Bubble

Original journal entry dated July 8th, 2002:

I was in a hot-air balloon with some other person, and we were running away from zombies. Or something. It had something to do with my old middleschool, the scary one, and a locker combination. I forgot my locker combination, and then I lost my homework and got in trouble, and then I somehow wound up in the hot air balloon. In any case I was convinced we were going to die because had already died before as a result of losing control of the balloon, and neither of us knew how to steer it and we steered it WAY too high, and it was really windy and the basket almost flipped upside down, so I almost fell out. But we did manage to land it, eventually, and were attacked by hordes of undead zombies. And then I woke up.

Original journal entry dated July 7th, 2002:

A lot of people, including me, were going to this one medieval fair thing, and we all had to dress up and stuff. It was really more like a medieval fantasy deal so I was dressed up as a wizard, or something. Anyway, there was the outer fair, which was free, and then the inner fair with all of the special events was behind a wall, and you had to pay a lot of money to get in. I had a sort of miniquest thing where I had to collect various issues of Dragonball, except that I kept getting the same issue over and over again, and it was very frustrating. There was this mad scientist type guy who lived in a tower and he had an issue I really needed, but in return for giving me the issue I had to live there forever. So I figured I'd take the issue, and then run away. Then S__ and everybody else wanted to go to the inner fair and left me behind because I didn't want to pay that much money. A group of people and I tried to sneak in by crawling along the rooftops to get over the wall, but for some reason the old principal from Highschool was chasing us, and we had to get down and hide. So finally, I gave in and bought a ticket, although the real reason for it was sort of different, because in my dream I had this boyfriend (and hell if I remember what he looked like, it was just one of those things that you know when you're in a dream) and I knew this one other girl was after him, and it sort of pissed me off. I got into the fair and she was hanging all over him, and I got mad at another friend of mine for not doing anything about it since he was supposed to be my friend and look out for me. Then the dream sort of shifted and I had to enroll in a school there, and in order to do that I had to get the old crazy scientist guy's signature. So I got it and went to the highschool and tried to enroll but it turned out that I had to go and get the principal's signature too and fill out a form to enroll, and he had the forms, and his office was in the fair, and it was too late to go there because it was closed. But I was allowed to go to all of the classrooms and decide which classes I wanted to take. I went to the language class because a language class was required, except they didn't have spanish, they only had japanese, and I didn't know anything and didn't have a text book. And then I did something wrong I think, and the teacher made me stay after class and said I couldn't leave the classroom until she told me to. For some reason it was then that I realized that I was not wearing any pants at all, but merely had my Star Wars comforter wrapped around the lower portion of my body, and I thought about how silly I must have looked and how drafty it was. In any case, the teacher had to leave to do something, and I got bored and left the classroom anyway because I wasn't supposed to, and some kids started bullying me and took my backpack, so I got mad and beat them up. Then one of the other teachers came along and I got in a lot of trouble, but everything was cleared up and they let me go. I was waiting for my ride, but didn't see the car anywhere, and then wondered if my ride really WAS there but I didn't recognize the car...

...then, for some reason, I was at my grandmother's house. Except it was more like a church, and had pews, but they were all lined up in front of a fireplace. We were supposed to be singing hymns and she got mad at me because I kept interrupting. Then she made everybody move and rearrange themselves on the pews, and I got in trouble for goofing off because I was playing with a raisin.

Original entry dated June 9th, 2002:

We were in a city. The architecture reminded me of something designed by Tim Burton, or maybe Jhonan Vasquez. Very tall, black, and spiky. The atmosphere was blackish red.
In the city there were human survivors, but it was being overrun by these tall icky greyish aliens. Think maybe a cross between one of those things from "ALIENS" and a vampire-fish, and you're starting to get the right idea. Anyway, we (the humans) had this thing we could do, by concentrating really hard as a group we could create a field all around us so that they could not see us, as long as we remained completely quiet. This was REALLY important. So we were holed up in our little cave, concentrating really hard on being invisible, when our scout came back, and the dumbass was being really loud, so of course the aliens found us. I don't remember much after that, and then I think it changed into another dream, but before it did there was a lot of blood.
I had another dream I think along similar lines, but there were big-wheels involved, like the kind I used to ride when I was a little kid. It was weird. I've had other nightmares but don't remember those.

