non-lucid

Más Despacio (7:06)

I'm sitting at a bar near an adult I've recently met when, on a whim, I say something to him in Spanish. Hardly missing a beat, the man responds in kind. It's clear he's more fluent than I am, and I'm worried this may have been a mistake. Nevertheless, I reply. He says something so fast that I actually have no idea what it was. After internally struggling with myself for a second, I reply, "Más despacio, por favor." He repeats himself a bit slower, but I still don't catch it. I say so, but I tell him not to worry about repeating it again, because maybe it was a mistake to try this. He insists, though, and this time I understand that he was saying that his wife knows about as much Spanish as I do.

Animation Studio (7:06)

I'm with a group of students roughly my own age, some a bit younger. We're exploring some kind of museum, or maybe it's an animation studio. In some of the exhibits, there's a trailer playing for some new animated movie, and I make it a goal to see all of the trailers before leaving. One of the rooms has an unusual second floor, almost like a system of catwalks, except in the same architectural style as the room below, which involves a lot of white. On the lower floor, most of the group is reenacting a scene that involves moving in slow motion. I'm participating, but I still wander up a staircase to the second floor. I find a section of floor that's transparent glass--there aren't even any reflections on it, so it looks like it's not there--and it turns out that the rest of the group is right underneath me. I wonder if they notice me apparently walking around on air above them. Then I go back and find a staircase in the corner of a room--it's so narrow that you have to squeeze through feet-first like you're spelunking--and I return to the first floor. In slow motion, I walk back into the group of students. I pass a blond girl whose current pose shows a bit of crack above her pant line, but when I look a second time, there's not even any midriff showing.

Later, I walk into a room, looking for someone to talk to. Indeed, there's a girl in here whom I know from high school, but the first thing she does is shoot a Nerf gun at me. Then another guy jumps out from behind some chairs, and they start having a Nerf gun battle. So much for talking. There's a trailer playing in this room, and I think it's the only one I haven't seen yet. So that's good, at least.

"I think you like me" (7:05)

I meet a group of people near my house. We discuss something. I'm particularly impressed by a certain old man, so when the group splits to go its separate ways, I decide to follow him. A little way down the road, he turns around with a smile to say, "I think you like me." It must have been pretty obvious that he was my favorite person there. Oh well.

Later on, I'm taking a train with him and with one other person closer to my age. There are a few women sitting at a table in the station where we get off, and one of them promises to kiss us if we make everything go smoothly. It's an unusual promise, but I like it.

We're off the train and it's about to pull away from the station when I remember that I forgot a deck of cards on board. There's no time to explain, so I dash back in, grab it, and run back to a door. The train's already moving at a good clip, so I'll have to dive and roll. There are too many railings and banisters in the station, and outside the station, there's still a concrete sidewalk. And the train's still accelerating, so this will get more dangerous the longer I wait. But suddenly the sidewalk gives way to grass. I can't hope for better, so I dive. Right about when I hit the ground, my alarm goes off.

Horse and Lava (8:45)

I sit down to play a game I haven't played in a while. I don't mean to play for very long, but when I finish the first level, I'm intrigued enough to play the next one, as well. I don't remember exactly how it goes, and it seems like it will have distinctly different game mechanics than the previous one.

It involves riding a horse around a 3D landscape. If you fall too far, your horse lands on all four feet and just stands there, but the screen fades to black and you start again from the place you fell. I guess they didn't want to make a horse death animation, in case it traumatized the little kids that play the game. Anyway, I manage to climb down a cliff into a red, rocky canyon crisscrossed by streams of lava. I don't think I was supposed to come down this way, but I complete the objective and then find my way out of the canyon by the way I was supposed to enter. Jumping over the streams of lava takes precise timing, and you can feel the heat of it at your back. I keep expecting some difficult enemies to appear, but they never do.

At the mouth of the canyon, three ghostly ancestral figures rise out of the sandy ground. They declare that since I have succeeded in my objective, they will allow me to do one final task to gain their assistance. We start to travel together across the sands, then the scene fades to black and reappears again at the beginning of the next level. My character laughs and tells his horse that he can't come, this time, because of the nature of the task. So it looks like I'll be doing this level on foot. Well, that's different enough that maybe I should try this level, too. I try out the controls for walking around on foot, because I'm not really used to them.

Unethical (8:45)

This game has a top-down view similar to Heroes III. I'm currently being told how the two nations I'm looking at have been unfairly put upon because of their small size. In fact, on the map, each "nation" has a grand total of two buildings. It's an example of that tendency in video games to compress the world. Right now, one of those buildings is being robbed of all its valuables, because the nation doesn't have enough guards to patrol it. My parents send me over to grab some of the loot.

The interior of the building is covered in rolls of coins. When you click on a coin, it disappears, revealing some of the floor underneath. One of the first structures I reveal is one of those ones that enhances your stats when you visit it. That makes me feel a bit better, since it seems I was intended to visit this place. I hear some of the high officials of this nation discussing the robbery. I'm not sure where they are, and I'm not sure why they're not coming in to find me if they know it's going on. I feel bad for them, though. I take my loot and go back home.

