Batch

06-19-2013 -- [This may have all been one dream or two or three that kind of flowed together. Either way, it works, so I am listing it as one dream.] I am in Buena Park near the mall, trying to walk to McDonald's to get some food, and mom is here catching a bus, so I just stop to kind of say hello. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people here, and when the bus stops, I am caught up in the crowd and kind of forced aboard. I don't have quite enough money for the fare and am afraid of getting in trouble, but the bus driver doesn't even seem to notice, and isn't worried about it.

I end up standing at the front of the bus, holding on to the railing and talking to the driver, though I am afraid he is going to be mad at the distraction. But he is explaining how they now routinely have security people on the bus watching everything else, so all the driver has to worry about is driving, and he can manage to talk to the passengers easily enough. I'm just kind of soaking it all in, learning what I can since I will soon be a bus driver myself. We just drive along, talking, though in the back of my mind I know I need to get off the bus soon, since I never planned to get on in the first place.

But somehow at some point the driver changes, and it is now a kind of large black woman (think Ros from Night Court or thereabouts) who is very late on the route, (like an hour or more) and is really stressing out about it. She has been ordered to just drive as fast as she can without stopping to let passengers on or off, so she can catch up with the route, which means I'm not able to get off the bus for quite a while. She finally makes it to Bolsa (which IIRC was actually out toward the beach, but in the dream is somewhere down near the Mall of Orange), which has her back on schedule, and we're finally able to exit, but she seems to take great joy in telling me there are no McDonald's in the area to eat at.

So I get off the bus, and find myself wondering how I am ever going to get back to Orlando, especially since I am in Washington or one of the Carolinas (no idea how, dream switch) but I find myself standing outside a fenced in back yard and listening to voices I recognize. Turns out I have found myself standing outside the back yard of the Kingslands. I can hear Chyanne and Cheryl talking, and soon Chy's mom appears and is walking toward me to let me into he back yard. Oddly enough, there seems to be no house, but she leads me down a ladder or some stairs into what almost seems to be a sort of storm cellar, which is where they live, now.

There are several puppies around, jumping all over people and licking them, and part of the discussion is about how they just got the kids backs (somehow in the dream they were taken away for a while, because of the overcrowding in the cellar, but it seems the issue was eventually resolved), and so they are running around, too. Chy is talking about how it happened because they were put under some sort of curse, and she is preparing a ritual to break the curse. It requires building a fire in the fire place with 42 sticks, and I am helping to put the sticks into the fireplace. I've just got the last of the 42 in there when Shane (is that right? Been a while) comes up with more sticks trying to add them. I try to stop him, but Chy explains there needs to be at least 42 sticks, but more will not hurt.

After that is finished, Chyanne and Cheryl are getting ready to go to work, and they work as seers, trying to tell the future for folks. But they are being sent to work in a small desert community, an area very different from where they usually work. As they are getting ready, Joel arrives home, and he is complaining about how his work has been forcing him to work next to a shoe store for the last few days, and today he almost caved in and went binge shoe shopping, an addiction he has been fighting against, as it caused their last bankruptcy. We're trying to convince him he doesn't need hundreds of fancy pairs of shoes. Leave that for the women.

So soon we're off at the desert, where the seers are somehow trying to stop and capture a gang of crooks. The whole thing is turning into a live version of Runescape, and this is part of a quest involving a lost desert that is separate from the Kharidian desert. We have to capture these thugs and take them back to the Kharidian desert, where we'll help set up a new 'gang' to challenge the current ones in the desert. It seems kind of like a human version of the See No Evil quest, where you reestablish monkeys in the desert. I can remember bits of the sawmill Runescape dream I had, and I think that quest somehow helped lead to this one. I've already done these, but I am glad to help my friends in completing these quests as well.

Oddly enough, the person who is going to lead this new gang is John Barrowman, who is a new Runescape player, though he hopes to advance well in the game. But oddly, he took the acting job of leading this gang without realizing it was part of a Runescape quest, so I get to explain it to him. He's been given a script to work with, and I am glancing at it, and it is actually a sort of a Runescape encyclopedia, about three inches thick, filled with hundreds of pages of small print, explaining the entire history, content, and future plans for the desert storylines in Runescape.

There are two vans that are going to be used to transport the newly caught thugs back to the main desert, and John is driving one of them. Somebody from the Buena Park First Church of the Nazarene is driving the second one, and as we are getting ready to drive off, my friend Dale walks up. He explains he has been hired to be the 'security' person to keep an eye on the passengers for this trip. He also doesn't realize that this is all part of a Runescape quest, and I don't have the chance to tell him before we begin the trip.

