Glieuaeiel's DJ

Frags:

• working on a math problem that involved counting and a grid with the cells colored in a pattern

Politeness (6:55)

I'm sitting at a table with my dad while Mom does something nearby. Dad is ostensibly talking to her, but he's talking about the one time he and I went to get a pumpkin milkshake together while on a road trip. [IRL: this has never happened, but I did have my first pumpkin milkshake a couple weeks ago.] Apparently it was one of the few times in his life where I wasn't rude to him. I was being nice to him. I think it's creepy that he's reminiscing so much about it, especially when I goes on to say the state in which it happened--no context or anything, just "Indiana." I don't really know how to explain to him that I think he's being creepy, so I decide just to be rude and hope he gets the message. I tell him to stop, and when he asks why, I just get up to move to a different room. Obviously, he thinks this is immature behavior on my part--being rude just because he's accusing me of being nice sometimes--but it's a fair enough price to pay if it means he'll stop trying to have conversations like that one.

Tenacious Moth (6:55)

I'm sitting outside at the picnic table when a moth flies at my head. Frantically, I swipe my hands through my hair, trying to get it out, but it won't leave. It doesn't seem to have a healthy fear of being crushed. I suspect it has a romantic attachment to me, or at least to some other person who often sits out here at this picnic table. But the sensation of moth's wings in my hair is really disturbing, and eventually I swipe so much that I jolt myself awake. A few minutes later, my alarm goes off.

Frags:

• a few different dreams involving swimming pools
• something about my family's pet cat

Portal (7:00)

Someone has opened a hellish portal in my basement. Creatures are crawling out of it, and I have to hit them with spells that fire balls of energy. I jump around the furniture, which quite large in proportion to my body.

Gold Model (9:20)

I'm trying to infiltrate an enemy base. It's near an outdoor carnival of some kind. I'm trying to find an elevator. I'm pretty sure it's here somewhere, but it's well hidden. There are people walking everywhere; they're mobilizing for some kind of attack. Eventually I find an express elevator of some kind. It takes me to a room full of high-tech jet-packs. A couple of soldiers are in the room, and I recognize them. Bad news. They're picking out which jet-packs to use in the coming deployment. They spot the one I arrived in and get very excited, because apparently the "Gold" model is quite good. I suppose it makes sense that the leader's personal transportation would be the best model available. They start coming my way, and I'm worried I'll be seen.

Rain, Rain (7:00)

I'm walking up five or six stories' worth of stairs with my dad and a friend of his. Somehow I take a wrong turn, and end up going up an outside staircase, rather than the indoor one we were using. I can seed Dad and his friend through the windows, sometimes. I decide that I'll just continue up this way. Maybe I'll even beat them to the apartment. But it's raining outside, so I have to try to hold my clothing in such a way that it won't get too wet.

The apartment's pretty nice. I meet some more adults there: acquaintances of my two companions.

Sexual Debut (8:03)

I'm walking along the sidewalk with a group of college acquaintances, listening to their conversation about wall jumps. Apparently there's a special kind of wall jump that many people from my house can do. One guy in the group is particularly good at it, so they want to see him do it again. He obliges: he jumps about a dozen feet straight into the air, then pushes away from the wall using one foot in such a way that he does a backflip before landing again. It's all very smooth and nonchalant; he controls his momentum somehow by moving one hand in a circle. The others are impressed. "Just how high can these wall jumps go?" one asks.

"Well . . ." he says, and he jumps again. This time he jumps all the way above the roof of the building (two stories up), and I'm not sure what he's going to use to push from. But he somehow curves around in the air over us and lands on a high tree branch on the other side of the sidewalk. Then he jumps again, doing another backflip and landing on the roof of a parked car.

That was amazing. And so dangerous, but he made it look easy. I had no idea that humans could--wait a second. I don't care how real this looks, I know for a fact that humans /cannot/ jump more than about three feet vertically. If he can do that, then I can set my hand on fire.

I spread my fingers in front of my face and watch as they artistically catch fire, dissolving into nothing and blowing away on the breeze. Then my hand goes, and my arm. I'm turning invisible. But my body's still there; I can feel it. Somehow this realization makes me decide that I should have sex. [Note: I'm not actually lucid at this point. I guess because I never did an RC, the moment of lucidity passed as quickly as it came.]

