Glieuaeiel's DJ

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.

No recall.

Superheroes (8:07)

To their surprise, a group of friends discover that they all have superpowers. The superpower is unique to the person. One of them can create force fields, which comes in handy when villains begin shooting energy bullets at them. Still, she barely gets up the shields in time, which makes her friends nervous enough to shout at her a bit. In the middle of a sentence, someone realizes that the villains just shot a "seminuclear bomb" at them. They all shout and panic, and the bomb goes off. From a distant perspective, you see a cylindrical shield appear around the group just in time to protect them from the blast.

Thinking they've succeeded, the villains approach the area of the ocean where the group of superheroes had been swimming. Soon after they reach the spot, the shield disappears, presumably releasing radiation poisoning into all of the villains. They all start making funny faces. I'm curious about how this movie is going to depict radiation sickness--it seems like something that would be difficult to cartoonify.

Autumn (8:07) (LUCID)

It's a beautiful fall day. I'm walking over the grass in a section of woods where all the trees are bare of leaves, and I'm not alone. There are dozens of people nearby, walking every which way, although I am traveling alone. I reach the crest of a small hill, but rather than walking down the other side, I keep on walking straight into the air. I suppose that must mean I'm dreaming, but I'm not sure I feel like doing anything about that.

On second thought . . . I do a reality check to get into the mindset of dream control. I still have to prove that I can exercise some kind of control over fire. I decide to try to use lightning. Looking at a nearby tree, I gesture at it somehow. To my surprise, with a flash and a bang, a bolt actually strikes the tree. It's on fire, now, but the fire is highly stylized. The tree is covered in a bunch of orange and black sprites--little crescent moons that randomly switch from left-facing to right-facing. I'm not sure that counts as actually starting a fire. I turn to another tree and try to hit it with lightning, too, but this time, nothing happens.

I give up on the lightning, and try to set the grass on fire with a sweeping motion of my arm. A ramrod-straight, paper-thin line of flame about a dozen feet long appears on the ground, but it doesn't interact much with its surroundings. I try to make lava from the foothills flow down through a nearby riverbed, but that doesn't really work, either.

Carefully, I look up at the clouds above me. I worry that without any trees or grass in my field of vision, the dream will start to come apart. The sky is pretty, but I look down again quickly. A little later, and without any apparent warning, the dream just stops. My vision's not black, per se, but I can't see anything.

Novice Author (8:07)

A novice author has recorded a video explaining the story behind her recent short book. She starts by reading something apparently from a writing textbook, about how it's a good idea to write the ending first, then pretend to get flustered by all the complicated detail and explain to the reader that you'll have to go back and tell it all from the beginning. I recognize that technique from a lot of the books I've read, and apparently the author does, too, because she looks up from the book to interject a short phrase meaning something like, "Just like they do in the classics!"

While the video credits are rolling, the girl's roommate comes into the room wearing a bathrobe. She's just trying to get her laundry from the machine, but as a joke the vlogger intercepts her, and in the struggle the robe comes untied. Eventually the roommate does manage to put on a pair of underwear. Then the vlogger's top comes off, too, and they sit down on the ground and start kissing. I'm pretty sure this is the first time either of them have explored this part of their sexual orientation, so, good for them!

Frags:

• A volcano goes off and we have to climb up a series of gigantic, cubical cliffs in order to escape the lava flows. The cliffs have a consistency similar to tofu. I take a few wrong turns.

New Student (6:56)

Natalie Tran is in my math class. It's a little bit surreal, because she's trying to pretend like nobody knows who she is. And maybe nobody does except me. During a class presentation, she tells us about a video she made that's relevant to the topic, and we should watch it sometime if we want to. Maybe she is after more subscribers after all.

