Thread: rezza's journal

Night 1.

Dream 1:

Dreaming of using my computer... just sitting there as some program compiles.

--

Dream 2:

On holiday with the folks. Something about Duncan and Irena's wedding, something about their marriage being on a boat, and how all the guests were ill. (DREAMSIGN: THEIR MARRIAGE WAS NOT ON A BOAT, I WAS THERE!) Anyway, got to the holiday place by boat. (Very vague recollection of the holiday itself - nothing really happened). While waiting for the big boat to turn up to take us back home, we decide to drive down the coast in the direction the boat will be coming from to see if we can spot it (we'd seen a police motorbike driving around near here to check up on speeding). Just before we leave, a big police boat comes storming up to the harbour at a ridiculous speed, and goes straight for the harbour slip-ramp thingy. The police boat turns out to have wheels underneath, and it drives up this ramp thing and sreeches round the corner at the top and roars off down the road. I say something like "Holy shit, they're in a hurry!", then mention how well trained they must be to be able to do that without slowing down. Anyway, we then pile in an anonymous car and start driving down the road. At this point I am worried that we won't notice our boat and so we'll drive further than we should and miss the boat back. We get to the end of the stretch of road - there's a small grimey bit of water walled in, and there are a couple of ladders which go up into the hillside above. We stop and get out the car to stretch our legs.

I climb up the biggest ladder, to find myself in a network of tunnels and rooms all inside the rock of the hillside. They're all slimy and dripping with water, and made of red brick. There are people running around in here. There's one ladder which to get up I have to push my way through an oily tarpaulin at the top. After that ladder, I begin to notice that the people are all looking for a way out. I see Khalid staggering around in these tunnels as if he's been mortally wounded, but I don't know its Khalid till the third or so time I see him.

I continue to explore, eventually finding myself in a smmall room higher than all the others. (dream gets very vague for a while at this point). I begin to feel claustrophobic, and I start to try to remember the way out. I have no idea where it is. I bump into other people all trying to get out, and in the dream I begin to recognise them even though in real life the only one I know is Khalid. Next time I see Khalid i ask him what's wrong, because he's clutching his chest as if he's been shot - he jus grunts and gets up and staggers away from me again.

Dream gets more vivid again here for the last bit. Eventually I make it back to the room above the ladder with the tarpaulin on top, but because the tarp is in the way you can't see the ladder. People are milling around the room searching, because they are convinced this room is the lowest spot and there should be a ladder here somewhere. I remember the tarp, and try to pull it up from the ground, but its stuck. I shout for help, and one other guy comes over. He seems vaguely recognisable, as if we met once in a bar or at a party or something. I tell him where the ladder should be and explain about the tarp, he pulls a knife out of his pocket and starts stabbing holes in the tarp. He perforates the area above the ladder, then says "I'm going first" then just jumps on the patch of perforated tarp. It gives way, and he goes falling down painfully, but manages to twist in the air to grab the ladder as he falls and stops himself.

I climb down, find my way out, and see my parents near the car outside. Nobody else comes outside. I wake up.

This is a dream I had 2/3 years ago, it was so incredibly vivid I just had to write it down as soon as I woke up (this was before I knew about dream journals and inducing lucidity). I wrote it from a sort of first person viewpoint, and I can still recall this particular dream almost perfectly.

Since I had this dream I have written a bit more on the end of the story, but that stuff wasn't explicitly dreamed so I didn't include it here.

DREAM

I looked around the arena. It was full of people sitting cross-legged around the rough circle drawn on the floor. Everybody was sticking to their group of friends and companions - there was no shouting and joking. Nobody was smiling because each person there knew that they could be called out at any time. The room was fairly large; about thirty feet across, and it smelled of stale sweat. The only illumination came from an old strip-light near the centre of the roof which gave off a flickering, yellowish glow which seemed only to intensify the apprehensive atmosphere of the place. None of this light reached the corners of the room which remained impenetrable to any glances. The floor was slick with grease and dirt, and obscurely I found myself wondering if anyone would be able to see the stains gained by sitting on such a floor against the general grime-encrusted mess of my clothes.

