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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 journal entry dated April 28th, 2002:

I woke up with blood under my fingernails, and all over my blankets for that matter. I don't remember any of my dreams but I guess I must have been having more nightmares. In any case, I tore my face up but good and was hoping that nobody would notice this morning, which they didn't, which is good.

The first dream was about a city. I think it was in England. It was old, and I was in the past, maybe Puritan times, I dunno. It was somewhere cold, rocky, and misty.
There was a plague in the village, and there was always a procession of corpses being carried to the graveyard. I suppose, then, that the plague was bad, but not so bad to the point where they couldn't bury all of the bodies.
And yet, everybody was dead. Maybe not DEAD dead, but dead inside. Except that one man murdered his wife, and then the Priest came and they took away the body... one more dead person, despite the cause, didn't matter... and then, either I died or my wife died, but I can't remember which. But there was a crazy, crazy old lady in one of the more dilapidated houses, and she wielded an axe... nobody went there, and maybe she died of plague, or maybe she DIDN'T die because nobody went there. But my wife died (I was male in the dream). Or maybe I did. And they said a few prayers, and everything was washed over with gray... there was an old stone building, it was haunted... come to think of it, the whole town was haunted... and all muddy... it was miserable.

And then the other dream. My brother and mother and I were living in bare shacks high up on stilts, in the mountains. It was snowy and windy and very cold. They had wooden planks for floors, and the wind whistled through the chinks. When I looked out, I could see the tops of pine trees.

#1 - I dream that I am playing a new sort of MMO. Gameplay wise, it functions more like a side-scroller, but it looks a lot like World of Warcraft. Guild recruitment in it is really weird - if you're unaffiliated and somebody defeats you in battle, they can force you to join their Guild. It sucks, because I end up in a Guild full of jerks that I really don't like.

Another thing is that once you enter certain sections of a stage or a boss battle, you can't back out of it, and you're severely penalized for attempting to leave or dying. My teammates all think I suck because I'm low-level and new to the game.

#2 - My family is eating at a diner, like Steak & Shake. I see an older woman sitting with what appears to be a newborn baby and a little girl. I smile at her. She starts a conversation with me, asking me what I do for a living and things of that nature. To be polite, I answer and ask how old the baby is. She starts talking about the baby. I thought she was its grandmother but she is actually its mother.

When we go home, she comes with us, bringing the baby with. She hangs out all night long and never stops talking. I notice that something is really weird with the baby. Its skin looks wrong and tight and its face looks weird, more like a doll; the more I look at it, the more it looks like a roast pig, except for the face, which looks like one of those creepy shrunken heads. It never really moves or cries. I ask her if her baby is o.k. She waves me off and says it will be fine.

At maybe 5 a.m., she asks us for a ride home. It turns out that she lives a whole city away. I manage to wake up my uncle and talk him into driving, because my sleep deprivation and medication has made me unable to drive. We drive through the mountains for maybe an hour and a half, and the sun comes up. The woman lives in kind of a run down green house on the edge of a lake. It becomes apparent that the baby is sick and might die, but she doesn't really seem to care. We drop her off and wave goodbye. I'm glad to be rid of her.

I guess I should have had a clue that this was a dream, because my uncle was actually nice to me. On the highway, he pulls the car over and asks me to look at the mountains. I do so. He tells me to look in a specific direction, and I do. He says that in that direction is a major temple, and I might be able to see its outline against the sky. I look harder, and my dream-vision zooms in, and I can just barely see the temple. He says something to the effect of, when I don't feel good, to look in that direction and try to find it.

I wake up.

Original journal entry dated Sept. 26, 2002:

I had a strange dream about shoplifting toddlers who ran around in costume all the time. It was... strange. And there was a dog in it. I can't remember much about the dog.

I had this dream that this one guy who looked a lot like an animated version of Hero from "RPG World", was leading all of us ([college friends], and I) on this one journey to collect these mystical stones. Everything was going VERY badly. We had to go to this one underwater Atlantis-like city, which was actually the ancient ruins of some advanced civilization of aquatic druids, and we all got a specific treasure item that was neat-o cool. Except one of my friends lost hers, because we got into a battle and she didn't get a chance to pick it up before some stupid mage cast a spell that teleported us about 50 miles out into the ocean, where we may have subsequently drowned if not for a passing ship. Anyway, we completed that quest, but she never got her item. On the next quest we went on we had to pass through that area again so we went back to kick some mage ass (on principle) and get her item. It turned out to be a Stone Of Greater Discounting. It allowed her character to buy rare and expensive items at FAR below normal price.

I had another dream that I had a camcorder and was videotaping a train ride I went on through the Rockies when I was about 14. The train ride actually happened, but I've never owned a camcorder, and as far as I know, in real life mountains don't breathe.