Batch

01-28-2014 -- [As usual, first part is not as detailed as it should be.] First thing I can remember, I am out somewhere, discussing potential mystery shops down in the Palm Beach or Lauderdale area. I am talking to a male scheduler, but the type of shop has a strong feel of the recent Circle K shops, stuff where the pay has gone down or they have limited the number of shops or something like that. Something has gone on that has caused me to quit, and say I won't be working for that company any more, and this has ticked off the male scheduler a bit. But then it turns out one of the shops is right next to where we are having our discussion, and the closeness balances out whatever has me ticked off, so I try to un-quit, and say I won't mind doing that particular shop.

The guy says that particular shop is only doing a shop-by-mail shop, that month, but it turns out all I have to do is mail something to them, and remark on any response I get, and that is even simpler than the usual shop, and pays the same, so I am quite happy with it, and am trying to get to necessary envelope together. Problem is, as I am trying to get things together, I actually start to drop stuff, and as I do, Joe S. and his little sister show up, and start pranking me. I am carrying a bunch of sheet music for choir, and as I am picking up other stuff, Joe's sister has grabbed my sheet music and dropped it into a file, while Joe has grabbed some of my other stuff, and started moving it. I have already had the hassles I have been mentioning with the mystery shopping company, and I just don't have the patience for their games, so I make as if to stomp off.

Joe's sister gives up on teasing me, and starts pulling back out sheet music and handing it to me, but now I find myself with two or three copies of various songs, rather than just the one I need, and as I try to separate out the extras, I just start dropping more and more, and scrambling for it. Meanwhile, I also have four toothpicks I have to keep track of, and keep safe (possibly in connection to the by-mail shop) and they are scattering on the floor as well. As I keep trying to pick things up, the scene shifts a bit, and I am standing next to my car at a toll booth, right before where you pay the toll, the door open, still trying to pick up sheet music and toothpicks.

The problem is, there is another car approaching the toll booth coming the other way (doesn't make sense, but there it is), and he may plow right into me. So I pick the entire car up, and set it just off the road on the other side of the toll booth, and then hurry out of the way, myself, so I don't get run over by the car, then finally manage to finish picking up all my toothpicks and music. Problem is now that I don't want to get in trouble for not paying the required tolls, so I again pick up my car (which has an e-pass in it) and kind of swing it over the toll booth on a sort of swinging platform (like the ones in Sonic the Hedgehog that sometimes swing you over spikes or fire pits) so that it registers. Problem is, I don't stop quickly enough, so it swings over a second time, and registers again. I just hope that the toll organization will be smart enough to realize they should only charge me one of them ... meanwhile the car keeps swinging back and forth, so now I have to hope they will disregard two of the three tolls, and I get the car out of there as quickly as I can.

Then things shift again, and I find myself in Manhattan (or a cityscape that looks fairly like it) surrounded by skyscrapers. I find myself watching a movie being filmed by real superheroes. The Incredible Hulk and the Green Goblin are in the middle of a big fight, and Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man comes swinging into the middle of it, and I can hear the Hulk muttering and complaining about how it is a mistake to let Spider-Man get involved in all this, because he is so wild, and improvises so much. And sure enough, Spidey swings into the middle of things, coming around on a web at high velocity, and nails the Hulk with an incredible drop kick that sends him flying about a half a mile, outside the city, where he lands on his back, sliding through a field on the edge of a lake. He's the Hulk, so he's not really injured, but he now has a slightly painful case of something like road rash on his back, which he is muttering about as he climbs back to his feet and starts to leap back toward the fight scene.

But the scene is now changing again, and Tobey has been turning into Harry Potter (or perhaps Daniel Radcliffe) who is standing on what almost seems to be a float, along with Hermione/Emma Watson, who is feeling rather down. For some reason, I am standing there trying to tell her how very beautiful her character is, being as sincere about it as possible, to give her morale a boost. But they have to get back to filming. (Like the superheroes before, they are making a movie, but they actually have the powers of their characters, so it isn't technical movie magic being used to make the scenes.)

I am in a sort of an alleyway, out of the way of things, and some sort of late-teen black princess (dressed in a fairly fancy purple gown) is approaching the alleyway I am standing in to get out of the way herself, until her scene is ready to begin, and she sort of glares at me, so I back up further to give her more room to sit down. Harry Potter goes flying by on a broom mounted to the front of a magic carpet where all the camera equipment is mounted, filming over his shoulder as he flies, and he passes the mouth of the alley, then flies a sort of arc before heading past the alleyway again, heading the other direction. By this time the black princess has moved on to do whatever her part is, but there is a little black girl (probably ten or eleven) riding up on a bike, looking forward to watching her sister film her scene.