There was one person sitting opposite me who was conversing quietly with his companions; he had a hunched back and abnormally long arms. I suspected that he had been artificially enhanced - as probably half the people in the place had been. He was staring around at the assembled mass of figures, sizing them up. He had won the last fight and was looking for somebody to challenge, discussing possible strengths and weaknesses of potential candidates with his friends.

My attention wandered. I turned to the only people who had been even remotely civil to me since I came to this dank world of darkness below the city: one a bulky man with a balding head and scarred face, the other a diminutive woman who had a striking if not immediately beautiful face and short-cropped dark hair. She noticed my looking at her and smiled warmly at me, before she broke into an altogether more disconcerting worried look as she turned her attention behind and above me.

I turned around to find the current champion of the ring grinning down at me. His face was only inches away from mine; the first thing that struck me about it was the smell. Both thickly sweet and rotten at the same time, it made me reflexively want to retch. It was a smell which seemed to fit with my current circumstance - thrust into a decaying society I knew nothing about yet somehow finding it enjoyable and repellant at once. With his face so close to mine I started to notice details I couldn't have picked out when he was on the other side of the room: he was extremely ugly, with a misshapen nose and lumpy brow. His eyes were set very close together, and shifted a little out of place to the left. What drew my attention, what kept me staring fixedly at him when everything in me ached to cry out in horror and jerk back from him, were his teeth. These confirmed my earlier suspicions of unnatural augmentations to his body - they were the teeth of a carnivorous animal. His canines were elongated and tapered to points, while his incisors were sharp and serrated. I was terrified of this visage presented to me, and even more so when it began to speak.

"You. New boy." His voice was harsh and loud in my ears. "You're up."

I finally broke the spell of mesmerising fear and shuddered. I shook my head violently.

"No!" I said. "I can't. I'm not even fr-"

"No excuses. You're here, right? That means you're fair sport. Nobody who comes here is allowed to refuse a challenge, apart from the boss over there." He turned and asked the crowd who had all turned to watch us "That right?"

There was a chorus of answers which were vaguely affirmative.

"Yeah! You turn up, you gotta fight!" That one came from one of the bestial champion's companions. I turned and looked imploringly at my two friends. They looked downcast and submissive. I was sweating profusely and hyperventilating. I started to scramble away in panic but those in the crowd nearest me grabbed me roughly and set me on my feet. Immediately a large space cleared around us and a wild cheering and foot-stamping began. My aggressor punched me full in the face as if in introduction to what would come. I staggered backwards, dazed, and a little concussed. For some reason I found myself wondering what the weather was like at the moment up on the surface.

Then something happened. I was no longer terrified and fearful for my life, but I became calm and rational. I was no longer involved with the action personally, but I was looking upon it from above and watching my body recoil from that first punch. I could think with perfect clarity. How would I survive? I would have to win. And so I began to control the movements of my body as I watched it from above, making it dodge and dance away from the next flurry of blows aimed fiercely at my head by my opponent who obviously wanted to win the fight as quickly as possible. Every action seemed like it was being played out in slow motion; as if it had been recorded and I was studying it, but I was able to direct the show. I swung my right fist towards that ugly mouth but immediately switched and threw with my left fist when it became obvious that my first attempt at a hit was going to be blocked. I didn't have to plan the feint - I was simply able to react with a swiftness which allowed me to almost instantly counter anything that happened.

My left jab connected and I watched with a trace of pride as the shocked look spread across the face of the man who thought actually downing me would be a formality. I took advantage of his surprise to land a kick on his right shin before he recovered and again swung at me. As before, he was too slow and I jerked my head to the right and heard the low rumble of his fist rushing through the air next to my face. I brought my knee up quickly and connected with his groin. There was a grunt of pain which seemed to last for seconds when I knew that in reality it lasted but a brief instant. I then rapidly thrust my forehead at his nose and hit him hard, knocking him sprawling to the floor.

