Glieuaeiel's DJ

Contentious Parking Spot (LUCID)

[The alarm woke me up at 10:00, but I fell asleep at about 10:07 and had this dream sometime after that. Content warning: some sex at the end.]

The field trip is over and everyone's figuring out how to get back home. A tallish guy walks down the line of students, trying to make eye contact with me. I'm pretty sure he's trying to ask me if I want to take the bus with him, so we'll both have company. When he reaches me, I assure him that I will (after verifying that he's talking about the same route as me); in fact, I had been planning to take the bus anyway. Our stop is at 58th street.

I get off at an underground stop and ascend the stairs to the surface. I emerge a couple blocks south of my dorm, in a neighborhood I usually try to avoid for safety reasons. The trouble is, I don't want to look scared, either. Thugs would find that encouraging, and innocent residents would find it insulting. So I try to maintain a measured pace as I walk to the corner.

I see two men my age coming my direction. I now have an agonizing decision to make. Do I run and be labeled as a prejudiced bigot, or do I keep walking and be mugged? Fortunately, they're far enough away from the intersection that I think I might just reach it far enough ahead of them that I don't need to worry. Unfortunately, when I turn the corner, I find that the dorm is still two blocks away, rather than the one I thought I remembered. Holding my pace, I try to stay calm.

Soon I'm in a car, turning a corner to find some empty street parking. In fact, there's a sign that states only people from my home state are allowed to park here, and two of the spots are labeled with the logo of the university in my home town. (I go to college out of state.) Apparently they're very organized about their parking around here. I pull into the spot. When I step out of my car, though, one of my high school friends is standing there.

"I'm going to have to move your car," he jokes. Apparently he uses it on a daily basis. Perhaps he even has a claim on it, because he actually goes to school at that university. [IRL: I'm not sure where he goes to school.] I assure him that he needn't bother; since I barely use my car anyway, I'll just put it in one of the long-term spots in the nearby underground parking garage. It's a bit of a nuisance, but hey, I'm a nice guy.

The parking garage is four stories deep, with a curving ramp going down. Once, I miscalculate the turn, and end up having to perform an elaborate K-turn in order to get the car aligned well enough to go down to the next level. On the third level, I find some empty spots, but they're far enough away from the ramp that I'm worried I wouldn't spot the car right away. It's a given that by the end of the quarter, I'll have forgotten completely where I parked. It'll be easier to find the car if I put it in one of the close spots on the fourth floor. So I keep going down, find a spot, and park.

Now my car is disguised as some kind of lightweight wooden framework [??], and I realize it would be very easy for some obnoxious fellow to pick it up and move it somewhere else. In fact, there's a guy trying to do so right now. I walk back to the car, thanking him not to do that any more, and I try to manifest some tent stakes into my hand so that I can pound them into the ground and hold the car in place. But obviously, if I'm manifesting things into my hands, I must be dreaming, and of course tent stakes are then a ridiculous waste of time.

I'm a bit fed up with half-lucid dreams where I get nothing done, so I throw caution to the winds and try to force the dream to change to one where I'm having sex. To my surprise, the dream doesn't immediately fall apart, and a few seconds later I'm lying on the floor with a plump woman in a white sweater leaning over me.

"You get two kisses," she says with a stern look, clearly implying that I will get no more. I accept this. The first kiss seems a little off, though, and this isn't really what I wanted to be doing anyway. I change my mind and try to change the dream to actual sex. The woman, now directly on top of me, thins somehow and becomes naked, and now this is definitely a sex dream. The girl says something about being 18 again. A few seconds later, it's over, which wakes me up.

Correctional Facility

[There's a bit of sort-of-lucidity right at the end of this dream, but not enough that I'm willing to call it lucid.]

One of my housemates lends me one of those red-light scanners through the bars separating our cells. I try to use it to give her ID card administrator access through the prison. From the instructions on the scanner's status display, I'm supposed to scan her card first, then scan the device that will grant her access privileges. Suddenly I notice that a guard is coming down the hall with some new prisoners. I have all sorts of illicit papers and devices spread on the floor of my cell, so I just try to lie casually on top of them as the group passes. Thankfully, the administrator doesn't notice. I scan a few more cards, but then I notice I've lost track of my friend in the confusion. I get up and walk down the center aisle of the bus, looking around at the people in the seats. Eventually, I find her [though she's a different housemate now], but the seats near her are taken, so I just grab a random empty seat a few rows farther back.

I'm nervous. This bus is taking us to a correctional facility, where we will atone for our crimes. I know it is the morally correct thing to do, but I'm worried that my time here will interfere with my studies at college.

The bus pulls to a stop in front of my old elementary school. It's almost dark out, and it's drizzling. Everyone seems to be heading around the side of the school, so I follow them. Then I realize there was a fork in the sidewalk a few steps back, and not everyone went the same way I did. But then someone shouts at those other people that they're going the wrong way. We're led into a nearby building with modern architecture (i.e. lots of windows) and up to the second floor. In the hallway up there, I see a number of doors with slots for access cards, and I'm very tempted to test my card on it to see if my earlier experiment worked. But there might be guards nearby, and I'm not sure I'd even be able to recognize one if I saw one. Maybe I'll get a chance to test my card sometime in the next few days, when I have a moment alone. But what if they chaperone bathroom trips? I might never get a chance!

I realize that I'm not carrying my backpack of stuff. What happened to it? Looking around, I notice one of the plainclothes guards is carrying a lot of luggage for the new inmates, including my backpack. I wonder if it would be polite for me to volunteer to take it back, or if he's carrying it because I'm actually not allowed to have any of my stuff right now. I decide not to ask.

After a bit more walking, I reach a big auditorium, where everyone is taking a seat. I sit towards the back. Once almost everyone is seated, the facility workers start explaining things to us. They start going through a list of attendance. One heavyset man with glasses and salt-and-pepper stubble names a person who is supposed to be here, because he was summoned no less than 351 days ago. The auditorium takes a collective gasp at that. There's no set time by which you have to answer a summons, but waiting that long is shockingly rude. Perhaps that person doesn't intend to answer for his crimes at all.

They start going down a list of attendance, but they are interrupted only five names in by one of the new inmates. "None of those people are here; we're all from Bus 84." Apparently Bus 85 got delayed somewhere. Clearly most people here know much more about this process than I do; they must have been committed here before.

Suddenly, people start pointing at the ceiling, which is made of glass. Looking up, I see some indistinct dark shapes flying overhead. Is it an air strike? Are we about to be dragged into a war? It's hard to see clearly enough to say if the shapes are dropping bombs, or indeed if they are airplanes at all. Then one of them flies almost right overhead, then dips downward and out of view under the floor. It was shaped a bit like the Millennium Falcon in miniature. No one in the auditorium is moving, but I think we're all wondering whether we should be running for cover.

The ship shoots upward again past the windows on the opposite side of the room, as if it has looped underneath us. It arches over the ceiling, then drops below view on the other side again, closer to the building than it was before. Has the pilot lost control? What's happening here? The ship shoots into view again, loops over the ceiling--and crashes straight down through the room about fifty feet from where I'm sitting.

One of the wardens shouts, "Good lord!" but they still don't seem to be moving. I guess they're just shocked. Well, damned if I'll be waiting for them. I run for the doors as the building begins to shake underneath me. Some other inmates are ahead of me, but when I reach the exit, there's no hallway: it's just a straight drop three or four stories to the ground. And the entire room is tilting, sliding, falling towards the concrete below. If this were real life, there's no way I would survive this.

I jump out of the door and land on the highway with traffic coming toward me. It's daytime now. I jump on top of the first car, then jump to the second, and continue jumping my way down the line. This is ridiculous, though, so I obtain a motorcycle from somewhere, mount it, then activate the jet engines. This is fun, but I still have to dodge traffic coming straight toward me. I bounce the motorbike into the air and activate the transformation into a sort of metal hang glider. [Interestingly, I don't think the transformation sequence had any visuals, I just sort of imagined that it was happening in an abstract sort of way.] Then the glider's jet engines kick in, and I shoot above the treetops and continue on my way.