So we're driving back to the main desert (or perhaps the Church in Buena Park, not sure which), and about halfway through the trip, Dale joins me in our van. He also has the big, thick encyclopedia, but he hasn't had any chance to read it. I am explaining how this is all a Runescape quest to both him and John Barrowman, and trying to get them ready for what is coming. I've been poking around in the thing, and realize that this quest will lead directly into the wonderful quest that I dreamed about a few months ago, that involve setting up the new gang, and in the process, infiltrating a temple in the desert, dedicated to sexual adventures. (That was a very pleasant dream, though I don't know if it ever got posted.) I'm thinking to myself that John will greatly enjoy that quest, and also probably be very popular in it, but I am wondering how much Dale is not going to like possibly being involved in the one and only x-rated Runescape quest.

We're nearly there (at the corner of Orangethorpe and Stanton, I think) when we have a blowout on the vehicle we're driving, and John pulls us into a service station where they can change the tire. The vehicle we're driving has changed from a van to either a bus or a big rig (or possibly one of those odd buses that is a big rig) and the thing is being jacked up very high to work on it. Oddly, though the blown tire is removed easily, getting the replacement tire on the rim seems to involve having all the new thugs hold the tire against the rim, and then run it as hard and as fast as they can against a wall, trying to force the tire onto the rim. Very odd method of trying to do it.

---

06-19-2013 -- [Almost forgot this one, then it popped back into mind.] I find myself at Fullerton College in the 500 building, in a very weird situation. It is half college, half high school. I am both attending the school as a student, and getting ready to do some teaching. Outside the building, I run into Julie Davey, my journalism professor, and she is both attending as a student and teaching as well.

Part of the high school thing is a daily class schedule, as opposed to the M-W-F and T-Th style schedules, and there is a math class that is first period, and I am hoping to make it on time and manage to pass the class for once, but almost immediately, I find myself with Julie as she is about to lead us in to a tour of the remodeled Hornet Newspaper office (I've dreampt of the remodeling several times, recently), except I look away for a moment and have fallen way behind, as she leads new students through different parts of the tour.

I am standing by Julie's office, while she is down the hall showing off the basic journalism classroom (518, was it?), before she comes back to the Hornet office (which is the expanded room 512). Though the main room of the Hornet is about the same size as always, the small rooms all have doors and are much larger than they used to be. Julie's office is also much larger. So somehow I am almost more of a visitor than part of the newspaper staff, and I don't know most of the staff, as it seems to be a new generation, but I am still hoping to end up doing some stories and full-page spreads, as I just kind of wander around the rooms.

05-30-2013 -- [A halfway short but fun one.] Hints of computer gaming, perhaps a little Runescape, and find myself in a cross between the Goodwin's family room and my room at BMs. Having a discussion with some people connected to the game, and notice the decor of the room seems to be BMs sewing room as well as my room, and one of the guys backs into the sewing machine, and it starts to sew up the pants he is wearing, while getting all tangled and mangled. Meanwhile I am sitting there petting a dog? Sheep? It seems to be a cross between a bijon, a greyhound, and a sheep, and I am not sure what it is, but it is friendly, and loves to be petted. BM comes in and says JM loves that thing, whatever it is. He comes wandering through, as well, in a rather curmudgeony mood. As he walks away complaining about things, I realize ... wait a minute. He's dead. He died six or seven years ago, back in ... 2008, was it? I'm dreaming!

I decide if I am dreaming, I am not going to let him interfere with me, and I am going to have some fun, so I walk up to BM, drop my pants, and tell her to have at it. She says no, rather angrily. I tell her JM is dead, and remind her he has been for years, but she still refuses. In addition, he comes wandering around again. I stare at him, reminding myself he is dead, and trying to make him disappear, but he just won't vanish, even though he is dead, and finally I get angry, and decide if neither of them are going to cooperate with me, I'm going to go elsewhere and have some fun, dang it!

I walk back to my room and start searching for my shoes, and then pull them on. I'm just about finished with that when BM walks in the room, and I think she is going to lecture me or yell at me or something, so I hide under a table, surrounded by a couple of racks of dresses, but it turns out she came into her sewing room just looking for a needle. I accidentally shift the table around a bit and apologize to her about it, and she's cool with it. Seems as long as I am not trying to do anything with her, she is not upset with me.

