Original journal entry dated Dec. 16, 2002: I had this dream that there was a Pokemon battling academy that was high tech, and the kids battled through computer simulations. There was a reactor on part of the campus and during certain hours it was unsafe to be near so a kid of pretty high rank was assigned to guard it. Anyway, during a spat, one of the kids made the super-intelligent decision of getting behind the fence and left a penny there. The head prof. freaked out when she saw it and severely punished the guard. And then there was more stuff, but I don't remember what the stuff was. The end. Original journal entry dated Dec. 21, 2002: I had a dream that I was a guerrilla-warfare librarian and I was trying to get my certification. I had to fulfill a lot of requirements, do training, and take a computer examination AND a field examination. For some reason, the cast of "Sonic The Hedgehog" was there. And my commander was Crow, from "Mystery Science Theater 3000". I have no clue why. But I got to drive a tank, so I didn't really care. And then there was something about Sailor Moon, but the thought of Usagi driving a tank scares the hell out of me.
Original journal entry dated July 20, 2002: I had a nightmare that I was in the hospital because I was going to have a baby, only it was actually twins. (this may be because back in reality, I had a stomach ache). Anyway it pretty much resulted in the doctors have to make a few strategic incisions, which I was not happy about. On the other hand one of the little boys was adorable. Or would have been, had he not born an incredible resemblance to a prune. So I had to go to the bathroom really bad, but the bathrooms in this hospital were absolutely DISGUSTING. They were old and even sort of old-fashioned, and very rusty and cracked, and disgustingly unclean. Most of them didn't even work. And none of the working ones were free, either. And the place really stunk. So I had to wait for someone to get done so I could go, but even then I didn't want to touch the toilet seat because I was afraid I'd get an infection because those incisions were still healing. And there wasn't enough space in the bathroom stall, either. Anyway, then my dream cut to an alternate reality where I was blessedly not having a kid and instead my dog had puppies. So everybody was eating in the hospital cafeteria even though I don't know why we took a dog to a human hospital and then I needed to find a way home. I knew I could take this one public transport, if I wanted to. But before I did that I had to do work, and for some reason we ("we" meaning my fellow patients and I) were treated like criminals and forced to do heavy cleaning duties and stuff. So then I found a combination grandfather's clock/guillotine, and it had a secret panel in it which led to a very old wrought-iron elevator, but the elevator didn't work so I couldn't escape. Then I had to go back to the person in charge and get on the transport. Then the woman driving the transport wouldn't let me on without payment, so I gave her some chicken soup. And then there was this riverboat cruise thing, and alligators and stuff. And the guide kept yelling at me to get out of the water but I couldn't because there wasn't enough room in the boat, since he had taken too many people with him. And the water was very murky and dirty. For some reason we were in the Rock River, which runs through Rockford, IL, but it's only fitting that I'd have a nightmare about Rockford. So then my dream changed and I was playing Virtual Reality duckhunt with some guy, only we had lifepoints too, and we wound up having a shootout because I was cheating.
