Grappling Hook I'm playing a James Bond video game on multiplayer. On my end it's two-person splitscreen, but there are four players in the game altogether. The person on the lower screen suddenly stops, and I freeze as well because I was screen-looking. But we're nowhere near each other, so I start moving again, hoping that he didn't notice. He's currently in a skirmish with the other two players. I enter a warehouse. There's a metal cabinet in the back corner that looks worth investigating. I walk up to it, and eureka! Among other useful items, there are a couple of bazookas. I take them, then screen-look again. Accidentally, I swear! But this time the lower screen corresponds to one of the other two players, and both of them are running up behind me. I try to turn around and get them with the bazooka, but my character is moving really slowly. "What am I, encumbered, or something?!" I say in frustration. I've never heard of encumbrance in James Bond games. But that must be what it is--there was too much big stuff in that cabinet. I get off one rocket, and then the others start firing rockets as well. Damn. I get to the bottom of the metal ramp leading to the cabinet; the other two people are standing there, too. The range is really too close to be using rocket launchers, but I shoot again, anyway. And I die. Grr. I respawn on a lower level of the map, near a raised highway. I decide to try out my grappling hook. There's a target for it (a small beige circle with a sort of raised knob in the middle) on each of the lampposts near the highway. Using the grapple here is a shortcut from the lower level to the upper level, so I see why it would be useful. I shoot the hook at the target and the wire pulls me up, but that just leaves me hanging a few yards off to the side of the highway, swinging slightly back and forth. I try to pump my legs to get a large enough swing that I can jump onto the highway, but I can't get it large enough to be comfortable with the leap. I let myself back down. I try again, this time standing farther back from the light. I'm not going to give myself any time to swing back and forth and lose momentum--the moment I get high enough, I'm going to release the hook. Since the wire will be pulling me forward, I should have enough sideways momentum to reach the highway. It works! Now I just need to figure out how to go _down_ using the hook. I go out on the balcony of the third floor of a building. It's dark out. There's a security guard in the parking lot below, locking up for the night. The grapple hook target is right on the railing for the balcony, so I attach the hook. I expect some kind of automatic animation showing me sliding down the line, but nothing happens. Well, I guess it's more realistic this way. Manually, I toss down the line. Some how the line attaches to something at a diagonal slope, so when I send my gear down, it slides out into the night like it's on a zipline. The security guard sees the gear going past and starts beating it up with a baseball bat. Shit, that gear's expensive! Hurriedly, I pull the gear and the zipline back up to the balcony. It only takes a couple of tugs. The guard peers in my direction, then suddenly points at me and starts shouting--and running towards my building. I'm not sure how he plans to get up here, until suddenly he shoots his own grappling hook at a target on the edge of the sloping terra-cotta roof that leads straight to my balcony. Uh oh. My only chance is to run past him while he's busy getting up here. I jump over the railing and onto the roof. It's hard to keep my footing as I run to the roof's edge, and I end up slipping over the side and landing on the ground with a painful thud. Okay, realistically, there's no way for me to escape from this. So I wake up. Ziplines and Triangles (LUCID) I'm hiding in the woods from the delegation of thirteen Aes Sedai who have come to take me away. Crouching beneath the bushes I listen to them walk nearer, I hope they will not find my hiding place. Wait, no, there are fifteen, not thirteen. That doesn't make sense; thirteen is the magic number. Oh, right--just five Aes Sedai, with ten wood nymphs to guide them through the trees. I look up from the book for a moment, thinking rather lecherously that at least I'll be able to imagine that the wood nymphs are topless green women, like in Shaiya. My hiding place has become my bedroom on the ground floor of my family's house. I hear a knock on the door, and I know it's because the wizards have found me. They mean to take me away with them to train my magical powers in a distant school, but I don't want to go. They'll be polite about it, at least at first, so I open the door to find my youngest sister with one of her friends. They hand me a letter, which I'm sure comes from the people waiting outside. I take it, but then I flip off the girls (they don't react) and shut the door. Later, I decide