melody is telling me she has a nice Christmas present for me, and don't worry, I don't have to wait until Christmas to get it. I am telling her I have a nice present for her, too (thinking about the necklace), and thinking I'm not so impatient that I can't wait until Christmas for presents. Besides, I am very happy that I noticed several boxes from amazon.com among all the stuff waiting in the front yard.

I walk inside to say hello to mom, and then start grabbing the various boxes and moving them inside (while not looking too closely at them to avoid Christmas spoilers) and Melody is talking about how the place is a pig sty and working at cleaning things up. I expect she may want my help, and am explaining that if we are going to work on some cleaning up, I may work on cleaning my room. It isn't too bad, so I am thinking if I can spend just one hour cleaning my room, I will probably be able to get it almost perfect. Meanwhile, we are both walking outside to clean up all the trash in the front yard, and Melody has decided to put her cat, Boots, outside while we are cleaning, but he doesn't want to go, and is digging his claws in and things. Once he's out the door, I pet him for a bit and explain he is still loved and wanted, we just need to clean things up.

So I am gathering up lots of trash in the front yard. Empty boxes, crates from mailing stuff, styrofoam, and a lot of empty pizza boxes, and cramming it all into a very large, but very beat up trash can, which is on the edge of coming apart. As I am doing so, I am telling Melody that as soon as Christmas is over, we may want to replace the trash can. I start telling hew how beat up it is ... and then I notice how it has an address painted on it that I have never seen before, for a street I know isn't anywhere within a mile of here. And I recall a strange sound while I have been driving my car the last few days from Florida to get here, and wonder if I dragged it all the way from Florida under the car, which might explain how bad of shape it is in. Meanwhile, Melody is looking at some of the Christmas decorations, including the angel on the wall with a crown of blinking Christmas tree lights, wondering if it is broken because she doesn't see the lights blinking. I explain they are working fine, and I can see them blinking, but I am looking from further down the front steps and it is darker, which makes it easier for me to see the lights.

I am almost done with the trash, and I need to go to the bathroom, and I can hear the house phone ringing inside, and everything is happening at once. We have a sort of extended family gathering going on, and I think my cousin Lyle has just pulled up outside, and I need to get to the toilet, and that blasted phone is still working. So I run inside and down the hall to the bathroom, just as my cousin walks in the door, but it isn't Lyle, it is Luke ... Skywalker. And he is screaming at me "Answer the @#$%& phone! You never answer the @#$%& phone! Damn it, answer the @#$%& phone, already!" I am sitting in the bathroom, and the whole house is under some construction, and half the bathroom wall has been removed (the top half) and people can just look in at you, and we are in the middle of putting back in the shelves along the bathroom wall. And I yell back at him "I'm in the freaking bathroom! I never answer the phone when I am in the freaking bathroom! Do you?!?"

Meanwhile, everything is changing. The reason we are doing all this construction on the house is that mom eventually sold the house, and the person who bought it was Rosemary (an ex-landlord), and the house that I lived in for several years (in Florida) was the Hickory House, but they changed it and expanded it, and we're now in the process of changing it all back, since we've bought it back again. I finish going to the bathroom (though I am now running around in my underwear. It doesn't seem to bother me any, though.) And I walk up to Luke Skywalker, and tell him I have words for him. I start forcibly explaining how I quit answering the house phone when I got my own cell phone, and I did it for a very good reason. Mom owned the house phone, and if I answered it, and took messages for her, some of them would get lost, and she would never get them. But if I stuck to my phone and she stuck to hers with her own answering machine, we both got all our calls, and we were both very happy. By this time, I am explaining calmly, and explain that I only answer the house phone when I told an important call is expected, and to please answer when it came in ... and nobody told me he would be trying to call.