Original journal entry dated July 16, 2002: There was an elf in my dream, and a big castle, and the castle used to have people in it but didn't any more. So the elf, apparently, kept on living there, even though it was a little kid. Something about one parent being a goddess or something. In any case, I don't know what made all of the people leave, only that they came back and found the elf, and assumed that it was a harmless orphan when it probably could have killed them just by pointing at them. Then there was something about the cellar of the castle, and everything in my dream changed so that it was like Harvest Moon (the game), and for some reason the cellar was massive and there was a lot of wheat, and the characters had to live there for awhile because their own houses had flooded. And then I dreamed that we (we being me and some group of people, or maybe I was the elf this time?) were going through a toy store, only it was all salvaged stuff from before some big apocalypse (something to do with the castle), so it wasn't n horrible condition but some of the stuff was old and beaten up. Then I dreamed that they stuffed me into a toy rocket and sent me to the moon. The end. Original journal entry dated July 17th, 2002: The first dream had to do with baseball. We were all sitting in a field outside of a baseball diamond, watching the team play. Professional teams were playing the first half, but then the people who were watching were going to take over and play the rest of the game. But when we were going to switch, the professionals didn't want to because the game was so close. But they had to give up the field. I was the first up to bat on my team, and I quite unexpectedly hit a home run. Then I was back in the field for some reason, waiting my turn or something, and Lexa drew a comic strip about how the Desk Monster, who was a sentient pile of garbage who lived in a school desk, took over the classroom. It was very funny. Then, for some reason, I was walking through an old apartment complex. I was walking through the old building... and it was horribly dirty and broken-down. There was dirt and roaches (both the insect and the other kind) and crack-heads and such on the lower levels. There was the atmosphere of hunger and general hopelessness, aside from the smoke and narcotics. But there was a level of the building that I had never noticed. When I went up there, it was ten times worse than the rest of the building. The walls were rotted through and in some place there were simply gaping holes in the woodwork. What furniture there was was moldy and dirty, and home to myriad disgusting little critters. There were a few people, but they were all in drug-induced stupors. I think I had someone with me, but I can't remember who. The light was dirty and yellow (well, this wasn't much different than the rest of the building). The last dream was sort of weird, in a way. In it, we -- we being a random group of adventurers that I don't know in real life -- were lost in the mountains. It was cold, snowy, and glacial. We were all looking for our master, basically our boss, who had gone to investigate a claim in the area. One of the party members, a dwarf, was hoping that it would be a silver mine, since he was a silver-dwarf - that was his caste, I guess - and he mined for and worked with only silver. He talked about the "gaudy" gold-dwarves, but I think he was sort of jealous. I assured him that silver was MUCH prettier. Incidentally, this is another dream in which I was male. Anyway, after much wandering around and a good deal of almost freezing to death we happened upon a rangers'-station and they took us in, warmed us up, etc., and reprimanded us for wandering around in an area we were unfamiliar with. But our master was there! He was very busy in a back room with something. He was a dwarf, I think. Anyway, the silver-dwarf went to watch him work. He was working on a ring. It turns out that the "claim" he was investigating was a special stand of trees with magical wood. You could forge the wood like metal, and it would become stronger than steel. The only thing you could carve it with was another piece of that type of wood. It was a beautiful rosy color, too. Anyway, he was going to make his magical ring out of this. The plans looked VERY complicated, though, and he called it his "masterpiece". But it turns out the piece of wood he was working on actually had the ring he was envisioning INSIDE of it. I briefly wondered if the ring was evil (a la "Lord of the Rings").
Original entry dated April 13th, 2002: My friends and I were battling giant robotic ponies in the mall. It was a sort of laser-tag type setup, only less fun and more deadly. Our foes looked like giant My Little Ponies with googly-eyes that shot lasers, so they were REEEEALLY creepy. *THUD THUD THUD* "AAAH! GIANT ROBOTIC PONY! ...aww... it has a butterfly on its butt!" In the battle all of us had skills, MUD-style, that we had to use and train to develop proficiency in. There was a kickass hoverbike with cannons on it that I couldn't ride because my Cycling skill was only at 20%. So instead I had a sorry-assed excuse for a pistol that did about as much damage as, say, a squirt-gun. I don't remember the rest, I think the dream just sort of fizzled out, and then I had a really sad dream but I don't remember what it was abou
Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002: I had a dream that D and I went to buy a new bike. I was gonna trade in my old one. I wound up with a pink one with this weird little engine-thing attached. Anyway, where we lived was this scary supernatural world. Like, the laundry room - nobody went in after dark. If you opened up three of the washers, you'd find creepy, on the verge of horrifying, things. But if you opened the fourth washer, you saw something so incredibly and awesomely terrible that NOBODY was willing to go anywhere NEAR that washer (much less open it). There was a little girl ghost in a bonnet who would wander around collecting change for my laundry for me, and I always warned her not to go into the laundry room at night, and to go nowhere near the fourth washer. Anyway, back to me. There was this weird... like... demon overlord dude who masqueraded as an eight year old child with ice-blue eyes and white hair. When the kid died through some freak accident, he decided that he was gonna make the world a really shitty place. He specifically tried to hurt my friends and me. There was also a house called "Harriet's House", which was a museum of sorts. It was now a Londonesque sort of home, but used to be an asylum type place with torture chambers. People would go on tours through there, but were warned before they did. The proprietor was a tall black lady with her hair drawn back in a bun. She wore a brown sort of pilgrim-looking dress. The rest of the dream was pretty blurry. I also had a dream that I worked for a company that produced video-games. We were in direct competition with another company that an ex-friend of mine worked for. It all sort of sucked. It wasn't so much scary as really depressing, and I can't remember most of it, except that the rival company stole our hit title idea.