I dreamed about a cop who looked a little like one of the people I work with (but not really), and he was harassing a woman about her ID card. She'd had her ID stolen, and it was a tribal ID, and the cop was giving her trouble over it not being a valid ID while both of us argued with him that it was. I was particularly irritated since the person that the cop reminded me with would never be such a jerk. Eventually, we convinced him, and he recovered the ID, which had been discarded in a parking lot.

I kept waking up and dozing because I was cold. I finally woke up completely and put a warmer shirt on and turned the thermostat up. I tried some visualization exercises, but fell back asleep.

I don't remember much about my dream, but someone was throwing a party, and there were 3 rooms, and each had a different activity in it. One of them was scrabble, but they were using 5 scrabble boards all at once, and people would keep letters they "won" by spelling words with them. One guy had won a lot of letter tiles and had built a tiny tile city out of them. I recall there being furniture in the room in the most awkward places, like a desk that was just sitting in the middle of the room.

I wake up, back to sleep, again visualizations. I'm frustrated because they haven't been working well the past 2 nights.

I dream that I am eating an apple, and it is delicious. It's huge, the size of a grapefruit. It's soft and juicy, and it's purple inside. I somehow know I am in an alternate dimension on an alien planet, and wonder if the seeds will grow new apple trees if I discard or plant them here. I try to convince another dream character (a recurring character, sort of a witch or sorceress) that she ought to eat some of the apple.

Wake up. Lie on my back and try to relax. I'm making some progress with visualizations and then I snore and startle myself. Ooops. Back to square one. Ok, time to turn on my side so I don't snore again.

I'm visualizing and dozing off and bitching to the wizard-cat (another recurring DC) that I'm frustrated with how things are going this morning. We are both drinking coffee out of mugs. I figure that maybe if I hold a conversation, it'll help draw me in. It's actually starting to work, detail is starting to creep into things (but it's still all very hazy and not at all real or anywhere near a dream). I sniff my coffee but instead of smelling like coffee, it smells spicy-sweet. Suddenly, out of nowhere, instead of the dream gently forming around me I'm fully lucid and the mug is completely real. It startles me so badly that I drop the mug and wake up.

There's a weird interlude before I fully wake up where I'm trying to find my arms and they're invisible. I know I'm dreaming, but at the same time I'm not sure, and I'm also half awake, so it's more like a weird semi-OBE than a lucid dream. I finally manage to actually move my arm and wake myself up.

Naturally, I'm irritated. I sigh and work on visualizations again. I explore an imaginary room. I'm in the great room of the cottage near the fireplace when I start to slowly ease into sleep. I'm sitting in front of the fireplace, wondering why there's a fire going and logs in the fireplace, but there's no pile of wood. I reach behind myself, produce some logs, and set them in the bin next to the fireplace. There's suddenly a desk in the middle of the room, the one from the scrabble dream, for pretty much no reason at all. Unfortunately, I lapse into unawareess.

After a gap in time I'm on a bus. I realize that it's almost a completely fully formed dream, but it's so thin and I'm so close to being awake that if I make the "push" that I need to make it super-real (i.e. feel like reality rather than a super vivid visualization) I will probably wake myself up. It's all very flat, like watching a scene rather than being in it. There is another DC there, a sorceress, but she flickers and turns into the warlock character (recurring DC). He is a smart-ass but generally helpful when it comes to gaining lucidity. The bus flickers and fades. I wake up and doze. I am now in some sort of weird geometric environment. Everything is made of white square tiles but it's also like something out of Escher. Warlock DC is there with me, silently walking with me through the scenery. Again, it is close to clarity but not really "there". Instead of trying to brute-force it and try to push through the membrane of the dream all at once to bring it into full focus, I dive to the ground and start running my hands and face on the carpet (that wasn't there a moment ago). I can't make anything focus or make it clear, the sensation is a lot like being really drunk. I go through a door and try to will a scene change even if the dream's not fully formed, hoping it will be easier that way. The room only half-changes, and everything is still white. I rub my hands together, hoping to make things more vivid, but it doesn't really do anything. I get frustrated and wake up.