The hooting and cheering had stopped. In all, the fight had lasted less than ten seconds, but from my lofty vantage point it had seemed like a long, graceful, balletic performance. I felt myself being pulled back down towards my body, and with a rush was back in it, reeling drunkenly with confusion as my absolute clarity of thought left me and my two friends quickly caught me as I fell. I was lowered to the ground slowly. I felt giddy with success: I could see the looks of surprised respect on many faces around me, not least the two who comforted me now. The small woman gestured at some approaching figures and said quietly,

"Here he comes. He'll ask if you want another fight and if you say no he'll take you into the back for your prize. The prize gets bigger the more fights you win in a row, but you look - ahh - a little the worse for wear at the moment. But its up to you. Not many people get to see what's there. It might be interesting." and she kissed me lightly on the cheek before a small, limping man walked up to me and asked me if I wanted to fight again. I declined with a shake of the head, then accepted his offer of following him to the back doorway to receive my prize. The crowd parted at our passing and whispered excitedly to each other. I was very tired and I ignored them. My nose was bleeding from that first punch.


***


The back room was smaller than I had thought it would be, with walls that seemed to be made out of metal. It was in stark contrast to the arena we had just come from: bright, airy, and clean. There were two large men wearing black suits (real suits! Something I had not seen for a long time), standing either side of the door me and my host had entered through. There were two other exits, one to the left and one in the wall facing me as I came in. The one in the facing wall was open, and I could see a couple of steps leading down from it towards a large open area with what looked like an underground river running across it, something I had never seen the like of before. It was strange: this room looked like an old storeroom that had been converted into a makeshift office, and the fighting arena had probably been an old factory floor before the Grubbers had converted it, but just through a normal-looking door was what seemed to be a cave. I thought I was just in a basement which maybe connected to some sewers, but apparently there was more to it than that. There was a large desk littered with sketches and hastily written notes dominating the room, and the Boss was standing behind it.

---
END of dream

Mon 17 May

--

Christmas time. I book my trip up to see the family, but none of my extended family are going, unlike normal. I'm still at uni (DREAMSIGN: not in real life I'm not) and I work out that I have to get the train on Christmas day evening to get back in time for my lectures (nobody has lectures on boxing day, that's crazy). Can't really remember anything else.

Tue 18th

--

Jack & Jess back from travelling round the far east, need a place to stay. Rich & George need somewhere too. We go to this (seemingly) smallish place which doesn't exist IRL, and start to have a look round. The rooms are fairly sizeable and pretty nice, for some reason George and Rich don't like each other at all and don't say a word to each other (DREAMSIGN? they get on really well IRL). Anyway, this place just keeps getting bigger and bigger the further in we go (it starts on the ground floor, then goes down. A long way down...) The floors aren't simply or logically laid out at all, the whole place is a mass of twisty corridors and stairways going all over the place.

They go and speak to the landlady, sign some stuff, and hand over first month's rent and deposit while I wait outside. When they reappear back up in the street, there are other people starting to arrive. General friendly chat along the lines of "Oh, so you've moved in already, have you? We might end up being neighbors!" At this point I start to realise the vast scale of the place they've moved into. I ask George I think how many people the house is for, and he laughs and says it isn't a house, it's a massive complex which has around 600 rooms in it!! He reckons they'll all be taken within one day though... I marvel at the size of the place, and how it just looks like a really small flat from the outside, then wake up.

Commentary

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There seems to be a trend of big, twisty buildings in my dreams Which I've not noticed before. Thinking about it now, I have vague recollections of lots of other massive, complicated buildings and structures like networks of caves etc in my pre-journal dreams. This has definitely got to be something to watch out for.

Well after trying to keep a dream journal for a few days then deciding it wasn't the best time to do it (my sleeping patterns are pretty screwed at the moment) tonight I went to bed thinking "wouldn't it be nice to have a lucid dream". And guess what happened?

Yep: lucidity. I am completely elated right now.Its 4:34am and I've just woken up from it, so forgive me if my thoughts are a little untidy.

It wasn't the most impressive lucid dream, probably not as memorable as my first, but I'm proud of it anyway, because I (kind of) induced it myself.