We are having this discussion in Rosemary's living room, which has somehow replaced my bedroom which was in the house just five minutes earlier. Luke compliments me, and tells me that it was very well explained, and very well thought out, and he is impressed with how I calmed myself and the situation down, with how he had started it all off by yelling at me, and we step outside the house to find that everything has changed outside as well (from when I was out here five minutes ago.) It is still the Hickory house, but instead of being all block it is now half block and half wood. It is still on Hickory Drive, but instead of being a straight, level street, it is now the top of a significant hill, and the street curves out of sight where Holly used to be, to connect with Crescent. The house next door has been torn down entirely, and we have put up a sort of storage shed tunnel sort of thing like the house next door on the other side used to have, and I am saying "I was only gone for a year-and-a-half, how on Earth has everything changed so much?!?" Never mind that it has actually only been five minutes. "How has everything changed so much in under a year? How has the street changed? How are we now on a hill?" I glance toward what should be the intersection of Hickory and Crescent, where there is now a freeway interchange. "How is there a freeway inter ... you know, actually the freeway interchange explains all the other changes. But an entire new freeway in under a year ... that's rather impressive."

04-26-2014 -- Odd one, with several parts. It starts with me seeming to remember a dream I once had, that involved walking through the snow in Southern California, and I seem to be telling my sister about it. It was a fairly interesting dream, but not supremely so, and "I recall that it started right ... here." Here being the parking lot of the place my sister is currently working, and I explain how I was here to pick up a package (in the dream) to courier it somewhere, and I spotted all the snow, and started off to walk through it for a bit. [Might have tied into the dream where I ran into the 10th and 11th Doctors in a bar, dressing up like pirates, here.]

As I continue to tell my sister about the dream, I follow her into her work place (which somewhat resembles the 3M Dental warehouse). There's tight security, but she has no problem getting me in. We are wandering through the office area, me still telling her about the dream. We soon find ourselves standing in front of a strange cross between a vending machine and a weird sort of robotic Santa Claus giving out candy, and for some reason we are trying to empty the thing out, taking all the candy. Most of it we are just putting into a basket that everybody can take it from, but as we get close to finishing it off, I do keep a few bits for myself, including a couple of small bags of M&Ms, and what I think was a white chocolate version of a Willy Wonka Scrunch bar, a thing that has never actually existed. For some reason I am putting them in my pockets, even though I know they will melt there.

Melody has wandered off to talk to some of her co-workers, and as I was almost finished with my dream, this annoys me. I wait a little bit, but just when I am about to be able to tell her the ending, she wanders off to talk to more people, and I decide I have had enough, and I am just going to leave. I head to the exit, wondering if security is going to give me issues for leaving without her being with me, but they just wave me through. Soon I find myself out in the parking lot, looking for my white car. Problem is, it isn't where I left it, and I am walking back and forth through the parking lot looking for it, until I begin to worry that it might have been stolen. Also there seem to be some toughs approaching me, and I am thinking things are about to get painful.

Then suddenly the scene changes, and I am in a house where I seem to be sharing a room with either Ron D. or perhaps Chris (Kevin) W. For some reason we are literally sharing the same bedroom, and I find myself preparing to take my old wicker laundry basket out to do a load, but I have to make sure I gather up all my clothes, and none of his. Very strange, especially since the scene just changes again, for no reason.

I am now sitting in a bar, along the right side of the bar. There are tons of people around, and we seem to be filming an odd sort of cross between a game show and a reality show. There is a very cute English blonde (I think it is the blonde I saw in the latest Star Trek film last night, Alice Eve) who has to decide which of two gay men (both already in a relationship with another guy) she is going to marry. We're all in this bar where she and her friends interact with these two guys to decide which one she will choose. First it seems like the show is being hosted by George Takei, but it may eventually switch to being hosted by Drew Carey.