My family starts doing stuff with the loot, and suddenly I become utterly convinced that this was unethical. We didn't need this stuff. At the very least we could have left it for some other, needier people to steal. I try to explain this to my parents, but they don't agree. I try to take inventory of some of the loot to prove it to them. Most of what I took was coins, so probably 99.9% of the value of the loot came from that. But we also took a lot of food, so I try to sort it in order to get some kind of handle on how much excess value we took. It takes some time to get everything together. The whole time, I'm just feeling a sort of righteous anger at my family. I get through to them, a little bit, but I still need to gather up all of the candy we took. My family all start eating Starburst and--to my incredulity--dropping the wrappers on the driveway. Littering, on top of theft? I yell at them a bit and then start peeling the wrappers off of the ground (they're wet). There are way too many wrappers here for them all to have been dropped in the last few minutes. They must have made a habit of this over months.

Soon after, some cars pull up at the bottom of the driveway. Law enforcement, probably. I'm happy they're here, even if it means I might get in trouble for being involved.

Oops (8:45)

Birgitte walks onto a bus and announces herself. She has brownish skin. There's a big man standing on the bus with his arm around a girl with blackish skin. It is understood that this man is Gaidal Cain, so he must've mis-identified this other woman as the one he was destined to be with. Oops. He look sheepish. Stepping away from the other girl, he attempts a suave introduction of himself to Birgitte.

Frags:

• a youtuber who makes videos about sexuality

College Medley (4:06)

On a college forum, one of the residential houses has posted something that they shouldn't have. One of the house members has edited the post to add a lot of his own text, in red font, pointing out why it was a stupid decision to post this online. I can empathize with his frustration--it's hard to stop a hundred different people from doing something stupid.

We're not sure who will be teaching our math class. Suddenly someone offers to call a professor he knows. I recognize the name--it's one of my old physics professors. He was . . . not very formal . . . when it came to math, so I'm worried at the prospect of taking a math class with him. I try to communicate this to a nearby classmate of mine, but then I realize that that classmate might not have been in physics with me. Oops.

This classmate and I take turns driving each other around. We listen to classical music while I'm driving, but when it's his turn, I can't find anything but pop on the radio. I've no idea how to make a good soundtrack with such music, so I decide to stop fiddling with the radio. Then we see a truck careening around a corner ahead of us, passing us to go back the way we came. That must be the professor arriving. We should head back.

As I'm getting out of the car, I see to my shock that there's a crocodile lying across the path in front of the car. It's too late to jump back inside, because the crocodile charges! Yes, it's as fast as I've always been warned that they are. Desperately, I try to fend it off with a chair. Eventually I scare it off by singing very loudly. I continue singing as I run down the path towards the house, knowing that the crocodile could return for another attack at any moment. Sure enough, it does.

Board Game Foul (7:07)

In excitement, I accidentally bump the game board, and pieces go sliding everywhere. Dang it, that's such a board game foul! Except somehow magically they stayed in their original configuration, they just slid off of the board. Phew. Okay, so now I just have to move them carefully back onto the board. We start giving the pieces vocal commands, and they go back to the board as if marching in formation, turning together and doing about-faces and everything. When the last piece gets back into position, though, I don't recognize the configuration. Is that really what the board looked like? Now the pieces are actual, life-size people, and I'm standing on the ground with them. Part of the configuration involves people crouched on all fours, each one with another person standing straddling them. I shout that I don't recognize the scenario, and a man shouts back that that's because we haven't played this one yet! Before I can reply, we're under attack, and everyone is moving. A woman dressed in furs brandishes a sword at me, and I figure that I'd better fight back.

Feces (7:07)

[This is my second dream about poop in recent memory. What the heck?]

Our pet dog is about to start defecating in the yard, so I'm trying to force her out through the gate to the other side of the wooden picket fence. The trouble is that I'm about to start defecating, too, and I don't know how much other poop is already lying in the yard. I could step on it at any moment, so I need to watch the ground, but I also need to focus on getting the dog out of the yard. It's an impossible situation, and gross. I wake up, sort of.

Notification of Acceptance (7:07)

I've been playing a handheld game, but the battery's almost dead. I save quickly, then shut down. The computer asks if I'm sure I want to turn it off, giving a list of files that will be deleted. Since I just saved them, I think it's safe to continue shutting down, so I do. Then I plug it in and turn it back on to check whether the files are still there. When I check in the game save location, I find an old version of the files--the most recent one wasn't saved! Then I check the other location, and the new version isn't there, either! Oh, no! Then I enter some kind of computer recovery mode, and I find a bunch of swap files (or whatever) that the text editor uses while it's in use. Some of them contain almost-up-to-date versions of the files, thank goodness.

Later, my orchestra conductor is walking around the dorm, notifying people personally that they've been accepted to the orchestra. I watch as she knocks on one door and it is opened by a pair of boys who look like they're about seven years old. The boys tell her about how they're in the middle of taking a practice SAT right now, but they don't look like they're in a big hurry. How did they get into this university at that age, and without taking the SAT? I peer into the room, and I see the practice SAT on the TV screen. It's a sort of video game. The current question has something to do with baseball, and there's a timer counting down from about two and a half minutes. I hope they don't lose the game because of this interruption. Then my alarm wakes me up, which makes me happy. No wonder both save files disappeared, and no wonder those kids were so young.

Frags:

• An old woman points out that my mother couldn't have been a cat, because then I'd be a kitten, and I'm not a kitten. Her observation has more to do with my age than my species.
• I'm watching a TV show. I notice that many (probably half) of the people in the current scene are naked. I'm glad that, here at least, the TV industry has gotten over its insistence on censoring nudity.

