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."

i'm at some kind of school or a boarding house with classes, really

i keep touching this fat girls legs but get embarrassed and stop because i dont want her to think i like her, i just want to touch her.

an asian girl named "12"

we have to jump across rocks in a low-ceiling'd room

in a third person pov, i make myself or my "character" move across a platform on a roof, collecting beams of sun energy. i'm good at this game. i keep getting "perfects"

on a really thin piece of paper, "10" and "12"'s conversation is written down. "is this you, 12?" "no thats from 1864" i crumple the paper and pretend it never happened.

i "wake up" and tell heather my dream, and say she was the fat girl. she wasn't really.

Dream Memory

I am riding my bike with Heather on the pegs. This is my "car", and in my dream it does feel like I'm driving a car. Somehow the pedals are the gas and break, it all works out. It's quite the illusion.

I drive into the parking lot of my local cinema (the scene is very realistic, everything is in place as it is in waking life). Heather talks to me about something on Youtube. I explain how I have dreams where a building will be a major internet site like Youtube, and even recall about a "dream" (I never had this dream, though- false memory) where the cinema in front of us was Youtube, embodied as a building.

I park my bike-car in a space and explain how sometimes I forget which pedal is the break and which is the gas. I then offer that Heather and I go to the south end part of town to see the big tent of wares (I had a dream once where I did visit this place, but it doesn't exist in waking life). We start to pedal away and I forget where it is. I get behind another "car" which is actually just Ken from 30 Rock sitting in the middle of the street. We go around him.

Hot Tea Fragment

I have a cup and pot of boiling water. It's really, really hot, the smoke is rolling out really thick. I pour it into my cup, but by the time the water is inside the cup, it has disappeared into water vapor. I keep trying to fill my cup but it doesn't work. Finally after several tries, I get enough for tea.

I turn around from the kitchen area to see a big circle of people. I sit down next to my friend Chase and set my tea on the ground by my chair. (Memory loss of whatever happens here)

Now I am in a dark auditorium full of everyone from school. I'm with Autumn. This scene lasts a long time as we converse with everyone. (Another memory loss )

Dream Graduation

I’m in school. Graduation is getting set up RIGHT NOW. Hallways are empty except me and a few other “left overs” who can’t graduate for whatever reason. I have a bottle of wine in my hand and start running and screaming: look at me! A cup manifests and I pour it, chugging the bottle and then the cup, bottle then the cup until I’m in the rotunda, drunk and everyone’s looking at me.

I follow some other left overs through dusty abandoned hallways so Mrs. L doesn’t see us and find us out. We all have this plan to graduate anyway so we go way up into the theater storage attic and try our best to hide ourselves. Me under a big blanket with someone and I’m drunk and my eyesight is like that of when I’m so tired I can’t keep my lids awake. So for most of it I do have my eyes closed and just listen under a blanket stacked on top of theater props so I almost touch the ceiling.

Someone tries to peep into the hallway and a little Asian girl who ate all her hair off (really) is the “hall monitor” for graduation sees that someone. She sends in this bulky girl, a real bully. She’s got a trick. She pulls the first kid she sees to her and licks that student’s lip, touches it and then taps her temple. She screams and falls down, not dead but just painful. She does another little trick to someone (pulls their lip ring over their nose!) and says she won’t tell Mrs. L. She’s gonna leave but first wants to show off another trick, looking for someone she pulls me over to her! No way, I hate pain (who doesn’t); she spins my chin into a tight spiral and every time I un-spin it a little, shit it hurts. But someone tells me there’s a trick to her trick and just un-spin it all at once: I do, and I feel just a little tug and I’m okay.

A few of us go further into the attic and we find that there’s a desk and under the desk is nothing, it’s a free-fall to the ice arena where they graduate so you can watch the whole thing. They’re almost ready! A teacher, Mrs. Smith (4’7 or something small!) sees us peeping and comes marching over. We all run out of the attic, oh too late, and Mrs. L is standing waiting for us.

She’s a lovely lady sometimes and says we can all graduate, so everyone puts their gowns on. I don’t have one. At the final door to the ice arena, its time to graduate, I don’t have a gown, but there’s a box with a white Freshman gown. I’m a sophomore in my dream (hey wait, why were all the different classes graduating instead of just the seniors!) and our color is green, so I’m a bit embarrassed. We walk out and I run over to Autumn so she can take my picture (it’s mandatory). When I get over to my class, they’re all wearing white and I’m the only one wearing green.


