Glieuaeiel's DJ

Dodgeball Ritual

I'm sitting with my sister, watching a dodgeball game. All of the players are wearing gray shirts with four check-boxes in a row across the front, with a variable number of boxes containing X's. Only one person, a friend of my sister's, has all four boxes marked, and I ask her about it. "It's because he's dead," she says. Meaning he's already been hit four times, and it's an unusual circumstance that he would continue the game under these circumstances. "Oh," I laugh. "That explains why there's no one else wearing that."

One of the players gets the ball, senses an alley, and charges up the gym towards the end zone. There's a player from the other team right behind him, and it looks like he's going to get tackled, but he does a baseball slide and he makes it! But he goes past a wall and out of my line of sight. People are celebrating his point, but he calls out that he still got hit. So it's a point, but he gets a mark on his shirt. I try to remember--did he already have three?

He comes back past the wall. Yes, three marks. So he's "dead," now. Suddenly I wonder if there's a ritual to commemorate this occasion. I ask my sister, but then my question is answered for me when the guy carries out an ornate chair and a purple blanket patterned with silver stars, setting the chair in the middle of the gym.

I switch places with the player, so now I'm sitting on the stool, trying to cover myself with the blanket. Everyone standing around the chair has a funereal expression on zir face. Once I'm covered, I'm whisked off backstage somewhere. There are musicians back there. Later, when another player is whisked off in the same ceremony, I notice that one of the musicians is rushing terribly.

Laser Tag Classroom

I'm sitting in a classroom when I see an enemy sneaking through the door. "Watch out!" I shout. Then I pull out my laser tag gun and start shooting at them. They angrily shoot back at me, but for some reason their shots don't seem to register on my suit. I feel awkward, like somehow I'm cheating. Should I just pretend that they hit me, since by all rights they probably should've? But then the person shooting at me loses all of her HP and leaves. By now the classroom has prepared its defense against the incoming invasion. More enemies come through the door, and people start shooting. All of the enemies are shooting exclusively at me, and it's overwhelming. Plus, one of them is somehow launching laser grenades at me. I have absolutely no idea how to do that, and I feel like I'm losing. And indeed, soon all of my HP is gone. I guess they got their vengeance, but that was not fun.

Never Tickle a Sleeping Polar Bear (7:12)

Two people somehow anger a polar bear. It starts chasing them and they run all the way to the other side of town and into a building, where someone uses a phone to call for help. Help is slow to arrive, though, and meanwhile, we're all watching some kind of live feed that shows us where the polar bear is. It will reach the building in a matter of moments. Now, looking out the window, I can see it running down the street. And still no sign of help.

The bear comes inside, and I know it will kill people one at a time until help finally arrives to stop it. Seeing as those two idiots were the ones to anger it in the first place, I think it's appropriate that they should be the first victims. We push one of them into a pool as a sacrifice. The polar bear paces on the edge for a moment, then dives in after the sinking person. I don't watch, but a friend comes up and tells me, "Well, I saw it." I can imagine how gruesome it must have been. I realize that now I will probably start having nightmares about polar bears attacking me.

Rock Concert Setup (10:40)

I've agreed to help an old high school friend set up for tonight's rock concert. I'm just really curious about how all of this works. One of the first things we do is unwind a lot of extension cord around some concrete poles set up around the edges of the pavilion. We go around the outside about a dozen times. Then a big truck dumps some stuff in the middle of the room and start threading a bunch more cords every which way. Meanwhile, I keep asking a bunch of questions about /why/ we're setting things up in certain ways, and it's clear that my friend is getting kind of exasperated. He just wants to get the job done. And apparently I'm messing some stuff up: he tells me that I'm not supposed to run the cord right along the concrete bricks; they're not supposed to touch at all. I'm about to ask him why, but then I see the unhappy expression on his face as he waits for the inevitable question, and I decide I'd better give him a break. He thanks me for it, and I set about moving all of the concrete bricks.

Later, his dad comes in, and my friend says something to him that I don't understand. In fact, I'm not even sure if it was English. I look more closely at the pair of them. My friend keeps bowing and saying what sounds like formalisms in a language I don't understand. He's acting very, very respectfully towards his dad. I seem to remember hearing back near the end of high school that he did something very embarrassing; maybe the punishment for that is causing this behavior now.

Portal (7:00)

Someone has opened a hellish portal in my basement. Creatures are crawling out of it, and I have to hit them with spells that fire balls of energy. I jump around the furniture, which quite large in proportion to my body.