Now that I'm out of danger, I pull out my cell phone and dial 911 to report the incident at the correctional facility. As I wait for the dispatcher to answer, I'm gliding over a grass field between two roads. There's a cute girl walking across the field. Tall, with wavy blond hair and freckles. We smile at each other. I'm about to fly onward when I remember that making out with someone is one of my dream goals! Letting go of the glider, I stumble a bit as I land on the grass behind her. This is a bit of a risk because there might not be enough action to sustain the dream--but if dream goals weren't risky, they wouldn't need to be goals.

"Hey, wait! Come back here!" I call.

She stops and watches me, looking a little defensive. I'm a bit thrown off by the fact that she's a little chubbier than she was before. It's like she's a different person, cute now in a different way. "Um, hi," she says carefully.

"I just want to make out a little." She just stares at me. "Please?"

She's still just staring at me as the dream fades to black and I begrudgingly wake up.

[IRL: Last night, I finally took out my dreaming goals sheet again to pick a few lucid dreaming goals. "Make out with a girl" was NOT one of them, though. Also, I would give a lot to know what crime I committed to be sent to that correctional facility . . . but alas, I cannot remember.]

Have to Study

I suddenly realize that I have only a few hours left to study for my Formal Languages final at 1:30. [Interestingly, that /is/ the actual time of the final, though at the time of dreaming I still had an entire day left to study. I woke from this dream feeling definitely anxious.]

Frags:

• "professor story"
• "psychological [illegible]"
• "borrow car, teleport?, materialize car"
• "machine gun"

Breakfast with Nat

Natalie Tran has made a new video. As always, she begins by talking about how long it's been since she made a video. But this time, she's not really apologizing for it, she's just going over some of the funnier comments and video responses she's received about it. She even wrote a song with lyrics composed almost entirely of titles of one page of video responses.

It's early morning. I go downstairs to find something to eat. While I'm doing so, Nat comes into the room and shows me that the food she made is sitting in the microwave. She seems very insistent that I take some, so I do. She's standing rather close to me, so I wonder if she's hoping we'll start kissing. When I sort of start half-flirting with her, though, she doesn't seem to notice. Later her boyfriend comes in, which is disappointing.

At one point I get a close look at her face, and I realize it looks much more European and less Vietnamese than it used to. This is very strange and worrisome.

Downtown Hotel Chaos

My family's been living in a hotel, but now we're moving out. I'm trying to gather my stuff and change my clothes. But there doesn't seem to be a good place to change. So I get on a double decker bus, the upper story of which is just one big room with no one else in it. But I'm worried that someone will come in, or that someone outside will look through the giant windows in the sides of the bus. And the bus ride is much shorter than I expect, so before I know it, a friend of mine is tugging my sleeve, saying that this is our stop. I have to get off again, without having accomplished anything.

I go back into the hotel and wander around for a little while, exploring.

Carnivorous Glider Rodents

My family is driving along the frontage road when we come upon a group of bicyclists. They're practicing a stunt where they bike forwards, then swing the bike perpendicular to its momentum so that it rolls sideways for a while. [IRL this is impossible due to friction, but I didn't realize this at the time.] Obviously they're paying no attention to other bikers since they're basically hoodlums, so when my parents try to pass one of them, he's not in control and he runs into one of them, and he crashes. My family continues on its way. I flip the bird over my shoulder on the off chance that the guy is looking in my direction. Instead, I hear the voice of a different guy I know saying hi. He sounds carefully unoffended, so I think he thinks I was giving /him/ the finger. Darn it.

There are some furry rodent-foxes falling from the sky one at a time. They have skin flaps like glider squirrels, and they just glide in from somewhere and fall on top of people and attack them. They don't seem very dangerous, but they seem annoying, so we have to try to kill them. I have a meat cleaver that I can try to throw like a battleaxe. We enter a ceilingless arena where one of the creatures has just landed on an awning. My dad starts calling out instructions for all awnings to be dropped flat, presumably so the creature has nowhere to perch. This is done, and the creature starts jumping up and down around the arena, bouncing fifty feet high. I'm looking for my shot, and I think I can take it at the bottom of this jump! But then I realize that the creature is coming down right in the middle of a big group of people, and if I miss I might kill someone. I hold my fire, but I watch with apprehension as the creature lands and dozens of people in the group take the opportunity to throw their meat cleavers. Six or seven people keel over due to missed shots; I don't know if they killed the thing or not.

Improvising a Screenplay (11:51)

I'm randomly driving around a town, improvising a screenplay aloud. I know some of the scenes won't come out perfect, but that's okay, because I'm only planning to use this as a sort of first draft. Once, a woman in a nearby car gives me a funny look, presumably because I'm apparently having a conversation with myself. Haha, oops.

The policemen and policewomen in this town are mounted on horseback, dressed in smart-looking blue uniforms with giant white feathers in their hats. There seem to be a lot of them on the road right now; I wonder why. Also, since I'm having trouble paying attention to the signs on the road and therefore making no few accidental violations of the law, I hope none of them have noticed me yet.

This car is new, and it comes with one of those small remote controls which can lock and unlock the doors. But this one also has another neat feature: if you're driving in a residential area and you click a certain button, the car automatically detects the nearest parking space, and directs your attention to it by slowing down and angling in that direction. There's a related feature for pulling out of parking spots which somehow detects passing traffic. I park and unpark a few times before eventually getting out to meet up with my family. I explain to them about the cool functionality in our new car.

Group Transportation (8:45)

A group of students at my college are traveling together one evening to get somewhere. However, the current stage of our trip is rather ad hoc: we're waiting on a curb to get picked up by people who have cars, but we're not sure who will be in which cars. So when I get in a friend's car and he drives off, I notice that there's someone back on the curb who didn't get a car, but there's still a spare seat in this car. I doubt my friend will be too happy about going back for him, but I tell him, anyway. He immediately starts turning around, but it's a complicated process, because this is a busy highway. For instance, we have to go a couple hundred feet down a side street.

Eventually we pick up the other guy. Then, later, we stop at a house on the outskirts of the city. I've never been here before. After a few minutes, it occurs to me to ask my friend whose house this is. He says it's somebody's dad's.

Frags:

• I'm watching a Miyazaki film in a theater. I'm surprised to realize, suddenly, that it's been dubbed in English, rather than just using subtitles.

Wing Women (6:30)

A group of girls is talking to me in a side room. At the end of the conversation, they form a semicircle around one girl in the middle and ask me a question: something about adding up all of their ages and dividing by five. I realize that what they're really doing is trying to tell me that the girl in the middle is really cute and I should really consider dating her, because it would make her happy. Reflexively, I smile in response to the friendly gesture, and I actually think my smile turns out to be a nice one. Then the other girls go back to the main room, leaving me with the cute girl.

Despite being pretty sure of what I was just told, I'm still nervous about asking her on a date. We exchange a few awkward half-glances and half-sentences, then she asks me if I want to go to the parking lot. It will be quieter out there, so that's probably a good idea. We go back to the main room and find some friends trying to arrange rides home. One of them, a first-year from my college, has a small four-seater. Someone goes off to find her so we can ask her for a ride. Meanwhile, I realize that it's raining out here. I stack my belongings into a pile to protect them from the water. Another guy from my college, in the year above me, shows up. He's a pretty big guy, so he might not fit into the car with the rest of us, but I figure I should ask if he can come anyway. While we're waiting for the car's owner to arrive, I mention something about the rain, and the guy points out that I have a sports jacket in my pile of stuff, so I should just wear it, 'cuz that's what it's for. I suppose I can understand his frustration, because formal jackets are used nowadays only for fashion, not for utility.

