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Original journal entry dated Feb. 9th 2002:

I had another bizarre dream last night. In it, M and A were going to a college in California, and they were driving there. I was going to a college in Michigan, and bummed because I couldn't go with my friends. My mother and her boyfriend were going to a casino somewhere. Anyway, M and A, instead of using a map, rolled up a little ball of clay and gave it a face. It would shout directions at them and tell them how to get where they wanted. But it was EVIL. And its strength came from mirrors. So at one point, they smashed every mirror in the hotel room trying to kill it. But it WOULDN'T DIE! And they'd given my mother one of them, too. As for myself, I had stayed home trying to figure out how I could follow my friends, but they showed up at my house saying that they hadn't been able to get to California. And then my mother and her boyfriend came home.


Original entry dated Feb. 1st, 2002:
Regarding several dreams taking place over a period of time:

Dream #1:
I dreamed about a vampire who was actually a large anthropomorphic lion, only he kept falling into lava and coming back to life. And I dreamed that I was at the Russian Olympic games, where one of the sports was to swing around a pole and see how far one could vault into the water. This feat was performed by 6 foot tall 8-year-olds. I sat in the bleachers, only I didn't have a ticket, so when they came around looking at peoples' tickets, I forged one and tried to remain inconspicuous.

Dream #2:
I dreamed that we were in a car trying to cross a bridge, which was actually a large ramp across a channel - you accelerated and then flew through the air and landed on the other side - but we kept crashing and dying.

Then I was on an ocean-liner with my aunt, and there was a murderer loose, and he would claim his next victim by slashing them on the thumb a day or two before he killed them. And my aunt got a slash on her thumb, so then she was really scared, and then my finger turned into a squid, so we all became vegetarians because we could no longer stand the sight of shrimp.

Original Journal Entry - Feb. 1st, 2002:


Santa Claus was actually an evil overlord who derived his power from people giving him pennies (thus granting him control over them). He caused storms and floods that destroyed entire villages. But we robbed him of his power, and he became a decrepit old man who traveled around with a family in a station-wagon. One of the little girls in the family learned his power, that is, to clap her hands and cause thunderstorms. The station-wagon then floated magestically across the ocean, into the sunset.

Original journal entry dated Jan. 31, 2002:

#1:
I had a dream that I was in a grade school fighting demons with an iron, and was afraid to stand still too long because they would come up through the floor. It had the Gundam pilots in it, for whatever reason. Then there was something about a woman being a train on train tracks going through a flooded city, and meanwhile I was a juvenile delinquent trying to set myself straight and failing miserably.

#2:
I lived in an apartment with the old dude from Men In Black. And then I was taking care of my pet rabbit, and for some reason the radiator was in the bathroom. I was cleaning her cage and set it next to the radiator, and somehow she got out of the cage and into the radiator. I managed to get her out but she was VERY badly burned, and really cut up, so I was flipping out and my mother (who was suddenly there for some reason) was telling me to cut it out because the burns were only third degree (?!) and she wasn't missing THAT much skin. Then mom woke me up (in real life) to tell me that she had let my rabbit run around on the deck for another hour or so. Then I went and checked on my rabbit (this is awake, in real life) who was remarkably unburnt and had all of her skin. *shudder*

I dreamed that I was part of a crew that was going to ride in a rocket to the moon. The capsule we were going in looked very old, like 1960s era Soviet technology, and it was very tiny. It had one circular room. 2 men were operating the actual controls, and I was supposed to navigate. For some reason, I did this with old-fashioned looking blueprints. Our first mission was successful.

Things went a little wrong during the 2nd mission. There was another woman, Sophia, who was training to be a navigator. They assigned both of us to the capsule for the next mission, but it was far too cramped for 4 people to fit inside... when all 4 people got in, I didn't have enough space to actually do my job. Finally, it was decided that Sophia would stay behind.

Eventually, we docked at a tiny space station with a room with several beds built into the wall.

Then, a perspective shift. I'm now a spectator, and Captain Kirk is leading an old-fashioned-looking starship. He's only doing it temporarily, until they pick up the "real" captain. They run into a very strange colony/organism, it's a giant, translucent, organic bag of liquid with worms and snake-like creatures inside of it. It reminds me a lot of looking through a microscope at a slide full of tiny creatures. Anyway, it engulfs the ship. Kirk leaves the ship and floats into a little air sac/bubble in order to try negotiating with the creatures, but they're sort of evil. Eventually, he decides it can't be done, so he punches a hole in the side of the sac and all of the fluid drains off into space.

