Bubble

I don't remember any of my dreams last night, beyond waking up and reminding myself to remember what I'd just dreamed about.

d'oh.

However, while trying to remember at least a few fragments of it, I somehow dredged up an ancient dream from when I was like... 4 or 5 years old.

I was in a store in the mall with my aunt S. It was a clothing store, think of like Ross's but a much older one... the name escapes me... the chain has mostly faded away. I don't think I've seen one in a long time.

Anyway, I lost my aunt somehow. I'm wandering around through the aisles looking for her, when I see a yellow Mylar balloon with a smiley face on it floating in the middle of the aisle I'm looking down. A balloon is interesting, but I'm looking for my aunt. I continue looking down the aisles. When I turn around again, the balloon is behind me, a few feet away.

As I go through the store looking for my aunt, every time I turn around or look down the aisle, the balloon is there. I start to feel like it's following me. It goes from interesting to weird to unsettling.

I finally find my aunt and complain about the balloon. I can't really articulate what's going on or why it's upsetting me, though. Either way, she either doesn't believe me or doesn't care. Little kids say weird shit all the time, after all.

I follow her out of the store and we meet up with my grandmother and my cousin outside in the main area of the mall. There is a giant yacht in the middle of the mall, just sitting there. It's huge. Not quite the size of an ocean liner, but definitely way too big to just be sitting there in a mall. I recall that the lighting in the mall was very dim, and the ground was very... kind of fake brown marbly. Very "generic mall". The yacht was very white.

I wouldn't quite classify it as a nightmare, but I remember that it was an upsetting dream. At the time that I had it, I still didn't have a firm grasp on the idea that dreams are different from reality, so I spent a while believing that a balloon had really chased me around a store. I didn't like Mylar balloons for quite a while after that.

Last few nights...

06/12/14:
I dreamed about a tree.

It was a huge tree with black bark and sprawling, twisted limbs... if anybody has seen a Live Oak, it was sort of like that, but much bigger. I know there is something wrong with it.

It is outside of the fence. The fence is wooden and rickety. It encloses something, but I'm not sure what. It's always dark, always night. The world feels very "small", like the entire world just surrounds the tree and the fence but doesn't spread very far beyond them. I am trying to somehow stop the evil I know is infecting the tree's roots.

Some sort of burrowing creature is inside of the fence, digging through the soft loamy earth. It's like a brown, short-haired dog sized ferret thing that can talk. Its tunnel reaches the "evil" roots. Once they are exposed, the evil is able to spread inside of the fence. It was an accident, the creature was just trying to create a "home" burrow. It apologizes and says it will make its home elsewhere.

I have to attend a class. My homework isn't done because I've been spending all of my time and energy trying to contain the evil. The teacher knows this, and fudges my grade. I feel like my classmates resent me because of it. I'm overstretched, though. The class is for a cello-like instrument. Not only is my instrument damaged, but in order to make a passing grade, I still have to play some songs for an exam, and they're too difficult for me because I haven't had time to practice. I feel overwhelmed and depressed.


06/14/14:
I have vague recollections of a nightmare. There is some sort of evil stitched-together zombie child. It's gray. It's stitched to a man's hip. I am trying to protect some other (living) children to it but it keeps "absorbing" large, bloody chunks of them and the whole situation is horrifying. I wake up but am still sort of half-asleep and the feeling of horror lingers until I fall back asleep.

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 dream about a man... he is fairly wealthy, he's a respected lawyer. He's tall, with pale skin, blue eyes and very short blond hair. Something happens - he has a mental breakdown, or something - and he loses his job, and everything he owns, and ends up homeless.

Rather than hang around the city, where people might recognize him, he heads out into a more rural area. He's always looking for somewhere to hide in order to sleep... bushes, thick brush, etc. The landscape is very Midwest. It's harder than you'd think, partly because farmers pay attention to what's going on on their land, and partly because in order to be able to get any of the stuff he needs to survive, he still needs to stay near the highway. He's sleeping in some brush when his ex-wife recognizes him one day, and it's very uncomfortable.

He makes friends with a kid who wanders around the countryside. The kid is a little boy, also blond... he has run away from home. Even so, his family is very poor. The two of them find the dilapidated ruins of an old house. A company started building houses, but never finished them because the economy tanked and they ran out of money. A little girl lives in one of the other half-built, decaying houses.