I dreamed I was wandering through Seattle, trying to show my mother around. I was also shopping - I don't clearly recall what for, but I believe it was clothing. The dream shifted, and I was playing a farming/crafting game called Salem with some friends (I believe it's a real game) but in my dream it was more like a V.R. simulation. The idea behind it is building, cooking and eating stuff, and crafting... without getting murdered by other players. One of my in-game friends told me that there was a gentleman here to visit me. I looked out of the second floor window of my house/shack, which was an old dilapidated white farmhouse, and there was the ghost of a man inside of a giant blue ball that had thick plastic netting like a laundry hamper. It looked somewhat like a hamster ball. My friend explained that the ghost had visited because he loved and missed me, but I had to explain to the ghost that he couldn't stay.
Original dream dated 02/19/2006: I had this dream that a whole bunch of people were back from the dead. Not zombies... just suddenly not dead either. Including my old pet cat, Abby, whom I loved more than anything on the face of the earth. However, all of the people who had returned were also going to die again soon. For some reason, in my dream, I thought that the best way to commemorate Abby's passing (and soon, her passing again) was to eat her remains. Hell if I know what goes through my head, it was a dream. Except that we put her in the pan and started cooking her while she was still alive, and when I realized "oh my god, what the hell am I doing?!" her paws were all charred and she was halfway cooked. She didn't seem to be in pain and she didn't seem to hold it against me, but I knew that she was going to die again very very soon because of what I'd done... my mom rationalized it by "She was going to die anyway" except that it wasn't good enough reasoning for me because it meant that she was going to die sooner than she would have died on her own... So anyway, I held my half-cooked cat for a while and cried. On to the next dream... So then I dreamed that there were 2 teams of people. All of them were female. One of them was 3 different people, and one of them was composed of a team of one person, cloned 3 times. The second team sat on top of some very tall poles and had little white explosive balls that bounced off of everything and anything. The first team's job was to get the balls from them. The second team got no weapons or anything at all, but their position was very secure. The first team got a whole bunch of gadgets and toys. So, the first team got really close - they had to because their weapons didn't have much range (one of them was a fan attached to a rope). The second team threw 2 of the 3 balls at them, which they managed to whack away from themselves with a flashlight, and the explosions the balls made were really big. The first team managed to kill 2 of the 3 clones, but the third one was impossible to get to. Finally, after talking with the clone for a while, it came down from the pole. It had originally been a girl, but now for some reason was a boar. The leader of the second team talked to the boar and told it that she wished that it could see something really beautiful so it would appreciate life. There was also a cat. The first teams' supervisor came up, and the boar was afraid of him, so it ran back up the pole. He wanted to talk to the cat, but the cat was also afraid of him. Then I woke up.