Gold Model (9:20)

I'm trying to infiltrate an enemy base. It's near an outdoor carnival of some kind. I'm trying to find an elevator. I'm pretty sure it's here somewhere, but it's well hidden. There are people walking everywhere; they're mobilizing for some kind of attack. Eventually I find an express elevator of some kind. It takes me to a room full of high-tech jet-packs. A couple of soldiers are in the room, and I recognize them. Bad news. They're picking out which jet-packs to use in the coming deployment. They spot the one I arrived in and get very excited, because apparently the "Gold" model is quite good. I suppose it makes sense that the leader's personal transportation would be the best model available. They start coming my way, and I'm worried I'll be seen.

College Medley (4:06)

On a college forum, one of the residential houses has posted something that they shouldn't have. One of the house members has edited the post to add a lot of his own text, in red font, pointing out why it was a stupid decision to post this online. I can empathize with his frustration--it's hard to stop a hundred different people from doing something stupid.

We're not sure who will be teaching our math class. Suddenly someone offers to call a professor he knows. I recognize the name--it's one of my old physics professors. He was . . . not very formal . . . when it came to math, so I'm worried at the prospect of taking a math class with him. I try to communicate this to a nearby classmate of mine, but then I realize that that classmate might not have been in physics with me. Oops.

This classmate and I take turns driving each other around. We listen to classical music while I'm driving, but when it's his turn, I can't find anything but pop on the radio. I've no idea how to make a good soundtrack with such music, so I decide to stop fiddling with the radio. Then we see a truck careening around a corner ahead of us, passing us to go back the way we came. That must be the professor arriving. We should head back.

As I'm getting out of the car, I see to my shock that there's a crocodile lying across the path in front of the car. It's too late to jump back inside, because the crocodile charges! Yes, it's as fast as I've always been warned that they are. Desperately, I try to fend it off with a chair. Eventually I scare it off by singing very loudly. I continue singing as I run down the path towards the house, knowing that the crocodile could return for another attack at any moment. Sure enough, it does.

Board Game Foul (7:07)

In excitement, I accidentally bump the game board, and pieces go sliding everywhere. Dang it, that's such a board game foul! Except somehow magically they stayed in their original configuration, they just slid off of the board. Phew. Okay, so now I just have to move them carefully back onto the board. We start giving the pieces vocal commands, and they go back to the board as if marching in formation, turning together and doing about-faces and everything. When the last piece gets back into position, though, I don't recognize the configuration. Is that really what the board looked like? Now the pieces are actual, life-size people, and I'm standing on the ground with them. Part of the configuration involves people crouched on all fours, each one with another person standing straddling them. I shout that I don't recognize the scenario, and a man shouts back that that's because we haven't played this one yet! Before I can reply, we're under attack, and everyone is moving. A woman dressed in furs brandishes a sword at me, and I figure that I'd better fight back.

Feces (7:07)

[This is my second dream about poop in recent memory. What the heck?]

Our pet dog is about to start defecating in the yard, so I'm trying to force her out through the gate to the other side of the wooden picket fence. The trouble is that I'm about to start defecating, too, and I don't know how much other poop is already lying in the yard. I could step on it at any moment, so I need to watch the ground, but I also need to focus on getting the dog out of the yard. It's an impossible situation, and gross. I wake up, sort of.

Notification of Acceptance (7:07)

I've been playing a handheld game, but the battery's almost dead. I save quickly, then shut down. The computer asks if I'm sure I want to turn it off, giving a list of files that will be deleted. Since I just saved them, I think it's safe to continue shutting down, so I do. Then I plug it in and turn it back on to check whether the files are still there. When I check in the game save location, I find an old version of the files--the most recent one wasn't saved! Then I check the other location, and the new version isn't there, either! Oh, no! Then I enter some kind of computer recovery mode, and I find a bunch of swap files (or whatever) that the text editor uses while it's in use. Some of them contain almost-up-to-date versions of the files, thank goodness.

Later, my orchestra conductor is walking around the dorm, notifying people personally that they've been accepted to the orchestra. I watch as she knocks on one door and it is opened by a pair of boys who look like they're about seven years old. The boys tell her about how they're in the middle of taking a practice SAT right now, but they don't look like they're in a big hurry. How did they get into this university at that age, and without taking the SAT? I peer into the room, and I see the practice SAT on the TV screen. It's a sort of video game. The current question has something to do with baseball, and there's a timer counting down from about two and a half minutes. I hope they don't lose the game because of this interruption. Then my alarm wakes me up, which makes me happy. No wonder both save files disappeared, and no wonder those kids were so young.

Frags:

• An old woman points out that my mother couldn't have been a cat, because then I'd be a kitten, and I'm not a kitten. Her observation has more to do with my age than my species.
• I'm watching a TV show. I notice that many (probably half) of the people in the current scene are naked. I'm glad that, here at least, the TV industry has gotten over its insistence on censoring nudity.