"Their" house has graying wood siding with peeling blue paint. It has 3 floors. It's mostly unfinished, without a roof or anything, although it does have a trapdoor up to the attic. Naturally, because this is one of my dreams, the house is haunted.

The lawyer guy camps out in the attic for a while. The kid takes one of the downstairs bedrooms... despite being half-built, the house still has broken down looking beds in its bedrooms. Lawyer guy has lots of sheets of paper that he likes to arrange in stacks. After a while, the attic gets too uncomfortable because it's too haunted. The kid feels things pull on his leg all of the time. But it's shelter and sleeping out in the elements is still worse.

The kid's mom eventually shows up. She decides that maybe she'd like to buy the house and fix it up. She realizes that the lawyer guy is camping out there... he's worried about what she'll think about him hanging out with her kid, if she thinks he's dangerous, even though he cares about the kid a lot.

There's another kid, a shitty rich kid, who likes to pick on the poor kid. They have a competition involving bottle rockets, and the mean kid sabotages the poor kid's rocket. The poor kid is distraught, because making his rocket cost him a lot of money (for him).

The kid has a crush on a girl, a mutual friend of theirs... she's a bit chunky, with brown hair that goes past her shoulders. One day she starts flirting with him, kissing him, etc... he figures out she had a fight with her boyfriend (the rich kid) and she's just doing this as "revenge". He gets pissed, and tells her to get lost.

Somehow, he ends up falling down an embankment next to the house. He feels something try to shove him into the highway. He grabs onto a tree, but feels it trying to peel his fingers from around the trunk.

I wake up.

Review:
Dream clues:
- Spectator perspective
- Haunted house
- Ghost

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:

I had a nightmare that I had a daughter. I don't remember much about it except that it was quite bizarre and I was very unhappy about many things that occurred in the dream.

I had a nightmare about a huge war in a desert, and a lot of people died, but I think that's more along the lines of the typical "post-apocalyptic" dream if not for one of the characters in it. I was 12 when I had it but the girl I met was so compelling that I still remember the dream. She was dressed in blue and had long, straight brown hair and dark, intense eyes. She was in her teens in the dream, but had an oval, almost classic face that was too sad for someone so young. She saved my life. In the dream, there were spaceship like planes that were black and flew very low, and tanklike things that transported weapons. I was almost crushed by one but she threw me out of the way. I can only assume that she died, but the whole scene was enveloped by the dust kicked up by tank-treads.

I had another dream about a bunch of people testing a plane. It looked kind of like a flat triangle. Like a stealth-bomber, but not quite, there was something decidedly different about it. In any case, the test backfired and the plane crashed and burned. Luckily, the pilot didn't die. I can't remember if he was badly injured or not.

This was followed by another, very long and vivid dream, which I'm going to try to actually do justice:

A tree towers to dizzying heights, wreathed in clouds. It is held up by a pillar of massive, mossy trunk. Through the tangled roots springs a city, its buildings sprouting like mushrooms between the toes of a giant. Grey and fading, the tree and city are cloaked by dusk. The strange slant of the sunlight causes the shadows to pool in strange places.

A man walks down the street, turning a corner, only to find himself amidst steaming tropical vegetation, a savage jungle. He panics, running blindly, and stares up into a dazzling sky to see something rushing toward him. That was how a nameless man was splattered in the middle of an intersection. The only person who took the time to observe this event was a small girl.

After pausing to observe this event, the girl continued on her way through the twisting streets. The residents of the city streamed about her in a phantasmal flow of ghosts, fantastic, colorful, distorted, and exaggerated.

Her eyes lit momentarily on a shadowy figure, and quickly jerked away. She drew into the phantom crowd, which closed around her in a flutter of harlequin rags, and she was relieved to see the figure encompassed by the swirl of paraders.

She withdrew from the stream of grotesques and picked her way along rambling streets, tiptoeing across melted bricks. She turned to find the shadow, floating languidly above the flowing pavement. It regarded her cooly with bulbous glowing orbs set into a body that seemed to have no substance at all, except for a blurred grey outline. Ghostly animals slunk behind the wilted trashcans, chittering softly from the half-shadows.

I've broken up some of these dream entries so I can tag them properly. With only 10 tags, it can be a little hard.