So I walk out of the house, looking for my car. There are probably a couple of dozen cars parked around the house, most of them older models that look quite broken down, and I find I can't really remember what car I am driving now, as I have gone through so many of them, recently. I walk past more and more, some of which I can remember driving in recent dreams, some I can't, but none seem to be currently driveable. I vaguely remember recently driving something in a 40s or 50s roadster with small wheels and a very low profile, from some dream that involved some sort of meeting in the Brookhurst moon park. [No idea if it was a real dream, or just a dream of a dream.] I climb through a sort of cross between a small garage and a sort of storage shed, with more dead, scrapped vehicles, and come out at the next store neighbor's, which seems to be almost a sort of junk yard.

As I walk up, the neighbors don'k know me, and are sort of unfriendly. Since they don't know me, they tell me I am probably in the wrong place, and want JMs place ... it's "Over there." with a point back where I came from. I explain I am looking for my car, can't find it, know it has got to be around here some place. Kind of a worn old roadster. "Oops," comes the unapologetic reply, and one of the people leads me over to a large car crusher, which he opens up, and pulls out a large cube of metal. They've crushed my beautiful ... well, my running car! I'm devastated for a few seconds until I remember, it is all a dream, and I decide I can fix this!

They just stare in amazement when I tell them this, but I grab the car's mangled bumper and kind of shake it out like you might shake out a wadded up shirt, and the car snaps back to mostly it's old shape, though it is kind of wrinkled. I smooth out some of the wrinkles while talking soothingly to the car, and it is getting in better and better shape. The tires are really mangled, though, have lost all their rubber, and at the moment are tiny, looking like the damaged castors off an old desk chair. I start gently rocking the car back and forth while continuing to mutter smoothly at it, and it starts to kind of regrow the rubber on the tires.

The tires are getting fuller and fuller, and even the wheels are getting a little bigger, and soon, instead of looking like chair castors, they are looking more like the wheels from a child's wagon, which are certainly an improvement on where they were. I keep rocking the car, and trying to grow them into something more like what you would see on a 40s or 50s car. Meanwhile, I am kind of stroking the hood, which is a faded, dull black with what seems to be an old, torn decal of Jim Carrey as the Mask, and as I start to gently rub along the hood, both the decal and the paint job are becoming whole and glossy and shiny, then I wake up!

01-17-2013 -- [This dream happened very early in the night when I should not have been having dreams with the 5-HTP I have been taking. I went to bed around 11:30, and woke around 2:00, earlier than I would expect. On the other hand, it was weird and disjointed, which I would expect from such an early dream.]

Big, long chase-style dream, with tons of scene changes, and very hard to remember details. Starts with an odd combination of a kids' play area and perhaps a ship (much like the ship I got pulled under in the David Tennant Bat'leth dream), where I seem to be kind of climbing into a kids play area. But soon things shift, and I find myself half-flying, half skiing through a snowy mountain area that seems familiar.

It is very much something we are doing in real life, but there is still a kind of a hint of Runescape, and it seems like some sort of route (like doing herbs at the five herb patches). Dale is doing this with me, but it has been a long time since he has done it, so he doesn't remember where things are, and I am half trying to help him, and half trying to beat him and gain more experience.

Anyway, we're sliding down the slopes of this snowy mountain, and eventually slide off on what almost seems to be a sort of freeway exit. It feels like halfway a small town exit off I-95 in the Tampa area (San Antonio or perhaps Bushnell), partway something off I-4 near Disney, and partly something in the Rancho Palos Verdes area in California. Anyway, we're on the off ramp waiting to make a left turn, and Dale just makes it in a gap in the traffic while I have to wait a bit for more traffic to go by.

It seems like I head west a few hundred yards, and then make a u-turn and head a bit further East, which begs the question why we didn't make a right turn instead of a left turn off the freeway off ramp. Weird. Anyway, Dale is ahead of me, and I soon find myself driving into a sort of combination apartment complex and retirement home, where it seems I have to deliver some newspapers.

It has a very Register feeling to it, because the paper comes in two sections, and I have to put them together. I know I have to deliver 8 or 9 papers to this complex, but I can't remember which units are my customers. Luckily there are only about 15 apartments, and I have a few extra papers, so I might be able to just deliver papers to all of them, and avoid any problems. At some point it also turns from the Register, to an issue of Grit.

Somehow somebody is ranting about how dogs aren't allowed, though they just might barely allow a small puppy, but somebody else has brought both a puppy and a dog, and that's just not allowed. Meanwhile, all the people are coming out to meet me instead of allowing me to drop the papers off at their porches, and taking papers directly from me, while a sprinkler is soaking all of us and the papers. It is very confusing and surreal.