Original journal entry dated May 22, 2002:

It didn't really start out as a nightmare, it started out as a dream that I was playing Dungeons and Dragons like my friends, and it was a normal session except for the fact that we would literally become our characters. And the fact that the campaign took place on the actual campus, not in a far off fantasy world. This was a whole dream in and of itself.

It then phased into the next dream in this manner:
When we were done playing, we cleaned our stuff up, packed it away, etc. I asked for a ride home but nobody wanted to give me one, although M offered to drop me off at the closest bus-stop. Unfortunately, it wasn't the bus-stop that I needed to be at, which was a mile down and across the freeway. So I started walking down the side of the freeway, which wasn't there at first, but then there were walls along the edge of the road and I had to walk IN the road, inching along with my back pressed to the wall, while tons of cars barreled by. I managed to get across the freeway when I realized that I had miscalculated and overshot the place where the bus-stop was, so I had to go back. As I was going back, I found myself stumbling along a gravel embankment at the edge of the road, and the way that the wall and embankment were arranged, I had to walk away from the actual road and into a sort of hollow near the freeway pillars and supporting structures... all of the sudden, it got way too foggy for me to see, and I wandered blindly until I suddenly felt incredibly cold, clammy hands all over me, and then I passed out...

...when I woke up, I was blind, but I was in a warm bed and a house, and people were talking to me. There were 3 voices - one was a fatherly voice, conjuring up in my head the image of a man smoking a pipe. The second was a daughter-ish voice, that of a young girl. She spent a lot of time talking to me and stuff. The last one scared me, it was a mother-ish voice, but instead of conjuring up a motherly image in my head it conjured up the image of something rather like a medusa (I'm talking mythology, not squid, here). They took care of me and talked to me, but they never touched me. In my dream I think I was an orphan so I guess I finally had a family. I always refered to the fatherly figure as "father", the sisterly one as "sister", but didn't refer to the motherly figure as anything at all. I kept asking them when I would be well, when any important events would happen, when I would be able to go back... they told me, one day, that in a day they were going to go somewhere, and asked me whether or not I wanted to go with - I could go tomorrow, or in a week. I told them tomorrow, and asked them where we were going to go and what we were going to do. They responded, "Tomorrow they will uncover us." As I vaguely began to wonder if my caretakers were something other than... well, alive or human... back in real life, D knocked on my door, and the dream abruptly ended.

So then I managed to get back to sleep, but this time my dream was different, it was about the dorms only the design had changed (for one, they were nicer and the foliage was more lush, the landscape was prettier). There were some design flaws in the dorms, one of them was that in order to reach their own patio the next-door dorm had to cross ours. So there was a debate as to whether or not they also got to use and put their stuff on the half of our patio that they had to cross to get to their own. Then there was some stuff about mom and screen-names, and a bunch of random stuff, one thing of which included a mural with different descriptive name-bubbles that you could choose to put next to the objects depicted in the mural. The Mural of the Week was one with dinosaurs, and for some reason they didn't look sad but they were crying, and some of the word bubbles were pretty silly.

I don't recall my dreams from last night. I kept waking up because my hip hurt, and I have a vague impression that they were related to the pain in my hip, but that's it. I only got ~5 and a half hours of sleep because of a shitty work schedule. My alarm went off and I kept hitting snooze, which I think destroyed my dream recall.

Original entry dated May 10, 2002:

I dreamt I was paddling a rowboat through a sea of kittens.

Original journal entry dated May 19th, 2002:

I had a dream that I was a skater-type person, in a forest with REALLY huge trees, and there was one tree that had an incredible long ramp up into its boughs... the ramp was extremely steep, to the point that one could not walk up it.