Original Journal Entry - Feb. 1st, 2002:


Santa Claus was actually an evil overlord who derived his power from people giving him pennies (thus granting him control over them). He caused storms and floods that destroyed entire villages. But we robbed him of his power, and he became a decrepit old man who traveled around with a family in a station-wagon. One of the little girls in the family learned his power, that is, to clap her hands and cause thunderstorms. The station-wagon then floated magestically across the ocean, into the sunset.

Original journal entry dated Jan. 31, 2002:

#1:
I had a dream that I was in a grade school fighting demons with an iron, and was afraid to stand still too long because they would come up through the floor. It had the Gundam pilots in it, for whatever reason. Then there was something about a woman being a train on train tracks going through a flooded city, and meanwhile I was a juvenile delinquent trying to set myself straight and failing miserably.

#2:
I lived in an apartment with the old dude from Men In Black. And then I was taking care of my pet rabbit, and for some reason the radiator was in the bathroom. I was cleaning her cage and set it next to the radiator, and somehow she got out of the cage and into the radiator. I managed to get her out but she was VERY badly burned, and really cut up, so I was flipping out and my mother (who was suddenly there for some reason) was telling me to cut it out because the burns were only third degree (?!) and she wasn't missing THAT much skin. Then mom woke me up (in real life) to tell me that she had let my rabbit run around on the deck for another hour or so. Then I went and checked on my rabbit (this is awake, in real life) who was remarkably unburnt and had all of her skin. *shudder*

Last night, when I lay down to sleep, I resolved not to attempt to induce a WILD. The reason is that I have been tired the past 2 days, possibly due to waking up between REM cycles for my attempts.


#1 - I dreamed, but don't remember it. I woke up, because I was hot, but immediately went back to sleep.

#2 - I was in class, in a first grade class, but I was my real age (nearly 30). I don't recall the reason for being in the class, there was some reason that I understood in the dream but that was never made entirely clear. I was not an intern or TA, I was definitely a student, and all the other students seemed aware that I didn't "belong". My teacher was a big woman. At one point, she was asking me questions in class out of a work book. I was answering correctly, but she was behaving as if I was not and "Correcting" me. Finally, it got to be too much and I stood up and yelled at her. She started to cry. Later, I told another student, "You know I'm actually 23 years old, right?" (note: I'm not 23). The student acted shocked.

#3 - This dream phased into another one where I was in a romantic relationship with a guy. I was staying with his family. He was kind of a blond "jock" type... not really my type. We had sex in the shower...his family knew we were very good friends, but I don't think that they thought we were involved in that way.

Then, the family attempted to buy a nicer house, but it turned out that there was a bankruptcy that the wife had forgotten to mention on the paperwork. Her husband began to yell at her, and she began crying. The real estate agent told them that they wouldn't be able to get another loan for something like 1500 years.

#4 - My aunt has agreed to give a family friend's friend a ride in their old red Dodge Caravan. We have to make special accommodations for her in the van because she's disabled. For some reason, this involves my uncle trying to fit a shopping cart into the van (he claimed it was her wheelchair). We finally manage to fit it in the back and go to pick her up. She's inside of my aunt's house. Their driveway is very steep in real life. My aunt pulls most of the way up the driveway, but not all the way up, and the poor woman has to walk the rest of the way to the van. She is very overweight, but it's not due to her overeating, she has some kind of hormonal disorder that causes this and makes her bones very soft. She has many small braids in her hair and is wearing a purple dress. Walking the 10 feet to the van is painful for her, but my aunt doesn't seem to care and won't pull up farther. I get out of the van and help the woman walk the rest of the way to the van, and help her climb inside. She thanks me, then sits down on the seat looking very relieved.

I wake up. In real life, I have gathered my sheet up somehow and am clutching it like it's a teddy bear.

Notes
Semi-lucid/gaining lucidity
Lucid

I recall several dreams from last night.

#1 - I had a dream, but don't remember what it was. I wake up.

I attempt WILD but cannot tolerate lying on my back; roll over on my side, and fall asleep. While I fall asleep, I still focus on my intent to go lucid: "The next thing I experience is a dream; I am aware; I am in complete control."