Then I dream that my mother gave me 2 bowls of popcorn. One is smaller than the other. I sit and pet an orange kitten, and we both eat popcorn.

Review:
Dream clues:
- I do not normally operate rockets
- It is not the 1960s
- "Spectator" perspective
- My mother is 2000 miles away
- I don't own a kitten

1. I dream I am working at a nursing home. I take care of an old lady, and take her to a doctor appointment, but forget to actually take her in to see the doctor. I send her off (to somewhere) and then remember that the doctor hasn't actually seen her, and start worrying that even though she is healthy she may have health problems that aren't so obvious... but there's no way to fix it without getting in a lot of trouble.

2. One of my less comfortable OBEs. I partially woke up, but my body was still 'paralyzed' and I was half asleep. I tried to settle down and catch onto a dreamlet or something. That isn't working and I'm not entirely lucid, so I try to sit up out of my body. My body "sticks" to me like it's glue, so I try to roll over out of it. I feel like I am tipping and sinking backwards into the bed. I am in the "wind tunnel". I start to panic, and after a lot of flailing around and struggling, I lapse back into unawareness.

3. I dream that there is a huge snowstorm and the whole city has shut down. The city I live in is one I've never seen before in my life. I go outside and start trying to shovel snow with everybody else.

4. I dream I am in a castle. I am moving through room after room. The floor has diamond floor tiles in various brown colors. I can get on top of the walls and run along them, and jump down into other rooms. As I am crossing a hallway, I see a mirror. Mirrors always make me lucid - I approach it, see my reflection, and 'push' into lucidity. Unfortunately, I'm sleeping too lightly, and it wakes me up (not a false awakening).

I grumble and roll over. A few minutes pass. Someone lightly knocks on my door, twice. I ignore it because if my brother is trying to wake me up on the morning I have a day off work, he's being a jerk.

Someone knocks on my door again, a little louder, twice.
I say "what?" but there's no answer. I get up and open my door, but nobody is there. I hear someone in the kitchen. I go into the kitchen and ask my roommate, "Did you knock on my door?"
She says, "No, I wouldn't do that."
My brother is asleep... my other roommate isn't home. My roommate verified that she was, in fact, making breakfast, and that I did ask her if she knocked on my door. Even though it was a hypnopompic hallucination, it still sounded very real, and was pretty creepy.

Review:
Last night was semi-productive, I guess. I'm having more lucids, but the quality has gone down. I don't think it's because I'm getting "worse" at lucid dreaming, so much as I am having a lot more lucid dreams lately and the quality will slowly improve again.

When I say OBE, I don't really mean that I believe it's an actual out of body experience. I mean that it's a specific kind of lucid dream I have where it feels like I am rising/rolling/whatever out of my body, and either end up in the void or end up in a facsimile of my bedroom, while my "body" remains in bed. I don't believe anything paranormal is going on, it's just a really specific kind of dream with a really specific feeling... and a specific set of challenges that I still haven't overcome.

Clues I was dreaming:
- I don't work in a nursing home
- We don't have blizzards where I live
- I don't generally wander around castles

My first dream was boring. I dreamed I was at work and hadn't taken my lunch at the time I was supposed to (I was an hour late going to lunch because I got caught up working on something) and my manager was mad at me.

My second dream was more interesting:

I dreamed I was at Disneyland. I was staying in a hotel building that was white and faux "plantation style". I was on the 2nd floor. The layout was weird because the kitchen was split in half, and part of it was outside on part of the balcony.

Anyway, it was also a first person shooter. I was trying to get out of the hotel room and sneak past Snake and Patrick Stewart, who were armed with laser rifles. I accomplished this by crouching, going out onto the balcony, leaping off, and hiding in a large stand of trees. Unfortunately, a patrol of enemies led by a woman in a strapless top (it was red and looked like part of a ball gown) and camo pants killed me because I used my own laser rifle (which, by the way, I thought was pretty awesome) to shoot the wrong mook. It also drew the attention of Snake and Patrick Stewart. Game over.

I restarted, but forgot to crouch when leaping off the balcony, and got shot.

I restarted again. This time, I crouched as I lept off the balcony, made it, hid in the trees, shot the woman in the camo pants, and completed the level by making it to an opera house/ballroom. It was a large, French-looking manor-like building with a moat and fountains.

