Glieuaeiel's DJ

Stereotypical (8:05)

One of my sisters has a friend over. She comes into the room in the middle of an argument and offers some advice that makes no sense. I find it annoying that she jumps in without knowing enough background on the situation to offer an intelligent opinion. Throwing caution to the wind, I tell her so, in no uncertain terms. Then I walk out of the room.

Or I try to. Somehow the furniture is throwing me off. I keep running into dead ends and having to backtrack. I suppose I must look ridiculous now that my dramatic exit is ruined. I suppose I must also look like a stereotypical rude older brother. Whatever. Eventually I realize I'm navigating like I'm trailing my left hand along the wall of a maze, which is silly. I extricate myself and go over to my laptop. I power it on with the intention of playing some video games, even though that will probably only reinforce the stereotype. Later, I wake up when my alarm goes off.

[I didn't try very hard to remember the details of this dream. I didn't feel especially happy when I woke up, and I figured that meant the dream couldn't have been a very good one. These details came back unbidden later in the morning.]

It's Your Destiny (6:58)

A red-haired anime girl repeatedly walks up to my character and hands him a note. Half the time, she folds it into a paper airplane and blows it at him like she's blowing a kiss. The other half is a similar animation that also involves her blowing something at him. It's obvious that only these two animations were made, and they alternate randomly for variety. In both, after she delivers the note, she uses a pink rod about the size of a penis, which turns into an umbrella, and she floats away.

Some girls I know who have played the game before tell me that no matter how you play it, your character ends up with that girl. It has something to do with your destiny. I'm resistant to this idea, but there's clearly a different girl following me around in the game to enforce my destiny. The next time I see her approach, I get ready to do battle. I'm not exactly excited at the concept. I have a premonition that this battle will involve throwing fireballs, though, so at the least it will give me inspiration for lucid dream control, when I ever have one again. [D'oh!]

Indeed, one or two golf-ball sized fireballs are thrown. We also try setting traps on various pieces of furniture, but I'm not sure exactly how to set them off. Anyway, this girl is herself not an expert at this kind of fighting, so I'm not completely flattened. Some people my age are standing in a nearby driveway (it's dusk), which complicates things, because I think we're supposed to keep our abilities a secret. As I'm looking around, I notice an uncanny coincidence: of the three groups of people standing nearby, all are holding or manipulating a car tailgate/rear bumper, and our spells start affecting all three bumpers at once. It's such a strange coincidence that I start to wonder whether maybe destiny has something to do with it.

There's a man walking around the bar, singing enthusiastically along with the background music (which is Copeland's Hoedown). Our battle ends at the same time as the music.

Gingerly (6:58)

My family is walking into a building through a room with a lot of dog poop in it. Fortunately, there's a clear path around the side. Unfortunately, my mom trips and falls into the dirty part, then rolls through the dirty part before coming to a stop. That last part was totally unnecessary. She could have stopped herself somehow. My sisters are making loud, disgusted noises.

On the way out, I consider going around the other way, but it turns out that there are a ton of cobwebs between the car and the wall of the garage. Not worth it. So I go ahead of the group back around the original way so that I can open the door. We're talking about how this was just a routine checkup for our dog, but last year's checkup was routine and it led to discovering an illness which she hasn't recovered from to this day. So we're hoping for good news, but we're worried. We're also trying to coordinate times and places, because there's something I need to go to on my own, and someone else will have to pick me up.

Burnt Sugar Cookies (6:58)

Last night, someone made SO MANY sugar cookies. Dad shows me the box. They're all a little burnt, so they're brown rather than beige. They're going to be used as rewards. Dad also shows me the container which is supposedly full of grease from all the cleaning that had to be done afterward.

We try talking to my middle sister about something stupid she's doing. Mom's been trying to convince her to stop, but she isn't listening. I decide to pipe up and try to calm things down. I admit to her that I don't know as many of the details of the situation as Mom does, but I still agree with Mom's assessment that she should stop. I try to give some reasons, but I'm not sure that she listens.

Later, we're sitting around the dinner table. Dad tells everyone about how I've solved some of my professor's "Challenge Problems." I hadn't been planning on bringing it up, because that would be bragging. But now everyone's looking at me expectantly, so I say yes, I solved two of them. "Both of which I've already seen from other sources," I add. My eldest sister says encouragingly that there's no problem with that; it's all about "unifying the notation." I nod. I'd never thought of it that way before.