You get what you pay for (7:08)

A couple of my cousins are in town, and Mom is driving all of us plus my youngest sister to a class. My sister and I aren't in the class, so we're just coming along for the ride before Mom drives us somewhere else. But when the class starts, to my surprise, Mom starts lecturing. It's a class about conducting an orchestra. Quietly, I remark to my sister that it seems like we'll have to stay for the whole class. She looks outraged.

I decide to open my brand-new conducting baton. For some reason, it's hard to see from the outside what the baton will look like. When I tear open the plastic-and-cardboard packaging, I discover that it's some sort of assembly with a handle and four identical attachments that look like big hexagonal construction nuts. The handle emits a broad-angle red laser, which you can focus to a narrower beam by adding one or more of the nuts (which are apparently lenses).

After testing this out, I'm angry. I just read somewhere that conducting batons work by blocking the light from objects behind the baton, so you can see it. But this baton just emits light of its own, and there's no way it's effective. I'm mad about what I got, as I'll tell anyone who will listen. Honestly, instead of all that fancy laser stuff, it would have been even cheaper to make a typical white plastic dowel, or whatever. Why couldn't they have done that? Mom stops her lecture to come down and see what's bothering me. I realize that I only paid six or seven dollars for this baton, which is really cheap, so I shouldn't expect good quality. You get what you pay for, I suppose.

Recreational Vandalism (7:08)

While riding the subway with a friend, I happen to have a couple of baby carrots. I wonder if they're strong enough that if I stuck them into the window, it would open and close a few times and break off entirely (sort of like jamming a gear with a wrench). Even before I say so out loud, my friend suggests we have fun and vandalize the train. Well, okay. So I do the thing with the carrots, and my friend does something similar about six feet away, and it turns out to be really effective. Half the side of the train on our side breaks off, exposing us and the rest of the passengers to the wind. The train pulls up to the next station, and I try to act nonchalant as I get off, despite the fact that the car around me is completely destroyed.

Of course, there is an investigation. My sister is very angry with us for having done what we did, so she helps the investigation assemble evidence against us. Once, I come across a big pile of evidence on the floor, and I wonder what would happen if I just took some of it. I'd probably get in trouble for obstructing justice, though, so I leave it. When the day of our interrogation comes, my friend and I try to be extremely friendly so the investigator will be on our side.

Frags:

• Two of my cousins have come to visit. I have a sort of friendly crush on one of them.

Someone Else's Dream (6:29)

There's something strange and kind of scary going on. One at a time, a couple of my friends and I have been drawn into this dream scenario. The rule is that the last person to arrive is in control of the dream, even if they don't know that they're dreaming or don't have good dream control. It's scary, because that person could unknowingly force you to do very dangerous things. I'm discussing the situation with my friends when suddenly a new person enters the dream, a stranger to all of us. It looks like a small four-footed creature with wings. We're worried, but then someone points out that the new entity seems very attuned to their mental state--they've already realized they're dreaming, and they're trying to escape. Indeed, the creature is energetically bouncing up and down. After a few moments, it disappears, leaving the previous dreamer in control of the scenario.

Spider Cleaning (8:06)

I'm in the basement of my house when a brusque girl comes walking up to me. She's been sent to clean out the spiders. I hadn't realized there were any spiders, and I say so. In response, she points at the ceiling of the bathroom. There's a sort of shelf made of cobwebs, with a couple big spiders on top and another clinging to the bottom. Oh. Wow, that's actually kind of scary. Then the girl starts swatting at the web with a broom, and the spiders fall to the ground and start crawling everywhere. Naturally, this makes me jump around a lot, and I'm impressed by how the girl seems totally unfazed.

Conference (8:06)

My partner and I are sitting down to have a civil conversation with the villains we've been tracking down. We accomplished this civility by trading parts of the skin from our face. So one guy has darkly tanned skin above his upper lip, and paler skin on his jaw and chin. The other guy has mostly dark skin, except that his lips and a patch of skin around them are lighter. (There are no scar lines at all, so it's not grotesque; it's just weird seeing such stark contrast in skin tone.)

Out With a Bang (8:06)

It's been a long story, and it's drawing to a close with the sole performer remaining on stage dancing to an upbeat musical number. With the final note of the music, she strikes a pose, and at that same instant, my alarm goes off and wakes me up.

Cave Channeling (6:58)

Rand al'Thor is in a giant cavern, being attacked by a fairly weak enemy creature. He tries to use the One Power to make its brain explode inside its skull. The first one or two tries are unsuccessful, and in the meanwhile, the creature is hurting him. But eventually he succeeds.

At another time, someone is trying to levitate a giant rock and drop it on his head. But he manages to deflect it and send it into the depths of a chasm.

There is a dock in this cavern that seems suspicious. Rand does something to it, and a round, apparently dead fish pops out of the water and lands on the wood. After making sure it won't suddenly come alive to attack him, Rand takes the fish back to the place he's made his camp, wanting to cook it. It seems like too much effort to conjure an entire stove to heat the fish, so instead he just warms up one patch of the rocks.

At another time, there is some kind of confrontation on a rock platform jutting out from a wall. The camera for this scene is level with the platform, but a great distance away. You see a woman run from the platform into a doorway in the wall, followed by a man. A heartbeat later, the man comes flying back out and slides backwards along the platform as though punched with considerable force. A few moments after that, there is a burst of fire from the doorway and the woman comes running back out, crying or screaming or in any case in desperate need of healing. I'm impressed by the creativity of the cinematographer, to shoot the scene from such an unusual angle as that.

