non-lucid

Extra Concerts

Somebody's been adding extra concerts to the program. It's almost concert night already, and we haven't known about the concerts long enough to prepare adequately. The conductor advises us, in lieu of getting the notes right, that we focus just on the rhythms. She sends me and another musician out into the hallway to find a room to do some last-minute practicing. The hallway's crowded, so the other girl pulls me into a practice room. It's small, and there are no windows, so I find myself wondering if she plans to make out with me--though I realize maybe that's wishful thinking.

Even though I'm not a singer, I've been given a part to sing. But there's no music on the page; it's just the words. How am I supposed to learn the song if I haven't been told what the notes are? I try to look around for someone who looks like she knows what she's doing.

Now I'm acting in a demonstration of some kind. I have to improvise my choreography on the spot. It's kind of fun, though, because I have one of those wide brooms. I've always wanted to dance around with a broom. I'm in a department store, and I do some flips over clothing racks. Then it occurs to me that I could pretend to be Harry Potter and fly around on the broom, so I accelerate down an aisle and come crashing into the floor. I think it works pretty well as a stunt. Afterward, Mom tells me that she counted at least nine cool moves in my choreography, which is gratifying. Also, she says she saw one of our neighbors in the audience; maybe I should find him to chat.

Public Service Lesson

My sister is carrying some food, walking towards us. Maybe a pound of PB&J slides out of her food and lands on the sidewalk. Gross. But of course she doesn't even pause to consider picking it up. My mom takes the opportunity to grab a paper towel and clean it up for her, at the same time giving her a verbal lecture about being a good citizen. Obviously, my sister's heard all of these things before, but Mom gives the explanation as though she's talking to a small child. I think that's a good way to do it--subtly imply that anyone except a small child should already know these rules. Mom finishes the lecture by pointing out that if any food gets stuck on the rim of the trash can while you're throwing it away, you should wipe off the trash can as well.

Private Investigator

I'm in a diner, talking to a suspect. I'm trying to trick him into admitting something. I know that he knows that's what I'm trying to do, though, so I'll have to be doubly clever. We're walking around the building, through various rooms, when someone body-checks me into a counter. In a threatening voice, he says I've been talking to too many Asians. Obviously, he wants me to stop asking so many questions. I walk toward the front of the diner. A manager sits at a table there, talking to someone else. It looks like they're doing a drug deal, except they're exchanging magazines.

Frags:

• "election results"
• During the morning, I'm walking around doing various things, all of which must be completed by a specific time in the afternoon. When I check my watch, I realize that it's already past 11:00--much later than I thought it was.

Modesty (6:57)

I've stayed the night at an acquaintance's house, but we're not exactly friends. In the morning, I'm looking for a bathroom when I pass a room where he's talking with some friends. They see me. I'm not wearing a shirt at the moment, and I hope they don't think that's rude of me.

Challenge Level (6:57)

I and a friend have decided to play the challenge dungeon in this game. It's the sort of freakishly difficult level that's unlockable at the end of a game in order to get the player to put in a few more hours playing it. So my friend and I are running around this dungeon, working together to kill monsters. So far, it's only been one monster at a time, albeit tough ones. Then we run around a corner and I accidentally step in a shallow pool of lava. I jump out again quickly. Then we're attacked by a Charizard. It almost kills us before we hide behind a corner. I charge up my breath attack, then step around the corner to hit the Charizard with it. It takes two shots, but finally, we succeed. Then there's a cutscene showing about a dozen monsters marching in formation down the hallway towards us. No more of this one-at-a-time business, apparently. This must be where the dungeon gets freakishly difficult. My friend and I share a laugh, accepting that this is probably the end of our playing today.

Spoiler for sexual content:

Now the camera switches to the inside of the next room. Sort of a sneak peek at what's waiting for us there if we get through the monsters. There's a naked woman having a conversation with some other people. She's distressed about something; something related to living in a dungeon. I'm impressed by the realism of the graphics for her body. It's definitely sexy. Another naked woman comes into the room, and to demonstrate her point about everyone always wanting her around just to be sexy, the first woman says, "Everyone always wants me to do this:" And then she and the other woman get on the floor and start grinding. A couple moments later, I wake up for the predictable reason.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

It's Your Destiny (6:58)

A red-haired anime girl repeatedly walks up to my character and hands him a note. Half the time, she folds it into a paper airplane and blows it at him like she's blowing a kiss. The other half is a similar animation that also involves her blowing something at him. It's obvious that only these two animations were made, and they alternate randomly for variety. In both, after she delivers the note, she uses a pink rod about the size of a penis, which turns into an umbrella, and she floats away.