Springtime Traditions (6:58)

Spoiler for Springtime Traditions:

There's a video choreographed to "Rite of Spring." Right now, we're at the frenzied section towards the end of "Mock Abduction." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the accompanying video shows three couples lying parallel to each other, having sex. The video cuts are all over the place. I have a feeling I know what's coming. Indeed, on each of the last chords before "Spring Rounds," everyone convulses together. A helpful white label appears on screen, too, saying, "orgasm." I wake up messily.

Frags:

• Someone asks me my year in school, so I hold up three fingers. "Fourth?" they ask. I suppose the little short wall between us might have gotten in the way, so I raise my hand higher and say, "Ah, no, third," and they say, "Ah, of course." I wonder if my pinky wasn't folded over far enough the first time.
• There's a free bottle of alcohol lying around, so I grab it. Reading the label, I see that it's apparently bourbon. Excellent; I haven't tried that kind yet. [IRL I have this thing where I kind of want to try all the different kinds of alcohol, and then maybe never drink again after that. Who knows.] I put the bottle in my backpack. I still feel weird doing things like that; I feel like it should be illegal for me to possess alcohol. But it's not, anymore.
• I witness an awesome piece of scenery, and I try to impress it on my memory. It might have involved clouds.

Horse and Lava (8:45)

I sit down to play a game I haven't played in a while. I don't mean to play for very long, but when I finish the first level, I'm intrigued enough to play the next one, as well. I don't remember exactly how it goes, and it seems like it will have distinctly different game mechanics than the previous one.

It involves riding a horse around a 3D landscape. If you fall too far, your horse lands on all four feet and just stands there, but the screen fades to black and you start again from the place you fell. I guess they didn't want to make a horse death animation, in case it traumatized the little kids that play the game. Anyway, I manage to climb down a cliff into a red, rocky canyon crisscrossed by streams of lava. I don't think I was supposed to come down this way, but I complete the objective and then find my way out of the canyon by the way I was supposed to enter. Jumping over the streams of lava takes precise timing, and you can feel the heat of it at your back. I keep expecting some difficult enemies to appear, but they never do.

At the mouth of the canyon, three ghostly ancestral figures rise out of the sandy ground. They declare that since I have succeeded in my objective, they will allow me to do one final task to gain their assistance. We start to travel together across the sands, then the scene fades to black and reappears again at the beginning of the next level. My character laughs and tells his horse that he can't come, this time, because of the nature of the task. So it looks like I'll be doing this level on foot. Well, that's different enough that maybe I should try this level, too. I try out the controls for walking around on foot, because I'm not really used to them.

Unethical (8:45)

This game has a top-down view similar to Heroes III. I'm currently being told how the two nations I'm looking at have been unfairly put upon because of their small size. In fact, on the map, each "nation" has a grand total of two buildings. It's an example of that tendency in video games to compress the world. Right now, one of those buildings is being robbed of all its valuables, because the nation doesn't have enough guards to patrol it. My parents send me over to grab some of the loot.

The interior of the building is covered in rolls of coins. When you click on a coin, it disappears, revealing some of the floor underneath. One of the first structures I reveal is one of those ones that enhances your stats when you visit it. That makes me feel a bit better, since it seems I was intended to visit this place. I hear some of the high officials of this nation discussing the robbery. I'm not sure where they are, and I'm not sure why they're not coming in to find me if they know it's going on. I feel bad for them, though. I take my loot and go back home.

My family starts doing stuff with the loot, and suddenly I become utterly convinced that this was unethical. We didn't need this stuff. At the very least we could have left it for some other, needier people to steal. I try to explain this to my parents, but they don't agree. I try to take inventory of some of the loot to prove it to them. Most of what I took was coins, so probably 99.9% of the value of the loot came from that. But we also took a lot of food, so I try to sort it in order to get some kind of handle on how much excess value we took. It takes some time to get everything together. The whole time, I'm just feeling a sort of righteous anger at my family. I get through to them, a little bit, but I still need to gather up all of the candy we took. My family all start eating Starburst and--to my incredulity--dropping the wrappers on the driveway. Littering, on top of theft? I yell at them a bit and then start peeling the wrappers off of the ground (they're wet). There are way too many wrappers here for them all to have been dropped in the last few minutes. They must have made a habit of this over months.