I had a few dreams which were about travelling up and down the country (in a train or trading caravan of some sort - its complicated to explain because I don&#39;t know exactly what it was myself&#33, and I met the same people each time (each dream was one journey). I kept sort of half waking up between dreams, and thinking this dream is getting boring, but then I thought ah-ha&#33; this is a good chance for lucid dreaming. Next time I dreamt, I had the same dream again. About halfway through the journey I was suddenly hit with lucidity, and I just screamed out excitedly for all to hear &quot;I&#39;m lucid dreaming&#33;&#33;&quot;. The people near me looked very shocked by my behaviour, it was very funny. They started turning toward me and looked like they were going to ask me what I was talking about, but I pointed at each one in turn and said &quot;Stop&#33;&quot; very clearly and louldy. They each froze in place, and for some reason I was very very freaked out by this power I had. I just started thinking about the fact that I was freaked out, and then thought uh-oh this better not turn into a lucid nightmare (I am way too inexperienced to deal with one at this point <img src="http://www.dreamviews.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle"/> ). I tried closing my eyes for 5 seconds to try to change the &quot;scene&quot; because the dreams I&#39;ve been having tonight have been pretty unpleasant anyway (unlike normal), and everything went completely white. I opened my eyes again, and I was in the same &quot;scene&quot;, but all the people I had &quot;stopped&quot; were carrying on as normal as if nothing at all had happened. At this point I started thinking of an old female friend of mine who I haven&#39;t seen in over year who contacted me recently, and she ran through the room I was in and out the door. This totally freaked me out. I am not used to thinking about people and them just showing up right away... I was on the verge of panicing and waking up, but I managed to calm myself down enough to follow her through the door she ran through.

My paranoia was reflected in the dream here because as soon as I went through the door I knew she&#39;d be waiting just behind it about to jump on me, and obviously, there she was. She jumped out at me, looking like a deformed, unnnatural ugly version of herself wearing tattered dark clothes, and she started hissing at me and scratching me. I had pretty much forgotten that I was dreaming by this point, but suddenly lucidity seemed to hit me again and I turned her back into normal and I made myself feel completely comfortable and at ease. (it really was easier to do it this time around than the first time during this dream&#33; Does this stuff get easier each time?) I said hello and kissed her in greeting, then the room we were in turned into a comfortable room with a couple of low sofas and a coffee table (I didn&#39;t do this consciously, but it was a welcome change <img src="http://www.dreamviews.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/grin.gif" style="vertical-align:middle"/> ) We sat down and I was about to talk to her to see what this me-version of an old friend of mine would say, but all she said was:

&quot;wake up.&quot;

...and I did <img src="http://www.dreamviews.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/icon_sad.gif" style="vertical-align:middle"/>

Still, I am very excited about this lucidity and what it might mean for my hopes of achieving regular lucidity in the future. In fact I feel really energetic and exhilerated and happy right now, and since I started writing this down I&#39;ve woken too far to drift straight back to sleep... I&#39;ll have to go read a book for a while or something to try to calm down.

Anyway, sorry for the long rambling... time for relaxation.









...or maybe another lucid dream?&#33;

Ho-hum, been a while since I added anything to my journal, but here goes. Its gonna be a long'un.

I was having a relatively normal dream, if such things exist, in which I was at some sort of social function and I met a load of people who were my friends in the dream, but I don't know in real life. Basically we all decided to go out for a few drinks later that evening, after the anonymous social function had ended (I have no idea what it was). I went to meet them in town, but before I found them I bumped into a bunch of my real life friends, so I dragged them along and we all met up as a big group of around 12 or so people. We went to a bar and had a few drinks, then the next thing I remember is that we are in a big DIY warehouse type store.

This is where things get a little weird.

We start playing a game, which involves picking up the nearest DIY tool off a shelf and using it to try to kill the other players. This is a normal DIY store with customers milling around and the occasional assistant walking past. The thing is, we know that its a game and not real, so if we die we'll just return to normality. (sound familiar?) It was a very strange feeling, completely different to lucid dreaming. It was more like playing a computer game. And now that I've written that down, I've just realized where this game thing in my dream came from - I've been playing doom3 a lot the past couple of days.