Lucid Awakening

I’m downtown, walking in a little drizzle. I plan on going to the community market to volunteer when I see a little nook between buildings with a candy store built in. It doesn’t have a door or a cashing machine, it’s just a bunch of glass jars with a ton of bright colored candy. I’m pretty delighted but wait! We don’t have a candy store downtown. And why is downtown so tiny? I’m lucid. I walk into the center of downtown (as I said, everything is tiny and compact, like 50 feet). I look around and notice:

This feels real. This is REALITY to me. Everything is solid and I am perceiving it just as I do waking life.

(This single lucid fragment has created something in me that has helped everything I've been doing dream-wise DRAMATICALLY. I understood before that dreams=reality while waking life=hazy and unreal while you're dreaming, but I never FELT and EXPERIENCED that completely. Now that I have, something has clicked. My reality checks take up to five minutes or more, not because I feel that more time is necessary or anything, but that's how long it takes me to discern my reality. REALITY has a new meaning. I become lucid more often (though write more in the hard copy of my dream journal, less on here). I thank my subconscious for letting me explore this feeling.)


Fragments

I make a sandwich for myself "when I wake up"- WHY WASN'T I LUCID?

Autumn and I are being obnoxious in school, so Heather leaves without saying a word to me. Crushing.
NOTE: Autumn told me today that she had a VERY SIMILAR dream, of her and I and Heather (who she has never met or talked to) all in a classroom.

Pug Genocide and the Obstacle Course

I’m on my street walking two dogs, a Pomeranian and a pug. I make sure to keep them walking on the right side of the road, and my dream-mind thinks of how much I like the direction of East. I have trouble keeping them out of the roads but I manage to take them to my destination: a big building with all the kids from school waiting in line outside. There’s something going on, but I don’t really know what. I notice that if I get in line, I’ll be waiting for hours. It’s extremely hot out, the peak of summer.

I see my Uncle Pat come at me from a distance. He has a shot gun. Suddenly I am being pulled to the ground. I can’t see anything and my dogs are taken. Hands are over me. I am put in a car. I open my eyes. I’m in the backseat. My mom’s in front with my Nana and the dogs are here in the back. The windows are rolled up and we’re all sweating really hard because of the heat.

“You can’t take Pugs out in the open,” my Nana says. She explains that they are being killed off, and my Uncle is one of the men who shoots them. I don’t know why it’s happening. I roll a window down and shove my face out. It’s a little refreshing. I draw things in the thick condensation that’s formed on the windows.

They drop me off at my dream-house, where I’m staying. It’s night time. I take the dogs into a shed and ruffle through a few boxes. I find a purple wig and put it on. In the mirror, I look the same, and my wig looks really funny. I can’t fit all my hair under it.

I go into the house. I’m staying with an autistic boy and his autistic friend. They annoy me, not because they’re autistic, but they won’t leave me alone for a moment. I try to run into my room and quickly close the door, but they get in. I do it again, forcefully and lock the door. The dogs play around in my room.

The scene jumps to me going back to the building with the school kids. It’s daytime again, but the same day, just a few hours later. No one is outside and I see the tail end of the line going in. Shit. To go in, you walk up some stairs on the side of the building, so I do that. The next part is the beginning of a big obstacle course. I didn’t know that was what this was.

Derek, my friend, is in front of me. After the stairs, you climb through a window-esque opening. I do so, but after casually going through, I am almost falling off a circular ledge that leads from the outside to the inside. Below me, all the kids are doing their obstacles or just watching me fall. This is the first part, and I’m already failing. Well I didn’t know about it, so I don’t feel that bad, I don’t really care about this. The ledge is absolutely terrifying, however.

I fall more, and I’m dangling half inside half outside the building, my hands on the ledge.

“Fuck all you hoes,” I say (lols) and manage to lift myself up. I slink around the ledge and come to a bigger part of it. Kayla, a schoolmate, is in back of me. There are two doorways. They are both extremely small. I enter one, and it gets blistering hot as I walk through. I take off my hoodie, and my mind says this is why my dream has been so hot. It’s still hot in the hallway. It zigzags vertically and becomes too small to fit through. I look back and see Kayla has taken the other hallway, the correct choice. Shit, failed again.

Scene change to the end of the course. I’ve probably come in last, but I’m hanging out with the first place and second place kids until they make a final announcement. It’s kind of like a break time. First place is “Heather”, although it doesn’t look like her and she keeps taking her glasses off (which she doesn’t have in waking life) and saying how she can’t see.