Frags:

• heard "The Open Prairie" theme from Copland's "Billy the Kid" suite; told someone near me how good I think it is
• watching a documentary on character development in TV shows; one particular show they point out as a good example
• choosing a rehearsal order for our string quartet
• my two youngest sisters are being noisy while I try to fall asleep in the next room

Frags:

• something about ballroom dancing, maybe

Stormtrooper (7:51)

Somehow I've found a Stormtrooper uniform. I put it on to disguise myself as I walk through the enemy complex with the rest of my partners in stealth. It's uncomfortable to have the mask all the way on, so most of the time I have it lifted (it has a visor that slides up a bit like a space helmet, and a separate part that slides up to reveal just the mouth). Then I have to put it on again quickly when another Stormtrooper comes around a corner, so they don't see that I don't actually have the same face as Jango Fett.

Somehow we get caught. An alarm might have been involved. Now we're in a small room with about twice our number of enemies. Not many of them are armed--they're just officials of some kind--but there are two people with lightsabers. Almost by accident, I take out my own two-sided green lightsaber and start attacking them. I barely have a second to hope that the rest of my group takes that as the signal to start fighting our way out of here. The people with lightsabers go down easily, and I realize they were never Jedi-trained. Somehow they just found those sabers and tried to pretend they could use them to discourage us from fighting.

Once we kill everyone, we go back outside. There's a hole in the bottom of one of the overhanging upper stories, and I realize that must be the room where we fought. I remember randomly slicing a couple of stone columns in order to add to the confusion of our escape.

Homemade Board Game (7:51)

I'm not sure exactly what the avatar for the player character in this game is supposed to be. All of the art is a bit exaggerated and cartoonish, and some of the recognizable structures seem much larger than they are in real life. So my character is probably some kind of small animal, but I can't see well enough to tell what. I'm almost out of the building when I realize it's a worm. Curled up in a spiral and bouncing along on its tail. Ah.

Outside, a spider and a woman with a lightsaber are waiting to kill me. I hide in a tunnel while I try to figure out what to do. My primary weapon is some kind of projectile weapon that I charge by holding down a button, then fire by releasing it. I'm not completely sure how to aim it. I try charging it while behind a corner, then briefly darting out to fire before hiding again, but my accuracy is not very good and despite my cover, I come very close to dying. Then I wonder if maybe the spider and the lightsaber-woman aren't actually allies--maybe they'll start fighting each other if I can get them close enough to one another! I run out to find that they're already fighting. With one last swipe, the woman kills the spider. Without waiting for her to notice me, I hit her with my own lightsaber. Her health bar was low enough that the one hit kills her.

There's a cutscene: the camera pans across the street to a view of one of my allies on top of a flat-roofed building, then zooms in on an enemy climbing up an outside ladder. I have to kill that enemy before he gets to my ally, but I'm really far away. I took too long with the previous battles. My main enemy is not present, but his booming laughter accompanies the end of the cutscene, mocking me for my inability to help.

I run as fast as I can, charging the gun and trying to gauge how much I'll have to lead the guy on the ladder in order to hit him from this distance. My aim is not very good, though. . . .

Later, the enemy is dead, and a third ally has joined me and the other person (a woman). He reports that all of the enemies are gone, but now he will have to "let her blood." A double agent! Before he can speak another word, I punch him in the face, and he goes out cold. I get prepared for the woman to insist indignantly that she could have defended herself, but she doesn't.

Later, the woman is my sister. She's explaining that before the enemies attacked, she was working on a new board game that she designed with a friend of hers. She shows me a table of instructions. It's in German, but I manage to work out that there are four players, identified by the German words for "Northeast," "Northwest," etc. But then there's a fifth player that must be "Central." That worries me. There's no way the gameplay can be equivalent for all five players when one of them starts in the center. With four it would be fine. I debate trying to explain this to my sister. Later, I see the actual gameboard, which is apparently not symmetrical at all. It's divided into irregular territories on a continent. Lots of the territories have a picture of a building or other structure on them, which I assume are the structures that can be built on that territory. Some of the structures are portal rings, others are orc strongholds which I think are the places where each of the five players starts out. There are only two or three territories separating some of the strongholds, which seems too close to me, but I decide not to criticize that, either. Let her have her fun.