Original dream dated 01/21/2006: So I had a dream... something about giraffes... I don't really remember. Or video games. Giraffes in video games? I know it was really weird, but I didn't write it down right away, I just though "Hey, that's a weird dream, even for me". Usually if I forget what a dream was, and I just sort of think about trying to remember it for a while, the memory will come back to me later (usually at an odd/inconvenient time). Something about World of Warcraft, with giraffes, maybe it's that the new race was a giraffe, I don't know. LATER EDIT: Ok, I finally remembered my dream, and it had nothing to do with giraffes. I dreamed that I was playing this video game based off of "Inspector Gadget". It wasn't an MMORPG but it had social elements (somehow?). Anyway, it was a VR game for a full virtual reality system that had just debuted, and in the dream, I was one of the main people who developed it. It was REALLY good game, too, not lame like a lot of games based off of animated series' are. Good graphics and special effects, kickass soundtrack, and the sheer gameplay itself was awesome. I was basically playtesting the game I helped create in the dream, the particular level I was in involved chasing this one badguy down mineshafts, he kept using explosives on me, it was pissing me off. You didn't play as Gadget, but switched between Penny or Brain. You generally didn't get to choose whom you would be playing as, it depended on what point in the story you were at. In this case, the story was forcing you to play Brain at this point in the game. I think that in this level the Chief was hidden inside of a barrel of explosives (TNT?). Basically, you (Brain) were following Gadget, who was chasing the bad guy, and your main objective was to keep Gadget from getting killed by all of the explosives, collapsing mineshafts, falling rocks, and machinery. It was a very tough level - one of the toughest. Basically, how 'levels' were completed was, each level had Objectives. As you fulfilled them, your Objective bar lit up and filled. You had to fulfill all of the Objectives to pass the mission. Once you'd fulfilled all of the Objectives for that stage in the mission, the difficulty level went up, and you got another Objective bar. Your objectives changed depending on what you did and what happened, so you might wind up with different objectives every time you played a level. I dunno, it was a system that made sense in my dream... in any case, I had fulfilled objective bar #1, which had been hard as fuck to begin with, and bar #2 was pretty insanely difficult. You could technically beat the level if you fulfilled only the objectives in the first objective bar, but you wouldn't get the best outcome once you had completed it. If you managed to fulfill all of the objectives in objective bar #3, you got the best possible outcome for the mission/level. So basically, objective bar #1 was Necessary, bar #2 was second priorities, bar #3 was going above and beyond what you technically "needed" to do. i.e. bar #1 would be preventing Gadget from generally being blown to bits, bar #2 would be actually harming the badguy he was chasing, bar #3 would be collapsing the mine shaft on top of the bad guy. Most of the levels revolved around preventing Gadget from killing himself, or else playing as Penny and sneaking around/hacking into computer systems. So the Brain levels were puzzle levels, and the Penny levels were sneak/recon levels, although they revolved as much around not being seen by Gadget as not being seen by the enemies. And of course, what you did as one character affected your next mission as the other character. All in all, not a bad dream. I think the giraffes idea came from Gadget having a stretchy neck... who knows?
Aug. 7, 2003: I woke up after what I know were most likely some pretty strange dreams, some of them about Lemmings, with a vague sense that something wasn't right. I still have that sense that something isn't right, but I can't put my finger on it. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, when my house is a smoldering pile of ashes or something. In the meantime, the Lemmings beckon. Aug, 12, 2003: I had a dream that I was a moogle, only I was some sort of strange, aquatic moogle. I basically spent a lot of time looking for treasure and bringing it back, particularly archaeological treasures that were impossible for other people to reach. I dreamed that I found this stash of rare pearls and stuff in a really ancient sunken ship. The catch to this was, even though I was aquatic and stuff, I was more like a penguin and a fish: I still had to breathe air. The wreck was perched on this really unstable shelf of rock, or something, and I was breathing pockets of air in the wreck, when something happened and it started sliding into the crevasse, so I had to make a split-second decision as to whether or not to take the treasure with me. I knew that people would probably exploit or wreck something so rare and beautiful, but I couldn't bring myself to leave it there, so I decided to bring it with and escape. I exited the room I was in, on the ship, and suddenly I was in some sort of little bedroom, and my aunt was there packing stuff up, to get it all out before the ship tumbled into the crevasse. She helped me pack the treasure, and then we escaped. So then, the dream continued... God only knows why... and there was some sort of sorceress, or evil, or something, taking over the land, and there were a bunch of mages I hung out with at this academy and they were practicing their fly spell, only one of them flew off-course and was attacked by some higher level enemies, so we had to go and help him. And then there was something about a big explosion and a matter-crunching/black hole sort of spell, and the apocalypse. There was lots of lava.