Circle Class

I am in a big fancy house and I am going to interview someone. They bring me to the “tea room”, which is a huge circular white room. I sit down.

Scene change to me sitting in the room, but in a desk. There are about thirty desks all arranged in a circular way. I see Jack sitting on the other side of the circle. I’m talking to Megan, a childhood friend, and Derek, a friend from school. We talk for a long time, most of the dream, but I don’t remember dialogue much. My mouth is really dry.

I look down the line and see Heather talking to a friend, Aimee. I get a jealousy pang but remember that I’m having a quite good time myself here talking with Megan. We are sitting in rolly chairs and I spin around the room, having some fun.

For some reason, a lot of people start to leave. I think they’ll come back so I wait. Eventually it’s just me and a few kids near Jack who are really dedicated students and wouldn’t leave a class. I know everyone is having a good time without me, and I get very upset. I see Derek left me a drawing. It’s really good, and on the back it has a black scratch area. It reveals rainbow colors if you scratch it away. I doodle on it and think about what Heather is doing without me. I do some funny things to entertain the students, who laugh, but I can’t close my mouth. It’s too dry!

I wake up, and have the worst dry mouth. I drink water and go back to bed.



Fragment

I am in Goodwill with my mom and someone else. This girl Emily who is really disgusting is here. She points to a sailing instrument, a tiny globe that has a handle under it that controls a grid laying over the earth. It tells you longitude and latitude numbers. I really want it, but it’s thirty dollars. I carry it around and slip it into my pocket.

I check out the records and they have video game soundtracks. I really want the Donkey Kong 64 Part 2 (doesn’t exist!) soundtrack, or the Banjoe Tooie. No money, oh well. I think about telling my friend Lotie about them, because she just got a record player.

I look at a television playing something on a shelf. A thought comes to mind that my mom had cancer in my dream or something. The dream details on this, but I don’t recall any of it.


Fragment

It’s a year later than now, and I “wake up” in a daze into the new present time, knowing nothing of the past year. I ask Heather all the things we did in the passing year, and have my mom tell me some things we did too. I go to a park with my mom and dad and my dad uncovers my old bike from under a hiding spot. He said I put it there last year.


Fragment
I'm in my first room ever. On the ground there are two vests, identical. Weird, I think. Why would that happen? I could be dreaming. I become lucid, look at the vests, and see they are remarkably different. I wake up.

Dynamite Town

I’m flying! I’m close to the ground, no cars, just a big long road in the country surrounded by yellow and orange autumnal trees. I let my muscles go limp and the wind takes me higher, passed the power lines. If I go too high I get a little nervous I’ll never come back down, so I stabilize myself a few feet above the power lines. “It feels so good to be flying, finally,” I say.The wind is warm and everything feels exhilarating.

A tiny voice in my head starts talking to me: it’s my mom! I lose lucidity. She wants me to go get “Cochla root” for my dad, who has a bit of back pain. I need to go to the medicine woman we see for the herbal nutrition we buy from her.

Luckily, my school is having a trip to the same area today! Now I’m on a bus, looking out the window. We’re here, in the little mountain town where she lives. I call it a “boomtown” but for other reasons: all around us, people are working with dynamite in the mountains to access the gold and coal that are inside. The surroundings are all dirt and mud with laborers outside on this particularly rainy day. The houses are scattered boxes on the fields passed the dynamite lands. The bus rides through on the only paved road I see.

Out my window I see a girl who’s working. I look in her eyes as she works. There’s a connection here, one that I’m uncertain of but I feel something. I want her to look at me, but the bus passes before she turns.



Ahead, the other bus of students is returning from the town, going home. There is only enough room for one bus, but this isn’t a problem in a dream. Our bus kind of goes “over” the other bus, without an accident or anything dangerous, we are on the same track but on different levels of the same road. My POV is inside the other bus as it passes below us. I see Heather sitting alone, crying. I know she’s having an anxiety attack because of all the dynamite and danger around her. Jack is in my bus and starts taunting her.

“Jack,” I say. Everyone on both of the buses stops talking. “Shut the FUCK UP.” He does. We move on.

We get to our destination soon. It’s a old fort house a little ways passed the main dynamite mountain area. Inside, I get a little scared; this is a haunted house-esqe attraction, not an informative guide through the history of the town. Although I’m scared, me and my friend Celina are the first to run in. The doorway frightens us: when you walk over it, it rains on you. This was terrifying in my dream!

We sit down against a wall and let everyone else explore the house. I go into the kitchen where the witch doing all this scary magic is kneading bread. I ask her about the medicine woman and where I can see her.

