The book of mars

The Glowing Forest and a Coaster Ride



I am in a really junky part of Maine, although like always, it’s beautiful. This time its exceptionally pretty: the car I’m in is traveling through a dark forested area on an old road. The moss on the great redwood trees illuminates our way enough so we don’t have to use our lights. Little glowing worms and luminescent animals scurry around. I see a moose with glowing green antlers in between the giant trees. In the car, my mom and I are discussing how much money the houses here cost.

“About the same price as living in the library,” my mom says. I nod as if this makes sense. It does in dream world I suppose.
Our friend Alice Louise is taking us to appraise a house for a guy and his daughter. Along the way she points out some noticeably pretty houses. Most of them have been built into the surrounding landscape; some are carved into trees, some are half sunken into muddy swamplands. One that she points out she’d like to live in seems too small, perhaps the size of a fairy house but a fairy mansion.

We turn into the driveway of a pretty normal trailer; one of the only normal houses in the area. It’s unfortunate that this is what we came to see, not one of the prettier houses. We meet the father and the daughter. The daughter is Abby (an acquaintance in waking life). All of us step into the sunroom which is attached to the side of the trailer. Suddenly it moves, detaching itself from the trailer, and rotates all around it to the other side. This was the “appraisal” that we came here for with Alice Louise. We’re ready to go.

Strangely, when we leave, it’s just Alice and I. She’s driving and I’m in the passenger seat. We’re in the country now, surrounded by low green fields and a big blue sky. The occasional farm passes by my window and there are silos on the horizon. In front of us there’s a guy running manically. He has long scraggly black hair and barely anything on except skin tight white running shorts. If he had a shirt on, I don’t remember. He seems to be running for fitness comically. We kind of catch up to him and slow down for some reason. He comes to the window.

“This is still Washington even though it’s not snowing,” he says, leaning into the window on Alice Louise’s side. She nods and they keep talking about how we are in the very middle of Washington where there is never snow or rain. He gets a little aggressive when he speaks, as if we aren’t particularly welcome right now. We drive off and he begins to run again.
Now the country road we were on has a four lane high-way coming the other way.

“See, we’re not even in the country anymore. We’ll be home soon,” Alice says.

The scraggly-haired man is ahead of us again. We see that he’s throwing sandbags on the road! That will definitely stop the Jeep we’re in. We dodge one but the next is in the center of the road and our front right wheel hits it dead on and we come to a stop. Now the only way home is to use…the roller coaster that is running along the road on the shoulder.

We each get into one of our own coaster cars on the ride. They are cartoon dinosaur heads; you step into its mouth, with the eyes and the nose above you as a roof. Mine’s blue, Alice’s is red. They not only run forward on the roller coaster track, but turn 360 degrees with inertia. I don’t like this. There’s a big hill that we are going up. In front of me, I see other coaster cars. They are jumping from track to track; we are on a similar four lane high-way but this side of the road is a roller coaster. I want to jump tracks like those cars, so I do. It’s easy with intent. When I jump, the coaster car does a flip mid-air and lands on the next track. Sometimes, the cars jump over other cars. It’s kind of a nice sight.

I realize we are going uphill faster than I expected and I don’t want to feel the fall. Although I like roller coasters, this hill is steep: twice Superman, if you will. I close my eyes and forget the dream. I become aware of my sleeping body. Yes, still asleep, not on a roller coaster, not about to fall…

I become aware of my dream body again once I am at the bottom. Alice Louise is gone from my dream. I am now in a gift store: the final destination of the coaster cars. There are a few wooden racks of hand-knitted things. I look at a pair of mukluks that my brother Holden had (dream memory, not in waking life) and remind myself to ask him to buy them for me. A girl comes over and looks at a rack of facial creams. They all have a certain element to them, but I forgot what it was specifically. She debates if one of the creams has that common element with the store clerk.