The car's owner shows up, and I ask her if the guy can fit in the car with everyone. "He really can't," she responds. "I mean, look." The other passengers are loading in their musical instruments, including a cello and a double bass. They're taking up a lot of room already. I slide in my viola case underneath the others, then look around at all the passengers we're trying to squeeze in. I think we might all be able to fit.

Morning Dash (6:30)

I've invited a guy over to my house to work on a homework project. When we sit down at a table to work, I start asking him to help me fix some parts of my personal appearance, like my eyebrows and my hair. He gets angry and leaves.

Mom asks me to help her pack lunches for my sisters. I consider it for a moment, but then I decide that I have too much work to do this morning to help her with that. I tell her as much.

Later, I'm mostly packed to leave to catch the bus. Then my middle sister comes into the kitchen and starts talking about something interesting. A few minutes later, I look at the time and let out a yelp. I ask Mom if she thinks I can still make it to the bus on time, and she says she thinks so. I run out the back door and down the hill. When I look over my shoulder, I see the bus on a road behind me. It'll be going around the hill, so I have a bit of time before it reaches the stop, but I have to run as fast as I can. On the way, I get a little confused about where the bus stop is. I'm running along an unkempt path through the grass, with only two parallel lines of dirt to indicate that vehicles come through here. Then my sisters come running in from a side path. "That's the path Mom always uses," I call out to them, laughing. Then we find the bus stop. The bus is waiting for us.

Hanging Roller Coaster (1:32)

[This dream isn't very cohesive. I had trouble falling asleep.]

I'm in line for a roller coaster. It's the last ride of the day, and the line is long. You ride the roller coaster like a zipline. Suddenly all of the hangers start moving at once, which surprises me, because I expected everyone to go one at a time, for safety reasons. Then I reach the end of the coaster and start going backwards. No wonder people went one at a time [??], because otherwise we'd run into each other at this part of the ride. Somehow I realize that I'm dreaming. I exit the boarding platform by using a series of coat hangers along the wall as if they were monkey bars. I realize that I'm not having much fun, and what I'd really like to be doing is having sex. I sort of just start imagining the accompanying pumping motion, and before long I wake up somewhat messily.

Stronghold Minigame (9:43)

I've had this game for a while, but on a whim, I decide to explore the menus for a bit. I find out about a prison minigame, which supposedly happens any time you get captured in the main storyline. The rules say that the game is only 6 minutes long, and you have to complete five smaller minigames in that time. Sounds like it would be pretty challenging to finish. I decide to try it. Next thing I know, I'm browsing through a menu of screenshots for each of the possible castles that you can try to escape from. The screenshots all have different dimensions, and they fit together like a well-planned, orthogonal collage. It's pretty cool. One of the wider screenshots catches my eye, and I choose it.

My character (a female) appears on the roof of an apparently vacant castle. Something bad happened here to drive out all of the inhabitants. A voice-over explains to me that my guards were killed as soon as I landed here, and they'll be no more help to me now. I see a soldier pacing a nearby tower, but I'm not sure how to reach it. Presumably he's an enemy, and the pathway for the level will bring me over there eventually to fight him.

I immediately start grabbing as much loot as I can. I need armor and weapons. I look behind me and see a dead dragon that apparently crash-landed into the edge of the roof. That must have been how I landed here--I rode the dragon. I run over there to see if there's any good loot. The dragon's saddle is decorated with two lightsabers, which are of course totally outside the universe of the game. I must have downloaded a Star Wars texture pack. I turn away from the dragon and notice my own lightsaber floating in the air about twenty feet up. It's hard to see because the camera is at about the same height and it's difficult to manipulate. I use the Force to pull my lightsaber toward me and pick it up. Then I find some armor and start investigating the rest of the rooftop. I keep picking up everything using the Force.

There's a child standing near the edge of the roof. When I approach her, she comes alive and starts talking to me. She lost her family in the chaos of whatever just happened, and she's willing to help me now. I cast a glamour spell to make the child look like an old woman. This will protect her somehow. The spell animation looks like a flying dragon's head.

Inside a small rooftop building, I find a furnished room. This is where the child's grandmother lived. I find a wooden box lined with felt rows, each containing smooth, round stones colored pastel green and red. The stones are about the size of a penny, and they have various lumpy irregularities. They are powerful magical artifacts, and I want to take them with me. I use the Force to group them into a ball, but the stones have a Force of their own which repels them from each other. I can't close my pocket, so as soon as I put them in there, most of them will pop right back out. I try anyway, but things happen exactly as I expected they would. That's probably why the wolf that invaded the castle didn't take these stones with him. The wolf was good, but the grandmother was better. I wish I had a ziploc bag or something to hold the stones together.

Suddenly Dad calls from a nearby doorway. The family is loading up the car RIGHT NOW, and I'm expected to do my part to help out. Obediently, I wake up.

High School Visit

I've decided to visit my old high school. I drive the Pathfinder to school and try to find a parking spot. There are a lot of empty ones, because I got there probably half an hour early and no one's there yet, because high school students are all procrastinators. I have some trouble lining up the car to get it in one of the diagonal parking places. Plus, some of the spots have colorful chalk markings on them with someone's name, seeming to say that the spot is reserved. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to park in the senior lot.

I go to class. The first one is math class, with the teacher who used to organize math competitions. He has trouble getting everyone to quiet down when class starts. It's a bit of a shock to me until I remember that in high school, you don't tend to understand just how much of a privilege an education is. Eventually my grandma (who is now the teacher) gives up and starts washing dishes instead. I notice that we're in her house, since she's teaching from home. The students disperse.

Frags:

• something about a random outcome based on how twisted my clothes got (my t-shirt kept getting twisted around me IRL, which probably spurred that dream

Meanwhile, in High School (6:59)

I'm sitting at a table in a room filled with tables, working on an assignment, when I see someone out of the corner of my eye. It's my mom, sitting at another table, trying to catch my attention by waving something. Exasperated, I acknowledge her, but she wants to start a full blown conversation. I pack up my things and say, apologetically, that "I just can't right now." Predictably, Mom gets furious. I walk over to her table (Dad's there too) and try to explain that I'm old enough now that she can't expect me to share every detail of my life with her. My voice sounds like maybe I'm about to start crying. Nothing doing, though. Looks like I'll have to pack my own lunch and find my own way to school, today.

I go back downstairs and check the time. It's later than I thought! Forget packing a lunch, I'll barely have time to shower and get dressed. I also think I should do my laundry, but when I look into the basket, I realize that I have more clean clothes than I thought. No need to bother, then. But later, when I actually go to choose an outfit, I have trouble finding clean shorts. I'll have to do my laundry tomorrow, which will be harder since it's a weekday and I'll be busy.

Dad drives me to school. I'm sitting all the way in the back of the car, and I'm surprised to see some orange traffic cones passing by my window. Some road work near the left turn just before the high school's parking lot. Looks like Dad's doing what he's supposed to be doing.

I take a seat in the classroom. I've decided that while I'm back home, I may as well sit in on some Spanish classes at my old high school to get in some extra practice. The teacher, a dark-haired man, begins the class by introducing himself and explaining about the course textbooks. Apparently he wrote one of them--part of a series of textbooks on a variety of subjects, all published in the same format but written by various guest authors. At one point, the teacher switches to English for a bit. His accent is kind of cute. Then we go around the class and introduce ourselves. I don't know anyone there, obviously. When it comes to be my turn, I explain that I'm actually a college student. There's something of a commotion from another student in the class, and I wonder if maybe he's doing the same thing as I am and I should have recognized him? That would be embarrassing.

At one point, the teacher's been talking about something, and he asks the class which of us consider ourselves to be "a member of that crowd?" I'm one of the few who raises a hand. A few minutes later, I realize that he might have been asking which of us have had sex, but with so much circumlocution that I didn't realize it at the time. Oops. Well, if so, I'm sorry for misrepresenting myself, but there's not much I can do about it now. Besides, I'm in college, they'll have expected it of me, anyway.