“You’re on the same road but this is the wrong house,” she says. I feel embarrassed. I sit back against the wall with Celina and text Heather. Eventually everyone has explored the scary house and we leave.

On the way home we stop at a McDonalds and I order two chicken nuggets. I receive my order and they are huge, about half the size of me! I can’t wait to give these to Heather (I’m vegetarian), but they’re really heavy and difficult to pull along.

The scene shifts to me in the back seat of a car. My Uncle Pat is driving. I don’t want to tell my mom that I didn’t get the Cochla root and she’ll have to drive back to the town. I think of ways to tell her the bad news. My Uncle is going really slow and when I notice this, he hits the accelerator and goes through a shortcut home: through a bank parking lot and then through a school playground. Before we reach the playground, my POV shifts to above the car, as if there is no car, only me and him floating (but I still “feel” that we are in a car). We start passing through the fence into the playground and I see a bunch of curved spoons on the ground.

“That’s where crack addicts do their drugs. If I was going to do crack, I’d do it here,” I say.

On the playground, we pass a teenager on a small child’s bike. Now I am riding the bike.

It has backwards peddle brakes which are so foreign to me that I just don’t brake. Instead, I kind of idle around the edge of the playground until I can cross the street. I go for it without looking, and a car almost hits me: it was my mom, we’re both going home. I find this funny.

Peddling home, I stop on the side of the street to collect some acorns that have fallen from a tiny tree. My uncle’s voice booms to me: “Stop, let’s go home!” I tell him to wait a minute and then we proceed home.

Fragment

(Copied directly from my dream journal, I can’t make sense of it)
Me + a lot of people, nighttime, afraid on couches in a big house. Julia. My cat forms into a square of space + I wake up with her still there.

dreamBirthday Party

I’m in the car with Pehry. He’s driving pretty recklessly with someone else in the front seat telling him to slow down. We take a sharp turn into my dad’s auto shop. The parking lot is full of tiny cars for children but exact versions of their bigger counterparts. I keep saying I want one, and then remember that I “have” one, a tiny tan minivan. It’s parked out back.

We get out and go into my dad’s shop. It’s a party inside; it’s my birthday! My family and friends are all inside. No one pays too much attention to me, but in my dream world this isn’t strange and I am content just walking around looking at the things in the shop.

I walk over to my Nana who is sitting around a turntable. There are old nursery rhyme records all stacked on it. I go through it and each one is colored and decorated with story elements: one is green with a frog, one is red with a pony, one is blue with a bear, etc.

My mom comes over to me and gives me a little ticket. It says “dunk house” and I interpret this as a ticket for me to go into one of those dunk booths at the fair. I quickly give it back to her, and she explains that my Nana is in the dunk house at the fair this year and with this ticket I can dunk her no matter if I hit the target or not.

Everyone keeps doing their thing at this mini-party and Autumn comes in from somewhere. She has her school bag, and I “know” that the door behind me connects to a few classrooms. Because she’s really big, everyone gets nervous and kind of moves towards the middle of the room to make room for her (she’s not THAT big).

She comes over to me and talks about missing a certain project that she’ll have to re-do.

“What? No, that project was that we had to listen to records in class. Why would you have to do that out of school? It’s so easy and dumb,” I say. She has her usual bad attitude and just shrugs her shoulders and says mean shit about everyone around us.
Someone outside is driving a specially-made car.

“Isn’t that the car Marty made that runs off blood instead of gasoline?” I say.

“Yeah I know about Marty,” Autumn retorts as if it’s “cool” to know Marty and she wanted to make sure I knew that she knew about him. We talk about how the problem with the car is that the blood soaks through the seats and stuff so your clothes get bloody and you can’t keep papers on the seats and stuff like that.

Fragment

I walk into a really small classroom. There’s a substitute teacher (who is an actual teacher at a school I went to) and a chocolate cake sitting on the only table in the room.

“Fuck yeah!” I say as I come in and sit down. The kids behind me are excited too: cake and a substitute. I have déjà vu (or perhaps I dreamed this before, or perhaps a dream memory) that I had been to this class and had cake before.

I get a little embarrassed because I don’t know how to sit without being too close to anyone. Kate (a…friend of mine) is here. We all take big slices of cake and talk about dumb things.

We have a project to do in class: listen to a few certain records. The teacher changes from the substitute to my old U.S. History teacher.

Fragment

Jack, Heather and I are looking through a big dumpster of metal scraps, looking for good pieces to put into a trash compactor. We are having a lot of fun doing this.