Spoiler for sexual content:

Moments later, I'm standing in a swimming pool with a girl. (I'm not invisible anymore.) We both know we're attracted to each other, neither of us have done this before, and both of us have decided it's time. There's another group of people in the swimming pool some distance away, but they're not paying any attention to us. We're not sure which sexual positions might work while floating in the water, so we just try a few, laughing. We must look exactly as inexperienced as we are, but that's okay. We end up spooning, and she makes an executive decision that this position will be fine. We sort of zoom around underwater while we do it. One thing about spooning is that it's easy to use my hands to help things along, and before long she has some convulsions that make me think she's probably done. Then she changes position to help me finish. I discover that I'm very ticklish in the area around my butt-hole.

Later, while we return to our original corner of the pool, it occurs to me that the pool staff might disapprove of what we just did. Having sex in a public swimming pool is perhaps not the most sanitary thing to do. I get a bit distracted worrying about this. Then we find a friend of ours waiting for us, congratulating us on finally having done it. I laugh and take her hands while saying, "Oh, so it's your turn now?" She laughs, too, shaking her head and saying, "Nooooo." She mentions something about a whiteboard. I tell her that I accidentally left it at my dad's friend's apartment. For no apparent reason, I suddenly wake up.

[Surprisingly, this was not a wet dream. Go figure.]

Frags:

• There are a lot of very loud birds outside my bedroom window. I decide to try to view the sound as peaceful and relaxing, rather than irritating. [Perhaps this actually happened. IDK.]

No recall.

Close (7:05)

I've just come from a formal-attire event, so I'm pretty well-dressed for this birthday party. I'm introduced to a relative of someone from the year above me in high school; they look uncannily similar. In general, I'm seeing a lot of people here whom I haven't seen for a long time. Several of the girls are giving me smiles and hugs and other forms of physical contact. It's a good feeling.

I walk around the house and find an acquaintance alone in the kitchen. I don't know him too well, so it's a bit awkward trying to make conversation. Later, I run into that relative-of-a-friend again, but she introduces herself to me with a different name. I realize she must be a twin--I seem to recall them telling me something like that. "You must be ____'s sister," I say.

When I try to leave, I need to recover an ID card from somewhere. But when volunteers at the event were going around using the cards, they managed to switch everyone's around, so we're all walking around comparing cards and trying to find our own. I wish the volunteers had been more careful. I end up holding a set of papers held in sheet protectors, fastened by a key ring. Later I give them back to someone who lives at the house. Apparently they're letters he's received. He keeps them in sheet protectors because of their emotional significance.

Legacy (7:05)

Suddenly, Dad speaks up from his workstation to announce that he can't maintain the Quantz website anymore. (This website has to do with geology, not webcomics.) He goes on to explain that he forgot to add a "--" to a statement decrementing a variable, and he considers this a sign of his age. He doesn't want to keep coding, and he thinks it's time for me to continue the legacy. He's going to give me an administrator login. Behind him on the computer is the splash screen for the website, which currently shows an animation of my name, a password field with a blinking cursor, and the word "Soon. . . ." Family-run business, indeed.

I decide to humor him, so now we have to go outside and perform maintenance on the system. There's a sort of crawlspace near the driveway which is covered in cat litter. Dad says the inventor of cat litter lived here before us, so this crawlspace was the first of its kind. I can't see the bottom, so I take my time lowering myself into the area. It's awkward. The entrance is sort of like an oversized staircase, except that the ceiling isn't high enough so you almost have to slide down on your back.

Companions (7:05)

I'm in a neighbor's house. They have a lot of pets. I might even say, too many pets. There's a bird's nest in an upper corner. I can't see what's going on, but from all the noise, I suspect maybe the birds are having sex. There are some cats and dogs, and also a giant rabbit. The rabbit is vocally angry about being locked in a cage, except it's not actually in a cage, it's just lying in the middle of the living room. Someone who lives in the house comes over, and the rabbit hops away. I hope I didn't offend the person by implying that they don't take good enough care of their pets. The rabbit poops out what looks like a hot dog, and the person tosses it into a nearby pen containing yet more pets. Presumably they will play with it. I suppose it would be expensive caring for this many pets, so you would have to be stingy about things like pet toys.

At one point, I'm playing with my family's cat. He's lying on his back, swiping at me with his claws. I've never understood why this cat never learned to play less violently.

No recall.

[I say 11:59 because that's when I got in bed, but I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. I was still awake at 2:48. I'm not sure why that happened; I usually don't get insomnia.]