I was skating around on the ground, and then these gangster type people drove up in a low-rider and started to threaten me because it was very dark and I was alone... in this one, though, I was male, looked blonde and surfer-dude-ish, and VERY 80s in a bad teenie flick sort of way. So I got scared and pulled a rolled-up rainbow out of my pocket (it was a very narrow rainbow, maybe a foot across) and threw it toward the ramp. It unrolled and created a glowy rainbowy escalator thing, and I jumped on it and started riding up the ramp into the tree. I was holding little metal bars in my hand that made ringing noises, and the pitch of the ringing changed as I got higher, so I would know how safe it was. But I had to hold them very straight and level and parallel, or else they wouldn't ring correctly. It was very dark and humid and exotic up in the treetop, and the sky was a pretty color of deep blue, lapis blue. The foliage was all dewy, and there was a tribal type of llady up in the treetops, and she made sure that I got up and down correctly. So I rode up and down the rainbow...

Somehow, my ex-boyfriend was in on the whole "rainbow" thing and had been watching... so after all was said and done, I wound up hanging out with him at night, God only knows why, and it was around Christmas. He and his mom were looking at various miniature Christmas trees and trying to decide which one to put in the kitchen (which is even more unusual because they're Jewish), they all looked pretty beaten up, one of them spun around and lit up, but they couldn't agree and were arguing with each other, then his mother asked me what my opinion was and I just shrugged and tentatively suggested the spinny one. I thought his mother was being unusually nice to me, considering, but didn't overly dwell on it. For a split second I turn around and he is several inches taller than me, I'm astonished and do a double-take and he's back to his regular (diminutive) height.

He seemed to know more about my life than he should, as usual criticizes me on a number of points and is somewhat caustic. I take it too hard because, well, I always take things too personally. Turns out Joe's been rooming with a female friend of his, I felt a tinge of jealousy but it turns out that they're just roomies in a conversation I have with him, we talk about "old times", then the conversation and dream cut off indefinitely.

Then it changes to a movie set. My friends and I, as our Independent Study Project, are making a movie, but our budget sucks because it doesn't exist, and somehow the rainbow is still here. So we all wind up riding around on it and it tends to defy the laws of physics, and somehow we get stuck in an alternate dimension, where we turn into different sorts of RPG characters, and all still VERY 80s, and one of our characters is a prissy bitch but she's the mage so we've got to put up with her. Even though she sucks at being a mage. But she winds up being REALLY badass later on. Then, I'm swimming down the river because we lost track of the rainbow, and get attacked by these little pygmy people who are shooting arrows - ineffectively - at me. So I laugh at them until the tribal African lady, who has somehow become my guide, informs me that the poison on the arrows was so potent that had one just barely nicked my skin I would have died instantly. So then I got all upset and scared and nauseous...

Anyway, it ended with us successfully completing the ISP with the footage from our adventure, everybody thought that a "documentary" approach to fantasy was really neat-o. We held a screening of it in a tiny theatre-type room that doesn't exist at New College - but in the dream, we went to a big university, not New College - and the professor who evaluated it was very old and sort of doddering.

Original journal entry dated April 28th, 2002:

I woke up with blood under my fingernails, and all over my blankets for that matter. I don't remember any of my dreams but I guess I must have been having more nightmares. In any case, I tore my face up but good and was hoping that nobody would notice this morning, which they didn't, which is good.

The first dream was about a city. I think it was in England. It was old, and I was in the past, maybe Puritan times, I dunno. It was somewhere cold, rocky, and misty.
There was a plague in the village, and there was always a procession of corpses being carried to the graveyard. I suppose, then, that the plague was bad, but not so bad to the point where they couldn't bury all of the bodies.
And yet, everybody was dead. Maybe not DEAD dead, but dead inside. Except that one man murdered his wife, and then the Priest came and they took away the body... one more dead person, despite the cause, didn't matter... and then, either I died or my wife died, but I can't remember which. But there was a crazy, crazy old lady in one of the more dilapidated houses, and she wielded an axe... nobody went there, and maybe she died of plague, or maybe she DIDN'T die because nobody went there. But my wife died (I was male in the dream). Or maybe I did. And they said a few prayers, and everything was washed over with gray... there was an old stone building, it was haunted... come to think of it, the whole town was haunted... and all muddy... it was miserable.

