The book of mars

I'm with my (dream)friend, a girl, kind of sporty wearing a flannel, at UMF but its not UMF. We're here for tryouts for this... game/thing/college/class.
Its being held down in the Roberts parkinglot, which is busier, with a building in the center. I pass Michelle Darling, hello.
There's a group of ppl who made it and those trickling out who didn't. The test is like, throwing these darts or catching them or something sporty.
She fails. But on her way out she catches one, but it doesn't count. I don't know if it counts or not.
I don't know how I pass, but I do. Eventually all the winners are left and are being guided away toward wherever we're going.
I look for her frantically, I don't want to be alone, but I know she's out.
In the crowd of people I see Rebecca! I have a dream memory of knowing she wanted to go back to school. I get in with her group and say hey.
We're stragglers. There's this big fat happy boy. I say something about my friend (another person, a winner) wants to go to this college thing to dismantle religion.
Everyone laughs.
Eventually we go to where we're going to be for the next like, 6 months.
Its a crystal cavern-turned-school. The cavern is the school. The crystals are super powerful. (This is some Hollow Knight bullshit).
The cavern is kind of 2D and there's a 'flat' back to it, even though it LOOKS like it goes deep. I wonder if we'll unlock it.
We go "right" into a huge chamber and are told some stuff, don't know. Its an important room.
We're herded into a crystal-cavern cafeteria-esque small room to the "left" of the flat center room and sit at tables. Its like everyone had been here before but I'm one of the new kids, even though we're all new: I'm like an hour late to the game or something. I ask the fat boy if I can sit next to him.
"OOO, your body!" referring to all my current bruises and scars. "Yeah I got too drunk camping." "This is my first time being drunk!"
I realize this is why they brought us here: a woman hands out a menu with only drinks. Mostly wine. He orders more wine. Chelsea is behind me and orders Coffee Brandy, but she calls it WBTB (lol). I have that flash-urge of "fuck sobriety" but I consider getting a coffee. Its like 2.98, the cheapest coffee and cream option. Tons of crazy chai coffee stuff, but all very expensive.
My vision flashes outside of myself and I see this crazy cackling headmistress kind of deal, and like a cinema/movie, I know she's got secret/subversive plans based on the "shot" of the scene. She's behind the flat part of the center room and zoom-slips through the crystalline hole. She lands on the outside of the cavern to the "right" -- we didn't know there was a behind. She punches the crystal and it super-charges something. This is "bad" ... she's not telling anyone she's doing this, she has some evil plan here.
My vision flashes again to a group of girls being shown the cavern for the first time. You can see the flash on the edges/seams of the room.
"WOAH," they say. Their faces are like half-drawn anime, I can see those vertical+horizontal face lines artist do, and I toggle the horizontal on and off with some dream-watcher power (not the me of the dream, the me of me/myself dreaming) and I realize they look half-drawn because the flash is so bright.
Then it subsides and I see their normal faces.
Flash back to me going back into the cafeteria room with everyone. The wine is being served.
"I think I forgot to order somehow" I say and the waitress/teacher (there's only like, 2 teachers here, she's one of them) sighs and says they can put in a last minute order for a price. Well, I guess, sure.
I ask her if she lives here year round, half knowing she must not, but just curious.
"Oh, no. This place is inaccesssible half of the year."

Some kind of time skip, and I'm on "leave" from the school, like a vacation or something.
I'm in Walmart in the back room. I came here very much on a mission. My job is like an assassination. I track people down with my team and tell them to go to jail or we'll kill them. We hunt out people who get away with bullshit.
I'm walking and I don't know who my target is until I do (the first person I see: I can feel the dream being made up as I go along).
Its Torrey. I feel bad, some part of me who knows it was random. But he sees us, my team and I, and knows what's coming.
I threaten him. I don't remember the exact words but I make the offer, tell him we know what happened.
"We have a graveyard for you all set up. Westskull or Eastskull cemetary, your choice. But I'd rather you atone. YOU MUST ATONE FOR YOUR SINS AND GO TO JAIL."
He's getting really nervous but refusing. He doesn't want either. He tries me: "How do you know, you have the paper?" "Yes, I do" "So you were in the cop car when it happened? I doubt it" and true doubt flashes on his face, but I know what my job is and I know I'm right, so I press onward. YOU MUST ATONE!!!
A roll-up door rolls up and a truck is parked out there. I have to get away from the situation, and I know my dream makes it up that I can dive under the truck like its my get-away vehicle, so it is (That dream faculty!). I do, and I'm nervous it won't work, that I'm making it up and he's going to get me, but the car rolls away and I'm unharmed as I'm dragged out of the building underneath it. In the parking lot I hop up into the cab.
I see my buddy, the driver, and know I'm safe. He has a super-long lens camera. I take it so he can drive.
We getaway. I fuck with the camera, but it won't stop zooming/adjusting. I go to turn the zoom off, but the body is super-blank.
"Simple camera," I say. "Yeah, it's probably not good." I finally take some shots. They look good. "Nah, it's great."