Soon after, some cars pull up at the bottom of the driveway. Law enforcement, probably. I'm happy they're here, even if it means I might get in trouble for being involved.

Oops (8:45)

Birgitte walks onto a bus and announces herself. She has brownish skin. There's a big man standing on the bus with his arm around a girl with blackish skin. It is understood that this man is Gaidal Cain, so he must've mis-identified this other woman as the one he was destined to be with. Oops. He look sheepish. Stepping away from the other girl, he attempts a suave introduction of himself to Birgitte.

Frags:

• a youtuber who makes videos about sexuality

Counter-Bullying

I'm sitting at a desk in a high-school classroom. The teacher is an athletic-looking male, and it's a math class. But I'm not paying attention to that, because I feel something hurting me from behind. Some dumb kid thinks it would be fun to bully me, eh? I half turn in my seat, then casually and carefully bite the finger that's hurting me. I only catch a tiny bit of skin in the bite, but I think it's enough.

"Thank you, for not doing that again," I say. No reply.

A few minutes later, I feel a prick of pain in one of my shoulders that won't go away. Apparently I didn't scare them off last time. I have no idea how they're causing this particular sensation of pain, but I try to get rid of it by rubbing my shoulder against the seat behind me. It stops. After a second, I decide it's time for a confrontation. I turn all the way around and grab the kid behind me by the front of his clothes. He looks to be about fourteen or fifteen, with his hair cut long, a bit like Justin Bieber. He had been laughing quietly to himself, but he's not any more.

"What's your name, kid?" I ask. He just keeps looking around, shifting his eyes and not making eye contact. He doesn't look particularly scared. I'm trying to give him an angry, threatening look, and I'm surprised at how successful I seem to be. It's not a look I've had much experience with.

I look around to see if he had an accomplice. The guy sitting to the kid's right seems to be laughing to himself as well, so I ask him, "How about you, huh? What's your name?" He too stops laughing, but he doesn't answer, either. I notice that both kids have the same basic haircut, and also the same hair color: light blond dyed a faint purple. Anyway, since neither of them are responding, I suppose I should start thinking about how to deliver the rest of my speech.

I get up to walk a few feet away, conscious that other people in the room are probably about to start noticing the confrontation. When I turn around, I'm surprised to find things have escalated: an ally of mine's found a friend of his, and they've ganged up on one of the boys who was bullying me. One of them is pinning the boy's arms behind his back, and the other is winding up to punch him. I suppose they figure they'll get him to talk by torturing him. But that's no good, so I run back and shove them apart with my hands. Now the teacher's definitely coming, so I only have a few moments to finish dealing with the situation my way. I start lecturing the kid from the seat behind me, even as the teacher runs up and tells us in an exasperated, angry voice to get back to our seats. It's clear he just wants to end the disruption; he doesn't really care what caused it. I think I should finish my lecture, first.

I [falsely] wake up. I spend a few moments trying to remember the details of the dream, then I open my dream diary. I'm surprised not to see a date on the page: I usually write tomorrow's date right before I go to bed at night. But then I look at some of the text already on the page and remember that I've already written down some dreams from earlier tonight. So I put down a new bullet point and write down some details from this most recent dream, including "slight purplish hair." My handwriting is unusually small. I hope I'll be able to read it later.

Now, I'm not sure what time it is, and I'm not sure whether I have school today. It's the day after I flew back to Chicago for school. [IRL, I'm still on summer vacation.] I'm mostly moved into my room, except I'm pretty sure some of my stuff is still in storage elsewhere in the city. I'd planned to get that before classes started, so I really hope it's not Monday. But then, I'd planned to fly back on a Friday, so maybe I have the whole weekend left? I'm not sure, so I look for my cell phone to check the date.

The room is large and rectangular, the headboard of my queen-sized bed midway up the longer side. My first cell phone tells me nothing. My second cell phone, a red one, confuses me. [IRL, I don't have a second cell phone.] I can't find the date or time anywhere. Then I see the word "recording" on the screen, and I realize I must have left it recording video all through the night. I wonder what size the file is by now.