#2 - I am in a small taco restaurant. It's a hole-in-the-wall restaurant; the walls are avocado green, and the paint is chipping. There is some sort of unnamed danger or dangerous situation. I am looking for M__ , but I can't find him, and I'm getting nervous and anxious. I am calling out, "M__? M__? Where are you?"

I have been dreaming for roughly 30 in-dream seconds when something filters into my brain. "I need to be aware. I need to be aware. I need to be lucid," I think. As this happens, my awareness increases. I begin to realize on a basic, non-lucid level that I am dreaming. That awareness increases and leads to a further desire to become lucid, until the dream scene loses its fogginess and I am fully lucid.

I know that I am dreaming. The anxiety of the dream that led to my lucidity has not faded, however - I'm still anxious and scared, even though I know that this is a dream and I am theoretically fully in control of the environment. I don't like the taco place at all and, although I know that I should explore my current environment to reinforce my lucidity, I am anxious to get out of there.

I remember Advanced Lucid Task I, which is "Find a treasure map and follow it to treasure". I decide that it is far better to pursue that than hang out in the creepy taco place. I attempt to do a scene change by closing and covering my eyes and focusing on an outdoor scene, but fail. When I open my dream eyes, I also open my real eyes.


I wake up. I immediately do a reality check; nope, I'm actually awake. I attempt to WILD but I feel overheated and I can't get comfortable, I'm way too hot. I get up and turn down the thermostat. I lie back down.

#3 - I am riding a bus alongside a canal. The road is actually level with the water, and the concrete sides of the canal rise above us. I'm riding it with a friend but I don't remember who. It's a coach bus, rather than a city bus. It connects with a ferry and a cruise line called "Olympia". I can only get to where I want to go to on the cruise line, but I'm worried that I don't have enough money. Right now, the emotional tone of the dream is fairly neutral.

The bus reaches its destination, and we get off the bus. I read a sign that indicates where the ship we're looking for docks. It docks in a ruined old building; upon inspecting a city map (note: appearance of a map possibly has something to do with my earlier focus on a treasure map) and based on my knowledge of the area, I realize that it is an old orphanage that was destroyed by a fire.

I take several photos of the orphanage with my camera. When I look at them again while I am showing them to my companion, there are ghosts in them; I am immediately extremely afraid, and the tone of the dream changes to one of great anxiety and fear.

I wake up. I'm not as hot any more, and much more comfortable.

#4 - I have a small blond boy with me. He needs to go to the bathroom. There is a van that is supposed to be a bathroom. The child climbs inside and begins to enthusiastically pee everywhere, like a fire hose. The whole thing is presented with the buzz and excitement of a 90s television commercial that is aimed at kids. The kid finishes peeing and climbs out of the van... he is soaked in urine. The woman who is in charge of him (I have switched to 3rd person) complains that he smells awfully ripe, and doesn't want to put him in their car; the man he was with doesn't seem to think it's a big deal.

#5 - I am running a chatroom. An idiot comes into my room and is being very annoying. I ban him from the room, but am unable to block his messages. He is spamming me with messages, and it's becoming increasingly irritating. I look for a support button for the website I'm running the room for, so I can ask how to ban him from sending me messages.

The dream shifts. I am now recording clips of myself pushing and riding a medical cart up and down a beach, so that I can edit it into one video and put it up on the website.

#6 - I am an old man. I am dressed in a rough gray scarf, a worn gray suit, and a brown jacket. My skin is old and dry and wrinkled by age. I am now not the old man, I am watching the old man. He is walking down a city street. It is more like an urban slum, like the areas of large cities that are forgotten and neglected.

He -- I mean, I, now -- watches a train go by. He/I meets up with a companion, a bigger guy with a shaved head. We want to go into a building, which is an orphanage, but the building is right along the train tracks and you have to walk across the tracks to reach the door. We have to time things carefully; the woman in the building opens the door, we wait for the first train to pass, and then leap before the next comes. The woman is wearing a plum-colored, old-fashioned traditional British maid's outfit, with frills along the apron. She has brown hair and looks like she is in her late teens or early 20s.

We go through the door. The orphanage is now a restaurant. There are corrugated metal stairs leading upstairs, where the food is served. We are on kind of a foyer. The restaurant has 3 floors, we are on the middle. The door behind us has turned into one of those metal gates that shopkeepers raise and lower to open or close their stores at night. We are level with the street; the street is now paved with bricks, and the train track is gone. Each of the levels of the restaurant is level with the street. I feel the floor moving beneath me; the restaurant is actually a truck.