And somehow the little girl and I in our alleyway, get sort of sucked on to the flying carpet in Potter's wake, so now we're flying through the air behind him while the film company films these fabulously expensive scenes. They must be adding the sound separately, because the whole time Daniel is muttering and complaining about how there is a fabulous peanut-shaped blimp flying high up in the sky, but they didn't know it was going to be there, so they couldn't plan to include it in the filming, which bothers him, because he thinks it is neat. The problem is, all the sheet music that I had been trying to carry has now turned into large, flat (unassembled) cardboard boxes, and the wind rushing by as we fly along has pulled them out of my hands, and they have been sucked in front of the cameras and have ruined the scene. Daniel goes ballistic, and starts screaming at me for ruining the scene, and mentions now they will have to refilm it tomorrow, but I am not available tomorrow, and you know what? He's glad I'm not available tomorrow, because after ruining the scene, I don't deserve to be in it, so hah! I don't remember what I actually have to do tomorrow anyway, but I say I can reschedule if they want me to, and be there, but he tells me that I am not wanted. Rather depressing.

[Just interesting information ... though I have not read it in some fifteen or twenty years, there was a very early Spider-Man comic book that had Spider-Man and the Green Goblin filming a movie in a desert somewhere (Spider-Man thinking the Green Goblin was only an actor, and not realizing it was the real Goblin) when the Hulk stumbled into the middle of things for a huge fight.]

07-23-2013 -- Find myself playing video games with a grown up Jeff (childhood friend.) His joystick seems kind of sluggish, so he is hooking up a different joystick to play with, but it doesn't seem to work. He is just about to detach it when the screen flashes and I tell it him try it again. It seems it took the system a few seconds to recognize the new joystick. So we're playing this video game that involves shooting at robots and space ships and such in a sort of a maze-like building, and it is a game that I have never played before, so Jeff is kind of teaching it to me. As I approach the space ship and start firing on it, drawing it's attention to me, he explains that you have to hit the spaceship on the sides or behind with ten shots to disable it. Now he tells me! My weapon is almost drained from all the shots I am firing worthlessly at it's forward shields, and it is starting to fire back at me, and I am almost instantly destroyed.

We begin to play again, and this time I have a better idea what I am doing, but suddenly the game is gone, and this is now live. We are in a large room, perhaps 100 feet square, perhaps 100 meters, and maybe 30 or 40 feet tall. The space ship is in here with us, along with a lot of robots that are attacking us. This time I manage to get behind the space ship and fire on it, and I eventually manage to disable it, but I've almost drained my weapon, and am going to have to wait a while for it to recharge. Meanwhile I am being attacked by more and more robots, including ones with energy weapons, and one that advances on me, blowing large (perhaps about a foot in diameter) bubbles. If the bubbles hit me, they make me slippery. If they don't, they still land on the floor and pop, making it slippery. So whether he hits me or not, anywhere he has been becomes a dangerously slick surface.

The bubble blower has managed to grab my wrist, and is holding me, so it is easier for the rest of the robots to reach me, but I manage to twist free, and run for it. There seem to be more and more robots pursuing me through the room, and there is no sign of Jeff, so I look around and find a doorway in the west wall, right near where it intersects with the north wall. I run through and find myself in another large room about the size of the last one, but this one, instead of being wide open, is like a maze, with no big alien space ship, but lots of the robots wandering around, chasing me. I keep going through several of these rooms (I can only remember 4 or 5, but it feels like a dozen or so) generally alternating between a single large space and mazes, until I finally come into another room that looks almost identical to the first, including a large space ship in it. But everything is still.

I make my way south in the room and find a door like the one I entered my room through, and open it to find myself looking out at a classroom of late teens or adults (late high school or perhaps college students) and I am embarrassed about interrupting their class, so I hurredly shut the door, but might have just spotted Jeff sitting at the teacher's desk. As I start back through the room, I find the space ship and robots are now beginning to move, and I figure I have triggered them by opening the outer door. I realize Jeff may soon be bringing an entire room full of people after me, and also that, by solving the maze all the way through, I may have also provided that solution for the others. And I don't know if it will be all of us against the machines, or also against each other. I decide the safest thing to do is return to the room where I started, and already defeated the space ship, so I move to the top right corner and the door to the next room, and find myself looking at a straight run through all the rooms, with no maze passages. No idea where they went, but it makes it quick and easy to return to my starting space.

The area is a little calmer now. The space ship is still disabled, and most of the robots that were attacking me are now scattered throughout the entire maze. I fight a few more robots, including bubble blowers, and by now my weapon is recharged. Soon there are some others running around, and though they don't attack me, they do seem to be on a different team, so I figure they are probably Jeff's students. I find them moving a small, disabled vehicle (think the fast sleds that dropped off the rocket launching guys in the X-Men video game) out of the doorway to the next room, seemingly in preparation to seal the door, and I don't want to be trapped in here, so I rush for the exit to try and push my way through before they seal it off.