I don't really approve of the whole thing, so I am pretty much just sitting quietly, staying out of the way, but Alice is wearing a really mini mini skirt which is riding up further and further to show her stocking tops, and then eventually even her bush, while a large group of somewhat large and unattractive black ladies are standing around berating her and calling her a slut. I am just enjoying the show. Eventually the gay couple who were sitting at my part of the bar have wandered off, and there is nobody on that side any more, so I decide to move to the left side of the bar and take a seat, but as I do so, everybody is telling me I can't, and to go away, so I move back to the right side of the bar, just to find there are a couple about to take my seat there. I explain it is my seat and I need it, and have to tell them about the filming before they will go away. But eventually they do, and I have my seat back, and find myself talking to the boy friend of one of the gay men who Alice has to choose from, and we are both agreeing this is very stupid.

10-22-2013 -- In a strange, live version of Runescape with a bunch of other people, there is a sort of group or mob of enemies to fight, including some dragons, some weird lava monsters, and a bunch of other big, powerful enemies, and a group of about 20 of us are getting ready to take them on. We start fighting against them, but the battle isn't going too well for me at first. I am trying to fire magic at them, but at first I am too far away. Eventually I make it close enough, and am close enough to manage some decent shooting at them, but soon I find I am running out of magic and energy, and my shots are doing no good.

The others with me continue firing, and for a while are doing well, and managing to damage the enemies, but soon they are also running out of magic and energy, and are starting to die to the opposing forces. Soon we're standing around discussing how we probably all want to get another 5 to 10 combat levels before we bother trying again!

Somehow things then shift to the House of Imports, where I seem to be working a shift, even though it is modern times (I worked there more than 20 years ago). My shift should have ended after 10 hours, but I realize I have been working more than 14 hours, and am probably going to be yelled at, so I better get my butt in gear and get clocked out. The dealership is quite busy, with a bunch of people looking through the showroom, and crowding the short stairway down to the lower level where the time clock is, so I rise a few feet into the air, so that I am just above everybody's heads, and fly down to the time clock to clock out. Nobody seems to notice or care, and it doesn't seem like a big deal to me that I can fly, either.

---

10-17-2013 -- [Unfortunately couldn't remember much even when I dreamed it, then waited four days before entering it in, and now even more is missing. Oh well.] Somehow I am wandering around at a school or a store, slight hints of department stores at malls or perhaps Marshall. Wherever it is, I find myself wandering into a bathroom, and am trying to find a clean, stocked stall to use. Could even be in a locker room at a pool. Soon I find that I have just boarded a bus, and am trying to pay my fare. Unfortunately, I have dropped my change everywhere, and have to bend down and scrabble for my coins.

Eventually I find myself in Disneyland, walking from the hub down Main Street, heading for town square, same area I have been walking through in a lot of dreams, recently. I pass Sharon H. and am heading for the corner shop next to the magic shop which had collectible plates and figurines and things in the last dream here (yesterday with a lot of AC stuff in the dream) and for some reason my pants are too large and keep trying to fall down around my ankles.

I reach the store, and am just kind of standing around, talking with Dale. Nothing too big or exciting, just chatting. But as we are watching, one of the people working in the shop seems to be putting together balloon decorations and placing them around the store. Thing is, she is using some unusual balloons, rounds, odd shapes, very strong colors, and occasionally other things. One sculpture that almost seems to be a Star Wars creation is topped by what seems to be a small white garbage can, but it fits perfectly and looks just like whatever it is supposed to be. There are other figures that look like they are made of gold balloons, but unlike most gold balloons, these are so strongly colored that they almost give the impression of being solid gold, though they aren't.

Another creation is actually a very impressive model of Aladdin's Genie, but this one is obviously made out of blue balloons. They are wandering around the interior and exterior of the store, putting these things up in various places as displays, and decoration, and they look very good and Dale and I are both quite impressed with them.

---

10-16-2013 -- I am running around Rosemary's place, and oddly enough I find that I can get my voice back as long as I am speaking in a slightly deeper voice. I find I can sing as well, as long as I deepen my voice from my previous tenor to a nice, strong baritone. I end up running around the place able to finally talk and sing and make myself be heard, but it does make my throat slightly sore, and I find I am a little worried about it. Soon, following the suggestions of others, I decide to go visit the doctors.