Frags:

• taking bites out of a head of lettuce, but it tastes so gross that I wonder if it's not actually brussel sprouts

Stereotypical (8:05)

One of my sisters has a friend over. She comes into the room in the middle of an argument and offers some advice that makes no sense. I find it annoying that she jumps in without knowing enough background on the situation to offer an intelligent opinion. Throwing caution to the wind, I tell her so, in no uncertain terms. Then I walk out of the room.

Or I try to. Somehow the furniture is throwing me off. I keep running into dead ends and having to backtrack. I suppose I must look ridiculous now that my dramatic exit is ruined. I suppose I must also look like a stereotypical rude older brother. Whatever. Eventually I realize I'm navigating like I'm trailing my left hand along the wall of a maze, which is silly. I extricate myself and go over to my laptop. I power it on with the intention of playing some video games, even though that will probably only reinforce the stereotype. Later, I wake up when my alarm goes off.

[I didn't try very hard to remember the details of this dream. I didn't feel especially happy when I woke up, and I figured that meant the dream couldn't have been a very good one. These details came back unbidden later in the morning.]

Meanwhile, in High School (6:59)

I'm sitting at a table in a room filled with tables, working on an assignment, when I see someone out of the corner of my eye. It's my mom, sitting at another table, trying to catch my attention by waving something. Exasperated, I acknowledge her, but she wants to start a full blown conversation. I pack up my things and say, apologetically, that "I just can't right now." Predictably, Mom gets furious. I walk over to her table (Dad's there too) and try to explain that I'm old enough now that she can't expect me to share every detail of my life with her. My voice sounds like maybe I'm about to start crying. Nothing doing, though. Looks like I'll have to pack my own lunch and find my own way to school, today.

I go back downstairs and check the time. It's later than I thought! Forget packing a lunch, I'll barely have time to shower and get dressed. I also think I should do my laundry, but when I look into the basket, I realize that I have more clean clothes than I thought. No need to bother, then. But later, when I actually go to choose an outfit, I have trouble finding clean shorts. I'll have to do my laundry tomorrow, which will be harder since it's a weekday and I'll be busy.

Dad drives me to school. I'm sitting all the way in the back of the car, and I'm surprised to see some orange traffic cones passing by my window. Some road work near the left turn just before the high school's parking lot. Looks like Dad's doing what he's supposed to be doing.

I take a seat in the classroom. I've decided that while I'm back home, I may as well sit in on some Spanish classes at my old high school to get in some extra practice. The teacher, a dark-haired man, begins the class by introducing himself and explaining about the course textbooks. Apparently he wrote one of them--part of a series of textbooks on a variety of subjects, all published in the same format but written by various guest authors. At one point, the teacher switches to English for a bit. His accent is kind of cute. Then we go around the class and introduce ourselves. I don't know anyone there, obviously. When it comes to be my turn, I explain that I'm actually a college student. There's something of a commotion from another student in the class, and I wonder if maybe he's doing the same thing as I am and I should have recognized him? That would be embarrassing.

At one point, the teacher's been talking about something, and he asks the class which of us consider ourselves to be "a member of that crowd?" I'm one of the few who raises a hand. A few minutes later, I realize that he might have been asking which of us have had sex, but with so much circumlocution that I didn't realize it at the time. Oops. Well, if so, I'm sorry for misrepresenting myself, but there's not much I can do about it now. Besides, I'm in college, they'll have expected it of me, anyway.

The teacher starts a presentation, and everyone puts away their drinks. Except one is still on the table, and one of the students accidentally knocks it over, spilling soda pop everywhere. The teacher interrupts his lecture to go find cleaning supplies, and I try to help out by mopping up some with a napkin. I hope that my helpfulness is a mark of being more mature than the majority of students in the classroom. But the teacher holds out his hand to throw away the napkin for me, and I let him take it, even though it sort of undermines what I was doing. Anyway, the napkin wasn't very absorbent, so now there's pop on my hands. I need to find a sink. I find one in the hall only a few feet away from the classroom.

A lot of the students are handing out out here until the presentation starts again. I look around and see an office whose name plaque carries a very strange title. I wonder if high schools can hire people to do things as strange as that because they're government-funded. Someone walks past me and into the office, and I wonder. I also talk to one of the students outside. They tell me they wanted to go to the big concert today, because it featured a big presentation about Mormonism. I had heard about the concert, but I didn't know it was about Mormonism, and now I'm kind of sad I missed it, too. [IRL: The concert is this afternoon, and it has nothing to do with Mormonism.]