The teacher starts a presentation, and everyone puts away their drinks. Except one is still on the table, and one of the students accidentally knocks it over, spilling soda pop everywhere. The teacher interrupts his lecture to go find cleaning supplies, and I try to help out by mopping up some with a napkin. I hope that my helpfulness is a mark of being more mature than the majority of students in the classroom. But the teacher holds out his hand to throw away the napkin for me, and I let him take it, even though it sort of undermines what I was doing. Anyway, the napkin wasn't very absorbent, so now there's pop on my hands. I need to find a sink. I find one in the hall only a few feet away from the classroom.

A lot of the students are handing out out here until the presentation starts again. I look around and see an office whose name plaque carries a very strange title. I wonder if high schools can hire people to do things as strange as that because they're government-funded. Someone walks past me and into the office, and I wonder. I also talk to one of the students outside. They tell me they wanted to go to the big concert today, because it featured a big presentation about Mormonism. I had heard about the concert, but I didn't know it was about Mormonism, and now I'm kind of sad I missed it, too. [IRL: The concert is this afternoon, and it has nothing to do with Mormonism.]

When we go back into the classroom, there's a stage at one end, complete with curtains and a podium. A man at the podium tells us that as a surprise, Mitt Romney has come with his campaign team to give a presentation. After this introduction, a few people walk out on stage. I'm not sure which one is Romney [although IRL obvs I know what he looks like], and the introduction kind of trailed off, so it's not surprising that the applause is slow to start. It's also very quiet, and peters out quickly. One of the campaign people says "Wow," loudly and sarcastically. Well, I'm not sure what Romney expected. We're mostly Democrats here at my university.

They launch into the presentation, which is an animated, rhetorical speech delivered while the campaigners circle and crisscross the room, making sure to invite each audience member personally to agree with what they're saying. It makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. Somewhere, I've found a pillow, and I clutch it to my stomach like it's some kind of security blanket. I stare at the floor, only half listening. I feel like I've read this argument before, somewhere, anyway. Something about how the Democrats are trying to convince you not to vote Republican because of what the Republicans /won't/ do, but when election day comes, you need to vote based on what /will/ happen. And so on. One of the campaigners notices my aloofness, so he gets up in my face and tries to engage me by giving me a manly punch on the shoulder. I look at him expressionlessly and say in a carefully controlled voice, "Please don't do that again." The man puts on a mock-surprised face and looks around at people nearby as if to invite them to start bullying me, but in the end he just leaves.

From behind, a woman crooks an elbow around my neck and good-naturedly shakes me a bit. Addressing herself to someone I can't see, she asks, "Is this called 'egging?'" (as in, "egging someone on"). Ah, so she's playfully imitating the campaigner. The person says yes, it is, so she laughs and releases her hold on my neck. Pressing herself against my side, she murmurs, "There's someone touching you right now, and you don't seem to mind." Bemused, I try to think of a socially proper way to respond that it's okay because she's a woman. But before I can, she lets go of me, and I can finally turn to get a good look at her. To my delight, I definitely recognize her from somewhere. While I'm snapping my fingers and trying to place where that was, she just introduces herself again as [XXXX]. Surprised, I tell her I remember her as a campaign assistant for [XXXX]. She laughs and says no, then dances off to the other side of the room with another girl. I'm reminded of the friendship between Meekakitty and Nanalew. Suddenly, the dream ends, and I wake up. For a moment, I think that it's only been about two and a half hours since I fell asleep. But that must have been a FA, because it was more like six and a half.

Supermarket (8:15) (LUCID)

I'm in a supermarket, and at some level I'm aware that this is a dream. As I walk through the crowded checkout lanes, I look closely at all of the faces that I pass. Each one is unique and distinctive and interesting, and I wonder whether they all come from people I passed on the street in waking life. I read somewhere on a forum that that's where they come from. The dream seems pretty stable, but I feel compelled to keep moving, or else it will fall apart. I walk up to a cashier and ask her for the credit card that a customer just gave to her. "Sure, one moment," she says, and then she hands me something, but it's not a credit card. I leave the checkout lanes and continue through the store. It crosses my mind that this counts as a lucid dream. Cool; I haven't had one of those in a while.

I decide to call Mom on my cell phone. I worry that maybe I'm actually sleep-calling her in waking life, too, so I try to think of conversation topics that wouldn't sound too bizarre. Meanwhile, I'm still walking quickly down one side of the store, looking around at everything. The store's wide entrance is coming up on my left. I can't think of anything else to talk about, and Mom seems more confused than anything, so I just say goodbye to her and hang up. I leave the store.

Somebody's angry at me for turning out into the road in front of him, but I'm sure I wouldn't have done it close enough that you would actually call it "cutting him off." I decide to play out the scenario to see what actually happened. I get in the car and start driving toward the hilltop road that passes near the supermarket's parking lot. Indeed, there's almost a solid line of cars coming that direction, with one little space in the middle that perhaps I could grab if I timed it right. But there's something strange about the road configuration that makes me think I wouldn't be able to accelerate quickly enough to avoid pissing someone off. Okay, better to avoid that.

I stop the car and get out. There's a mid-sized lake to the right of the road with a big yacht anchored near the shore. A bunch of sailors are walking around over there, presumably on shore leave. I start walking along the narrow path between the lake and the side of the supermarket, going over to see what's going on. But then one of the sailors starts walking along the path toward me, shouting something about me not being allowed to come this way. An irritating fellow, but only doing his job, I suppose.

I keep walking, but suddenly I need to poop. I remember how in the past this has always made me panic and wake up, only to find that I didn't have to use the bathroom at all. Well, I know better, now, so I'll just go to the bathroom in the dream. I squat in the middle of a grassy lawn and start doing my business. The sailor is still walking towards me and shouting, so I interrupt him to warn him that even though I've avoided behaving "beaverishly," if he keeps it up, I may have to. (Apparently, in this situation, "behaving beaverishly" means that I'll strip totally naked just to annoy him even more.) Going to the bathroom is taking a long time. Some of the sailors are running close nearby. I hope for their sake that they don't accidentally step in any of the poop. The sailor still won't leave me alone, so I carry out my threat by pulling my T-shirt over my head. This makes my vision go completely black. Oh, darn.

I wake up to a confusion of covers. After a moment, I figure out that somehow I've come into a squatting position. Uh oh. Looking down, I see that my worst fears have come true--there's quite a bit of poop on my covers. Despairingly, I try to wrap up some of it using the sheets, but it's not enough. This will be hard to deal with. Then it occurs to me that there's something distinctly nightmarish about this situation, and I tell myself exasperatedly, "Come on, wake up for real." And I do. [No, I never did have to go to the bathroom. Why my dreams always do this to me, I don't know.]

Pop Quiz (9:42) (LUCID)

A smart math major I know is pacing the front of a classroom. He's quizzing me about details from my previous dreams tonight. I know I definitely missed a few when I wrote them in my dream journal, so this will be a perfect opportunity to recover them--my unconscious itself is telling me what they were! He mentions something about a homework assignment, and a few different people named Erik. [Ironically, I can't remember the details of these details.] It occurs to me to wonder if he's even telling the truth. I have no recollection of the events of which he speaks, so he could easily be inventing them, and I'd never know. Still, I wake up and write them in my dream journal. Only, it was a FA, and when I actually wake up, I can't really remember them any more.

[I've decided to start including some timestamps: when I got in bed, when I got up, and when I recorded each dream.]

In bed from 11:18 to 9:05

Beware Lava 3:29

The eldest competitor first learned to channel a long time ago. An image of burning matchsticks appears. Then the matchsticks burn almost all the way to the point where the person holding the matchstick would get hurt, and the fire gets blown out. That's what happened to his ability. But he's still part of this competition. He's competing against two of his own students, both female. They start in separate, nearby rooms in a Minecraft world, underground. I'm playing as the teacher. He walks around the halls and sees that the doorways of the rooms of his students are blocked by collapsed ice. He's competing with them, yes, but he still feels like he should be nice to them. Back in his original room, he finds a back passageway that he can open using his ability to conjure fire. It leads into the room of one of the students. Then he shoots more fire, but he quickly realizes that it's getting out of control. The student in the room doesn't yet even know he's there, so he'd better warn her.