Anyway, now it turned into sort of a minigame. I had to collect cartoon pigs and store them in the ballroom. I also had to collect food from various plants around the hotel and either store them in the fridge or use them to fill my Hunger bar.

I felt semi-lucid toward the end, but my alarm went off.

Review
Dream clues: Pretty much everything. If I had to pick one thing, though, I'd say the ability to "replay" reality was a pretty big one (and a potential bridge to lucidity).

I don't recall my dreams from last night, beyond that my mother was in them. At one point, I woke up because I felt cold. I know I had dreams... I just can't recall them. This has happened a few nights this week. It's weird for me, because my dream recall is usually pretty good.

Maybe as I go through the day, I'll remember and then edit this post.

Edit: I recalled the dream as I was eating dinner.

I dreamed I went to eat at an old buffet restaurant with my brother and mother. It was ugly, with lots of cheap wood paneling and muddy-looking murals of pine trees. The carpet was a sort of ugly beige pattern. The interesting thing about the chain was that it was a combo buffet/ "real" restaurant, so there was also a regular menu in addition to the buffet, but nobody ever really went there for anything but the buffet. So, they had regular servers, but very rarely did anybody order off of the dinner menu.

My mother was commenting on how they couldn't keep servers there because they only paid the server minimum wage (servers make an average of $3 per hour in many states in the US because it's expected that their tips will make up the rest) and most people didn't tip their servers at buffets/tip enough, because they didn't feel like their server "did enough".

I don't remember if the food was any good. If I don't remember... I guess not.

I dreamed about abandoned, crumbling, overgrown overpasses and train tracks through the wilderness. I clung to the bottom of one, like monkey bars. Some friends and I went into the wilderness to explore, but we were afraid of getting lost. We ran across another group of people. In our explorations, we cut through a lot of grass and underbrush, and I was worried about the impact we were having on the landscape.

I then dreamed that I got a job at a shop in a historic section of a city. It was a job at a candy shop, and it was partly commission-based. My mother didn't want me to take it. She said the area was "too dangerous".
I was at the outside cafe section of a nearby restaurant when I went lucid. The restaurant was inside of a converted Victorian style house. When I realized I was dreaming, I immediately went inside to look for a specific DC I really wanted to see. I didn't see him. Instead, there was a waiter who was in his late 30s but mostly bald. I covered my eyes and tried to imagine that he was the DC. When I uncovered them, he had changed a little bit; his face had morphed, and was a little blurry, and tufts of hair were coming out of the side of his head, and he looked a little... melted. I got very frustrated.
I recall that my surroundings were hazy. I recall the restaurant having a lot of dark wood in its decor, and being a fine dining/upscale sort of place.

Review:
I think I went lucid because I realized the area I was in was unfamiliar and I did not recall how I got there, and this was a cue that I was dreaming. I have also just randomly gone lucid a lot out of "habit" - I am used to habitually questioning reality, now, so I also do it while I am dreaming as well, which I suppose is the whole point of ADA. This has led to a gradual but measurable increase in lucid dreams. Three years of practice are finally paying off.

For anybody who is just getting started, remember this: it took a year and a half of trying before I had my first lucid dream.

I need to work on remembering to stabilize and observe before trying to do anything. I've been frustrated at the haziness of my lucids lately, but I also have not been observing and stabilizing as I ought to. I need to work on vividness and stabilization. I miss the beautiful landscapes of my first few lucids... I've stopped observing and gotten too impatient, and it's backfiring.

I try too often to exert direct control. I think my attempt to change the waiter may have been a tad too direct. I still wouldn't call it a complete failure - I did succeed at partially changing his features.

Things I could have done:
- Asked the waiter to seat me, sat down at the table, and waited for the DC I was trying to find to show up at the time we'd agreed on.
- Continued to look for the DC in the crowd.
- Looked for the table that I knew the DC was waiting at.
- Used the restaurant doorway to go somewhere that I knew the DC was at (scene change).
- Reached behind myself and felt for the DC's hand.

So, tonight will be another night - and hopefully, another lucid. I need to remember to use my environment to my advantage.

I have a dream that there are basically zombie ghost things trying to get into my house. Somewhat like Minecraft or Terraria, I keep building better houses to keep them out. My mom and brother are there. It's a nightmare, but it's goofy. Something busts through a window with its arm and is groping around, but it's a silly cartoony looking arm.