When we go back into the classroom, there's a stage at one end, complete with curtains and a podium. A man at the podium tells us that as a surprise, Mitt Romney has come with his campaign team to give a presentation. After this introduction, a few people walk out on stage. I'm not sure which one is Romney [although IRL obvs I know what he looks like], and the introduction kind of trailed off, so it's not surprising that the applause is slow to start. It's also very quiet, and peters out quickly. One of the campaign people says "Wow," loudly and sarcastically. Well, I'm not sure what Romney expected. We're mostly Democrats here at my university.

They launch into the presentation, which is an animated, rhetorical speech delivered while the campaigners circle and crisscross the room, making sure to invite each audience member personally to agree with what they're saying. It makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. Somewhere, I've found a pillow, and I clutch it to my stomach like it's some kind of security blanket. I stare at the floor, only half listening. I feel like I've read this argument before, somewhere, anyway. Something about how the Democrats are trying to convince you not to vote Republican because of what the Republicans /won't/ do, but when election day comes, you need to vote based on what /will/ happen. And so on. One of the campaigners notices my aloofness, so he gets up in my face and tries to engage me by giving me a manly punch on the shoulder. I look at him expressionlessly and say in a carefully controlled voice, "Please don't do that again." The man puts on a mock-surprised face and looks around at people nearby as if to invite them to start bullying me, but in the end he just leaves.

From behind, a woman crooks an elbow around my neck and good-naturedly shakes me a bit. Addressing herself to someone I can't see, she asks, "Is this called 'egging?'" (as in, "egging someone on"). Ah, so she's playfully imitating the campaigner. The person says yes, it is, so she laughs and releases her hold on my neck. Pressing herself against my side, she murmurs, "There's someone touching you right now, and you don't seem to mind." Bemused, I try to think of a socially proper way to respond that it's okay because she's a woman. But before I can, she lets go of me, and I can finally turn to get a good look at her. To my delight, I definitely recognize her from somewhere. While I'm snapping my fingers and trying to place where that was, she just introduces herself again as [XXXX]. Surprised, I tell her I remember her as a campaign assistant for [XXXX]. She laughs and says no, then dances off to the other side of the room with another girl. I'm reminded of the friendship between Meekakitty and Nanalew. Suddenly, the dream ends, and I wake up. For a moment, I think that it's only been about two and a half hours since I fell asleep. But that must have been a FA, because it was more like six and a half.

Supermarket (8:15) (LUCID)

I'm in a supermarket, and at some level I'm aware that this is a dream. As I walk through the crowded checkout lanes, I look closely at all of the faces that I pass. Each one is unique and distinctive and interesting, and I wonder whether they all come from people I passed on the street in waking life. I read somewhere on a forum that that's where they come from. The dream seems pretty stable, but I feel compelled to keep moving, or else it will fall apart. I walk up to a cashier and ask her for the credit card that a customer just gave to her. "Sure, one moment," she says, and then she hands me something, but it's not a credit card. I leave the checkout lanes and continue through the store. It crosses my mind that this counts as a lucid dream. Cool; I haven't had one of those in a while.

I decide to call Mom on my cell phone. I worry that maybe I'm actually sleep-calling her in waking life, too, so I try to think of conversation topics that wouldn't sound too bizarre. Meanwhile, I'm still walking quickly down one side of the store, looking around at everything. The store's wide entrance is coming up on my left. I can't think of anything else to talk about, and Mom seems more confused than anything, so I just say goodbye to her and hang up. I leave the store.

Somebody's angry at me for turning out into the road in front of him, but I'm sure I wouldn't have done it close enough that you would actually call it "cutting him off." I decide to play out the scenario to see what actually happened. I get in the car and start driving toward the hilltop road that passes near the supermarket's parking lot. Indeed, there's almost a solid line of cars coming that direction, with one little space in the middle that perhaps I could grab if I timed it right. But there's something strange about the road configuration that makes me think I wouldn't be able to accelerate quickly enough to avoid pissing someone off. Okay, better to avoid that.

I stop the car and get out. There's a mid-sized lake to the right of the road with a big yacht anchored near the shore. A bunch of sailors are walking around over there, presumably on shore leave. I start walking along the narrow path between the lake and the side of the supermarket, going over to see what's going on. But then one of the sailors starts walking along the path toward me, shouting something about me not being allowed to come this way. An irritating fellow, but only doing his job, I suppose.