I soon find myself at a cross between the Doctor's office that Terry and Grace used to run, and a dream clinic that I have frequently visited, wandering into areas that guests aren't allowed in, but that I had been invited into by Terry, Grace, and Kathy in the past. The problem is, they no longer work here, and the doctors that do are a little unhappy about me wandering around ... though not enough to actually say anything.

---

10-16-2013 -- Out on a long cross country road trip with Chris Vopat, where I am riding in the back of his pickup truck. This is bad enough for the long trip and the distance we're traveling, but it becomes even worse as a volcano a few miles away erupts and starts shooting lava down its sides and hot ash into the air, which is quick to ruin the air quality even where we are, a few miles away.

--

10-16-2013 -- At an Adventurers Club reunion type of thing, but it is not being held at the Club, which has long been shut down. I run into a couple of performers who seem to be doing some bits, but I have missed most of it, and have no clue what is going on. Then I run into BC, and she has been here for almost the whole thing, and mentions that Anne has been doing stuff from her odd version of the Vagina Monologues (see past dream here), which it seems she has now made a regular part of things whenever she is doing AC reunion stuff, which doesn't make any sense to me.

We sit and discuss this, but more and more as we talk, I find myself thinking of taking a trip to California and visiting with Dale. Somehow he is here for a visit, or perhaps only just left, and I am really in the mood for a visit to California since I haven't left the state in something like a decade. I am not sure how, but I know somehow I can get there. But I have no money for tickets to the park. I am trying to think of ways I can sneak in (possibly involving friends on the monorail), but then I remember that Keith works there, and he can probably sign me in a couple of times, which should solve that problem.

Somehow thinking about that brings it about, and I suddenly find that I am in Disneyland's Frontierland area, walking back toward New Orleans Square and Critter Country. As I walk along, I see a couple of Adventurers Club performers, either on their own, or perhaps working streetmosphere, and I am thinking it might be fun to go watch them sometime. Meanwhile, I find myself walking into a western-themed restaurant that, for some odd reason, serves egg drop soup from large bowls.

Turns out Dale has been debating trying the soup for ages, but he is never brave enough to do so, and I am kind of pushing and encouraging him to give it a try, but he really isn't sure he is willing to do so. I give up, and am about to wander off and go walking through the park, when a large group walks in. They are mostly women, just a couple of men, and though I can't identify specific people, it seems to be a group from Pine Castle. They are playing a strange game to choose a person, something of the nature of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but completely different. They have wandered in and surrounded me at the exact right time for me to win, and since I won, I am expected to provide small presents for everybody, but I have no money, no gifts, and they are all kind of disgusted with me. Doesn't seem fair, since I never asked to be a part of their game.

---

10-13-2013 -- I am somewhere that is halfway in the midwest somewhere, and halfway in England. I'm walking down the street on foot while a friend is on a skateboard, or perhaps a bike. In the street is a police car, and a cop is just stepping out of it and is keeping an eye on us, but he isn't actually doing anything, so we just try and ignore him. I head down a street that seems to be a cross between a hill in Omaha, and Dale in Buena Park. I reach about the point where Athenian Burgers was, and find Carl and Mary Baumer there. They seem to be thinking about treating me to a meal.

Instead I find myself walking down La Palma (or perhaps Orangethrope, or some random street in Omaha) discussing job possibilities. I am kind of down and depressed, and Carl (who is slowly turning into dad) is trying to cheer me up. He asks the guy who has given me a place to stay (should be Joe Lane, but is strangely looking like Marv Goodwin) what he thinks, and Marv says that I am probably going to fail at everything, but yeah, I ought to try, anyway. Dad is about ready to kill him, but Marv just drives away on his fork lift. So we walk on down to the corner, and I seem to be on the southwest corner, at Magnolia and either La Palma or Orangethorpe, but as always for Buena Park, my compass is off.