to go outside and look at the cars in which these people arrived. There's no one in sight as I walk down the driveway, but there are six or seven unfamiliar vehicles parked along the sides and along the road. Some look like they came from the early 20th century, and they're painted rather garishly with the names of the institutions to which they belong. I'm not sure how many of them belong to the wizards, and how many to other groups that happen to be in the same area. When I return to the top of the driveway, I decide to drive in the Pathfinder. It's parked in such a way that it faces down the driveway, so I just hop in and drive it with my bare feet. I don't even have my driver license with me, which kind of bothers me, but this is rather fun. As I go down the driveway, I realize that it will be hard to turn around, so I brake and try to turn the car so that it goes between two of the big pines along our driveway. I slide sideways for a bit, but eventually I make it through and onto the lawn. I realize that I've never gone off-roading in the Pathfinder before, even though it's an SUV with a very off-road-y kind of name. It's fun, bumping along in the grass, but I have a bit of trouble getting the car back onto the driveway where it started. So I get out and walk the car, instead. As I'm about to go back into the house, I see my mom in the garage. We talk about bikes for a moment. It looks like she's about to take something to the bottom of the driveway. It looks heavy. I ask if she wants help, but she declines. It must be about five in the morning; I wonder if she got any sleep at all. She works too hard. But without asking her a second time, I just go back into the house. When I reach my bedroom on the top floor, suddenly I wonder if this was all a dream. I do a nose RC. It works! My bedroom is very dark. I decide to try verbal commands. "LIGHT!" I shout. "MORE LIGHT!" The lighting changes a bit, but it's not really any better. There are probably people sleeping nearby, but since it's a dream, that doesn't matter. "WAKE UP, EVERYBODY! THIS IS A LUCID DREAM!" My vision's gone wonky, like there's another image overlaying my bedroom. It looks like a curvy triangle, and I suspect it's the shape my covers are making in front of my face. Not good. Desperately, I try the light switch. Of course, it does nothing. I decide to abandon the bedroom and try my luck outside. I dash down the hall and into my parents' bedroom. As I run to their balcony, I shout some bullshit statistic, like, "Did you know that 80% of socks are hung on the sixth and seventh clotheslines?" Then I grab one of the socks that's hanging over a thick cable slanting down from the outside of the house, and I slide down the cable like it's a zipline, knocking the other pairs of socks willy-nilly to the ground. I land in a large city plaza full of trees. Miraculously, the curvy triangle has vanished. It's a beautiful day, and there are a few people walking around. I decide to try speed-running down the sidewalk. I turn to my right, and I manage to get some speed, going perhaps twice as fast as I'd be able to sprint while awake. As I approach a heavyset guy my age going the other direction, I notice that he's looking straight at me. I slow down for a closer look. He's smiling, and he's got one hand held out like he's pointing a pistol at me. Well, that's weird, but maybe that's just how DCs say "hi" to people. I laugh and smile back, jokingly asking what he would have done if it turned out he actually shot me by accident. Then I realize that it wasn't a very funny joke. Oops. I elect just to walk away from that one. The sidewalk ends at a highway where there are a lot of people standing around. Another guy my age tries to get me to play catch with a remote-control helicopter. Agreeably, I climb up onto a horizontal metal pole and get set to grab it. But at the last minute I chicken out. Those blades look dangerous. A few moments later, I [falsely] wake up. I keep my eyes tightly shut. I might as well try to chain into another LD. I lie still, trying to picture the scene I just left. Then I wonder whether my theory was correct, the one about the blankets making that curvy triangle, and I decide it's worth it to open my eyes and check. Yep, there's that triangle. But wait, before I draw any conclusions, I should make sure I'm actually awake. I sit up and do a nose RC. Oh. I decide to try using the makeshift zipline again, so I run through my parents' room and slide down. It's not as spontaneous, though, and everything outside seems to be darker and more indistinct. Moments later, I [falsely] wake up again. I lie underneath the covers with my eyes open, not sure what to do. Suddenly I notice the window. It's raining, and it looks like there's a sinister figure standing just outside, staring at me. I sit up in terror. Turns out it was just a tree and a strange trick of the light. I do