So anyway, back to the game. I end up with an electric drill with which to kill my friends (gosh this dream sounds nasty if you start reading from here lol), and start wandering round cautiously trying to find them. The dream is a bit vague here, I don't think I did very well at the game, because its actually really hard to kill someone with a drill if they're actively trying to kill you at the same time with a screwdriver or an angle grinder. I think I killed only one other person, by using my electric drill to bludgeon them to death instead of drilling them. The guy who I killed was trying to use one of those old-fashioned manual drills you find in school wood workshops, with the handle you turn on the side. He managed to get it to my skull at one point and start turning it, and I felt it going inside my skull (very weird feeling) and it tickled me a bit.

When people died, instead of leaving bloody, disfigured corpses, the bodies just disappeared by dissolving into red smoke (just like in the game doom3). Everyone was laughing and joking and having a good time. Lots of friendly shouts of "Come 'ere, you bastard!" or "haha, I'm gonna sandpaper your face off!" etc. If you've ever played a multiplayer game like quake or doom or unreal tournament, you'd recognize the talk .

Anyway, it eventually turned out that because I was doing a lot of sneaking around and hiding, everyone else managed to kill themselves off except me. I was the winner. I laughed and smiled and was happy about winning, then I thought I should be leaving the game and getting back to real life to carry on being sociable with my friends.

I couldn't figure out how to leave the game.

At first I started to panic, thinking I was stuck inside the game, but then I thought "Actually its just like not being able to wake up in a lucid drea... - oh!" And lucidity hit me. That was the strangest way to achieve lucidity I've ever had.

Anyway after I realised I was dreaming I forgot about the game completely and wandered outside the store. I came out on some steps next to a busy street with throngs of people lining the street and some sort of parade going on. I asked the person closest to me (who of course was a very attractive girl ) what was going on, and she told me that there was a carnival going on outside town today, and the parade was making its way there. I asked her if she was going, and she said yeah, in her horse-drawn carriage. I thought that was a bit odd, but let it slide. I asked her where it was, and she couldn't find it, but she said Igor would know. She then just shouted "Igor!!" really loudly, and a short old man with a thick Russian accent came up and asked what she wanted. Anyway it turned out that he couldn't find the carriage either, so I asked the girl if whe wanted to come with me. When she asked how I was getting there, I said "Well I'm flying of course!" and at her absolutely dumbfounded look I laughed and said "I'll show you", and started swooping around and pulling off tricks above the appreciative crowds. Thats about the last thing I remember.

Strange dream. I wasn't lucid for ages, and the weird thing was that I remembered so much before I became lucid. After writing this down I've remembered even further back in the sream, and also lots of other bits from the sections I wrote down here. The dream was really vivid and detailed and I'm surprised I remember so much of it. I just wish I'd thought to try out more dream control and maybe the time stopping thing to stay in the dream for ages, but I was too busy just going with the flow to think of stuff like that. I get annoyed when I realise I'm dreaming but don't think to take advantage of that fact at all - just sort of think "wow, I'm dreaming!" then carry on with whatever I was doing. Seems like a bit of a waste of lucidity to me. But I suppose I had an enjoyable dream anyway, so it doesn't matter all that much.

rezza out

dream &lt;&lt;EOF

I was somewhere in the middle east with a few friends. There were some people from a government trying to catch some people they thought were terrorists.

Somehow we ended up getting mixed up in it. We were at a casbah somewhere in a litte carpet stall, and one side (can't remember which) took over the stall and started briefing people. We got given a job - we had to go through the city to the other side and look for a certain person. I seem to remember we were given a task to do at the end, whether killing them or giving them some information or something else, I can't remember (and possibly never knew).

As we were heading through the city, we kept getting glimpses of an area under the pavements which seemed like it was 1.5 to 2m deep and very dusty, full of pipes and wires and wooden supports etc. For some reason we were trying to work out what it was there for, and it felt like a problem we'd been set by a schoolteacher.

Anyway for one reason or another, we found ourselves in this space - sort of a tunnel network, but it rather resembled foundations for a building, with all the other stuff that goes along with that (pipes, wires, cladding, piles of sawdust, heaps of broken bricks, wooden struts, etc etc). We wandered around under there for a while, then suddenly someone realized (decided?) that the under-space was there so people could get easy access to pipes and wires atc without having to dig up the pavement.