And then the other dream. My brother and mother and I were living in bare shacks high up on stilts, in the mountains. It was snowy and windy and very cold. They had wooden planks for floors, and the wind whistled through the chinks. When I looked out, I could see the tops of pine trees.

I don't recall much of my dreams last night.

I recall a group of children, and one of them had a chainsaw, and I was trying to warn them that the chainsaw was dangerous, but they weren't taking me seriously. I looked away as the one with the chainsaw started swinging it at the crowd.

And then... people who turned into cans of mush? Looked kind of like canned pumpkin. I don't recall why, except that some of the cans were diseased, and they were needed to defeat some sort of evil ghost by piling all of the mush on top of it, and all of this was taking place on a boardwalk above a nasty polluted pond. I also recall a very gaunt woman with stringy blonde hair.

There was a lot of blood involved. Otherwise, my dreams were disjointed.

Then, I dreamed I was buying a bike. The store I was wandering around in also had a grocery section. I was looking for something specific there, but I don't remember what, and then my mother was grocery shopping with me.

Original journal entry dated Oct. 16, 2002:

This one had me and B and S in it and then a bunch of people I don't know because I've never seen them before. We were all fixing up this old castle that was haunted and stuff, and there was this huge library in it, and it was creepy, and old, and dirty, and dusty, and dank... and then there was a store next door that was all for college stuff. And then after we were done, I moved to Antarctica and made a living fishing. I lived on an old barge! It sucked!

And then I had this dream that I was transported to an alternate reality, or the past, or something, and I was actually a ten year old boy with a red bike, and there were all of these aboriginal people, and a canyon, and then they led me to this old professor guy's lab, which looked like one of those power things from Trigun only, you know, somebody lived inside of it. Yeah. So then we found all of these notes in a sort of Call of Cthulhu-esque way, and found out that he had actually gone crazy, and then there was a landslide, and my bike got wrecked.

Sept. 18, 2003:
I had this dream that I was back in my aunt's old house, and there were all of these zombies everywhere. And they weren't stupid, shuffling zombies, even though they were all nasty looking, they were cunning and intelligent zombies. They'd plan traps and pull all kinds of tricks and stuff, and this made them far more dangerous than your average zombie. And of course, the old standby - get bitten by a zombie, and you turn into a zombie.

So I'm holed up in this house, and there are zombies everywhere, and of course houses are not terribly secure, especially old ones. And this person busts in, and I think he's a zombie so I try to kill him, but it turns out he's one of the few people left who's still human... his name is, of all things, Sniper, and he's a sharpshooter. He's also a total asshole, but that's beside the point.
The problem - we have several guns (Sniper's are very nice and very deadly, mine's a worn out rifle and a pistol) but very little ammunition. The odds that this house has ammunition are slim to none. If we go outside to get it, we're toast. I have a feeling that Sniper sees me as a minor annoyance/possible human shield, at best. Especially since I have a habit of forgetting to reload the shotgun and running out of ammunition at the worst possible time.
Anyway, we secure the house as much as possible, you know the drill - board up the windows, etc. Except we're gonna run out of stuff to board windows up with, so we decide to secure a smaller but tactically crucial section of the house. By this point we're running pretty low on ammunition, although I've gotten a few chances to prove that I'm not completely worthless. Just mostly.
So once everything's secured, someone knocks on the front door. Sniper opts to open it since he has much better aim than I do. So he cracks the door open, and there's a woman standing out there, and she's obviously a zombie. But she pleads with him a little bit, says she only wants some money, that she needs to feed her kids (who are little zombie-lings by this point). So Sniper, in an odd fit of human compassion, opens the door to pass some money through, and the two evil children attack him. He shoots them before they can bite him or anything and the mother runs away, dropping a pistol that happened to be fully loaded. So we're like “cool, ammo”.
So then I had to go down into the basement, I don't remember why, I think it was to look for food and see if there was any ammunition down there (even though odds are, there was not), and I get freaked out when I see this zombie (the one from earlier) trying to get in through the basement windows... she can't, though, because there's a metal grating over them. So I grab what I need (no ammo down there) and run upstairs again. And that's when the dream sort of faded out.