Some girls I know who have played the game before tell me that no matter how you play it, your character ends up with that girl. It has something to do with your destiny. I'm resistant to this idea, but there's clearly a different girl following me around in the game to enforce my destiny. The next time I see her approach, I get ready to do battle. I'm not exactly excited at the concept. I have a premonition that this battle will involve throwing fireballs, though, so at the least it will give me inspiration for lucid dream control, when I ever have one again. [D'oh!]

Indeed, one or two golf-ball sized fireballs are thrown. We also try setting traps on various pieces of furniture, but I'm not sure exactly how to set them off. Anyway, this girl is herself not an expert at this kind of fighting, so I'm not completely flattened. Some people my age are standing in a nearby driveway (it's dusk), which complicates things, because I think we're supposed to keep our abilities a secret. As I'm looking around, I notice an uncanny coincidence: of the three groups of people standing nearby, all are holding or manipulating a car tailgate/rear bumper, and our spells start affecting all three bumpers at once. It's such a strange coincidence that I start to wonder whether maybe destiny has something to do with it.

There's a man walking around the bar, singing enthusiastically along with the background music (which is Copeland's Hoedown). Our battle ends at the same time as the music.

Gingerly (6:58)

My family is walking into a building through a room with a lot of dog poop in it. Fortunately, there's a clear path around the side. Unfortunately, my mom trips and falls into the dirty part, then rolls through the dirty part before coming to a stop. That last part was totally unnecessary. She could have stopped herself somehow. My sisters are making loud, disgusted noises.

On the way out, I consider going around the other way, but it turns out that there are a ton of cobwebs between the car and the wall of the garage. Not worth it. So I go ahead of the group back around the original way so that I can open the door. We're talking about how this was just a routine checkup for our dog, but last year's checkup was routine and it led to discovering an illness which she hasn't recovered from to this day. So we're hoping for good news, but we're worried. We're also trying to coordinate times and places, because there's something I need to go to on my own, and someone else will have to pick me up.

Burnt Sugar Cookies (6:58)

Last night, someone made SO MANY sugar cookies. Dad shows me the box. They're all a little burnt, so they're brown rather than beige. They're going to be used as rewards. Dad also shows me the container which is supposedly full of grease from all the cleaning that had to be done afterward.

We try talking to my middle sister about something stupid she's doing. Mom's been trying to convince her to stop, but she isn't listening. I decide to pipe up and try to calm things down. I admit to her that I don't know as many of the details of the situation as Mom does, but I still agree with Mom's assessment that she should stop. I try to give some reasons, but I'm not sure that she listens.

Later, we're sitting around the dinner table. Dad tells everyone about how I've solved some of my professor's "Challenge Problems." I hadn't been planning on bringing it up, because that would be bragging. But now everyone's looking at me expectantly, so I say yes, I solved two of them. "Both of which I've already seen from other sources," I add. My eldest sister says encouragingly that there's no problem with that; it's all about "unifying the notation." I nod. I'd never thought of it that way before.

Springtime Traditions (6:58)

Spoiler for Springtime Traditions:

There's a video choreographed to "Rite of Spring." Right now, we're at the frenzied section towards the end of "Mock Abduction." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the accompanying video shows three couples lying parallel to each other, having sex. The video cuts are all over the place. I have a feeling I know what's coming. Indeed, on each of the last chords before "Spring Rounds," everyone convulses together. A helpful white label appears on screen, too, saying, "orgasm." I wake up messily.

Frags:

• Someone asks me my year in school, so I hold up three fingers. "Fourth?" they ask. I suppose the little short wall between us might have gotten in the way, so I raise my hand higher and say, "Ah, no, third," and they say, "Ah, of course." I wonder if my pinky wasn't folded over far enough the first time.
• There's a free bottle of alcohol lying around, so I grab it. Reading the label, I see that it's apparently bourbon. Excellent; I haven't tried that kind yet. [IRL I have this thing where I kind of want to try all the different kinds of alcohol, and then maybe never drink again after that. Who knows.] I put the bottle in my backpack. I still feel weird doing things like that; I feel like it should be illegal for me to possess alcohol. But it's not, anymore.
• I witness an awesome piece of scenery, and I try to impress it on my memory. It might have involved clouds.