Visiting Space

My parents and I are going to visit outerspace. Its night time and we’re in a family car traveling to the space station. We stop at McDonalds and while they’re inside, I get into my space suit. It’s a stretchy black mesh material and on each side of me I have some control pads for my hands.

When they come out, we eat and drive over to the station. Every family or visitor has their own cube inside a building (I don’t remember the building, just being in the cube). It’s a big wooden box with a wheelchair access incline inside of steps that lead into the center of the room. We get into place and I guess we rocket off!

At first, we’re all nervous and doing our jobs stabilizing the cube in space and tracking ourselves to our destination. Then we settle down and my mom starts ice fishing, because there’s an empty hole in the bottom of the cube to the right side. I look into it and there’s just black black water, as if the water was over the blackness of space (and then floating beneath our cube?) The fish are mechanical but also organic in a way that they grow the mechanical parts of themselves. My dad is playing with fishing line and hooking little beads together on it and stringing it around the cube in a decorative way.

I don’t remember landing, but we all are on stable ground now. I was unengaged with what my parents were doing for most of the trip and when I go over to them now that we’re here, I realize they’re fighting. They speak something about a lady that my dad meets here, or maybe a guy that my mom meets here. I don’t care! Let’s go explore!

All of the cool parts are lost in memory. My mom is somewhere, and I’m with my dad. We are about to go into a museum for something. The world around us is the same as Earth, just more exciting because it’s NOT Earth. It feels like I’m in an amusement park, and everything could be mundane but still not that bad.

Inside, the museum is a multi-tier building that stacks on top of itself. The biggest room is the first, and then you walk up stairs to a smaller room, etc until the last room which is an observatory. My dad and I are in the last room. Instead of peering out of the glass windows, I look at the display case in the center. There are a lot of crystal rock art sculptures. I’m amazed at one of them: It’s all solid clear crystal with a fist coming out of one side. I’d assume that it was carved to look that way, but so much of it seems to be natural. I am on another planet, so I don’t question it. I put it in my jacket after pondering about video cameras watching us and hoping they just aren’t around.

We walk out and no one notices me or questions me. Outside, we have to go through a gate with a guard who’ll direct us to our next attraction. The big rock has slipped down my pant leg, settling kind of near my shoe. The exterior of the museum looks like my old neighborhood.

On a tree there’s a hand painted sign that says “Give me one instant chocolate Reece’s cake mix and I’ll trade you a FREE TOILET!” That’s dumb, I think. No one wants a toilet. I have the conclusion that the guard we’re about to see put that sign up for everyone to see who comes from the museum, hoping someone has one of the cake mixes.

He looks at me and my dad and doesn’t question my bulging pant leg. We’re directed to the cubelot, where we meet up with my mom. She’s mad at my dad and I see a voluptuous lady with a thousand blonde curls wave at my dad. I see! We get into the cube and start going home.

Half-way through space, we stop at a little planet to get some food. It looks kind of like the other McDonalds. My dad meets his friend and tells us about some new information they found out about Earth.

“They took apart all the walls on Earth and on the light switches they found hind markings. E.T. did it when he was having his stay on our planet! Whenever a light turns green, I puke.” My dream self thought this made sense: he implied that all the walls of Earth, as if there were walls on the “outside” of our planet, were inspected for residue of the infamous E.T. (the movie dude in my dream was an actual alien who visited for a little while). The light switches he spoke of were what made the traffic lights work. The word “hind” was a kind of sexual term that implied he tried to have sex with them.




Fragment
It’s the last two days of the world. Everything has been ending and I am alive for these last days. I jump between the layers of my potential realities, but it’s all over…