Anyway, dad leads me to what seems to be a cross between a truck yard, a warehouse, and an office building (feels a lot like the TAMS property), where he does their tires, and has contacts, and is sure he can get me a job. But they turn us down. He's a little upset, and we cross the street to a corner shop that is a cross between a restaurant and a liquor store, where dad sits down at a picnic table out of the way on the side of the building to have a cigarette. He's out of breath because of the smoking, and I'm out of breath because of my weight, and there are some toughs who are being slightly threatening, but don't really care enough to be serious about it. I'm not sure but it is possible that Paul and Irene Broden come by after that and buy me dinner at the Chinese restaurant.

10-14-2013 -- I am at what starts out as the Hickory house, but soon turns into a cross between the Hickory house and the place on Chipola. I'm heading out to drive somewhere for work, either a mystery shop or perhaps a security shift, but my car isn't in the driveway, and I am not really sure why. I'm worried it has been stolen again, but it turns out someone or something pushed it aside. It is sitting in the neighbor's yard, somewhat damaged, with a wheel missing. Seems there is no way I can head off to work now. I'm a bit depressed, and am kind of whining "Why me?", tired of all the problems with my car. Somebody (perhaps mom) tells me to quit whining, and says Don Dunn is working on the car for me. Huh? I saw it just sitting there in the neighbor's yard ... how does Don Dunn have it? Perhaps he has a different junk car of mine.

Anyway, I can't go to work, so I decide to go inside and get some sleep. I head in, and the house turns to a cross between the Hickory house and the Chipola house. I stroll into what would be mom's room at Hickory, but is mine at Chipola, and go to sleep. It's the middle of the night when I hear a noise and wake up. There are a bunch of bad guys coming for me, and the first time through I find that I am quite scared. I am walking through the hallways in the house in the dark, hiding from them, and trying to keep away from them. But oddly, it is almost like I fall back asleep and wake up again. There are still bad guys in the house, but this time I am angry, rather than scared, and I am stalking them.

All the lights are off, and they are stumbling around in the dark, but I know the house a lot better, and am able to be stealthy. I manage to take them out one by one. Accidentally break one guy's neck, but they are attacking me at home and I don't feel very bad about it. Soon we are dodging around the two doors in Keith's room, and I have managed to grab most of them and throw them out the front door, but I'm pretty sure they'll be back. Soon I start walking through the whole house, turning out the lights they turned on, so if they do come back I'll have an easier time finding them, by looking for the lights they turn on again.

Then I find out the light is on in Melody's room, though they never got that far, and I start to get a little worried. I open the door and find Melody sleeping in her bed. I didn't realize she was home, and she didn't hear anything, just slept right through it, though she is starting to wake, now. Meanwhile, all the thugs are coming back, and are trying to lure me outside. We're in the living room, and I am about to give them a good thrashing, when the leader pulls a gun on me!

Melody takes him out from behind with an amazing roundhouse kick that he never saw coming, and says nobody is allowed to pick on her little brother! The bad guys all go running out of the house (I guess two of us are just too much to bother with.) Soon Melody and I are standing in the living room while she works at cleaning out the fish tank. I say I thought that was 20 years ago, when I still had my fish, and that after the last one died, nobody would be bothering with the tank anymore. She explains that she took it over, and for years has been keeping strange lime green alien fish in it.

10-08-2013 -- On the road working with some sort of radio transmitter equipment, and antennae that fold up and fold out or something. Eventually I find myself approaching the Hickory house. Dad's truck is parked on the grass, near his bedroom window, even though he is probably dead. We have moved out of the house, and yet I think mom has just recently moved back in, so it is sort of coming home after not having lived here for quite a while.