Back on the platform, there is a discussion going on. One of the Forsaken, Sammael, is lying to a main character. He claims that he's not Sammael. There's another person from the Age of Legends present on the platform who knows the truth of Sammael's identity, though. That person frowns at Sammael whenever he lies about himself, but doesn't immediately say anything to the main character.

Asmodean and Sammael get to talking, and eventually it comes out that one of them is gay. He turned to the shadow mainly because of the difficulty he had in admitting this fact, and also because the other one didn't return his feelings. While watching this, I think wonderingly that it really has become cool to include gay people in all the new TV shows. I also hope that somehow having had this important discussion, the two of them will make up and get together and join the good side.

Passing the Time with Lanfear (6:58)

[Major spoiler for book five of WoT! Also, this dream involves sex.]

Spoiler for Passing the Time with Lanfear:

Lanfear, clad only in black underwear, is lying on a table, masturbating. She's in her headquarters, somewhere, and I guess this is what she does with her free time. I'm sad to learn that she's still alive, since that means Moiraine's sacrifice was for nothing. There are about three men in the room with Lanfear. One of them walks around and gets in a position to have sex with her from behind. I assume he's doing this without asking her, so chances are when she notices him, she'll blow him to smithereens, or something. But to my surprise, she doesn't do anything right away. Only, a few moments later, the man simply disappears, then reappears dressed in a woman's outfit, complete with a wide-brimmed, white hat with a flower.

At one point, Lanfear says something, and suddenly her underwear disappears. Somehow I suspect this was a trap laid by Rand. She triggered the trap a while ago, setting the weave, but it didn't do anything noticeable until just now, when one of the words that she just said set off the effect. Clever. She gets up as though about to go somewhere, and I wonder if she means to do it naked.

Gendered Web Browsers (6:58)

I'm talking to my grandma when she says something about web browsers "for girls." With an internal groan, I try to explain to her that web browsers aren't gendered. I realize that she's from an earlier time, where the distinction between the sexes was more marked, but I have to do what I can to advance the cause of gender equality. I expect to have to repeat myself a few times, since she's hard of hearing, but to my surprise she understands me pretty well. I look at her ear to see whether she's wearing her hearing aid. Her ear looks strange--it's more like a cavity in the side of her head than a projection on the outside of it--but yes, the hearing aid is in. Well, good for her.

Grandma takes me to a room full of computers to demonstrate her point. All of the computers are showing the desktop, and most of the desktop backgrounds are pictures taken by the computer's user. The pictures tend to feature moments from family history--birthdays, vacations, that sort of thing. Admittedly, a lot of these pictures look like they could only have been taken by a female. Grandma sort of has a point, but I still feel like there's something she's not understanding.

Urine (6:58)

Someone from my family is trying to shoot a pet video about a dog. We're all outside in the back yard. They try to get it to do some cute tricks and then howl for a while. They're going to autotune the howling into a cute melody. [Actually, while I'm watching them shoot the video, the howling is already autotuned. It's like I'm half watching-them-shoot, half watching-the-video.]

Later, there's a pet rat sitting at the top of the hill. It's about two or three feet tall. Its trick is that it can pee on command. When I learn that Mom and Dad are planning to have it do this trick, I try to dash out of range, but I'm not fast enough. It feels like I've been hit by a sprinkler from behind. That rat has demonically good aim, and it always makes sure to hit absolutely everyone in range. Well, crap. Now I'm going to have to take a shower.

I look around to see how fared the rest of the family. Mom's not wearing any pants or lower underwear, and she's peeing while standing up. [For some reason, I just take this in stride.] I start walking back to the house, carrying a jar of the rat's urine. My sister is saying something about how we should have collected more urine to donate, and my mom is disagreeing with her. She says that the place accepts only a small amount of urine with each delivery, so there's no point collecting more.

[I've decided to start including some timestamps: when I got in bed, when I got up, and when I recorded each dream.]

In bed from 11:18 to 9:05

Beware Lava 3:29

The eldest competitor first learned to channel a long time ago. An image of burning matchsticks appears. Then the matchsticks burn almost all the way to the point where the person holding the matchstick would get hurt, and the fire gets blown out. That's what happened to his ability. But he's still part of this competition. He's competing against two of his own students, both female. They start in separate, nearby rooms in a Minecraft world, underground. I'm playing as the teacher. He walks around the halls and sees that the doorways of the rooms of his students are blocked by collapsed ice. He's competing with them, yes, but he still feels like he should be nice to them. Back in his original room, he finds a back passageway that he can open using his ability to conjure fire. It leads into the room of one of the students. Then he shoots more fire, but he quickly realizes that it's getting out of control. The student in the room doesn't yet even know he's there, so he'd better warn her.

"Run!" he shouts. Without waiting to check that she does, he drops the wide bucket of water that he was holding. That water is an important resource, and he can't allow it to warm up. Heat is dangerous, here. I start trying to conjure some ice by first pressing 1 to select fire, then Enter to conjure a ball of fire in my hand, then 2 to switch to ice, then blowing on the ball of fire to freeze it, then throwing the ball of ice into a pile on the floor. All of these different buttons are tripping me up, and it's not going very quickly. Suddenly he notices that he forgot to freeze one fireball before throwing it on the floor. It's probably warming up all of the ice balls, making them completely useless. The air in the room feels very warm, and when he picks up the bucket of water, it's warm, too. The floor is especially warm, which probably means that there's lava rising below, melting the ice out from under his feet. It's time to get out of here. There's not even enough time to gather up what few supplies he has. He just runs--back into his original room and over to the far corner, then out with the pickaxe and start digging furiously. To where, he doesn't know. He has no supplies, so he's basically starting over.