Non-Lucid: Rat Circus
Prior to my lucid, I had a regular dream. In it, a bunch of hamster, mice, and rats took care of a bunch of human babies that lived inside of an aquarium. Somehow, something happened and the aquarium was contaminated with radiation. The rats were distraught, since a hazmat team had sealed off the aquarium. They managed to save all but one of the babies.
The aquarium was in an apartment that one of the rats owned. For some reason, some other rats (and a mole? I can't remember) dug up his garden. They would do this by digging holes under it at night and grabbing vegetables by the roots. The mole could also turn into a sort of sentient gas if he needed to.
Anyway, after the whole aquarium baby fiasco, another group of rats decided to build a tiny circus in a corner of the parking lot. There is sort of a time lapse sequence as the circus is built and illuminated, until there is a bustling rat city built around it. I woke up bewildered. I have weird dreams, but that one is pretty up there.

Lucid: The Cottage:
I settled back into bed and did my relaxation exercises on my back. Once I had begun working on my trance, I very slowly rolled onto my side and began visualization exercises. As with the prior night, I began the exercise where I explore my cottage (a location I have been "building" as a placeholder to get kicked back to, rather than something like the void or my bedroom or a stupid laundromat in Nebraska).

As I continued the visualization slowly gathered intensity. Lucidity actually snuck up on me on this one, since I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I didn't notice my body falling asleep, and the change was so gradual that I didn't realize the dream had fully formed until I looked around and realized that I was actually standing in a hallway rather than imagining that I was standing in a hallway.

I decided to explore in earnest. The floors were polished wood, sort of a dark honey color. I decided that I needed to find a mirror so I could reinforce my lucidity. I turned to my left and went through a door.

I found myself in a small alcove right before you enter the great-room, and there was a small wooden table against the wall, of the sort you would put in an alcove. It was dark wood, with turned table legs, and on top of it was a porcelain bowl with potpourri in it. Above it was an oblong oval mirror with a baroque-looking gold frame. This wasn't exactly what I'd envisioned (the furniture was a little more elaborate and fussy than I'd normally pick out). They both looked like antiques, though, so maybe it was the antique-lover in me.

Anyway, when I looked in the mirror, I saw that I was wearing a green-gold bodice with a cream colored chemise and green skirts. My hair was chin-length, and it was red, but it looked like I had a bad dye job. I laughed at how bad my hair looked and made some faces in the mirror before reminding myself that I didn't want to get too fascinated by mirrors again.

I went into the great room. The walls were white plaster. The floor in front of the fireplace was stone. The fireplace itself was made of irregular stones, fitted together. The fireplace had moved from where I initially imagined it. I decided to find the DC I'd been looking for (because I have some questions for them) but I didn't see them. I went through a door to my right, where there was a small den, but he wasn't there. Since the den also connected to the kitchen area, which led back into the great room, I decided that I would simply wander around the cottage in circles until he did appear. Lo and behold, on my second lap, there he was.

He looked different from the DC I recalled, far different, so I was a little irritated. I couldn't decide whether or not he actually was that DC. For one thing, he had very short hair, and it was a chestnut color rather than ash blond, and in sort of a faux-hawk. I told him that he didn't look the way I expected, and asked him to at least change his hair.

He responded, "I'm a warrior and I don't want long hair. It gives my enemies something to grab in combat." I actually couldn't argue with the logic of that, to tell you the truth. I took my glasses off and put them on again (made things blurry and then clear again, basically) and every time I did this, his face would shift a little bit. His eyes were kind of a dark blue-green. I still couldn't decide if this was the DC I wanted, and how much I could rely on his answers to any questions I asked him, so I decided to wander around the cottage a little more.