After a while of exploring (no idea how long, time was a bit tricky to keep track of in this dream) we came across a sort of 4-wheel drive buggy with big squashy tires to go over all the stuff down in the under-space. I was arguing we should use it to get to the other side of the city faster, but someone else was against it. I managed to persuade them, we got in, and away we went.

It was controlled using a joystick, which was very odd. We had an extremely bumpy ride for a while, then came out of a doorway onto a beach. The beach was spread across a beautiful bay, and we were quite close to one of the headlands framing the bay. We got out of the buggy thing and a small boy came running towards us, shouting. We waited.

Turns out he worked for the owner of the "campsite" on this beach, and was trying to persuade us to use it. It was getting dark then, so we thought "Why not?" and went for it. At about this time the friends I was with changed from being generic "dream friends" (I didn't know their names, or sexes, or who they were, I just knew they were my friends) to being three specific friends from real life (two guys and a girl).

Anyway, this campsite the guy worked for was on a patch of yellowed scrub grass, hidden behind a few trees at the back of the beach. When we got there we could see that it was rather odd. It was essentially just a load of 2m by 2m square plots of land which were all marked out in paint in great rows. In some of them people sleeping in sleeping bags were visible, in others people were sitting around on the grass chatting or cooking from camping-gas stoves. There were no tents anywhere. The most striking thing, though, was that each little plot had a country written on it in the same white paint which was used to indicate its edges. I remember seeing countries like France, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom on some of the ones we passed. We got our plot, and were just heading towards it when I was rudely awakened by my alarm clock.

EOF

Wow, long time since I last posted an entry <img src="http://www.dreamviews.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smiley.gif" style="vertical-align:middle"/>

Anyway...

The place was run by two nasty characters, whose names I can&#39;t quite remember. It consisted of a rural area, and an urban area approximately the same size. The rural area was populated by homely-type farmers etc, very down-to-earth and friendly. I travelled through, staying at a farmhouse on the way. Good food.

The urban area was a bit of a sprawl... made me think of London circa ~1700 (after the rebuild after the great fire) for some reason. Anyway it always seemed to be raining, and the ground was permanently wet. There were sinister-looking characters around - long trenchcoats, shifty looks, nasty glares. People avoided them. Not that there were many people wandering around the city anyway... most folks seemed to stay at home.

So I arrived there, started walking around. Came across a walled park, which had a locked gate. I was curious, unlocked the gate somehow, and went in. The park area sloped down to a fairly big river. As I started strolling down to the river&#39;s bank, some old-ish guy came sprinting down past me, dove to the wet grass and skidded along for about 5 meters before stopping. He was being chased by a couple of the sinister-looking chaps I&#39;d seen outside the park. They caught up with him after he had come to a halt, and gave him a bit of a beating. Feet, fists, and truncheons. They spat on him unceremoniously and walked back up to the park gate.

The old-ish guy looked about 60, running to fat, and balding. The near-premanent rain had given him a pallid look, maybe he had cholera.

He was scrabbling around in the wet grass, looking for something. I wandered up to him and asked if he needed any help. He grunted a negative and continued searching. I stood next to him, watching. Soon he found what he was looking for: a hole in the ground. He shoved his hand in, and grabbed his prize: a large bar of &quot;Rod Stewart&quot;-brand chocolate. He looked at me and smiled, then gestured for me to follow him as he stood up painfully and walked down to the river. He was covered in cuts and bruises.

We got to the river, and he stepped down into it. I looked a little uncertain, then followed as I noticed a door set into the opposite bank. We waded across and opened the door. Inside was a warmly-lit earthy/rocky space, with a fire on the rocky back wall and lots of tree roots in the earthen ceiling above our heads. There was a wooden table in the middle of the room, and a passageway leading off the left-hand wall.