Then, I'm having an actual nightmare. The tone is just creepy and foreboding. Something about tunnels beneath the city, and scary things that might be in them... that kind of nightmare. There's a character who's investigating it. I don't recall his name. There's also a shrine that goes down into one such tunnel, but it's unattended and has fallen into decay.

I go semi-lucid. I realize I'm dreaming, but am not fully "there". I see the main character descending into a tunnel - I decide to follow him and use the darkness of the tunnel to do a scene change. I leap into the air and fly full speed into the tunnel after him.

Instead, as I descent into the tunnel, I hear a buzzing roar and ghostly voices. One voice in particular is very loud. It keeps saying "HELP ME, ALEX". It's so loud and sudden and insistent that it rattles my nerves and startles me into non-lucidity.

I'm buffeted around in the tunnel and the buzzing, ghostly voices continue. I continue flying though the tunnel. I regain lucidity again after a brief while, and hear the same voice yelling for help. I still have no idea who the hell Alex is, though.

When I realized I was not going to be able to regain control of the dream, I woke up, rolled over, and went back to sleep. I dreamed I was in my old city, riding the bus around to get to work, but I couldn't remember where I worked and I was getting very frustrated.

This dream makes more sense if you know that I had minor surgery done on Wednesday.

I dreamed I was back in the back room of my aunt's old house. It was a very old house and the room was more like an add-on than anything. The floor was basically toothpaste-colored linoleum, and it was set about 5 feet lower than the rest of the house.

Everything was very dark and very dimly lit.
Anyway, for whatever reason, there were urine samples set out. I don't know why.
Also, my stomach and torso were cramped up (they probably actually were and it made it into my dream) so I was trying to lie down on the cool linoleum to make them feel better.

Then for some reason, I realized I was dreaming. There was no clue or sign, I just suddenly thought, "I am dreaming" and realized it was true. Unfortunately, I was stuck in the dark.

I tried to punch through the void, but nothing happened. I tried to feel my way through it, and I felt the wall of a corner. At the time, I thought it was really the wall and I was feeling the waking world through my dream, but I now know that wasn't true. My bed isn't near a corner; I'd have fallen out of bed getting to one. This wasn't quite a false awakening, but it was sort of like a quasi false awakening.

I backed away, worried I had actually felt the wall of my bedroom through my dream. I made a hop and tried to fly, and I was hovering, but things were still dark. I tried to punch through the void, but it was like punching air.

I tried to imagine a temperate rainforest (a trail in my favorite park), and I imagined it as vividly as I could, but it did not appear in front of me. I got a glimpse of a tree, but it was all cartoony and not anything like the park trail.

I think part of what I need to overcome is understanding that as soon as I have visualized something, it is. I don't have to visualize it to try to make it "appear". As soon as I have visualize it, it exists. Period.

I know this is a hurdle I may have trouble overcoming for a while, and the Void continues to be an issue.

I woke up and my whole torso had cramped up. I was sleeping in a weird position because of it, so my shoulder also ached.

I dreamed I was back east. at my aunt's house. It was really snowy outside, like right after a blizzard. I had let the dogs outside, and I was playing with them in the snow. My aunt wanted my uncle to come out (and go somewhere, I think) but he was in a bad mood and he didn't want to.
I think that sometimes, I don't go lucid because the dream I'm having at the moment is so pleasant.

Then I dreamed my grandmother and grandfather had moved/were moving. They had 2 cats that I needed to care for. I had to coax the cats inside, into the garage, and I spent some more dream time playing with cats. My uncle wanted me to find something of his that was in my grandfather's apartment. It turned out to be a collection of coins that was easily worth 100 grand. I freaked out when I realized it. I suddenly got paranoid that someone might break into the apartment, so I went around checking all of the locks, but none of them would cooperate and lock properly.

Dream Review
Dream clues:
Heavy snow when it is currently only October
My grandparents don't have cats
My uncle doesn't collect coins
Locks wouldn't lock

10/28:
Dreamed I went to a Farmer's Market. I was somewhere along the west coast. Anyway, there was a lot of different organic produce at a vegetable stand.
We (me and some friends) stopped by a strawberry patch, where we picked some strawberries that smelled wonderful. They were ripe and juicy. There were a few that weren't quite ripe, so we left them there.
Then we walked down a hilly dirt road to another stand, which specialized in heirloom and rare vegetables and fruits. It was run by 2 guys who looked like hillbillies. They had skin that was leathery from being in the sun so much, and some missing teeth, and one of them was wearing worn out bluejean overalls.
There were purple and yellow tomatoes at the stand. The yellow ones bruised easily. There was also yellow watermelon.

