Journal #86

03/21: The Price Is Right is back in dreams again, this time in animated form, in to the style of PBS (Public Broadcasting Service)-style shows for kids such as Arthur (R.I.P.) and WordGirl, and like the dream on December 4th, it's Showcase time again, but in a classroom-like setting. This time, there is a "category" that tells the four remaining students things about a Showcase they're trying to bid on.

The dream, like one of the Wayne's World films, shows all the possible endings, and one of them it decides to show is when one of the students overbids on their Showcase, gets booed, and has these red "down" marker like objects thrown at them. There was also another possible ending where all the students overbid on their Showcase, gets booed, and has the same thing that happened to one student, happen to all of them.

However, there was one student who feared this monster that would be out to get him if he lost, kind of like me when I was younger -- well, my elementary and middle school days, but I never really explained it to anyone. I forget his/her/its name, but it resembled like a typical villain from an anime, as they're usually blond-haired, and this one was no different. I'm guessing this one was male, dressed like a "scene" kid (possibly skater/emo mix) revealed in dark shadows.

Watching the events play out on TV in my room, I ask in disbelief, "What is Weston Gardner doing on a kids' show?", and the dream ends at 6-ish in the morning before any of the students on the show in the dream reacted to it. (also, that wasn't the "monster" the student feared.) (Personally, I think the mysterious character the dream showed looked like a mix between him and professional wrestler Jeff Hardy -- minus the hair dye.)

(Fun Fact: Weston was actually a contestant on The Price Is Right 12 years ago in Season 39 (2010-11), show #5263K -- aired out of order on October 13th, 2010, actually airing on September 22, 2010 in an afternoon showing, in the place of the long-running soap opera As The World Turns, which ended after the 2009-10 season in the U.S. on CBS. He won two prizes in the Drew Carey-created pricing game Rat Race (a late-Season 38 debutante) totaling $3,614, and later went on to win his Showcase, accumulating $28,638 in cash and prizes, including an extra $1,000 in his Showcase Showdown -- that's where they spin the big Wheel to see who qualifies for the final round of the show, simply named "The Showcase", and the three contestants that got up on stage to play a pricing game try to get as close as they can to $1.00 -- without going over. He passed the first Showcase, which included a boat, to his opponent, and she overbid. Oh, and the show re-aired two days after Christmas 2010 on December 27th.)

I had a heck of a bad day yesterday (mentally having to play the protagonist and antagonist at the same time in the morning), and it was stressful. I just have to learn not to take game shows and their results way too seriously, which I had been doing since my teenage years, and quite frankly, I think it was anxiety and depression-inducing. I just have to find a better way to manage mental health and anxiety. -WM86

01/16: I believe the dream this time was a continuation from the "teenage girl trying to be Hayley Williams of Paramore" dream from three days earlier on the 13th.

However, this time, I found myself in the living room of a beautiful house with a beautiful view of the neighborhood underneath a sunny/partly cloudy day a flat-screen HDTV with something recorded via a digital video recorder, or DVR, for short. On the TV screen playing through the DVR I see what appears to be a professional wrestling ring with red ropes, and a wrestler with seemingly strange attire taunting the crowd and holding in one of their hands what appears to resemble a championship belt, probably belonging to World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, for short; the champion dressed eerily similar to 1-time WWE Champion Jeff Hardy back in the days of the revered Attitude (1997-2002) Era, but all I could see was a flash of dyed blood red hair, but the person wearing his in-ring attire (oversized colored short-sleeved shirt, baggy pants, wristbands made from women's pantyhose, etc.) from 1998-99 (during the "New Brood" days) to at least 2002 was smaller than he is (he's 6'1"), and more than likely female.

The rest of the dream made no sense, as a fake program on Netflix was shown with a cast of teenagers in what appeared to be an action-packed series in another room in the house, the setting still being daytime.