I wake up. Attempt WILD, fail. My heater is distracting me. I think I will have to turn it off at night.

#7 - I fall asleep. I am in a small town in an area with a temperate climate, although I can't say specifically where. It is summer. There are several wooden buildings, many of them shops. I am now playing a video game. I go into a shop and meet a character and befriend him. He is a large bald man who looks like a biker. I go into another shop, a leather-working shop, and there is a cutscene. A man comes in with a gun and threatens to shoot the shopkeeper. The biker I befriended shows up with perfect timing, and disarms him. I understand that if I had not befriended the first character, the cutscene would have ended more tragically. I exit the shop.

Ninjas bound through the trees on the outskirts of town. I realize that I am in no shape to combat ninjas without armor. I re-enter the leatherworker's shop and ask about armor. He tells me to give him a pattern for what I want, within an inch of my measurements, and he will produce it for me. I have an idea of what I want, but I need to find a photo and draw a pattern. I go back outside.

The ninjas are dancing around in the trees. There is a female ninja with long hair and a long, pale blue scarf. She is wearing some kind of dark purple 70s pantsuit/leotard. She slices off the ear of another female ninja with short, blonde hair. She springs off of tree branches, and it looks like ballet. I think to myself (semi-lucidly) that that is ridiculous and could never happen in real life because those branches would not support her weight and nobody can jump like that.


I wake up.

I dreamed several dreams, and woke between each.

*side notes
*gaining lucidity
*lucid

#1 - I was having difficulty doing something. That's all I remember. Dream fragment.

Woke. Did Reality Check. Attempted WILD; failed, fell asleep.

#2 - I am in a house. I'm looking for a bathroom. There's no bathroom, because I didn't have enough in-game gold to buy an expansion. I discover that some of the red and white scented candles I've been buying were made by my cousin. He's been lying about having a regular desk job.

Woke, used bathroom. Reality Check. Attempted WILD; failed, fell asleep.

#3 - A wife and husband are fighting over their finances. The husband is unemployed or doesn't make much money, and the wife is burnt out and tired of working overtime to completely support them. The wife decides to make adult videos, and her best friend offers to help her. Her husband finds out and is extremely upset.

Woke. Rolled over and fell asleep.
#4:
I dream that I am riding a bus through a sweeping countryside. It appears that I am somewhere in New Zealand. The landscape is mountainous and verdant. It has just rained, the sky is full of gorgeous, radiant clouds, and it's is very beautiful (note: sweeping landscapes after a storm are actually one of my dreamsigns)

It begins to storm violently, and I'm up in the mountains. I am both riding and driving the bus. It's storming like crazy, and the mountain road is winding and dangerous. I'm high up in the mountains now, going over a narrow bridge. The choppy water has risen to the very bottom of the bridge, and it churns dangerously. The bus hydroplanes, loses control, veers off the bridge. The bus is now an old cadillac. The bus now disappears from around me as I enter the water. Frigid water envelopes me as I sink, and places immense pressure on my body; I debate fighting it, or merely letting myself sink. I allow myself to be pulled under and away with the current.

I wake up on a bus. I don't wake up on a bus; I am driving a car. I'm going to pick up a friend's dad. My friend is a chubby blond teenager wearing a Hulk Hogan shirt. We pick up his dad at a fast food restaurant that looks like McDonald's. He jokes about us being a software development team. He is actually a developer, himself. He looks really tired, and I ask him if he's been pulling long hours. He says, "Yes, and driving is a challenge. I'm practically cross-eyed." He decides to check his voicemail and starts swearing; apparently, his boss/team lead is asking for a whole bunch of ridiculous stuff that he can't possibly do on such a short deadline.

I wake up on a bus. I have stretched out across the seats, and a little girl is commenting to her mother that I'm taking up too much space. I try to pull myself up into a fetal position to free up more seats. My friend and his dad are also on the bus. The landscape is the one as described before; the sweeping New Zealand landscape.

I wake up and feel a bit irritated that my prior attempts at WILD have failed. I see light seeping in through my bedroom window and am a bit upset that it appears to be so close to morning. I'm also irritated that I didn't pick up on my most obvious dream sign.