An announcer starts speaking over the top of the video, something along the lines of, "Will he survive, alone, without resources, in the dangerous world into which he heads? Find out next time on 'Impossible Minecraft Campaigns!'" Meanwhile, the man is thinking that this was only the first of three episodes, and he's worse off than he was at the beginning--so it's unlikely he'll even survive the next one.

[This dream seems to be partially inspired by the dream incubation (?) I did before going to bed. I imagined myself in a forest, chopping down a tree, when I realize I'm dreaming and then start throwing fireballs everywhere, starting a forest fire. The heat was an important part of the scene, although it was supposed to be awesome, not terrifying, like it was in this dream. There was even a time where I imagined holding a fireball and then blowing on it to turn it into a ball of ice. So it seems like the dream incubation did something, although it was very indirect, and it didn't trigger lucidity.]

Group Hug 6:38

[I don't remember the main plot of this dream, just a side plot that I probably remembered due to its uncomfortable nature. My middle sister has always been trouble.]

Spoiler for Group Hug:

I'm watching TV in a room with a bunch of people. My middle sister is lying on a couch that's directly under the TV, facing away from it. I hear a moan from that direction, but it takes a couple of seconds to register that that was not a usual sound at all. I stare at my sister, wondering if she's dying from some wasting disease. I wonder if I should ask her if she's okay, even though that would disrupt the movie. Then I realize that the moan sounded almost sexual. I'm not sure. She's covered in a blanket, so she could be. . . . I avoid looking at her directly, but from where she's putting her hands and the disgusted sounds the rest of my family is making, it seems like she's probably masturbating.

Later, the main plot has taken the family driving in a car to another place. We get out and I start talking to one of several men standing outside in a group. It's an important conversation, and our discussion basically resolves the main plot. Towards the end, one of the other guys in the group starts muttering audibly to himself. I can't understand what he's saying, but it's distracting, and I realize, delightedly, that that's the point. It's a joke that when you mutter to yourself, you never know what kinds of conversation you might be interrupting. Or that no matter how important your conversation is, you might still get interrupted by a random muttering dude. Either way, it's funny. We all start laughing, and then, to my incredulous surprise, we go in for a group hug. We pretend like we're going to exclude the muttering guy, but then we let him in. All in good fun.

Later, all that's left is to wrap up a few loose ends. My middle sister came with us because she wanted Dad to buy something that removes semen from a uterus. Turns out there was a secret passage that comes up underneath that couch. One can reach it by going through the false back of a cabinet under the TV. So she had actually been having sex with some guy who came through that passage. We never saw him, but when the truth came out, we also found out that she's worried she's going to spill some semen out from the way it came in if she doesn't get some kind of tool to remove it in a controlled fashion. So now that the main plot is resolved, Dad got her some kind of wooden thingy that looks a bit like a spool that should apparently do the job. That ties things up nicely, so it's time to wake up.

I open my eyes into my dorm room and check the time, to see if I woke up in time for class. The clock says the time is 18:90. Converting from military time, I'm shocked to find that it's already evening. Wait a second, that kind of ridiculous lateness usually happens in dreams. And there aren't ninety minutes in an hour. Hah! Nice try. I manage to wake myself up successfully.

Candied Brazil Nuts 9:03

Dad and I park in the driveway and go into the house. A serial killer has been living in here, so we expect there will be a lot of bodies. And yes, there are. A lot of movie stars. There's a living movie star with us now, a young (black) one, and it's tragic to watch his face as he sees all of the bodies. He knew these people. It occurs to me that I'm paying attention to the fact that he's black, when really it shouldn't matter. So I stop thinking about it.

After tidying up a bit, Dad and I get back in the car to head to the picnic. Taylor Swift is on the radio: "We are never ever ever getting back together." Except it's not actually her song--it's a rap song that uses the same chorus. Man, that's what frustrates me about rap. They borrow melodies from classical music and from good pop songs and they just reuse them without adding anything.

We get to the picnic and find Mom. She came earlier than us. She tells us that she meant to clean up the killer's house herself, but she had other things to do first. She didn't mean to leave us with the job. I'm not cross with her about it, but she seems like she's in a bad mood. Then Dad gets mad at me because I forgot to bring the hot dogs. I meant to bring the hot dogs, and I even planned out exactly which hot dogs to bring, but I forgot. One of my sisters tries to defend me by explaining this, but Dad says it doesn't change the fact that I forgot. I suppose he's right. My alarm wakes me up.

Renegade

A recent event has caused a member of the party to turn around and run back in the direction whence he came. The other five or six party members (all of whom are friends in real life) joke about how he's on a renegade quest for revenge--he's so angry about what happened that he's willing to go back an face a werewolf alone, rather than wait to ask for backup. Actually, he hadn't been planning on going back for that reason . . . but a few minutes later, as he comes in range of the werewolf, he decides to kill it. He activates the werewolf transition animation for himself, then (as a werewolf) raises a long, thin sword above his head and charges. He worries about missing, since it's difficult to get the timing right, but he manages to hit the werewolf. With the damage bonus from a charging attack, it turns out to be a one-hit kill!

