Glieuaeiel's DJ

Some Salsa Dancing (5:53)

I'm messing with the wiring in my car so I can do a power cycle on it and fix something. Then I realize I've been doing a lot of extra work. [My dream journal says that around now I "park and check car" and "Mom strikes," but I don't know what this means.] Later, I'm with my sister and we're trying some salsa dancing. We manage some really cool flips and barrel rolls. I feel like I'm inventing an all-new kind of dance.

Basement

I find myself in a crawlspace with periodic rectangular holes in the floor, leading to staircases that descend into darkness. I'm trying to find a lighted staircase so that I can escape from here. Eventually I find one, but there are other problems. I become lucid somehow, and risk looking into the darkness. The dream fades palpably, and in desperation I try to turn it into a sex dream. I suppose it works, after a fashion (no visuals), but I wake up soon afterwards.

Takeover

A villainous man takes the whole building hostage. Most of us are penned up alone in small rooms, separated from each other, but we can see what's going on in the building by looking at the various TV screens on the walls. Against orders, a naked woman in one room talks to the man. Smirking, he pushes a button that blows up the room she was in. I'm scared that there will be gore all over the room when the smoke clears, but fortunately, there is not. Then there are some explosions along the outside walls of the compound, and I know that the outside resistance movement is trying to break in and depose the villain. I wish they wouldn't try--they have no realistic chance of winning. But I leave the room to try and help them somehow.

I meet up with someone on my team and we run into a problem. There are no nearby enemies, so we try to solve it in a few different ways. After the last attempt, I say, "It's no use, we tried this last year." (This enemy takeover is a yearly occurrence, one we are cursed with until we find a way to escape it.) Suddenly, a door opens above us and an enemy comes out. When we get a clear look at his face, we see that it's "The Law" (from Rocket Jump's VGHS). He smiles nastily.

Salsa Skills

One of my salsa teachers (a girl) comes up to me at a dance. She says she's been really impressed by how much I've learned, and she wants to dance with me.

[Sadly, no such thing happened at the IRL dance the previous night. :'( ]

Pirate Crew

I've joined the crew of an infamous bearded pirate. There's a gigantic swimming pool inside the ship around which everyone sleeps at night. Once, I accidentally set of a musical alarm of some kind that woke up the captain. In response, he declared that there would be no music of that genre played on his ship any more. In fact, no one can even get that kind of music stuck in zir head, because there's a mind-reading device aboard that will instantly know. [The dream goes on to illustrate what the punishment would be, but I can't remember it any more.]

Out of the Frying Pan . . .

I'm near the docks of a city. There are a number of ships made of fog moored in the water. Later, a person meddles in some kind of voodoo magic that results in zir writhing on the ground, apparently feeling as though ze's being boiled alive. In order to avoid death, ze is forced to use a counterspell. But then another person standing nearby tells zir that as a side effect of the counterspell, ze is now possessed by about twenty different malignant spirits. Suddenly, the person seems very confused and dizzy.

Extra Concerts

Somebody's been adding extra concerts to the program. It's almost concert night already, and we haven't known about the concerts long enough to prepare adequately. The conductor advises us, in lieu of getting the notes right, that we focus just on the rhythms. She sends me and another musician out into the hallway to find a room to do some last-minute practicing. The hallway's crowded, so the other girl pulls me into a practice room. It's small, and there are no windows, so I find myself wondering if she plans to make out with me--though I realize maybe that's wishful thinking.

Even though I'm not a singer, I've been given a part to sing. But there's no music on the page; it's just the words. How am I supposed to learn the song if I haven't been told what the notes are? I try to look around for someone who looks like she knows what she's doing.

Now I'm acting in a demonstration of some kind. I have to improvise my choreography on the spot. It's kind of fun, though, because I have one of those wide brooms. I've always wanted to dance around with a broom. I'm in a department store, and I do some flips over clothing racks. Then it occurs to me that I could pretend to be Harry Potter and fly around on the broom, so I accelerate down an aisle and come crashing into the floor. I think it works pretty well as a stunt. Afterward, Mom tells me that she counted at least nine cool moves in my choreography, which is gratifying. Also, she says she saw one of our neighbors in the audience; maybe I should find him to chat.

