Casting Shadows

Note: I often tell Marvolo that I hate him in real life. I don't, of course--I consider him a friend, after all! He knows that I'm only joking with him. For your benefit, I say that I hate him because he hates dark soft drinks, chocolate, and Lucky Charms cereal.

I am in one of my classes at my current school, but the layout of the classroom was that of one of my old ones. The counselor comes to the door and says that all of the Driver's Ed kids need to report to a certain place so that we can be tested on what we remember from the manual. I'm somewhat nervous--I know that there is a lot that I can't remember--but I believe that I will be alright. I briefly wonder if the other students will be, too.

In the testing area, I'm with a few of my friends. I tell Marvolo that I hate him. "I know to expect that you hate me because you always hate me!"

We end up in the cafeteria line. I'm wanting some white milk and so I grab a pink carton that simply reads "MILK" on one side and has two lids: one on the top and one on the bottom. This is normal but frustrating, because I can't sit down the carton on my tray.

There is a group of children behind me that look to be fifth grade/sixth grade age. Knowing full well that I am not in any sort of costume, I say, "Hey kids! I'm the Easter Bunny!" Unsurprisingly, they don't believe me.

I'm reading a book, but I don't know if I was the one who wrote it or not. It's about this guy in Alaska who's writing to his daughter in an email. Every now and then the letter breaks off to show what's happening with his daughter. I distinctly remember reading about her being in an alley about to be killed. At the end the guy gets really mad because he never heard from her again--he doesn't know that she was killed.

[Clearly, my brain ripped this one from Family Guy.]

(Don't let the title fool you. This is just another DF--I'm just tired of putting "DF" in my titles.)

MCL and DV are finding new ways to annoy me. On MCL my morale keeps going down even without me playing the game, and DV is doing something similar.

Note: I have to sit with a young brat on the bus. Last Friday she literally crawled on me, screaming, "I WAN'T PEPPERMINT! I WANT PEPPERMINT! GIVE ME PEPPERMINT!" the entire bus ride. Even after we told her that she could have not just one, but two if she would just settle down--nothing. Glah.

Dream: The girl is sitting beside me. She keeps saying, "Please give me [...]. Please give me [...]." I don't know what she wants.

First I'm in my English III class. The desks aren't placed where they normally are, but that's okay. We're taking a test/just got through with one.

Later I look into a mirror and see that my eyes keep going cock-eyed on their own. I'm devastated and go to my mom and say, "I need to go to the dentist and an eye doctor," but she tells me that we don't have enough money for any appointments.

There are three TVs in my room, two of which are broken. The third is a wide-screen plasma TV and I am watching the new episodes of Death Note on it. Looks as though Light has split apart from the SPK and has caused some sort of damage to the HQ, because the sirens are going off and L is P-O'ed.

My dad comes in and takes the big TV away. Grr. -_-

Jason is a relative to the Davis'. He and I are in the parking lot of Wal-Mart and are about to go in. Jasper and David are inside and we are supposed to meet up with them. There is a little man with brown hair and a great bushy beard inside of a box (sort of like a small vending machine), and on the top is a sign in great neon colors, "SOCIOPATH." I pass him by but Jason, who is carrying a small pack (that looks like a pack of matches) of some sort of illegal drug offers it to him. For one second, Jason is there, and the next, he is gone--the little man kidnapped him!

I dread telling Jasper and David that their brother is missing. Will I be blamed for his absence? Probably. I don't like the thought. I know that I have to tell them, though, and so I march forward into Wal-Mart.

Perhaps there is some sort of time skip, or perhaps I simply can't remember what happens in the in-between, but it's at night and I'm on a car with the Davis', heading for Oklahoma. It's late at night and there is a giant billboard sign that has a crude picture of a lake, and then an arrow pointing to a spot in the southern part of the body of water. A "you are here" type of thing, telling us that we are at our destination. We drive by the sign a little and when I look back there is a small island (again, where we are) that is clearly visible.