As I approach the door, I find there is a lot of mail waiting there, though much of it is sitting on the steps, rather than being in the mail box. There is tons of junk mail, which I know I really ought to leave alone, but instead I start picking it all up and sorting through it. There are selection packages from music clubs, and lots of past due bills, greeting card catalogs, mail order catalogs, letters from prisoners, lots of mail with change of address labels on them that have somehow followed me from several other addresses, and possibly even a letter from Gordon.

I take some of the mail inside, and ignore the rest. I am very tired, and think I really ought to get some sleep, but it is raining really hard outside, and it turns out the roof leaks very badly, so it is dripping inside, as well, including on most of the beds. So I am wandering the house looking for somewhere to sleep.

I walk into mom's bedroom, and though the roof is leaking in here, too, the bed is big enough that water is only dripping on parts of the bed. Parts seem to be dry. So I climb onto a dry portion of the bed and start to fall asleep. Problem is, though I didn't actually see her, mom was sleeping on her bed, and I ended up curling up on top of her, so when she shifted in the bed, I fell off, and she chased me out of the room. I glance into some of the other rooms, and they have odd beds that are being rained on.

Somehow I end up in the back yard next to my bedroom window, kind of half looking inside, and half crouching out of sight underneath it. I have something on my face, perhaps a cross between some kind of sauce and peaches, and my marmalade cat (probably Sammy) seems to be licking it off my face. Melody wanders into my room, moving things and eventually closing and locking my window (which has been open) before moving on to her own room. Meanwhile, I have shifted over to hiding under her window, making some slight amount of noise. I am half trying to remain crouched out of sight, and half trying to pop up and startle her. She leans out the window and sees me, and is half trying to lecture me, and half closing and locking her window.

Things are kind of half shifting to becoming a large data center with computers and data banks all over the place, but still with the layout of the Hickory house. It is very strange.

Miniaturization and modernization are happening at a very fast pace, and I can kind of see as memory chips are getting smaller and smaller (and yet the amounts of them being stacked together are getting greater and greater) so that even while the individual chips are shrinking, the overall drives are getting physically larger and larger.

People are wandering through the house, and almost kind of just waving their hands, and more and more memory modules are appearing in place, and getting bigger and bigger, so that the amount of information they can hold are increasing at an exponential rate. And yet the volume of information to be contained is expanding at an even greater rate.

It's like the amount of storage is increasing from megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes and beyond, and yet the amount of information there is to store is somehow increasing at a rate that is infinitely greater. It is like storage is expanding at a rate of infinity, while information is increasing at a rate of infinity squared.

I notice this in a concrete manner because the computer that was keeping track of every kind of soda in the world used to take up about a quarter of a room, but it now takes up an entire room, even though the rate of data storage has increased so drastically. And yet it can no longer hold the data on every soda, but only on the three or four most major flavors of Coke products, because we are learning ever greater details of the molecular and even atomic structure of the Coke products, so that even though we can store billions of times more information in much smaller spaces, we've run out of room.

Meanwhile, I can barely move as they keep waving their hands and creating more and more drives and memory modules to fill up the space, and I am truly frightened that any second they are going to create memory modules in the spot that I am standing, that will materialize inside of me, occupy the same space, and cause me to explode around them.

So I am fearing for my life, while at the same time complaining because we no longer have the information on Coke's Fanta flavors, while I am being squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces. They have to move some things and make a way for me to reach the door so they can throw me out and fill the space where I was with more memory. Very surreal. Especially since at the same time it isn't problems with Fanta soft drinks, but Fantasoft (the company that created Realmz, a fantasy game I used to play.)

So I find myself standing back outside the house again, and I have something in my teeth. It is like a bit of food or something, except instead it seems to be tiny bits of incredibly strong wire and wiring and plastic, that I am pulling out of my teeth, and it is incredibly annoying. Except it also seems to be a bit of a Kit Kat Bar which is somehow made of data chips and plastic, rather than candy, while I am looking at a small circular pattern on a computer screen that seems to be in almost psychedelic colors as it spins around. Very bizarre.