I fail to do a Reality Check. In retrospect, my bedroom window was INCORRECT. The curtain wasn't there. I shrug it off, telling myself that it's just another chance to try to WILD again. I settle down in bed (note: I am fairly certain this was a FA and I am actually trying to WILD from my FA, which is kind of hilarious because it actually works)


#5 (?) -
I begin to see something forming in front of me, very blurry - it is a field of large, smooth pebbles. I decide that it looks somewhat like a beach, or is close enough to make into one. I try to make it solidify, but it fights me. I try to imagine it as part of a landscape, but it remains a flat plane - almost like a pattern. It is supposed to be the ground, I understand, but it takes up my entire field of vision.

I can feel it there - the dream is blurry, but it's forming. I don't want to lose it or lose consciousness, so I start actively trying to make it stabilize. I focus on the pebbles; they sharpen a bit, and then go all fuzzy again. I run my hands through the pebbles, then dive to the ground and shove my face into the pebbles. They're still fuzzy and immaterial, although I feel the ghosts of sensations from them. I enthusiastically rub my face back and forth in the pebbles. I feel like they're fading away and get upset, so in a moment of desperation, I lick the pebbles. They don't become any more material; they taste like grit and sawdust. I roll around on the ground like an idiot, grabbing handfuls of the ground and rubbing it into my face. I feel and smell dead leaves. Suddenly, there are dead leaves mixed into the pebbles.

I look up. There's more landscape forming! I see fuzzy green. I feel like this is like the edge of a lake or swimming hole. I stumble to my feet and pick leaves out of my hair.

The world suddenly solidifies, as my lucids often do - everything goes from a blurry mess to absolute perfect clarity. I am now on the edge of a small lake or swimming hole, on an artificial beach. I'm at a cook out!

There are tons of people milling around. The dad from my prior dream is grilling food, and there are a bunch of fat guys in tank tops drinking beer out of a cooler. There is a little girl in a purple swim suit playing with the sand. She has a toy shovel and those little plastic sand castle molds, and she's making a castle. She has white-blonde hair that curls in little ringlets around her ears, and blue eyes. She looks like she's maybe 3 or 4, and she's adorable. There is also a black and white Border Collie lying on a red and white checkered blanket next to a guy in a t-shirt and his kids. The dog is panting, because it's hot outside.

The swimming hole has a tall, metal slide where you can slide into the water. The sky above, unlike 99% of my lucids, is vivid blue and brilliantly clear - this is a hot summer day, probably July or even August.

I clap my hands together and yell out loud "YES! Finally!" I immediately run up to the dog and pet her. Her fur is thick and somewhat coarse. I scratch between her ears. She's very friendly, and enjoys the attention. As I scratch her behind the ears, I recall my lucid task.

"I need to destroy something right away!" I tell the dog. I had decided on Simple Task I, which was to destroy an object by any means.

I look around. One of the first things I see is the little girl's sand castle mold, but even thought she's a dream character I feel kind of bad about that. I see a plastic drinking cup with Vash the Stampede on the side of it (I haven't watched anime since the 90s, I don't know where that came from) but decide it's too solid/not interesting. There's an array of picnic stuff - plates, cookware, food, etc. I settle on the one thing that I feel is out of place: an empty carton of half & half.

I point at it and try to make it explode. Nothing happens. I get angry and pick it up and throw it, yelling, "This is MY dream!" It still does not explode. I chase after it, scoop it up, and tear it into several pieces. I begin to throw the pieces at the two fat guys who are sitting in plastic lawn chairs and drinking beer. They think this is hilarious.

I hear the little girl calling to me from behind me. She is running toward me, waving a huge syringe. One of those big, scary-looking ones they use to inject things into your rump. It's almost as big as she is (and for some reason, empty). I laugh and launch myself into the air, hovering above her. She runs around below me, waving the syringe. I rise higher into the air, using swimming motions, and taunt her. She begins to climb the ladder to the slide, which has now somehow gotten higher and scarier-looking and is turning into a bridge.

The dream fades, and I wake up. It is 3 a.m., which means that it couldn't have possibly been light outside last time I woke up.

Original entry dated Feb. 16, 2002:
Regarding several dreams taking place over a period of time:

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 African American 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.