Awkward

I'm sitting in a room with my parents and my youngest sister. Apparently she heard something at school today, because she asks, "What are tist-estic-cles?" She stumbles over the word as though it's unfamiliar. Oh, dear. As a male, I feel like I should be the one to explain this, but I can't decide where to begin. But then my parents jump in ahead of me and start explaining. I feel like they're not doing a great job of it.

[IRL, that sister is in ninth grade, so she definitely already knows what testicles are, but I guess my unconscious is a bit behind the times.]

Car Solves Relationship Problems

A man on a game show has just explained to the host that he's having some relationship problems with a woman. As far as he can see, he has two options, but both of them have disadvantages. The show host then jumps in to say that all is not lost, because he there's a third option by which he can get the best of both other options! Then the show jumps into a thirty-second explanation of the new option, which is something about buying a new car, because this thirty-second "explanation" turns out to be, basically, an advertisement for a shiny red sports car. The man is a bit nonplussed, and he wonders quietly (so that only I can hear) how many lights they needed to use to get those highlights on the car. By "highlights," I assume he means the horizontal white lines of reflected light along the side of the car that make it look extra-shiny.

Math Battle

I forgot to bring my sword when I entered this dungeon. Swords haven't been allowed in the previous dungeons, so I've gotten in the habit of not bringing them. But now I'm worried that the creatures in this dungeon will be too difficult to kill without one. And a humanoid creature just appeared out of the darkness to attack me. It looks familiar, like the Draugr from Skyrim, but the name that identifies it is unfamiliar to me, so I'm guessing it must be a higher-level version of what I've fought before. Uh oh!

We exchange a few blows. It's not an easy battle, but I think I'll be able to defeat it. I must have gotten used to hand-to-hand combat while going through those other dungeons.

I know that there's a girl somewhere in the dungeon, an adversary of mine, who was somehow responsible for designing the dungeon. Eventually I catch up to her, near a wall with three thick, knotted ropes hanging from the ceiling in front of it. It's the final round of the math competition. I, the girl, and another guy who won the competition last year are the only three contestants remaining. We stand around for a bit while the rules are explained. There are three different math problems to chose from, one at the top of each rope. The first person to climb a rope and solve a problem wins.

Without warning, last year's winner says, "Well, let's go," and starts the stopwatch. It takes a couple of seconds for me to realize what happened. When I finally do, I feel like that was unfair of him, but I don't say anything--I just grab a rope and start climbing. It also seems strange that one of the competitors is in charge of the clock. The girl is behind both of us, somehow out of the running.

The problem at the top of my rope has many diagrams of pyramids constructed by stacking lots of spheres, only sometimes a group of spheres will be missing from the pyramid. As I'm struggling to understand what the problem is asking, the other guy says, "Why are you working on that problem? This one's much easier." Startled, I decide without thinking to switch to the other problem. The other problem has a diagram of a lot of dominoes arranged in a complicated pattern. You're looking at the pattern from off to the side at an angle (rather than top-down). I have trouble understanding what this problem is asking, too.

A bit later, I learn that only a few seconds remain. My answer sheet is still blank. I decide to leave it that way. Not a very good show, but I'll just try to do better next time. I'll try not to let people like that guy throw me off by making me second-guess which problem to do.

I go back to my seat as we wait for the results to be announced. For a moment, I'm confused, because it looks like there's someone already sitting in it. But then I look again, and it's empty. I must not have been looking at the right place.

The teacher starts discussing how to use graphing calculators to perform addition of "structs." I listen to the first couple of sentences, but then I tune out, because I already know how to do this. Suddenly I think I'm dreaming, and I wake myself up.

[These dreams were not very fun. I felt kind of sad this morning.]

Pop Music vs. Classical Music

Listening to a pop song, I realize that the intro is taken from a piece of classical music. But they really messed up the phrase when they took it out of context and changed it like that. I'm frustrated. I try to find a family member, so I can explain to them what the problem is.

Malicious Shower

Trying to avoid notice becomes somewhat more difficult when my sister shows up in the restaurant. Mentally, I change my disguise to a short-haired Korean woman with a strong accent. I walk to my sister's table to ask her a question, and after we exchange a few sentences, I realize that she thinks I'm one of her new students just arrived for orientation. My disguise looks just like one of the students she just met.

The manager of the restaurant comes over to say that I can have as many samples as I desire before deciding what to eat. After he's gone, I decide to try some of what my sister's table ordered. The trouble is, it's still in a tin baking pan, and whenever we try to cut a bit off of it for me to eat, the pan just spins in circles. There's not enough friction. But eventually we hold it still long enough for me to cut halfway through and rip the piece the rest of the way off. It tastes good. I wind up for a high five with my sister; it's funny because we're both wearing oven mitts on our right hands. But afterwards, I worry if that might have blown my cover.

I wander around the restaurant and arrive at the conveyor belt that customers use to return used dishes. It's similar to the oversized baggage claim in that there are a limited number of slots. You have find an empty slot and try to slide your dishes into it as it rotates past you. A slightly awkward kid from my school is in line in front of me; I doubt he has the chops for this. Plus, the employee overseeing the conveyor belt points out that there's only one slot open. The kid tries to slide his tray at the slot, but he hesitated too much, and it hits the rubber divider. The overseer takes the tray and puts it in the next available slot, and then it's my turn. Fortunately, it looks like there are a lot more open slots, now. But it turns out that I miss, as well.