10/29:
I had a dream that there was a very tall skyscraper. I was some sort of emergency medical person or something. Anyway, there was some kind of zombie virus outbreak, and then I was a vampire plotting to secretly take over a few floors of the building, and then I was an EMT again but I was also the janitor. I was trying to stuff as many boxes as I could into a helicopter. Then I was riding in a semitransparent, ghostlike shopping cart that flew between the floors of the building and could pass through walls.

I was an EMT again. We started locking down floors of the building as it was overwhelmed by the outbreak.

Then, suddenly, I was in a helicopter. There was a chef there, and the helicopter was full of canned chickens. The company running the helicopter had a reputation that hinged on fresh chickens, and hadn't expected me to be there, so they were trying to cover it up. They offered me a sample of chicken broth.
Then all of the chickens (canned or not) were gone and there were 2 people dressed in rat mascot costumes in the helicopter. They were apparently members of a punk band. One of them had taken his mascot costume head off, and he had a tattoo on his face. They were talking about how they had saved a lot of lives in the outbreak. Taking the mascot head off was a big deal, since they never took their costumes off.

Then I woke up.

I had 3 lucid dreams on the 20th. I actually had ONLY lucid dreams on the 20th:

1. I don't recall what I was doing prior to the first dream, but I "came to" in a room near a mirror (mirrors tend to make me lucid - something about looking at myself). I looked in the mirror after attaining lucidity and thought "I don't look like that!"
I closed my eyes and forced my face to conform to non-dream reality, and looked again. This time I actually looked like myself. I inspected my face, and decided I was satisfied.
I tried the "mirror trick" where I close my eyes and pretend a DC is behind me, then check my reflection. I was trying to summon Warlock, because he's a lot of fun to hang out with (lucid or non), but he wouldn't show up. I decided it was because he was busy, rather than it being due to a lack of dream control.
I decided it would be fun to make myself into a cartoon, but the dream was fading. I tried lifting my hand to my face, so I could inspect it and try to make it cartoony, but I felt my non-dream hand move. Interestingly, I "felt" myself bring it up to my face, BUT I know I couldn't have moved it that much with that much coordination. The "black fog" was setting in, and I think it was actually an illusion of moving my non-dream hand created by my mind because it was expecting the dream to end.

I woke up, rolled over, went back to sleep.

2. I dreamed I was in a Cadillac being driven by Buddy from Six String Samurai, and I think the kid was in the back seat. We were trying to find something, but the road was blocked off, so instead we went down a road that said Do Not Enter. I voiced my objections, but we kept going. We were on an overpass very high off the ground. It curved sharply, and was a very smooth and even light grey color, with no highway markings. We were going ~120 mph. I expected us to go over the side of the overpass... so naturally, we did. As we were falling, I realized I was dreaming. I tried to stop the car in mid-air, but when I attempted to exert control, everything went black. I woke up irritated.

I decided to try WILD:

3. I made it through the "wind tunnel", which tends to be uncomfortable.
I was hanging in the void, 3D darkness, aware that I was asleep, but there was no "Stage" to enter.
There were little ribbons of color sort of sparkling but not really sparkling in the void because there was no light. Think of it as being different colors of black, like an Aurora Borealis that is all black. It's black, but it's a color - red, or green, or blue, but with no light. Colored darkness. It drifts.

I saw curls of gray-white "smoke", more physical than the rest. I tried to form it into a dream, played with it, tried to make it into something, but all I could do was manipulate it a bit and blow it around.
Eventually, after playing with the "smoke" for a while, I got bored and slipped back into non-lucidity.

On the 21st:
I dreamed some people (a husband and wife) wanted to buy a timeshare. They were both kind of chunky, with black hair. They spent $1200 just to tour the place, and it was not what they were promised. They were out $1200 and very disappointed. It was basically kind of a crappily built poured-cement condo dressed up a little bit. The mall and pool area required you to cover your head with a towel when you wanted to be there. There were people there (a few) but they were oddly emaciated, looked sketchy, and weren't doing much.