Anyway, Dale is still ahead of me, and I have to try and catch up with him, and so I have to get out of here, but all the old people want to walk with me and talk with me. Meanwhile, I am trying to fly out to gain some speed, but the area I am leaving seems to be lined with the kind of netting / fencing that they use on a golf driving range to keep you from being able to hit golf balls out of the area, and the stuff is tight and limiting my flying.

I make it out of that area, and move on to the next area, which seems to be a combination of the Animal Kingdom, Knott's Jungle Island, and a Polynesian area I've dreamed about a few times recently. I have to get in here, but I am still being chased by somebody who started chasing me at the gold course as I tried to fly. I am at this second area to make a pick-up of Idexx samples, which is why the flavor of the Animal Kingdom, but the security entrance is actually kind of the covered bridge entrance to Knott's Jungle Island.

I am supposed to stop to see security to get in, but with the idiot chasing me, I just decide to fly over the bridge (and security gate) to escape the guy. Unfortunately, that has security starting to chase me, so I just trade one for the other. I try to explain I'm here to pick up the Idexx samples, but they say somebody else just came and picked them up (Dale, of course). So I ask if he picked up both sets of samples, and they didn't know there were two sets of samples. (The reason they didn't know is that there aren't two sets, but I did find samples to pick up, so whatever Dale grabbed, they weren't the right stuff.)

Anyway, I grab the samples and try to fly right back out the way I came in, but I seem to be being chased by more and more people. There are large vines everywhere in the air, and I am trying to dodge them and fly around them, but there are more and more of them, and I am having more and more trouble. Right when I escape one guy, somebody else always starts chasing me.

At one point, some of the vines I am having to fly around and avoid even seem to be shooting out of my mouth, and at others they are shooting through the pane of glass in the front door of the Hickory House, as things just get odder and odder, in a full-out chase dream that makes less and less actual sense.

01-02-2013 -- This one seems to start almost as a gas station mystery shop. I am at the pumps at a gas station, getting ready to maybe pump some gas, and also looking around at outside displays, thinking to maybe get some oil. I suddenly realize I brought oil with me, and it is already mine, even as I am pulling it off the display, and am hoping I don't get in trouble for using my own oil, because it sure doesn't look right, the way it is going down.

Soon I stumble into a sort of meeting of an organization that seems to be kind of a get-rich-quick thing. You know ... the various real estate gurus who advertise buying property with no money down and making a fortune. There is a sort of feeling of some kind of scam going on, and though no characters appear, there is a strong feeling of something connected to Psych. The guy leading things seems to be Alexandre O., a pastor I knew from my days at Hosanna Printing.

My cell phone rings, and I am asked to turn it off, as they want no recording of the meeting. My phone quickly turns into a small hand-held cassette recorder, and though I try to turn it off, the wheels keep turning and the tape keeps moving, so I think it is still recording. They don't think it is a problem, though, since that is what everybody else's recorders are doing. (Just how many people are recording this thing when they aren't supposed to?)

It is a longish meeting, and there is a lot going on. It goes on for quite a while, but not in any detail I can put down here, except in a few small scenes. At one point they give a small, meek, slightly Oriental girl (think Amy from Futurama) a lot of money, several thousands of dollars that they collected from the rest of us at the meeting, and she is insisting that it is too much. The guy in charge interrupts her, and demands she tell us her name, and this shy girl who has barely spoken to us, and has identified herself as Amy in a whisper speaks out loud and clear, and gives her full name in a forceful manner. His point? Money has a large effect on a person's self confidence.

They bring a pizza in, and ask me to try the first piece, and I could swear it was the pizza that was made in my last dream (see Harry Potter, Voldemort, and the Pizza). It looks like the pizza from Aldi's, as it did, and is also fairly mangled. At one place, the crust has bubbled up, but instead of just a bubble in the crust, it bulges up and almost looks like a small planet on a column rising up from the crust, and I am really not sure about eating it.

Soon the meeting has been thinning out, and I have been asked to do something to show some sort of talent or skill that I will use to make something of myself. I grab a rather basic and simple guitar and start to try and play it (rather badly, as I have no idea how to play the guitar) and one of the other people takes it away from me. They somehow kind of unfold it into a much larger string instrument like a bull fiddle or something, and start to play amazingly on it.

I am embarrassed, but I start to sing along as they play. I have a lovely voice, and sing really well, but very softly because of my throat. [I have had no voice for about five years.] Soon we have moved away from the hotel we were in for this meeting, and Alexandre has turned into what almost looks like Peter David, and I find myself actually kind of whining about how I'm not actually good enough at anything, as we are trying to cross a really busy street to get back to the hotel.