Fragments of Fragments

• A room made of zebra print. Not painted over or wallpapered, but the structure is the patterns of zebras.
• I check a letter written to Morpheus, looking for a response. I go through sheet after sheet, looking for markings.
• I go downstairs and make myself toast.

Dream Graduation

It’s the first day of my senior year. Most of the student body is sitting on a giant multi-tier bench system that isn’t quite bleachers. It’s in the middle of a giant intersection downtown. All of us are seated by popularity, with the most popular at the bottom with no one in front of us so we can see the “show” that’s going to happen. I happen to be in the very front row (though I was never that popular). From where the benches are, we can see upper main street which trails off and turns a corner. It’s sloped quite a bit more than usual.

The “show” starts. All of the “really really cool” fashionably dressed kids come out and use main street like a runway. The first is this big black guy who was never dressed nicely at all, but he was wearing some classy clothes (classy in dream terms: truthfully it was quite wacky). A few more people trickle out of some building passed the curve of the street. None are girls!

As the fashion students strut around downtown, the whole world turns, or at least the benches we are on. If one starts walking down the street instead of up, all of us lean toward that end of the street. I am so scared that I’m going to fall off the bench which would be really embarrassing. Whenever the benches turn, I grab onto the girl next to me: a girl I know in waking life, Hilary. Behind me, my ex-boyfriend Dylan is sitting. In my dream, they are dating, so it’s awkward that I’m holding onto his new girlfriend pretty tightly.

Once the show is over, all the fashionably dressed popular students are allowed to look around main street alone; we are all here to visit the new shops on the first day of school. I realize that we will be able to join them row by row and I’m in the first row. I panic because that means all the still-sitting students will watch what I look at. My row is dismissed.

I walk around kind of hazily and embarrassed for a few minutes, waiting to see someone I know on the street and for the rest of the rows to come join us. Eventually they do but I can’t find anyone I know. I decide to spend my time as I should: looking at the new places.

The first place I see is a new tattoo shop right next to our older one. It’s called Astral Tattoos and it isn’t an actual store, it’s a pink and green painted wooden booth. They’re selling body modification, tattoos and henna tattoos. I don’t pay attention to what else or what specifically the tattoos are, but I imagine they’d be interesting.

I find my brother Holden (who doesn’t go to my school) and follow him around until we are all brought into the big building at the end of the street. It’s the high school (not where it usually is, it also looks very different).

Inside, we are all wearing our caps and gowns now. Everyone’s color is maroon; it’s our school colors (not in waking life). I follow a few students who are in front of me, because we are arranged alphabetically. Steven and Jamal are before me and Adam is in back of me, although all of them have last names that are in back of where I would have been. I’m really nervous and walk into the bathroom for a moment, look at myself and walk back out. We are led into the auditorium of the school which is absolutely huge and decorated with maroon everything.

I sit down in my row with Steven next to me. Jamal isn’t here so there’s an empty seat. As the students are being shuffled in, I question where I am.

“Is this a dream?” I look around but make up a history to make sense of where I am: yes, the graduation memory that comes to mind is actually when I graduated junior year. Now it’s senior year, so this is real life. Wasted dream check.

Behind me, Martin who is a junior but is sitting with the seniors is handing out camera kits for us to use. I go to grab one but realize that I don’t talk to him a lot and that would be weird and he’d want someone he knows to have them.

While I sit and wait for the ceremony to start, I look at a pamphlet that I have in my hands. It has a bunch of activities we were supposed to do while downtown. They include things like woodworking, pottery, volleyball, etc. I didn’t sign up for anything. I wake up.


Fragment

Heather invites me to her house. It’s a huge place and her room is the size of a usual upstairs area in a normal sized house. We go passed her room which is quite barren. We seem to be in the attic. In back of her room she has a big stage that’s halfway on the house, halfway on the roof with wide glass windows containing a backstage area. She begins to dance with life-sized puppets as her back up dancers. The music plays and she steps into the darkness about half-way on the stage, the dancers follow, and everyone glows in the dark.


Fragment 2

I remember eating a lot of maple sugar through a straw out of this tiny dollhouse. I drained it of maple sugar and felt sick. I could see all the sugar particles in my thigh which was where I would gain the weight if I didn't start running. The radio started to play and a commercial was discussing weight gain.

"Usually when people eat fatty foods, they will gain weight. However, some people have a large amount of bridges in their body which distributes the fat evenly, so they don't gain any weight." I knew I had a lot of "bridges" in my body and didn't worry.

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.