1. First, I dreamed I was with a friend of mine. We were walking down the street, somewhere in Florida (I think), trying to find a park, and for some reason there were like sculptures that turned into other things, or they came alive and followed us... I can't remember...

2. Then I dreamed I was in some sort of mansion with lots of halls and rooms. It was dark, gothic, and maze-like. There was some sort of party going on. I was with a friend of mine, who was some sort of monster/vampire/demon (but he was friendly... at least to me). He was actually a much younger looking variant of the Warlock character who shows up from time to time, but he wasn't (as) self-aware. We both looked and acted like teenagers.
I was looking for a different costume to wear, he helped me sneak into a room but told me to be very quiet. The reason was because there were demons behind some curtains, and noise would wake them up. I was scared and very cautious about moving around the room. The room was full of all sorts of costumes and garments, and I picked out some crazy stuff. Think goth-on-acid. Then, we left the room. We went back to the main party room, which was like huge theater, and there were sculptures covered in gold on the ceiling. We went to another room, which turned out to actually be outside, and there was a whole field of lilies in the clearing of a forest. We wandered around in the forest, and there were different clearings with different flowers, including some lilacs with kind of a yellow-gold hue. My friend made a joke about me liking lilacs (I don't remember what it was).

3. The dream shifted (definitely a different dream) and I was in a farmhouse. I had several sisters, older and younger, the youngest was about 8. There was an "evil" sister, whose skin was all white, and she had huge circles under her eyes, and ratty blonde hair... we'd thrown her out of the house, and she was even supposed to be dead.
I send the youngest sister out to go bury the seedling for a tree. I don't remember why. It was daylight, but by night she hadn't returned, and at night the 'evil' sister was trying to get into the house. For some reason, if we could keep her out until midnight, she would go away forever. We had nailed chicken wire over the windows, so if she broke them, she still couldn't get in. I also ran around closing all the doors and locking them, including one that she almost made it to. She was sort of zombielike but I was worried she'd still be smart enough to find and use a wire-cutter. I spent some time rattling the windows with a stick to scare her away, but it would just draw her attention. The youngest sister I sent out never came back, and I was worried that my older sisters would be angry with me for sending her out. I was also worried she WOULD come back, and we'd have to open the door for her, and risk letting the other one in.
I don't know if we ever won or what happened to the youngest sister. The dream faded.

4. I dreamed I was underwater. I could breathe just fine. There was some sort of short blond kid I didn't recognize. I got an octopus stuck in my ear and it was really gross. That's all I remember of the last dream.

Last night, I dreamed I stole a $1200 suit case from an art exhibit and got chased by Kate Middleton through a shopping mall. The exhibit was being run by 2 old guys and one part of it was giant paintings someone had made of anime characters. Kate chased me into the bathroom (which, in my dream, was a bathroom for rich people). I hid in a stall and counted out cash, since I didn't want to be tracked by using my debit card. A girl in there kept asking what I was doing. I dropped some quarters on the floor but left them because bathroom floors are gross. I escaped the bathroom and made it to an elevator, and she was unable to follow me.

The suitcase was actually a work of art created by a friend of mine, and it looked exactly like a regular suitcase. I was going to ask her to help me make some shoes and sell them at exorbitant prices later on. Everyone kept asking why I didn't have any art in the exhibit, and I felt really embarrassed about it.

In other news, this makes me 1 journal entry away from 400 in my offsite dream journal, which is several years old.

The night prior, I had a dream about superheroes. And then there was a tall skyscraper, and I put some of the windows out with my mind from a distance. Then I was caught in a huge wave, that was rocking me back and forth with each surge, but even though I was immersed in it I did not drown. There was a really old guy who was supposed to be a villain.

Last night I dreamed I was on IRC, only IRC was set up more like an image board. Anyway, I found a channel I liked that was full of a bunch of other gamers and role players. There was a kid on there obsessed with Yu Gi Oh to a really annoying degree who kept challenging me to fake "fights", and then cheating terribly. I commented that he was taking an awful lot of Free Actions (for some reason we were playing by 3.5 Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules) and then beat him up with a pair of giant stuffed foam thumbs. A toy he was using as a prop to fight with exploded into a bunch of glass beads, and then he turned into a kitten. I felt bad about wrecking his toy and being so mean to a little kid/kitten, so I picked up the toy (it looked like a doll head, only made out of beads) and began trying to repair it.