"Run!" he shouts. Without waiting to check that she does, he drops the wide bucket of water that he was holding. That water is an important resource, and he can't allow it to warm up. Heat is dangerous, here. I start trying to conjure some ice by first pressing 1 to select fire, then Enter to conjure a ball of fire in my hand, then 2 to switch to ice, then blowing on the ball of fire to freeze it, then throwing the ball of ice into a pile on the floor. All of these different buttons are tripping me up, and it's not going very quickly. Suddenly he notices that he forgot to freeze one fireball before throwing it on the floor. It's probably warming up all of the ice balls, making them completely useless. The air in the room feels very warm, and when he picks up the bucket of water, it's warm, too. The floor is especially warm, which probably means that there's lava rising below, melting the ice out from under his feet. It's time to get out of here. There's not even enough time to gather up what few supplies he has. He just runs--back into his original room and over to the far corner, then out with the pickaxe and start digging furiously. To where, he doesn't know. He has no supplies, so he's basically starting over.

An announcer starts speaking over the top of the video, something along the lines of, "Will he survive, alone, without resources, in the dangerous world into which he heads? Find out next time on 'Impossible Minecraft Campaigns!'" Meanwhile, the man is thinking that this was only the first of three episodes, and he's worse off than he was at the beginning--so it's unlikely he'll even survive the next one.

[This dream seems to be partially inspired by the dream incubation (?) I did before going to bed. I imagined myself in a forest, chopping down a tree, when I realize I'm dreaming and then start throwing fireballs everywhere, starting a forest fire. The heat was an important part of the scene, although it was supposed to be awesome, not terrifying, like it was in this dream. There was even a time where I imagined holding a fireball and then blowing on it to turn it into a ball of ice. So it seems like the dream incubation did something, although it was very indirect, and it didn't trigger lucidity.]

Group Hug 6:38

[I don't remember the main plot of this dream, just a side plot that I probably remembered due to its uncomfortable nature. My middle sister has always been trouble.]

Spoiler for Group Hug:

I'm watching TV in a room with a bunch of people. My middle sister is lying on a couch that's directly under the TV, facing away from it. I hear a moan from that direction, but it takes a couple of seconds to register that that was not a usual sound at all. I stare at my sister, wondering if she's dying from some wasting disease. I wonder if I should ask her if she's okay, even though that would disrupt the movie. Then I realize that the moan sounded almost sexual. I'm not sure. She's covered in a blanket, so she could be. . . . I avoid looking at her directly, but from where she's putting her hands and the disgusted sounds the rest of my family is making, it seems like she's probably masturbating.

Later, the main plot has taken the family driving in a car to another place. We get out and I start talking to one of several men standing outside in a group. It's an important conversation, and our discussion basically resolves the main plot. Towards the end, one of the other guys in the group starts muttering audibly to himself. I can't understand what he's saying, but it's distracting, and I realize, delightedly, that that's the point. It's a joke that when you mutter to yourself, you never know what kinds of conversation you might be interrupting. Or that no matter how important your conversation is, you might still get interrupted by a random muttering dude. Either way, it's funny. We all start laughing, and then, to my incredulous surprise, we go in for a group hug. We pretend like we're going to exclude the muttering guy, but then we let him in. All in good fun.

Later, all that's left is to wrap up a few loose ends. My middle sister came with us because she wanted Dad to buy something that removes semen from a uterus. Turns out there was a secret passage that comes up underneath that couch. One can reach it by going through the false back of a cabinet under the TV. So she had actually been having sex with some guy who came through that passage. We never saw him, but when the truth came out, we also found out that she's worried she's going to spill some semen out from the way it came in if she doesn't get some kind of tool to remove it in a controlled fashion. So now that the main plot is resolved, Dad got her some kind of wooden thingy that looks a bit like a spool that should apparently do the job. That ties things up nicely, so it's time to wake up.

I open my eyes into my dorm room and check the time, to see if I woke up in time for class. The clock says the time is 18:90. Converting from military time, I'm shocked to find that it's already evening. Wait a second, that kind of ridiculous lateness usually happens in dreams. And there aren't ninety minutes in an hour. Hah! Nice try. I manage to wake myself up successfully.

Candied Brazil Nuts 9:03

Dad and I park in the driveway and go into the house. A serial killer has been living in here, so we expect there will be a lot of bodies. And yes, there are. A lot of movie stars. There's a living movie star with us now, a young (black) one, and it's tragic to watch his face as he sees all of the bodies. He knew these people. It occurs to me that I'm paying attention to the fact that he's black, when really it shouldn't matter. So I stop thinking about it.

After tidying up a bit, Dad and I get back in the car to head to the picnic. Taylor Swift is on the radio: "We are never ever ever getting back together." Except it's not actually her song--it's a rap song that uses the same chorus. Man, that's what frustrates me about rap. They borrow melodies from classical music and from good pop songs and they just reuse them without adding anything.

We get to the picnic and find Mom. She came earlier than us. She tells us that she meant to clean up the killer's house herself, but she had other things to do first. She didn't mean to leave us with the job. I'm not cross with her about it, but she seems like she's in a bad mood. Then Dad gets mad at me because I forgot to bring the hot dogs. I meant to bring the hot dogs, and I even planned out exactly which hot dogs to bring, but I forgot. One of my sisters tries to defend me by explaining this, but Dad says it doesn't change the fact that I forgot. I suppose he's right. My alarm wakes me up.

Renegade

A recent event has caused a member of the party to turn around and run back in the direction whence he came. The other five or six party members (all of whom are friends in real life) joke about how he's on a renegade quest for revenge--he's so angry about what happened that he's willing to go back an face a werewolf alone, rather than wait to ask for backup. Actually, he hadn't been planning on going back for that reason . . . but a few minutes later, as he comes in range of the werewolf, he decides to kill it. He activates the werewolf transition animation for himself, then (as a werewolf) raises a long, thin sword above his head and charges. He worries about missing, since it's difficult to get the timing right, but he manages to hit the werewolf. With the damage bonus from a charging attack, it turns out to be a one-hit kill!

Awkward

I'm sitting in a room with my parents and my youngest sister. Apparently she heard something at school today, because she asks, "What are tist-estic-cles?" She stumbles over the word as though it's unfamiliar. Oh, dear. As a male, I feel like I should be the one to explain this, but I can't decide where to begin. But then my parents jump in ahead of me and start explaining. I feel like they're not doing a great job of it.

[IRL, that sister is in ninth grade, so she definitely already knows what testicles are, but I guess my unconscious is a bit behind the times.]

Car Solves Relationship Problems

A man on a game show has just explained to the host that he's having some relationship problems with a woman. As far as he can see, he has two options, but both of them have disadvantages. The show host then jumps in to say that all is not lost, because he there's a third option by which he can get the best of both other options! Then the show jumps into a thirty-second explanation of the new option, which is something about buying a new car, because this thirty-second "explanation" turns out to be, basically, an advertisement for a shiny red sports car. The man is a bit nonplussed, and he wonders quietly (so that only I can hear) how many lights they needed to use to get those highlights on the car. By "highlights," I assume he means the horizontal white lines of reflected light along the side of the car that make it look extra-shiny.

Grappling Hook

I'm playing a James Bond video game on multiplayer. On my end it's two-person splitscreen, but there are four players in the game altogether. The person on the lower screen suddenly stops, and I freeze as well because I was screen-looking. But we're nowhere near each other, so I start moving again, hoping that he didn't notice. He's currently in a skirmish with the other two players.