I keep walking, but suddenly I need to poop. I remember how in the past this has always made me panic and wake up, only to find that I didn't have to use the bathroom at all. Well, I know better, now, so I'll just go to the bathroom in the dream. I squat in the middle of a grassy lawn and start doing my business. The sailor is still walking towards me and shouting, so I interrupt him to warn him that even though I've avoided behaving "beaverishly," if he keeps it up, I may have to. (Apparently, in this situation, "behaving beaverishly" means that I'll strip totally naked just to annoy him even more.) Going to the bathroom is taking a long time. Some of the sailors are running close nearby. I hope for their sake that they don't accidentally step in any of the poop. The sailor still won't leave me alone, so I carry out my threat by pulling my T-shirt over my head. This makes my vision go completely black. Oh, darn.

I wake up to a confusion of covers. After a moment, I figure out that somehow I've come into a squatting position. Uh oh. Looking down, I see that my worst fears have come true--there's quite a bit of poop on my covers. Despairingly, I try to wrap up some of it using the sheets, but it's not enough. This will be hard to deal with. Then it occurs to me that there's something distinctly nightmarish about this situation, and I tell myself exasperatedly, "Come on, wake up for real." And I do. [No, I never did have to go to the bathroom. Why my dreams always do this to me, I don't know.]

Pop Quiz (9:42) (LUCID)

A smart math major I know is pacing the front of a classroom. He's quizzing me about details from my previous dreams tonight. I know I definitely missed a few when I wrote them in my dream journal, so this will be a perfect opportunity to recover them--my unconscious itself is telling me what they were! He mentions something about a homework assignment, and a few different people named Erik. [Ironically, I can't remember the details of these details.] It occurs to me to wonder if he's even telling the truth. I have no recollection of the events of which he speaks, so he could easily be inventing them, and I'd never know. Still, I wake up and write them in my dream journal. Only, it was a FA, and when I actually wake up, I can't really remember them any more.

Sledding (9:03)

"As my first eccentricity," the groom declares, "I'm going to kick out a few tables." Someone has just said something to warn the wedding guests that the groom might be eccentric, and he seems to be wasting no time proving the warning right. "Let's have a look at some of these flags," he says. Each table has one special guest of some kind, each of whom brought a flag with a personal or national pattern on it. Of course, the groom comes first to my table (though, note that I'm not the special guest of the table; that's someone else). He handles the flag disparagingly, pointing out what he thinks are problems with it. It looks like the flag has two patterns, one on each side. One side looks a bit like the U.S. flag. Then the groom says that he's very sorry, but because of this flag, everyone sitting at this table will have to go. This is of course unreasonable and unfair, but I suspect reason will not work with him. I leave the wedding venue, which is a building on top of a tall hill.

Then I wonder whether I shouldn't have given up so easily. I decide this is a quest for justice and true love. (Everyone knows I'm the one who's supposed to be with the bride up there.) "There's some stuff back there that belongs to me," I declare to myself. For instance, my shoes. I took them off somewhere before going to my table, and I wasn't given enough time to collect them before leaving. I turn around and start back towards the main entrance. The groom starts making fun of me, specifically for the allies that I'm bringing along to help me. [I've no idea how he was doing this--physically, he was still at the wedding, nowhere nearby.]

What he doesn't know is that I chose my allies because they all have superpowers. We fall upon the wedding ceremony without warning. I try to invent a variety of superpowers and hand gestures to go with them. For instance, with a wave of an arm, one person can send out a wave of frosty air that freezes people in place, like icicles. There's one man in a hat standing calmly amidst the chaos, and I'm not sure if he's on my side or not. Inexplicably, my forces start retreating. I realize that hat-man must have a mind control superpower, and he's using it against me to make everyone run away. I wonder if they will all die, and I feel that's a terrible price for the main character to pay just to save one person and a pair of shoes. I run away from hat-man myself before he can take control of my mind, but not before separating the bride and groom in the snowstorm and taking the bride with me. The groom has a snarl on his face.