I have to go to the bathroom. I haven't seen one in this restaurant, so I walk through the big hallway connecting the restaurant to the other business in this building. The main room of the other business is very tall, and small circular tables dot the floor, spaced pretty far apart. It's a nice room, very open. There's a big window in one wall, and the others are painted in light colors. It's the second time I've visited this room; I was here once before my sister came into the restaurant. And yes, there is a bathroom!

I go inside, but when I go into the stall to pee, I'm doused from above with a lot of water. I try to get out of the shower of water, but then another one starts above my new location. It's like there are fire-extinguishing sprinklers all over the ceiling, with laser detection so that they start pouring whenever anyone stands under them. I mean, I wouldn't mind the shower, but I don't think I have any way to dry myself off. Oh, wait--there's a brown towel hanging from a hook just inside the stall. Good thing I thought to bring that. I go back into the stall and try to pee, but it's difficult. I have to hold up the toilet seat with one hand while standing pretty far back from the bowl and aiming my urine carefully.

When I wake up, no, I don't actually have to go to the bathroom.

Unsanitary

[Content warning: this one features poop.]

Spoiler for Unsanitary:

I have to go to the bathroom, so I start peeing in the front hall, naked. There's a place for me to do that, there, but there's no place to poop, so it's bad news when poop starts coming out, as well. I couldn't stop it because I had to finish peeing, first. Fortunately, it's pretty dry. Although I don't really want to, I don't have much choice, so I put my off hand under my butt and try to hold the poop there. I decide to go into the bathroom, since I suspect my sister is in the family room, and she probably doesn't want to see this. When I open the bathroom door, I'm taken aback by the mess. There's a house centipede on the floor, and also a trail of what looks like wet grass leading out of the bathtub. I wonder if it's marijuana--maybe my other sister was doing something in here. It would be just like her not to clean up after herself. But I'm just going to have to deal with the mess, because I'm in sort of an emergency situation.

Slushie Shop

Dad and I are on the way to an event I want to attend. It's an hours-long drive from my house. We're passing a slushie shop, and Dad asks me if I want anything. I don't, really, so I reply, "Only if you're really hungry." He stops anyway, so he probably only asked me because he wanted to visit the place himself.

Another day, we're going to the same event, and we stop at the same shop. This time, they're understaffed, so they tell us it will take half an hour for the slushie to be ready. It takes a moment for that to sink in. There's no way we have half an hour; we didn't build that much extra time into our schedule. My soccer game starts pretty soon. But we stay anyway. While we wait, we sit at a table with two employees of the shop. One of them gets to talking with my dad about the four districts of Denver. One of the districts is mentioned by name, and the male employee starts talking about a building in that district which is associated with the gay rights movement. He's in favor of it, and he's frustrated with people who are making trouble for the building. After he leaves, the female employee apologizes for him, saying that he doesn't understand that gays are degenerate people [or something to that effect]. I don't respond, since I don't want the situation to escalate, but I reflect upon the apparent fact that everyone against the gay agenda is just a homophobe.

Another day, we're going to the same event, but this time my mom is driving me. We stop at the same shop. My mom tries to pour the slushie from the machine herself, but it doesn't go too well. Worth a laugh, though.

Procrastination

As I'm driving in the right lane along city streets, something important falls out of the passenger side of the car. I really don't want to go back for it. It seems like that would be a huge hassle. On the other hand, I need that something when I get to my destination, so if I don't stop now, I'll just have to stop later, and that would be even more of a hassle. Reluctantly, I look for a place to pull off on the shoulder. I'm not going to turn the car around; I'll just park and walk back. The brakes don't work very quickly, so I miss the first spot I was aiming for, and I have to use the next one. It's right next to a residential driveway. I hope the owner doesn't mind.

Chocolate Graham Crackers

I'm lying in bed in the morning. There's a lot of cereal in the bed with me; my personal stash. But I'm leaving for college in four days, and I'm not sure I can finish all of the cereal in time. I decide to have cereal for breakfast. It's a mixture of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and chocolate graham crackers. Carefully, I dip each piece of cereal in milk using my right hand, then put the dipped piece into my left hand to hold. I'm still in bed, so eventually I'm going to have to carry all of this to the kitchen table.

Incentive

Students are given one piece of candy for each point they got on the last assignment. I got 20/20, which is nice. The students handing out the candy give me two packets of colorful chocolate spheres lined up in a line, then a few extra pieces of some different kind of candy. I'm confused, because I thought there were ten spheres in each packet, so I shouldn't have gotten any extra. But it turns out there are only about eight, so it works out.

Morning Showers

Groggily, I stumble to the showers of the hotel where I'm staying. I can't seem to think straight or keep my eyes open for more than a split second, so it's a moment before I realize I'm standing under the water, holding a paperback book. A book! Quickly, I walk a few steps away and set the book on a shelf, hoping the water damage won't be too bad. I go back to the shower and stare at the wall for a few seconds. Suddenly I wonder if I'm wearing my glasses--are those its rims that I can see around the edge of my vision? I put a hand to my face. Yep, I'm wearing them. Wow, I must be really tired. I take off the glasses and put them in a basket nearby. I continue with my shower for a few minutes, but something's bothering me. I feel like there's some part of the showering process that I've forgotten, maybe something that I forgot to wash. I look down at myself. I'm wearing pants. Argh.