I enter a warehouse. There's a metal cabinet in the back corner that looks worth investigating. I walk up to it, and eureka! Among other useful items, there are a couple of bazookas. I take them, then screen-look again. Accidentally, I swear! But this time the lower screen corresponds to one of the other two players, and both of them are running up behind me. I try to turn around and get them with the bazooka, but my character is moving really slowly. "What am I, encumbered, or something?!" I say in frustration. I've never heard of encumbrance in James Bond games. But that must be what it is--there was too much big stuff in that cabinet. I get off one rocket, and then the others start firing rockets as well. Damn. I get to the bottom of the metal ramp leading to the cabinet; the other two people are standing there, too. The range is really too close to be using rocket launchers, but I shoot again, anyway. And I die. Grr.

I respawn on a lower level of the map, near a raised highway. I decide to try out my grappling hook. There's a target for it (a small beige circle with a sort of raised knob in the middle) on each of the lampposts near the highway. Using the grapple here is a shortcut from the lower level to the upper level, so I see why it would be useful. I shoot the hook at the target and the wire pulls me up, but that just leaves me hanging a few yards off to the side of the highway, swinging slightly back and forth. I try to pump my legs to get a large enough swing that I can jump onto the highway, but I can't get it large enough to be comfortable with the leap. I let myself back down. I try again, this time standing farther back from the light. I'm not going to give myself any time to swing back and forth and lose momentum--the moment I get high enough, I'm going to release the hook. Since the wire will be pulling me forward, I should have enough sideways momentum to reach the highway. It works!

Now I just need to figure out how to go _down_ using the hook. I go out on the balcony of the third floor of a building. It's dark out. There's a security guard in the parking lot below, locking up for the night. The grapple hook target is right on the railing for the balcony, so I attach the hook. I expect some kind of automatic animation showing me sliding down the line, but nothing happens. Well, I guess it's more realistic this way. Manually, I toss down the line. Some how the line attaches to something at a diagonal slope, so when I send my gear down, it slides out into the night like it's on a zipline. The security guard sees the gear going past and starts beating it up with a baseball bat. Shit, that gear's expensive! Hurriedly, I pull the gear and the zipline back up to the balcony. It only takes a couple of tugs. The guard peers in my direction, then suddenly points at me and starts shouting--and running towards my building. I'm not sure how he plans to get up here, until suddenly he shoots his own grappling hook at a target on the edge of the sloping terra-cotta roof that leads straight to my balcony. Uh oh. My only chance is to run past him while he's busy getting up here. I jump over the railing and onto the roof. It's hard to keep my footing as I run to the roof's edge, and I end up slipping over the side and landing on the ground with a painful thud. Okay, realistically, there's no way for me to escape from this. So I wake up.

Ziplines and Triangles (LUCID)

I'm hiding in the woods from the delegation of thirteen Aes Sedai who have come to take me away. Crouching beneath the bushes I listen to them walk nearer, I hope they will not find my hiding place. Wait, no, there are fifteen, not thirteen. That doesn't make sense; thirteen is the magic number. Oh, right--just five Aes Sedai, with ten wood nymphs to guide them through the trees. I look up from the book for a moment, thinking rather lecherously that at least I'll be able to imagine that the wood nymphs are topless green women, like in Shaiya.

My hiding place has become my bedroom on the ground floor of my family's house. I hear a knock on the door, and I know it's because the wizards have found me. They mean to take me away with them to train my magical powers in a distant school, but I don't want to go. They'll be polite about it, at least at first, so I open the door to find my youngest sister with one of her friends. They hand me a letter, which I'm sure comes from the people waiting outside. I take it, but then I flip off the girls (they don't react) and shut the door.

Later, I decide to go outside and look at the cars in which these people arrived. There's no one in sight as I walk down the driveway, but there are six or seven unfamiliar vehicles parked along the sides and along the road. Some look like they came from the early 20th century, and they're painted rather garishly with the names of the institutions to which they belong. I'm not sure how many of them belong to the wizards, and how many to other groups that happen to be in the same area.

When I return to the top of the driveway, I decide to drive in the Pathfinder. It's parked in such a way that it faces down the driveway, so I just hop in and drive it with my bare feet. I don't even have my driver license with me, which kind of bothers me, but this is rather fun. As I go down the driveway, I realize that it will be hard to turn around, so I brake and try to turn the car so that it goes between two of the big pines along our driveway. I slide sideways for a bit, but eventually I make it through and onto the lawn. I realize that I've never gone off-roading in the Pathfinder before, even though it's an SUV with a very off-road-y kind of name. It's fun, bumping along in the grass, but I have a bit of trouble getting the car back onto the driveway where it started. So I get out and walk the car, instead.

As I'm about to go back into the house, I see my mom in the garage. We talk about bikes for a moment. It looks like she's about to take something to the bottom of the driveway. It looks heavy. I ask if she wants help, but she declines. It must be about five in the morning; I wonder if she got any sleep at all. She works too hard. But without asking her a second time, I just go back into the house.

When I reach my bedroom on the top floor, suddenly I wonder if this was all a dream. I do a nose RC. It works! My bedroom is very dark. I decide to try verbal commands. "LIGHT!" I shout. "MORE LIGHT!" The lighting changes a bit, but it's not really any better. There are probably people sleeping nearby, but since it's a dream, that doesn't matter. "WAKE UP, EVERYBODY! THIS IS A LUCID DREAM!" My vision's gone wonky, like there's another image overlaying my bedroom. It looks like a curvy triangle, and I suspect it's the shape my covers are making in front of my face. Not good. Desperately, I try the light switch. Of course, it does nothing. I decide to abandon the bedroom and try my luck outside. I dash down the hall and into my parents' bedroom. As I run to their balcony, I shout some bullshit statistic, like, "Did you know that 80% of socks are hung on the sixth and seventh clotheslines?" Then I grab one of the socks that's hanging over a thick cable slanting down from the outside of the house, and I slide down the cable like it's a zipline, knocking the other pairs of socks willy-nilly to the ground.

I land in a large city plaza full of trees. Miraculously, the curvy triangle has vanished. It's a beautiful day, and there are a few people walking around. I decide to try speed-running down the sidewalk. I turn to my right, and I manage to get some speed, going perhaps twice as fast as I'd be able to sprint while awake. As I approach a heavyset guy my age going the other direction, I notice that he's looking straight at me. I slow down for a closer look. He's smiling, and he's got one hand held out like he's pointing a pistol at me. Well, that's weird, but maybe that's just how DCs say "hi" to people. I laugh and smile back, jokingly asking what he would have done if it turned out he actually shot me by accident. Then I realize that it wasn't a very funny joke. Oops. I elect just to walk away from that one.

The sidewalk ends at a highway where there are a lot of people standing around. Another guy my age tries to get me to play catch with a remote-control helicopter. Agreeably, I climb up onto a horizontal metal pole and get set to grab it. But at the last minute I chicken out. Those blades look dangerous. A few moments later, I [falsely] wake up.

I keep my eyes tightly shut. I might as well try to chain into another LD. I lie still, trying to picture the scene I just left. Then I wonder whether my theory was correct, the one about the blankets making that curvy triangle, and I decide it's worth it to open my eyes and check. Yep, there's that triangle. But wait, before I draw any conclusions, I should make sure I'm actually awake. I sit up and do a nose RC. Oh.

I decide to try using the makeshift zipline again, so I run through my parents' room and slide down. It's not as spontaneous, though, and everything outside seems to be darker and more indistinct. Moments later, I [falsely] wake up again. I lie underneath the covers with my eyes open, not sure what to do. Suddenly I notice the window. It's raining, and it looks like there's a sinister figure standing just outside, staring at me. I sit up in terror. Turns out it was just a tree and a strange trick of the light. I do an RC to find out that I'm STILL dreaming. I get out of bed and decide to try snapping flames again. Just one snap, and it doesn't work. I start trying to picture candle flames in my head, but suddenly I get very frustrated with the whole situation and I deliberately wake myself up.