Kayla (a girl I know in waking life) is buying a pretty unique pair of gloves. They have the fingers cut off hobo-style and are black with Nightmare Before Christmas things sewn onto each finger. The back of the hand part of the gloves have a big skull sewn onto them. She is dressed all gothic-esque and has an air of “I don’t give a shit if I’m retreating back into this style.” (She dressed the same way years and years ago). I lose the dream.



Lucid Beach

I am on a beach with Heather. There’s a ton of people all taking up the shore space, but we find a little sand-muddy area. It’s not particularly nice, but it is the beach (and its winter in Maine, so its pleasant to dream of). Heather starts having an anxiety attack because of the people so we go to the “next” beach, a few feet from this one. They are distinctly not the same beach, but are very close. On this one, there are no people. We have sex, but it doesn’t really work out and we end up laughing and leaving.
There’s a sign on the beach that says there’s a sale going on at “B♠N”. What a weird name for a store I say to myself! We look up and B♠N is right in front of us. In the parking lot area of the store, which is all sandy and car-less because of how close it is to the beach, my mom’s kind of disembodied voice begins to talk about Zelda. Heather responds by saying she’s played all of them, which she has (in dream life, not waking life). I feel weird because I introduced her to the series and still haven’t played all of them (I have in waking life). I become lucid thinking of the name of the store. Jack and someone else are with Heather and I now and we all go into the store. I retain my lucidity but simply watch the events and notice the surroundings. In the store Heather says something about dreaming.

“This IS a dream actually!” I try to convince her and she laughs and kind of “knows” that it is, and I keep pestering her about it. I touch her and really feel her skin.

“It’s weird how I can actually feel your skin,” I say. I’m not amazed about the act of feeling it, but at this point I’m thinking of how my mind is either creating the feeling of her skin, which is an exact representation of the feeling in waking life, or I really am feeling it…on the dream plane. My cat jumps onto my sleeping body and I wake up.


An Anonymous Gift

I’m in my high school. For some reason I take my pants off and put them on the janitor’s cart. I have my white long johns under them though, so I don’t look too strange. I begin walking to my class. Someone in the rotunda says my mom is embarrassed in her classroom (she doesn’t work here in waking life) so I go see her first. Her room is where my 11th grade English class was. It’s set up the same way. She tells me I have a package in the office and I should get it soon. I don’t remember to ask why she was so embarrassed.

I go into the bathroom. Heather is here. Somehow, she ends up out the window, trying to crawl back inside from two stories below on one of those fair game ladders that twist and turn as you climb them (usually horizontally). She’s crying manically and saying the ladder is slippery and she’s going to fall. I somehow manage to take all her limbs and with the help of the janitor who comes in to clean, we get her inside. She’s really distraught.

I leave the bathroom and Heather is now Autumn. We go into our classroom. My 5th grade teacher is our teacher now. Lynn, a friend of ours, laughs when we enter the class an hour late. The teacher is really upset with me in particular and tells me to go get a late pass if I have a good excuse for my tardiness. I leave but have no excuse; I just want to be gone from the room.
I walk downstairs and take a drink at the fountain. My teacher had been following me to see if I was going to the office to get a late pass or not. I casually stroll into the office. I don’t like being in trouble, so I intend it to be the end of the day so I can get off the hook. The bell rings and all the kids scurry out of their classrooms. I sneak into the back area of the office and call UPS from the office phone and tell them not to deliver my package if it’s going to be late. I don’t know why I do this, since my package is already here. It’s nicely wrapped and has a stamp with my name on it.

I bring it upstairs to the benches and open it. It’s a pair of goggles, like steampunk-esque but modernized. They’re red with orange accents. I close the box and leave the school.

My mom picks me up and we begin to drive on back country roads. It’s raining pretty hard, but I’m having a nice conversation with my mom and we don’t mind it. I show her my goggles and she likes them. Neither of us know who got them for me or where they came from. We arrive at this old trailer that I used to know in waking life. In my dream, it’s where Heather lives. Without getting out of the car, my mom somehow knocks but no one comes to the door. I know Heather is home. We just leave.