I [falsely] wake up in a hotel room. While I'm still in bed, my sister comes in to talk with me about lucid dreaming. I tell her that in a dream last night, I was scrolling through tumblr. She seems surprised, but she believes me. "So there really is a tumblr in there," she says. ("There" refers to "the dreaming world.") She's been trying lucid dreaming herself, but apparently she still has trouble believing how closely dreams can imitate real life. Right now she seems to be imagining all of the things she could do while she's asleep, all of the stuff she could get done. "There's so much time," she says. "You could fill out forms." She's always seemed rather results-oriented to me.

My sister starts getting ready for the day, but I keep lying in bed, thinking about how much I DON'T want to take a shower. I know I'm being lazy; I just really, really do not want to take a shower. Internally, I wonder how long it's been since I turned off my alarm at 7:00. [IRL: I meant to get up at seven, but when my alarm went off, I decided I was just too tired.] Out loud, my sister says in a surprised voice that it's already 11:00. Dang, that's late. It's time for me to get moving, whether I want to or not.

I enter the long, windowed hallway that leads from my room to the showers. Sullenly, I consider taking off my clothes and walking there naked. It seems an appropriate punishment for the world that made me get up when I didn't want to. But I don't do it. I reach the end of the hallway, which dead-ends in a pair of double doors. Confused, I realize I must have missed the turn. When I start going back the way I came, I look through a window and see a dome-shaped structure off to the side of the hallway up ahead. That must be the showers. I vaguely recall that the architecture looked dome-shaped from the inside.

Soon after, I actually do wake up. I'm amused to note that I'm actually NOT strongly opposed to the idea of taking a shower. And it's only a little after 8:00.

Flute Solo

As a favor, I've asked a teacher to come play a piece of classical music for me. Now, another teacher and I watch as she performs an arrangement of it for solo flute. I had been worried she would refuse, so I'm glad she's doing this. She's quite good. In fact--is she somehow playing two lines of music at once? I listen closely but am unable to decide. Perhaps she's just switching between the two lines of music depending on which one has the moving notes. She reaches a climax in the music with lots of fast, leaping intervals. During the slower section after that, she interrupts the music to say to me, "Have fun practicing that." (An ensemble in which I play will be learning the same piece, soon.) A phrase later, she stops playing again to say something else, and eventually she stops playing the piece altogether, once it's clear that there are just a few slow chords remaining. The other teacher, who has been holding up a triangle in preparation to play it with the last chord, mimes teetering on the brink of playing then falling over from the waist. She's obviously saying she's disappointed that the flautist didn't properly finish the piece. After this, I think there's one more piece for us to go over.

Standing Room Only

People standing in the back are having a hard time seeing the presenter, so they keep shifting around in a counter-clockwise direction. Even though I'm back there with them, I think the constant shifting is more annoying than not being able to see. Cynthia, standing next to me, agrees. (Cynthia's a college housemate of mine, a year older than me.) Suddenly, the whole audience starts moving. Apparently the presenter noticed all the milling around in the back and decided to try to fix things himself. So now those people have made him interrupt his presentation. I hope they're happy.

As we're moving around, I stretch my arms over my head. Realizing that my left arm is behind Cynthia's head, I decide I might as well put my arm around her shoulders. It's a bit of a cliche, but I need all the help I can get. At first, Cynthia doesn't react. Then she moves my hand from above her shoulder to under her armpit, and says, in a surprised voice, "Glieuaeiel, you've put your arm around me." Like she's known all along that we're interested in each other, and the only slight surprise is that I would choose now to make a move. Then she calls me a first-year, which is an unfair dig at the fact that I'm younger than her (since in fact I'm a third-year). She's always been one to worry about not acting her age, though, so maybe it really does bother her. Anyway, it's actually a bit uncomfortable walking around in this position. [I guess the arm-around-the-shoulder thing is best used when nobody's moving.]

The presenter is saying something about wizards and what effect the concept of wizards had on our childhoods. Shortly, everyone starts moving around again, and I get separated from Cynthia. I wonder if I should try to find her again, but I decide she'll be fine on her own. I try to help out by moving some music stands, but then I realize that I'm not sure where they should go. Still holding the stands, I find a seat near the front of house left, then set the stands in front of me. Someone reaches past me to grab one of them, and I realize that the stands were supposed to be distributed so that everybody gets one. I keep one stand for myself and hand the last one to another person sitting near me.

Frags:

• A survey about preferences in fiction genres uses the word "tranny" to mean "the protagonist of a science fiction novel." It must have been written by someone old, who didn't realize that nowadays the word is an offensive term for something entirely different.

Workout Schedule

Spoiler for Workout Schedule:

A woman is considering changing her workout schedule because a recently arrived man want to use the facilities at around the same time. She decides not to. Right now she's doing ab exercises. She notices she's in pretty good shape, so she keeps doing them for longer than she had planned to. I wake up messily.

Out of Order

The members of the adventuring party start singing. It's a very pretty song. I like it a lot. But I can't remember why they're doing it, so I flip to a different part of the book to try and figure it out. That doesn't answer many questions, so I flip around again. Now, before all of this, I'd been near the end of the book. But by the time I'm done, I've found a chapter back in the first third of the book that I don't remember reading at all. Oh, dear. I guess I must have skipped these chapters accidentally, when I was trying to find my place after setting down the book for a while.

LMMS

I open a new project in Linux MultiMedia Studio and start composing. The idea I have in my head uses the string section, so it would be nice to have some good samples for that. I remember that I configured a couple for a previous project [IRL: true], so I open that project and try to copy over the instruments. It works pretty well! Now I guess I should start thinking about how to use percussion. Should I use it to reinforce the string accents, or do they stand well enough on their own?