[I forgot to check whether my covers in waking life were actually making a curvy triangle. I suspect they were not. Also, during the original LD in my bedroom, I said something clever involving the phrase "What the frack." Soon after, I tried to review the moment in my head so that I'd remember it when I woke up. But apparently it didn't work.]

Alex Day's Penis

Spoiler for Alex Day's Penis:

I've been watching Alex Day's newest video. It's almost over. As a grand finale, he apparently takes off his pants (though you can't see for sure, because only the top half of his body is in the shot). I feel like rolling my eyes. But then suddenly he starts messing with the camera, and there are a few frames in the resulting jumble of camera angles where I think you might actually be able to see his penis. It looks like he has an erection. This is over the top, even for him; I'm astonished that he got permission from YouTube to do something like this. There's one shot where he has an empty can of energy drink with the bottom cut out; he's holding it over the top of his penis, I guess to imply that it's longer than it is. I notice that although his penis is quite long, it's rather spindly as well. Heh. The whole time, of course, he's grinning like a maniac. I feel like I should finish what I started and watch this video to the end, but I don't like it. I keep looking at the play bar to see how much time is left.

Study Abroad

I'm visiting an old high school acquaintance while she's studying abroad in a Spanish-speaking country. Feeling brave, I decide to try talking to her in Spanish. She responds in kind, but she talks so fast that I can't really understand her. I do understand that she asks me how much Spanish I've done while in college. Slowly, I manage to formulate a response, telling her that I've studied a bit on my own but she's clearly better than I am, now.

Shootout

[This isn't really a legitimate dream, because it happened this morning when I was half awake and feeling too comfortable to get out of bed. But I definitely wasn't fully awake, and I think it's interesting, anyway.]

Not wanting to get out of bed, I'm entertaining myself by imagining various soccer plays that involve me scoring a goal. The first one is too slow, because I shot with the side of my foot. Ruefully, I remind myself that in order to get any speed, you have to have your knee over the ball and kick with the laces. Then I have more success. I bet the coach is glad about putting me in as forward. Our offense was hurting, before. I'm still frustrated with some of my fellow forwards. Then, one time at the moment when I take the shot, my actual, waking-life right leg jerks as though it's doing the kicking. Surprised, I wake up fully.

[These dreams were not very fun. I felt kind of sad this morning.]

Pop Music vs. Classical Music

Listening to a pop song, I realize that the intro is taken from a piece of classical music. But they really messed up the phrase when they took it out of context and changed it like that. I'm frustrated. I try to find a family member, so I can explain to them what the problem is.

Malicious Shower

Trying to avoid notice becomes somewhat more difficult when my sister shows up in the restaurant. Mentally, I change my disguise to a short-haired Korean woman with a strong accent. I walk to my sister's table to ask her a question, and after we exchange a few sentences, I realize that she thinks I'm one of her new students just arrived for orientation. My disguise looks just like one of the students she just met.

The manager of the restaurant comes over to say that I can have as many samples as I desire before deciding what to eat. After he's gone, I decide to try some of what my sister's table ordered. The trouble is, it's still in a tin baking pan, and whenever we try to cut a bit off of it for me to eat, the pan just spins in circles. There's not enough friction. But eventually we hold it still long enough for me to cut halfway through and rip the piece the rest of the way off. It tastes good. I wind up for a high five with my sister; it's funny because we're both wearing oven mitts on our right hands. But afterwards, I worry if that might have blown my cover.

I wander around the restaurant and arrive at the conveyor belt that customers use to return used dishes. It's similar to the oversized baggage claim in that there are a limited number of slots. You have find an empty slot and try to slide your dishes into it as it rotates past you. A slightly awkward kid from my school is in line in front of me; I doubt he has the chops for this. Plus, the employee overseeing the conveyor belt points out that there's only one slot open. The kid tries to slide his tray at the slot, but he hesitated too much, and it hits the rubber divider. The overseer takes the tray and puts it in the next available slot, and then it's my turn. Fortunately, it looks like there are a lot more open slots, now. But it turns out that I miss, as well.

I have to go to the bathroom. I haven't seen one in this restaurant, so I walk through the big hallway connecting the restaurant to the other business in this building. The main room of the other business is very tall, and small circular tables dot the floor, spaced pretty far apart. It's a nice room, very open. There's a big window in one wall, and the others are painted in light colors. It's the second time I've visited this room; I was here once before my sister came into the restaurant. And yes, there is a bathroom!

I go inside, but when I go into the stall to pee, I'm doused from above with a lot of water. I try to get out of the shower of water, but then another one starts above my new location. It's like there are fire-extinguishing sprinklers all over the ceiling, with laser detection so that they start pouring whenever anyone stands under them. I mean, I wouldn't mind the shower, but I don't think I have any way to dry myself off. Oh, wait--there's a brown towel hanging from a hook just inside the stall. Good thing I thought to bring that. I go back into the stall and try to pee, but it's difficult. I have to hold up the toilet seat with one hand while standing pretty far back from the bowl and aiming my urine carefully.

When I wake up, no, I don't actually have to go to the bathroom.

Unsanitary

[Content warning: this one features poop.]

Spoiler for Unsanitary:

I have to go to the bathroom, so I start peeing in the front hall, naked. There's a place for me to do that, there, but there's no place to poop, so it's bad news when poop starts coming out, as well. I couldn't stop it because I had to finish peeing, first. Fortunately, it's pretty dry. Although I don't really want to, I don't have much choice, so I put my off hand under my butt and try to hold the poop there. I decide to go into the bathroom, since I suspect my sister is in the family room, and she probably doesn't want to see this. When I open the bathroom door, I'm taken aback by the mess. There's a house centipede on the floor, and also a trail of what looks like wet grass leading out of the bathtub. I wonder if it's marijuana--maybe my other sister was doing something in here. It would be just like her not to clean up after herself. But I'm just going to have to deal with the mess, because I'm in sort of an emergency situation.

Slushie Shop

Dad and I are on the way to an event I want to attend. It's an hours-long drive from my house. We're passing a slushie shop, and Dad asks me if I want anything. I don't, really, so I reply, "Only if you're really hungry." He stops anyway, so he probably only asked me because he wanted to visit the place himself.

Another day, we're going to the same event, and we stop at the same shop. This time, they're understaffed, so they tell us it will take half an hour for the slushie to be ready. It takes a moment for that to sink in. There's no way we have half an hour; we didn't build that much extra time into our schedule. My soccer game starts pretty soon. But we stay anyway. While we wait, we sit at a table with two employees of the shop. One of them gets to talking with my dad about the four districts of Denver. One of the districts is mentioned by name, and the male employee starts talking about a building in that district which is associated with the gay rights movement. He's in favor of it, and he's frustrated with people who are making trouble for the building. After he leaves, the female employee apologizes for him, saying that he doesn't understand that gays are degenerate people [or something to that effect]. I don't respond, since I don't want the situation to escalate, but I reflect upon the apparent fact that everyone against the gay agenda is just a homophobe.

Another day, we're going to the same event, but this time my mom is driving me. We stop at the same shop. My mom tries to pour the slushie from the machine herself, but it doesn't go too well. Worth a laugh, though.

Procrastination

As I'm driving in the right lane along city streets, something important falls out of the passenger side of the car. I really don't want to go back for it. It seems like that would be a huge hassle. On the other hand, I need that something when I get to my destination, so if I don't stop now, I'll just have to stop later, and that would be even more of a hassle. Reluctantly, I look for a place to pull off on the shoulder. I'm not going to turn the car around; I'll just park and walk back. The brakes don't work very quickly, so I miss the first spot I was aiming for, and I have to use the next one. It's right next to a residential driveway. I hope the owner doesn't mind.

Chocolate Graham Crackers

I'm lying in bed in the morning. There's a lot of cereal in the bed with me; my personal stash. But I'm leaving for college in four days, and I'm not sure I can finish all of the cereal in time. I decide to have cereal for breakfast. It's a mixture of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and chocolate graham crackers. Carefully, I dip each piece of cereal in milk using my right hand, then put the dipped piece into my left hand to hold. I'm still in bed, so eventually I'm going to have to carry all of this to the kitchen table.