I am no stranger to Jeff Hardy-like characters in dreams that dress unusually, as I've had dreams like that since 2001 (age 15), and the last one I had was twelve years ago back in 2009 (age 23).

I am also no stranger to dreams taking place inside houses, as I remember having one as early as 1995 where I heard these electronic toy sounds, and then I walked into a room and saw what appeared to be a toy rabbit chomping on a floor, Pac-Man-style. When I went to tell my mom about it before going to school, she hilariously made a reference to Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (& Knuckles)'s Special Stages where you had to collect all the blue spheres to get a Chaos Emerald. I remember another one from early 2004 where the TV was on, probably on MTV as a music video was playing as well.

If this was trying to show me an idea for YA/teen lit, I understand. Once again, I don't mind having these dreams.

-WM86/DFW

1/13: The dream I had was one of the more colorful ones I've had in a while, continuing the trend of dreams trying to show me ideas for my writing YA/teen lit since winter 2011-spring 2012. This has been the trend since a dream I had on September 6, 2019 where some recurring dream characters over the years started to become younger and colorful, like a few dreams I had between 2012 and 2016.

This time, I found myself in what appeared to be a cross between a middle or high school's library and a Barnes & Noble surrounded by children and teenagers between the ages of 12 to at least 17, and it seemed as if they were leaving when I hear music in the key of F minor, and being sung in a pitch-perfectly haunting style, by a teenage girl that appeared to be a fan of American singer-songwriter and Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams, even down, eerily, to the dyed red-orange hair; except, unlike Hayley, this character's eyes were brown. If the setting were a library, I would say that it was kind of a mix between the ones at Oberlin (formerly Daniels, thanks to an unfortunate event in the news in May 2020) Middle and Southeast Raleigh Magnet High in Raleigh, NC. If the setting were in a mall, I would probably say that it eerily resembled the Barnes & Noble at the Triangle Town Center, also in Raleigh, as it's on the top floor of the mall. I even noticed some lost characters from dreams from most of the spring of 2020 to at least October 18th and 25th walking out of the place after the beautiful singing from the redheaded girl.

I couldn't tell if the girl was trying to sing like Williams or even Canadian singer-songwriters Avril Lavigne or Felicia "Fefe" Dobson, either, as they have distinct, completely different singing voices. I believe her voice was a little smaller than those three. Come to think of it, I think it sounded like a cross between voice actresses Veronica Taylor, Tara Strong and Nancy Cartwright; I have a memory of a dream from either 1990 or 1991 that had a screaming voice that sounded like a mix between the character Cartwright voices on The Simpsons for 32 years, Bart, and Nick from the 1989 Disney film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, portrayed by Robert Olivieri, but my four or five-year-old self was too young to process what was going on at the time.

I am also no stranger to dreams of girl characters that think they're Hayley Williams of Paramore. The earliest I can remember my first dream of a character like that was either in 2008-09 or 2009-10, where it was set in a school with creepy 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System/Game Boy-like music playing in the background as I saw a bad day at school in the eyes of a teenage character that had the unfortunate honor of being sent to detention, and in the room where it was held was a girl with that trademark dyed red-orange hair. The last time I saw a character like that was in 2016, the year my grandmother on my mom's side unfortunately passed. That girl had turquoise hair in at least two dreams. She never showed up again after that. The dream character with the turquoise/hot magenta-colored hair from another entry from December 2019 may have been also been inspired by her, but she didn't sing or apparently have any spoken lines, either.

Like I've said before, I don't have a problem with dreams that provide ideas for writing teen lit/young-adult fiction. I couldn't get anything done most of 2020 due to stress and anxiety over COVID-19, the news, etc., and I'll try to change that for 2021. -WM86/DFW

11/3: After a few scenes that didn't make any sense, like four months ago showing my grandma's house before she passed away nine months ago, everything picks up after a dentist's appointment (I don't really have one until three weeks later).