an RC to find out that I'm STILL dreaming. I get out of bed and decide to try snapping flames again. Just one snap, and it doesn't work. I start trying to picture candle flames in my head, but suddenly I get very frustrated with the whole situation and I deliberately wake myself up. [I forgot to check whether my covers in waking life were actually making a curvy triangle. I suspect they were not. Also, during the original LD in my bedroom, I said something clever involving the phrase "What the frack." Soon after, I tried to review the moment in my head so that I'd remember it when I woke up. But apparently it didn't work.] Alex Day's Penis Spoiler for Alex Day's Penis: I've been watching Alex Day's newest video. It's almost over. As a grand finale, he apparently takes off his pants (though you can't see for sure, because only the top half of his body is in the shot). I feel like rolling my eyes. But then suddenly he starts messing with the camera, and there are a few frames in the resulting jumble of camera angles where I think you might actually be able to see his penis. It looks like he has an erection. This is over the top, even for him; I'm astonished that he got permission from YouTube to do something like this. There's one shot where he has an empty can of energy drink with the bottom cut out; he's holding it over the top of his penis, I guess to imply that it's longer than it is. I notice that although his penis is quite long, it's rather spindly as well. Heh. The whole time, of course, he's grinning like a maniac. I feel like I should finish what I started and watch this video to the end, but I don't like it. I keep looking at the play bar to see how much time is left. Study Abroad I'm visiting an old high school acquaintance while she's studying abroad in a Spanish-speaking country. Feeling brave, I decide to try talking to her in Spanish. She responds in kind, but she talks so fast that I can't really understand her. I do understand that she asks me how much Spanish I've done while in college. Slowly, I manage to formulate a response, telling her that I've studied a bit on my own but she's clearly better than I am, now. Shootout [This isn't really a legitimate dream, because it happened this morning when I was half awake and feeling too comfortable to get out of bed. But I definitely wasn't fully awake, and I think it's interesting, anyway.] Not wanting to get out of bed, I'm entertaining myself by imagining various soccer plays that involve me scoring a goal. The first one is too slow, because I shot with the side of my foot. Ruefully, I remind myself that in order to get any speed, you have to have your knee over the ball and kick with the laces. Then I have more success. I bet the coach is glad about putting me in as forward. Our offense was hurting, before. I'm still frustrated with some of my fellow forwards. Then, one time at the moment when I take the shot, my actual, waking-life right leg jerks as though it's doing the kicking. Surprised, I wake up fully.
whiterains dream yet another restarting uni dream. there are lots of old mates from uni, but also school and loads of randoms too. i go on a hall crawl with an old school mate. i find russ in hall 4 and this arab looking guy who lives next to him with his wife. his wife is pretty hot and she takes a bit of a shine to me. we are all pretty hammered and siting around in this common room type thing. im sat on this sunken sofa, dead comfy in between these 2 girls. chris is there, but even after wondering why we are starting again, i dont get lucid. there is a weird zip line type thing outside. there is no way to attach to it though, so in the end i kind of attach it with barbs to my skin on my chest and swing along. no pain but weird... i see a massive crowd milling around some station on the way to london. i see an old mate TJ who i havent seen in years. this finally gets me lucid but i dont think of chichen itza. i just say to him that i will comealong with them for a bit. i follow them around while stabilising, but eventually it jumps back to another dream. the common room has turned into a bus. im chatting to alana as we watch the world go by. i remember everyone going wild when another coach comes past and i remark at how odd it seems when we are already on a bus full of hot girls. there is another bit with the arab couple. somehow we get involved in some kind of 3 way. the dude seems cool with it at first, but then later on he pops back up in the dream with a gun. at first i think to flee but there seems no point so i just stand my ground and face whatever is coming. he fires off one shot but as he gets closer he seems to want to talk rather than just shoot. im relieved and seem to be talking my way out of it when it fades. also remember smoking with vas in manc, and just being at a party in the same little bar as ever..
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