At some point we stop and climb on a cable car. According to the dream, I didn't just ride all the way from Mississippi to Oklahoma. Both Jasper and Payton were curled up on the floor of the cable car, asleep. I don't know where Samantha is, but David is the one directing the car. I tell him about Jason; he seems mildly disappointed but otherwise unaffected.

Riding the cable car is a scary experience, but I remain calm.

Once we get off of the car, we are all on a little trail in a rural area of the island. At the very end of it are bleachers where several people are staying. Jasper and I walk the trail a few times back and forth, talking. I steel myself in preparation of telling him about his brother's kidnapping, but he tells me that he was only pretending to be asleep.

At the end I (and perhaps he along with me) come back to the bleachers. Guess who's here? That's right, Jason. I ask him to come back with me (a small celebration is due, since he has turned up), but he tells me that he wants to stay for a bit longer; he needs to speak with Jarvis before leaving.

At this, I look behind the bleachers. Jarvis is standing there. Wyvern approaches him and goes in for a kiss, he kisses back, and then--as if he realizes what he's doing--breaks the kiss and storms off, angry. I know that he's angry with Wyvern for kissing him and himself for kissing her back. Wyvern sits down and cries, and I try to console her. "He enjoyed. He enjoyed it and if he wasn't already dating Paramore he would go out with you."

*** Note: My Art II class was assigned to research a Mississippi artist so that we could give a ten-minute presentation on him or her, and I chose a woman named Dot Courson. Funny to note that my teacher told us that if we could get the artist to come to the school and speak in front of our class we did not have to speak at all. After taking a public speaking class during my freshman year, I'm no longer very terrified of giving presentations, but I really didn't care for the project itself at all and so I was the least prepared out of all of my classmates. Considering this, even I didn't want to give a presentation.

Happy ending: My PowerPoint got lost among all of the others and so my teacher couldn't find it! I don't have to give the presentation, but I do have to go to her class as soon as I get free time to take a test.

Here's Dot Courson's profile, if you're curious: http://dotcourson.com/

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Friday, October 11, 2013

Dot Courson comes to visit me in my home in Ucon. Apparently Mrs. Tucci had contacted her and told her that I would be doing the presentation, and so Mrs. Courson would present herself for me.

I "am" Harry Potter. I am talking to Hermione Granger and she is telling me about how hard it is to be Muggle-born. We start to reminisce and the scene goes back in time to when Hermione and I first went to Diagon Alley.

Diagon Alley is a part of Gringotts Wizarding Bank, which is underground; practically everything is brown. There are "sections," or little trails, for all of the shops. Specifically, there are two caves that lead to the Gringotts vaults: one is for Muggle-borns; the other is for anyone who has at least one close Wizarding relative.

I am with Hagrid, as he is my guide through Diagon Alley. I briefly look backwards to watch Hermione, dripping wet with only a thin sheet to cover up her nakedness, is taken down the cave for the Muggle-borns.

Hagrid is taking me to get my wand, but I have to fight to get it. He shows me to a hole in the ground where there are several small dinosaurs and it becomes clear that he and I will have to defeat all of these over-grown lizards so that I can get my wand. Since he and I can only use our bare hands, we fight the little beasts for what seems like forever. By the time we get to around three I start to feel better, as surely it won't be long before I get a wand (and then I will never have to fight like this again!), but no such luck: the dinosaurs suddenly regenerate and I feel like giving up. Surely there is no possible way to win!

I don't remember much from my dream last night. I know that my father was holding my mother and I captive in the trailer. I once asked him why, but I don't remember his answer (it might have been something like, "Because I love you"). At some point he texted me and explained to me that he would be drinking the following weekend and I asked him why, but he said because he always drinks on the weekends and the holidays. That wasn't what I meant. . . .

At some point I'm trying to escape from him.

Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Emotion before deaming: Calm
Emotion after dreaming: Calm--maybe a bit accomplished
Thoughts: Oh screw it, I'll try out this WILD technique tomorrow. I just wanna go to bed.
Time spent sleeping: 12:00 AM - 5:30 AM
Note: Sorry for the crap-writing in this one! I'm on the run so I can't bother to proofread it now.

I'm sitting down on the floor in the corner (as if it was Christmas time) of the trailer that looked as if it was the one that my family and I lived in back in Ucon. It's been forever since we've eaten real spaghetti and my father asks me if I would be willing to give it a try if he "cooks it right." Despite my distinct hatred for spaghetti, I agree, and then I go back to my room to look up how in the world I'm supposed to make an Iron Man costume.

(If you're curious, then the wikiHow article that I found in the dream told me that I needed a pair of red pajama pants and a shirt from some superhero that I've never heard of.)

It's fairly early in the morning and so I go outside to walk around. The sun hasn't even come up yet and so the entire world is lit with a dim reddish color that you can only find during the early hours of daylight. Nothing is strange or "off" in anyway but I'm happy, and so I think--in a joking manner, of course--that if there's a giant cat of the jungle behind me then I am definitely dreaming.

Well, amigos, guess what was behind me, pretty as a painting?

Boy, was I surprised! I hadn't even expected anything to happen, so I felt a mixture of mild excitement, mostly shock, and a dash of fear (for the love of God there's a cougar right there and it's not moving!). Without a doubt, I was dreaming. I willed myself to rise a few yards in the air and glided back and forth, reminding myself that I needed to do all that was in my power to calm down. "Don't force it--let's just watch."

And so I did. I don't really remember going back down, but my parents and I loaded up in the car for a road trip to Illinois. My mother tells me that she had never gone that way, "but she should have." Curious and interested in seeing some "lucid crap," I ask my father if he can turn the car into a bus. He tells me that yes, that was possible, but he would need to speed up in order for it to work. I watch as the speedometer rocketed all the way up to 160, but I knew that we were only going forty at least. I told him as much and he makes it look like he's going to turn the car into a bus then, but instead we just stop.

Mama's parents were in Illinois. The two of them, along with my parents, sat around talking about relationships. My father said that he had always thought that "separate marriage was a good thing," and my grandparents said that Nickson had said (in regard to one of the relationships--either my parents' or my grandparents) "I'll take it." In the dream, this meant that he wanted to see me.

Towards the end I was starting to want to get out of there and explore the dreamscape, and so I found steak and some other vegetable. I wanted to preserve the food and so I picked up two cylinder blocks and willed them to enlarge and merge. "I have the power!" I shouthed. Well, at least they got bigger. . . .

I felt myself drifting apart, the world getting dark, and for a second I wanted to hold on to my lucidity; then I realized that I was waking up and, with a sort of resigned accomplishment, opened my eyes.

Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Emotion before Dreaming: Calm
Emotion after Dreaming: Calm
Thoughts: Calm down . . . clear your mind. . . .
Intended Technique: WILD (((please note that I was only practicing the WILD technique--I didn't think that anything would come out of it)))
Time Spent Sleeping: 9:00 PM - 12:00 AM

Please note that I DO NOT have any affiliation with the website-thing Second Life.

There is a particular character that I like to draw who I have named Mimi Mace--the girl on the far left is her. Please excuse my awful drawing skills. Anyway, she, Jasper, and I were all playing some sort of game that resembled one of the places in Second Life a bit. The only things that I can remember from the dream, though, are these:

1) all three of us were attending some college
2) we were gathering at Jasper's place--or we might have all lived together--and the "Second Life game" was on the XBox 360
3) Mimi's character was laying on a bench that was placed beside a clock tower in the game (or perhaps that was the dream world's real life, I dunno)

Just a cute little mention: Note that I'm pretty skeptical about a lotta stuff, but I just think it's kind of cool that Jasper dreamed of Mimi last night, too. XD