The movie cuts to an aerial shot of the heroes as they run away from the building. It was obviously rendered with a 3D graphics engine, and not very well, at that. The snow on the ground is too smooth and too reflective. I'm not impressed by their graphics team. The heroes are carrying a light, but I notice there's a second source of (badly rendered) light, as well. I wonder where it's coming from, and the movie cuts to a shot of the castle on the hill. There's a guard carrying a lantern around the outside walls--a sentry. The heroes must have been trying to sneak back in, and they had to run away when they saw the guard's light coming near. They'll probably try again soon. They do, and the guard sees their light. He raises a cry: "I see a cherry!" (referring to the size of the light, I suppose).

Spoiler for sexual content:

Again, the heroes turn and dash back down the snowy mountainside. The camera focuses on the main character and his long-lost lover. She's wearing a totally unadorned white silk dress. (There aren't even any visible seam lines.) Now that they've been reunited, nothing can stop them from enjoying each other's company. The man starts sliding down the snow on his back and the woman rolls on top of him--basically a sex position, except they also happen to be sliding down a hillside. [I suppose I should mention that this portion of the dream was from the guy's perspective, but I'm going to keep telling it in third person if that's okay with you. . . .] It's very comfortable, not to mention arousing, and they end up sliding into an area with relatively few trees. The man asks if this is an okay spot for her, and she says yes; the ground is flat, so it will be comfortable. He manages to respond (in a rather strained voice) that her body makes any place comfortable, but then he gets a bit too frisky and I wake up.

New Digs (8:33)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something to Do (7:00)

I'm on track to finish my homework with plenty of time to spare before the due date, so I have some free time. This sort of situation was very rare for me in the last couple of years, so I'm not totally sure what to do with myself. [IRL: this is a pretty accurate description of my life right now.] I decide to go down to the house lounge and see what's going on. There are a few people hanging around, and I ask them if they can help me think of something to do.

Preparation (7:43)

I'm one of two competitors in a running competition that'll start in a few minutes. While things are being set up, I go to find a bathroom. Things aren't really laid out in an intuitive way. I think I pass some women's bathrooms, but unfortunately I can't use those. Then I find a place tucked away in a corner. It's very low-tech. The toilets are basically wooden frames surrounding holes in the ground; you have to squat in order to use them. And there aren't many dividing walls--it's outdoors and not really shielded from view. I'm not sure if the dividing walls are even intended for privacy; they might have some other purpose. Then a teenage girl walks up and gets in line to use one of the toilets. There's nobody using it right now, but I guess she thinks since I got there first, I ought to use it before her. I don't have much choice but to steel myself and use the toilet. I try to ignore the fact that she's standing only a couple of feet away from me.

Under Siege (7:06)

I'm discussing something with Mom and one of my younger sisters when we suddenly see a crowd of torches through the front window. A crowd of people, carrying torches up our driveway. "Check it out," I tell my sister. "There's a mob outside."

I run upstairs. Dad passes me on the way and tells me to close all of the doors and windows and generally try to seal the house against invasion. So I run into the master bedroom and start closing everything. But there are a few balconies and other such things that have complicated methods of shutting, so I don't think I'm going to finish in time. I think I see a few shadowy figures already running around on the roof; they could be here in moments. I decide I'll try to gain myself some time by knocking a few of them back to ground level.

Somewhere I find a rope to swing on and a place to jump from, so that I can swing in and rabbit-kick people off of the roof. Turns out my aim is pretty good with the jumping, and they never see it coming, so I knock down a couple of them. I'm a bit apprehensive that I might kill them if they land on their necks, but at the same time, they are threatening my family's safety, and it would be a definite step forward in turning back the attack. But none of them actually die. There's one woman in particular who always seems to keep her balance and land on her feet, unscathed. It's frustrating, because I feel like I still haven't dented the onslaught.

I go back inside the house. When I walk into one room on an upper floor, I realize that there's someone else in here already, and he's not a friend. There's a pile of guns in the middle of the floor, and we both dive to grab a shotgun. Basically it comes down to who gets the first shot. But we both start pulling the trigger, and nothing happens.

Empty. Both of them.

We drop the shotguns and grab small machine guns instead. He's got a head start on me, so I need to take cover while I reload. I knock over a table and try to keep it between us by carrying it around while he shoots at it from the other side. Obviously, though, I have only seconds--somehow he'll find a way around it. I finish reloading and stick my head above the table to shoot at him, but I think he might have got me first.

Frags:

• I look in the mirror and am startled to find that my hair's grown long enough for me to pull off a sort of effeminate look. I spend a minute looking at it from different angles.