New Digs (8:33)

I'm exploring an outdoor area in a game. There are shiny, giant river rocks buried in the dirt. One of them you can pick up and add to your inventory; the rocks are worth something. It surprises me that there are so many other rocks available--if they make it that easy to make money, inflation will skyrocket. I'm still contemplating the patch of ground when someone else comes by and tries to pick up another rock, a differently colored one. It doesn't work. I laugh and point out that the rock is much bigger than it looks. Together we brush off some of the dirt to see that it's far to big to pick up and add to your inventory. Ah, so that's how the game developers solved it.

Later, I brush off some more dirt, and two beer canisters come rolling out from where they were buried. These canisters are three or four feet long and about as wide around as a typical beer bottle. They must have been left behind by the previous campers. Well, they're ours now, and I'm sure we'll make good use of them.

Still later, I'm looking around the cabin with my new roommates. I remember the beer canisters and I go back to where I found them, in a corner of the room. I find two more canisters, and soon after, I find the original ones, as well. I distribute them to people around the house, then wonder whether it may have been a mistake to break out the alcohol so soon. Another girl is giving me a worried look that says she's wondering the same thing, so I try to reassure her (and myself) that it'll be fine.

I declare to my friends that I believe I've "met the room." You see, I've been feeling stressed and out of sorts, and I think it's probably just from the change of circumstances to this new home. Now that I've had a look around it, I have a much clearer idea of where everything is, and hopefully I'll start feeling more comfortable. But as soon as I say so, I realize that I'm still not clear on a lot of the details. I take another look at the cabinets around the walls, opening them one at a time to see what's inside. Some of them might be wardrobes for my roommates, and I avoid those, because looking in there would be a bit rude. When I get to the kitchen, I'm surprised to find that the cabinet directly above the sink is not actually a cabinet at all. When you open the door, you just see a space between the two neighboring cabinets, and a little triangle where the roof comes together at an angle. Not very well-insulated, to be sure, but it's attractive in a rustic kind of way.

I take a look at our computer network. The operating system is basically just a UNIX shell with a blocky monospace font. Somehow I find myself in the directory of my onetime girlfriend (who's one of my new roommates), and I notice that she has folders named "SAIL," "Manchester," etc. [These are videos made by "Nanalew" on YouTube. Obviously I've never met her, but somehow my mind conflated her with my old girlfriend.] It's cool, somehow, seeing those directory names. It somehow invokes the idea of working hard to make something really cool.

I feel like I should get to work on my homework assignments soon. I know I have them, and it's not an overwhelming amount of work, but I've been chilling out and doing peripheral things for so long that I might be in trouble if I don't get started soon. I'm feeling a bit stressed, which makes me sad, because, of course, my current life goal is not to feel stressed. I go back into the main room and tell my old girlfriend about it. She sympathizes, and she recommends that I take a "two-thousand word nap."

"A what?" I ask. She explains that it's some bad advice that she read somewhere about what to do when you're stressed about homework. I suppose a two-thousand word nap must be between five and ten minutes, and the reason it's bad advice is because when you're up at four a.m. to finish a paper, if you go to sleep at all, you might not wake up again before morning.

While she's looking the other way, I contemplate how lucky it is that she's sort of back in my life again. I wonder if she'll be at all interested in cuddling when we're doing homework together, or what have you. I'm pretty sure everyone would agree that cuddling is better than not cuddling, but maybe she would want to avoid it because it would make it seem like we're dating again.

I go into another room of the house, where there's swing music playing. Nobody's there except one woman, who shows me a new move called the "Haymitch" [or something like that]. I have no idea if I'm doing it right, but it seems to involve standing shoulder-to-shoulder and pointing with your outside hands. I decide that's enough of that and take my leave to go to another part of the room. On a whim, I dance a bit by doing a hopping move for four beats in a row. Afterwards, I feel it went surprisingly smoothly. Maybe I would actually be good at swing dancing.

Frags:

• something about ballroom dancing, maybe