Incentive

Students are given one piece of candy for each point they got on the last assignment. I got 20/20, which is nice. The students handing out the candy give me two packets of colorful chocolate spheres lined up in a line, then a few extra pieces of some different kind of candy. I'm confused, because I thought there were ten spheres in each packet, so I shouldn't have gotten any extra. But it turns out there are only about eight, so it works out.

Car Argument (LUCID)

From the back seat of the car, I'm having a minor argument with my parents. The situation seems a little ridiculous to me, and when my mom leans over to reveal completely gray hair done in a long braid, I'm pretty certain I'm dreaming. After a nose RC, I'm sure of it. Thank goodness I don't have to deal with this argument any more. But as I try to figure out how to get out of here and start working on my dream goals, I realize that I'm waking up. The interior of the car seems to fade into the view of my bedroom from my bed. For instance, my mom's gray hair becomes a fold in my blanket. Well, that's too bad. [Thinking about this now, there's a good chance that that was actually a false awakening. I'm not sure, though.]

Snarl

[This dream was definitely inspired by the series of videos called "The Walls 2" recently recorded by Yogscast on YouTube, which I watched the day before yesterday. It also happened quite late in the morning (for me)--around 10:30.]

We're playing PVP Minecraft in 2-person teams. There are only two teams left. One member of the enemy team is chasing the other member of my team, while I in turn chase him. We run back to my team's base, then we sandwich him between us and kill him with swords. Excellent! Now, the other guy is hiding underneath the ground here. There are lots of holes in the ground and lots of tunnels, and it's all very confusing, so we're not sure how to get him.

We decide to build an enclosed room with a roof and a tower. So my teammate and I sit down with the Legos and start working. I begin by making the tower, which is a really tall wall built from 1x2x1 blue blocks. I get bored with how slowly it's going, so I try just spreading the blocks like I'm extending a folding telescope. It doesn't work, and my friend laughs at me for trying. Anyway, eventually I finish the tower and start working on the other half of the roof.

Suddenly I hear a violent snarl and I feel as though my head's been seized in the jaws of a big, angry dog. The snarl continues as it starts shaking my head back and forth, up and down, like a very erratic vibration. I spend a panicked second trying to decide what to do--is my friend playing a prank on me?!--before I wake up. It feels like the vibrations continue for a moment before they stop. I sit for a minute in shock before doing an RC and confirming that I'm awake.

[It's crossed my mind that maybe that was a seizure, but I doubt it. More likely I imagined it. Either way, it was a strange experience.]

Water Damage

It's time for my lesson to start! The instructor and the one other student are already swimming out from the shore. I hurry after them, but then I realize that I'm still carrying the 600-page novel I've been reading. Water damage! I panic and get out of the water, extremely grateful that the covers of the book are laminated. Only the first quarter inch of pages seems to be wet. I don't know how many pages that is, but I sit down and start peeling them apart one at a time, blowing on each of them, for all the good that will do. This is a library book, and I have to save it, and my lesson can wait. By looking at page numbers, I notice that sometimes the pages are stuck together so closely that I flip three of them at a time without realizing it. That just goes to show how dangerous water damage is.

Despair

For the last week or so of class, the instructor is alternating days between individual work and group rehearsal. There's one piece that we'll all play together as an orchestra, but all the other ones we must each prepare on our own. Today's for individual work. I feel like I've been pretty productive so far, but I'm still worried that I only have half an hour of class time left. My project doesn't feel close to finished.

I get an unexpected call on my cell phone, so I walk over near the doors to the auditorium while I answer. It's a young boy, I'd guess about thirteen or fourteen years old, and I can't quite figure out what he wants. He says something about a ScanTron, and he seems to be asking my permission for something. He's not very coherent, and whenever I ask him a question, there're about five seconds of silence on the line before he answers. Other people in the auditorium are staring at me like I'm being rude, so I leave to go pace around the hallway instead.

Eventually this boy says, "Your answers were very helpful," and with a shock I realize what he must be talking about. Not long ago I took a short quiz for this class, and I turned in my ScanTron by dropping it into a slotted box in the room. This kid must have taken out my ScanTron and copied my answers when he went in to take the test, and then his parents found out about it, and now they're making him call me. I hadn't realized that the test I took--questions from the 11th grade ACT--used the same set of questions as the actual ACT for eleventh graders this year. This is not a good situation. But I don't see that there's anything I can really do about it at this point, so I don't react strongly one way or another.

Another voice comes on the line. It's an older man, probably the boy's father. "You've been surprisingly nice to my son," he says.

"Nice?" I ask.

"Yes. We were worried you might press charges for theft."

Theft? Wait, did this kid actually steal my ScanTron without putting it back in the box? That would be bad news; that test is a significant portion of my grade for this class. I ask the boy if he put my test back. He doesn't seem to understand the question. I sometimes hear an indistinct voice in the background, as if his dad is coaching him about what to say. I try asking him other questions, but he has trouble with all of them. Eventually I back up and ask if he's even in eleventh grade. That, at least, he answers in the affirmative, though he doesn't enunciate very clearly. He eventually says something that reassures me that my test is still safely turned in. That was all I wanted to know, and I'm fed up with this horrendously ineffective conversation. But I don't like this kid, so before I hang up, I give him an angry, rapid-fire lecture about everything he's done wrong. I tell him to answer more quickly when people ask questions over the phone, and I tell him never, EVER to take anything out of boxes with slots on top. I also threaten to come after him if there are any problems with my grade on that test. I hang up without waiting for him to answer (though I wonder if maybe I spoke too quickly for the slow-minded fellow to understand anything), and I go back into the auditorium.

Another student is just finishing giving his presentation (a slide show about something from physics), and people are packing up to leave. Crap. The instructor must have asked for volunteers, since presentations weren't supposed to start for another day or two. That this guy was already prepared makes me feel even worse about my own project.

A friend of the presenter's drops some review worksheets on the seats at the back of the room, near the exit. I grab one on my way to get my things, even though my chances of being able to do the worksheet without having heard the presentation are very low.

When I try to put the worksheet into my backpack, I knock a hose loose from a glass jar, and the hose starts filling my backpack with water. I'd stuck the hose in the jar earlier because I couldn't figure out how to turn off the water. And now it's ruining everything in my bag, taking my progress on the project from "very little" to "absolutely nothing."

It's too much. Maybe I should try to turn off the water or control the damage but it's too much. I give up. I seize one of my juggling balls, hurl it across the room, collapse tumultuously into a chair, and start sobbing. Some of the nearby students are looking at me; others are trying to ignore me. I see people throwing my juggling ball around the room. At my feet, the water coming from the hose thins to a trickle, then stops, and I know the instructor has shut off the water supply. Moments later, he comes to look at me from the next row forward, frowning.

"I've seen a lot of reactions like this in the past few days," he says.

It didn't work, I realize. Despite my complete breakdown, he's refusing to show me any extra sympathy. What an unfeeling world this is.

My dad comes to drive me home. Suddenly I realize that, in my distraction, I've forgotten to put on my seat belt, and my dad is careening straight towards some cars stopped at a light. With my free hand, I seize the strap and pull it across my body, hoping that holding it in place will be useful even if I haven't managed to fasten the buckle. Dad swerves out of the way, narrowly avoiding an accident, and explains that he was trying to do a live performance arrangement of "Jingle Bells" using sounds that a car makes. Shaken and annoyed, I tell him irritably that that was a really bad idea. He seems to think it's my fault, though, since I was humming the tune earlier.

Back in my room, I decide to do something really simple to convince myself that I'm not a complete failure at life: I put on my glasses. But the glasses don't work. I can't make the world come into focus. I can't even do that. I try reviewing some German instead. I stare at the word "ssssssssut" for a time, but it doesn't make any sense even though I know it should. At this point, basically the only emotion I'm feeling is despair.