I am walking with a character down a hallway that looks like a cross between a backstage area from WWE Monday Night RAW, SmackDown! Live or Impact Wrestling and the hallway from a backdoor leading to an office, locker rooms and the backdoor of the gymnasium at Southeast Raleigh Magnet High--which, like certain young-adult fiction projects I've written--had arcade machines. The person I walk down the hall with is possibly Ashton Hobbs from Contestant 25, a young-adult fiction book series I'm currently working on and has taken me over 20 years -- September 1995 to be exact (I was 9 at the time) -- to get perfect.

The next scene makes no sense, and was like a scene from a typical TV sitcom or movie after a school bully/main antagonist has done enough damage. I then see a locker room where a possible student is coughing, stuffed in a locker. The character and I then exit the school where this redhead teen and what appears to be his parent or his mentor were parked in line one spot ahead of us smiling and waving at me before my alarm clock buzzes at 6:45 this morning. I, however, do remember an OC ReMix playing - a remix of the opening from the 1989 Commodore Amiga game Shadow of the Beast - one of the first OC ReMixes on the site since the site's introduction in 1999.

I wonder if I had gotten this dream last night after viewing the Wikipedia articles of Ross Powers and Kelly Slater on Wednesday on my Surface tablet that led to the image of the redhead teen at the end of the dream. However, if I view the Wikipedia article of James Lafferty, nothing happens dream-wise. I've also had some pretty strong dreams two months ago before my doctor's appointment and the finals of the U.S. Open, too, but it's probably too late.

I think this dream was trying to tell me to watch what I write sometimes, although I have never in my 21-year writing career (yes, again, 1995) written about bullies doing these horrible, unspeakable things like what was demonstrated in my dream last night.

11-03-2014: It's been a while since I last posted here. Yes, I have had some strange dreams over the past three years, but either they went too fast or I haven't had the time or bad days have caught up to me...repeatedly.

However, the one last night was pretty memorable. I was able to also match the description of the dream character as well. She had brown hair and brown eyes, a petit build, wearing a beige bubble jacket, dark blue jeans with black high top Chucks (Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, for those who don't get the popular term) with either aqua green or sky blue shoelaces.

She also looked around 14 or 15-17 years of age, and politely asked me and another character on a bus as she walked by, "Is anybody sitting here?" I didn't get to see what happened next, as I woke up around 6:30~40-ish. I believe she appeared in one other dream I had a couple of months ago, stemming from a strange YouTube video I saw detailing the uploader's views on reactions if YouTube user davemadson was terminated, and one of which had a screaming little girl that likely came from an episode of R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour that aired on Discovery Family (formerly The Hub). (On a sad note, he DID have to close down his channel on April 7, 2014 because of his busy personal life AND Microsoft discontinuing support for Windows XP that day--and I didn't even subscribe to him.)

However, it was likely the girl from last night's dream but with the same clothes clinging to me, holding on to my left arm like she's scared of somebody. And yes, she still had the same (either) medium or dark brown hair and brown eyes. Again, I didn't know what happened next like the dream last night, as I woke up early.

One of my life goals is to write a YA story, or young-adult novel. And as I'm writing this entry, I'm considering making her the main character. As I listen to a lot of music, I am also considering what kind of playlist she might have (personally, I would like it to be '90s mixed with today) as well. I am also in my 19th year writing (got my first computer/word processor in 1994, didn't start writing until 1995). In regards to the dream character, I haven't given her a name yet. I am also considering creating teenage boy characters where James Lafferty and Miko Hughes are inspirations/ideas (this is starting to become a trademark habit of mine) as well that serve as an interest to her. However, I'm not sure whether to base the story in California or North Carolina yet.

I have found out in recent years that writing a story that takes place in North Carolina is a lot harder than writing one that takes place in California. This has been going on since late-2003 when I took a creative writing class in my senior year of high school. And I also learned that writing a young-adult novel is a tall order and I've got my work cut out for me. So that means I'd better get going and not let life distractions get in the way of achieving said goal. Until next time...WM86