The street crossing was fairly realistic, except for trying to dodge into too small of gaps in the traffic, when we can see much larger gaps a few seconds away, and would have just waited for them in real life. As we finish running across the street, Peter David has turned into Dale, and he has accidentally run behind a fence which separates the street from the sidewalk, so he has to back-track to get around the fence. I expect to beat him to the hotel because of this, but he still gets there first.

We head inside, and I note in passing that it is a nice hotel, but when I push the button for the elevator, and the doors slide open, they don't open onto an actual elevator, but onto a hallway containing the elevators. Weird. I glance at our room number, which is something like 5641 or some such, and hit the button for floor five, but that's not where we want to go. The rooms are not numbered by floor, but sequentially, and we have to read a sort of chart to figure out which floor our room is on.

09-18-2012 -- More bits. Bad night of sleep. I'm running around somewhere, kind of hick town type of area, in a small town somewhere that I have had a dream of in the last year or two that involved looking for a pharmacy. I am walking down a small street when somebody running by shoots at me, and misses. Another person drives by, and also shoots at me. By this time I have dived to the ground.

A third guy rides by, this one on a bike, and he shoots at me too, and since I am already on the ground, he hits me. It hurts, but does me no actual damage, and I jump to my feet. A fourth person is trying to shoot me, and I grab the gun from this one and shoot him. Since I don't want to seriously injure him, I graze his shoulder, and leave him with pain, but nothing else. He is complaining, and I am asking him how he likes it. Somehow these hicks just like shooting people for fun.

The guy on the bike comes back and is going to try to shoot me again, but I take his gun away from him, and am threatening him with it. He reminds me of Mad Jack from Grizzly Adams, except he is also extremely cross-eyed. I am amazed he could aim the gun at me well enough to shoot me. He keeps being a jerk, so I try to shoot him with his own gun, but he tells me he already removed the ammo so I couldn't. Instead I break the gun to pieces and drop it on the ground, which annoys him.

I keep walking down the block, and soon come to a night club where I end up picking up a weird sword. It is made of metal, but it bends really easily, and twists into different kind of swords. Somehow I can still kind of fight with it, and there are hints of a past dream involving Spider-Man, but nothing I can remember well enough to post about. Also hints of stage magic and magic using a staff.

---

Some kind of dream where I am Harry Potter at Hogwarts. I can't remember anything of the time in Hogwarts, but soon we're on the road in one of my white cars (either the Kia or the Ford Escort) there is me as Harry Potter, Hermione, and oddly, Draco Malfoy who is still a bit of a jerk, but is trying to change and improve.

I have no idea why, but Malfoy is driving, and he is terrifying. He is all over the road, driving as fast as he can, swerving around traffic, running lights, almost hitting pedestrians who are diving out of the way ... he is a horrible driver. No surprise, we get pulled over by a cop. Malfoy is afraid of getting in trouble. I just have my wand at my side, and figure a brief confundus, and we're on our way. Unfortunately, Malfoy pushes Hermione to get out of the car and talk to the cop. As soon as she begins, Malfoy floors it, turns a corner, and then starts to slow down a little, hoping she will catch up with us. That idea is obviously ridiculous.

---

Certain there is an interesting missing fragment from the night, but just haven't been able to remember it.

---

Very sci-fi dream. I am in a different world that people can travel to from the normal world somehow (space ships or stargates or something), but however I got here was not the normal way, which means unlike everybody else, I can't easily communicate with our world back home.

The Charmed Ones are here, and there has been some kind of message from some sort of spirit (their Grandma?) that indicates that I should be with one of them or perhaps all of them. Pru does some sort of reading that doesn't show that I should be with any of them, but that does hint I should be around and be a friend, and that things might change with time.

I find myself being confronted by Leo the Whitelighter, who seems to be the father of a very hillbilly-ish family that he is fairly abusive to. He offers me a ride down 192 back to my hotel room. When I get there, we are all getting ready to check out and go home. There is a rumor of some sort of haunted house above our floor, and there is one little kid who has been planning to climb through the vents to get the the floor above and check it out. I am interested too, so we get to it.

We find the vent, and there is a fan in it that was have to loosen and take out, but we manage to eventually squeeze our way up to the floor above, and instead of any sort of haunted house, we just find another hotel room or apartment. Nothing interesting in that, so we just drop back down to our own room. But now we're hot and sticky, and have to wash up before leaving. Unfortunately the hotel room bathroom seems more like an airplane bathroom, with a really weird, tiny toilet is is hard to get to and use properly.