I crossed through the great room and opened the door. Rather than the snowy forest from before, or the temperate rainforest I was expecting, instead the rolling landscape was more like the Shire. It was bright and sunny out, and the sky was a pretty shade of blue, with white puffy clouds. There were some hanging planters full of flowers hanging over the door and windows. They were red and blue, and I don't know what kinds of flowers they were, but they spilled over the sides of the planters. I smelled them, but they didn't smell like much of anything.

I decided to go find Grimalkin (he is a cat in a wizard hat). I figured he might be in the kitchen, because he likes hanging out there. I went into the kitchen, and he wasn't there. I could feel that the dream was drawing to a close, so I wanted to find him quickly.

"Grimalkin?" I called. Immediately, as if in reaction to my attempt to summon him, the dream lost intensity. It became a ghost of what it had been. I tried to restore the intensity of the dream, but didn't have much luck. I could already feel that I was on the verge of waking up, so I let it go.

I woke up and looked at the clock. I'd slept a solid 8 hours, although my alarm wouldn't go off for another 30 minutes. I tried to doze, but my brain seemed to have decided that it had had enough sleep for the night, so I got up and made coffee.

Original journal entry dated April 23, 2002:

This one was about an old friend of mine. I haven't had any dreams about him in a really long time. I had a dream that I was having my wisdom teeth pulled and I was REALLY messed up on painkillers when I left the dentist's office... apparently he'd been the person who had given me a ride, he tried to help me walk but my legs were jell-o so he had to kind of half-drag me to the car. I realized that, since an old friend was in it, this was going to be a sad dream, so I woke myself up.

note: I have since gotten my wisdom teeth removed; a different friend took me home from the office.

Original entry dated April 13th, 2002:

My friends and I were battling giant robotic ponies in the mall. It was a sort of laser-tag type setup, only less fun and more deadly. Our foes looked like giant My Little Ponies with googly-eyes that shot lasers, so they were REEEEALLY creepy.

*THUD THUD THUD* "AAAH! GIANT ROBOTIC PONY! ...aww... it has a butterfly on its butt!"

In the battle all of us had skills, MUD-style, that we had to use and train to develop proficiency in. There was a kickass hoverbike with cannons on it that I couldn't ride because my Cycling skill was only at 20%. So instead I had a sorry-assed excuse for a pistol that did about as much damage as, say, a squirt-gun.

I don't remember the rest, I think the dream just sort of fizzled out, and then I had a really sad dream but I don't remember what it was abou

My dreams are mostly jumbled and nonsensical.

I dreamed that I found a DVD case. It was for a Disney movie. I was worried I was ruining a collector's item, but unwrapped it anyway. There was a children's book inside, sort of a young adult's book, that was missing the first three chapters. It looked like they'd been ripped out. The subject matter of the book was Arthurian legends.

I opened another DVD case, and Minnie Mouse hopped out. She got into a fistfight with a Disney Princess (Tiana) over who was the best. Tiana won. Minnie was still pissed off over getting her ass kicked, so she challenged me to a duel to the death. I refused to fight a cartoon mouse, though. I picked the book back up and now the chapters were back.

I woke up, scratched my head over the dream, and lay back again. I woke up and dozed a few times while trying to visualize. I try the cottage from last night - no luck. While I am doing the visualization, I actually lose awareness as I fall asleep, but I must still be thinking about it, because as soon as a dream starts it's me sitting down in front of my laptop. I manage to link this to my prior visualization and realize that I am not actually awake, because the last thing I was doing was exploring an imaginary cottage, and I never got out of bed, but I am not in the cottage either, so I realize I am dreaming.

I forget to stabilize. Instead, I dive into the laptop screen, trying to use it as a portal, but everything goes gray. Not black... gray. I wander around in the grayness. I can see vague forms, and I can feel my feet shuffling along the ground while I try to conjure up a dreamscape... I'm afraid to open my dream-eyes because I'm worried I'll wake up. I open them, and I do. Still... it wasn't pitch blackness, so I guess I'll call that progress.