Meanwhile, I notice most of the others are wearing more and better equipment than I am, and wonder if they have earned it over the course of many skirmishes, or if they scavenged it during this game, and find myself thinking I should have broken into the space ship once I disabled it, and seen if there was any equipment within that I could have used. Oh well ... I'm still learning this. Most of the robots have now been destroyed, though some of the guys are still busy feeling up the chests of some of the female robots, while the ladies look on in disgust. There are some burgers available that seem quite thick, but not all that large around, but they take forever to eat, and are really, really filling.

Scattered throughout the maze are models of scientific principles, including the occasional tongue-in-cheek version. Instead of the five balls hanging from strings they have a full-size model of the cartoon floating around the internet with the five kids sitting on the swingset and the teacher standing to the side pulling one to the side, about to show conservation of motion or whatever the principle is. Somebody notices that I am not one of them, and asks me what I am doing here, and I am explaining my friend Jeff and the game, and they are also wondering if it is their professor.

One of the guys, who seems to have a bit of history, and a really good record (and a bit of an ego as well) is building a burger and is demanding to know where the mayo and the tomatoes are. He may be half-blind, because the mayo is right in front of him, but I think we're already completely out of tomatoes. Too bad, Mr. Attitude Guy!

12-10-2012 --I'm at Brookhurst Junior High, somehow wandering around the campus, trying to remember where I had classes and things, back when I attended. I'm kind of comparing the actual school to what I remembered of it during a recent dream, and I can never get the numbers to line up correctly.

I'm thinking the first row of classrooms were numbered 1 - 10, with the metal shop and wood shop as 9 and 10, then the second row was 11-20 and so on, but the numbers just aren't adding up correctly, since there was an extra classroom on the first row that would throw things off. I'm also trying to remember if the library was located in the third row of class rooms or the fourth row, and what it's number was. But again, I couldn't quite remember.

[In truth I can't remember in real life, either, and there is no map online anywhere to remind myself. Oh well.]

Soon I am sitting at a computer (right next to the school) looking at a text map I made of the school to post with one of my dreams in here, but I realize I really ought to make the wood shop and metal shop larger, since they were larger than the other classrooms. I'm trying to enlarge them without ruining everything else on the map.

Soon I find myself talking with a teacher named Mr. Morgan, who is not a real teacher I had, but in the dream, he is a teacher that taught a reading class back in the 7th or 8th grade, and he failed me because I missed his class so much by running late, since he was first period. I am telling him about the class I had at Savanna with Ms Wood, reading for enjoyment, or some such, and explaining I got a B in that class, but it would have been an A, if I hadn't been late all the time. [In actuality, I had Ms Wood's reading class in eighth grade, in the room next to the drafting shop, which was also used for theater classes, but for some reason the dream moved it to Savanna.]

He reminds me how he made me an offer to save my grade if I wrote up a report for him on some sort of profitable gambling system that my dad was involved with, in a mafia sort of organization. I tell him I can't remember anything about it after so much time, and ask how I did on the project, and he reminds me I never turned it in, which is why I didn't get the extra credit and failed.

I start to leave, and walking out toward Crescent, in the area between the first row of classes and the wood and metal shops, the area starts to turn into a car wash, and suddenly my car is appearing around me, and I am hurrying to roll up the window, so I don't get soaked. The car wash finishes, and I half-drive, half-walk to the little parking loop in front of the first row of classes. Oddly, I am instantly looking to climb down a very short cliff to get in my car at the parking loop, but there is a bully and a wolf trying to give me problems.

The bully isn't too big of a difficulty, but the wolf, who is supposed to be somewhat friendly, seems to be rabid or something, and keeps trying to bite me. I try to hold him off and not hurt him at first, but soon he is really doing a number on my hands, drawing blood even though I am wearing thick leather gloves, and I finally have to start fighting him in earnest. Once I manage to throw him 10 or 15 feet against a wall, but he comes right back at me, so finally I have to break his neck and kill him.

End up talking to the teacher again, he has given me a note on an entire note pad, the notepad is somehow advertising the golfer Jack Nicklaus, and I explain how we have a hospital in Orlando built in his honor. [Actually hospital is named after Arnold Palmer.]

As I start to climb into my car, I am suddenly walking out the door of the Hickory house, and have heard something about how some friends have done some work on one of my cars, and have taken the other one for scrap. Somebody is asking me if this bothers me, and I say it doesn't. I don't know what the car they took was, but the one they left me was the blue Jimmy that I now drive, except they also washed it, and the blue seems to have been dirt, so it is now a white Jimmy.