He sat me down and told me about the sinister men, how they were &quot;secret police&quot;, but that anyone with enough money could buy their way into the service. How they were untouchable, and ran the whole place for the 2 nasty characters whose names I couldn&#39;t remember at the start, and still can&#39;t remember now. How they would wander around extorting people out of money, running insurance rackets, mugging people, and generally being &quot;The Man&quot; in the worst way they could. He told me about how last week, he had just purchased the big chocolate bar he had now placed on the table and was currently eyeing hungrily, and how he had come down to eat it next to the river on a rare fine day, but some secret police had beaten him up, made him drop the bar, and dragged him off to their overnight holding cells for no apparent reason. It had started raining again, and his chocolate bar was washed down a hole in the grassy slope. As he was being draged away, someone had whispered in his ear that he should come back in exactly one week&#39;s time, because his chocolate bar would have been all the way through the water system and would be right back where he dropped it then. And that&#39;s where I saw him - running from &quot;The Man&quot; once again, managing to avoid getting dragged off to the cells, and finding his precious chocolate bar. I looked duly shocked, although having heard this story I vaguely remembered being told something of these secret police by a friend of mine before coming to the place.

He began munching his chocolate bar in earnest, and gingerly offered me a piece. I accepted, and sat there wondering what I could do to stop these secret police.

--

That&#39;s the end of the clear recollection, what comes next is a bit more hazey, and mostly unrelated to the first part.

--

There was something about swords, and lots of people all with swords all walking down a tunnel. I was one of the besworded people, and for some reason I had a vassal who was following my orders, though didn&#39;t seem to happy about the situation. He had a sword too.

We all strolled down this tunnel, looking (hunting?) for something. We were all a bit nervous, and making bad jokes among one another to cover up that fact. Oh, there were about 7 or 8 of us.

Something happened which made us all turn on one another. I&#39;m not sure what, but it made the other people change from my allies to sources of food. We all started attacking each other. With our swords. I was ok, most of the other people were quite shit, but I was doing well because I had a servant to fight for me. Temporary allicances were made and broken as the numbers were whittled down, people were stabbed in the back and fell to the ground dead.

Eventually there was just me, my vassal, and someone who knew what they were doing left. I ran at the guy who seemed to know what he was doing, and he disarmed me. My sword clattered uselessly to the ground. I managed to grab him in a bit of a bear hug and pin his sword arm to his side though, and I shouted &quot;Kill him&#33;&quot; at my vassal. My vassal smiled grimly at me and pointedly sheathed his sword, then leaned back against a wall with his hands in his pockets, clearly expecting me to die and for him to be released from servitude.

I became enraged. You could say &quot;incandescent&quot;. I basically pounded on my opponent in a frenzy - knees, teeth, head and feet all flailing wildly, while my hands were trying to wrench his sword away from him. Eventually I did manage to get his sword from him, and backed off with a snarl to gain the advantage of reach. He merely looked pleased with himself, and recited a verse of poetry to me, which he said he&#39;d thought up just then while we were grappling. Alas, I can&#39;t remember what this poetry was. He also said he&#39;d come up with another verse while he killed me, and he stepped into some kind of martial arts stance which I didn&#39;t recognize (tbh he looked like a fool, waving his hands around and sidling around me with his feet). He looked extremely confident.

I just kept slashing at him with the sword. He got cut to shit, and despite kicking me once and puching me a few times, eventually he started wavering and looking very weak from blood loss.

I was just about to deliver the final blow, when we both just stopped moving, then he seemed to step out from himself, and someone I hadn&#39;t seen before also stepped into the scene next to him. I was a bit bemused. This guy who stepped out from within my opponent was smiling and laughing, he just said &quot;Man&#33;&quot; at the newcomer, who replied with &quot;Yeah, he&#39;s a bastard to kill, isn&#39;t he? He&#39;s gone for a really cheesey build. You had almost no chance.&quot; Then I realized that we were playing some kind of game, and I woke up.

Comments on the last entry:

The closed water system was odd. So was the fact that there was just a fairly small urban and rural area enclosed in... something. Not sure what. But I knew that there was nothing outside of it.

Oh, and there was a piece of music playing, almost like a soundtrack, as the swordfighting was getting going - a dnb track I've been listening to recently, which has a suitably frantic urgency to it. Very atmospheric.