non-lucid

Old-Time Riddles

I'm reading a set of six or seven old Garfield comic strips. But it turns out they're actually riddles. An old man comes up to me and explains them, one by one. The last one is about balloons: A man buys a balloon in the early 1900s. Then he sets it down and picks it up again, or something. Anyway, the trick to the riddle is to realize that back in those days, people didn't know how to use helium, so balloons didn't float. They weren't held with ribbons; they were held using a sturdy plastic stick. I think this is rather clever, and the old man and I part on good terms.

[Drat! I got the month wrong. Also, sorry about my absence, there. I've been trying to install Linux on my laptop. . . .]

Crash Landing

I'm in an episode of Doctor Who! I'm in a flying craft when I hear some team members calling for help. I expect someone else to help them, but no one does, so after a minute I go over there myself. The two team members, a man and a woman, are sitting side by side, flying the craft from a sort of detachable pod on the side. There's also a giant, black grasshopper in the pod with them. It's not moving, but it looks dangerous, and I assume that's what's worrying them. I get in the pod to help them, but it looks like we're going to have to crash land. We're going too fast; there's no way anyone should be able to survive this. But somehow, with myself at the wheel, we just glide to a halt on the ground. No one's even bruised. I look over at the two other people and say, with a wry smile, "I have no idea how that just happened."

But there's no time to think about that. Everyone gets out of the craft. The man who was next to me takes out a small model of the grasshopper and disparagingly throws it on the ground. Wow, was that all he needed to do to deal with it? Suddenly I remember that the only reason we needed the grasshopper was because it powered the craft, somehow. I'm glad to be rid of it. But then, from the place the model grasshopper landed, bugs begin to rise from the ground--one by one, but quickly, so that soon there'll be an entire swarm of them. And they don't look benign. The Doctor runs in and meaningfully taps his watch. Yep, it's time to get out of here. I try to run on ledges around the side of the cavern, swatting bugs away from my face. Eventually I get away.

Later, it comes to light that the structure in which we now find ourselves is a remnant of an ancestral civilization, forced to escape from its homeland.

Grammar Game

The point of the game is to take regular English sentences and "translate" them into an amusing American dialect. Something about switching from present tense to present progressive. One variant of the game involving the word "grandma" turns out to be pretty hilarious.

Rude Receptionist

I'm talking to a clerk at the front desk of the hotel at which we're staying. Somebody mentions cherries. I'm excited at the chance to practice my Spanish.

"Oh, oh, I know this one. . . . Cer--, uh . . . cerezas!" I grin around the room. "That's 'cherries' in Spanish. I learned that earlier today." [IRL, that's true. And during the dream, I used the memory trick that I invented yesterday for that word: "cereza" is sort of a combination of "cereal" and "cabeza."]

The clerk exhales, shaking her head. She says something about never being very good at Spanish, herself. I think she sounds too defeatist. Then someone comes into the hotel, and she calls him over. "Mr. Branagh!"

Surprised, I look closely at the newcomer. Indeed, it's Kenneth Branagh. I'm impressed at how calm the receptionist remains in the face of a movie star. I guess she's prepared for that, since actors probably stay in hotels a lot. Then she starts talking to him about all of these hotel policies about publicity posters. (He's carrying a bunch of posters, presumably with the intent to advertise his newest project by putting them up around the hotel.) It really seems to me that she's splitting hairs, and I realize she's not only being calm--she's being downright rude. Oh, dear.

Old-Fashioned Bathroom

I enter the bathroom in an old-fashioned wooden building. I'm not sure if I saw the sign correctly when I chose this door, so I might have gone into the women's bathroom by mistake. I look around to check, and indeed, most of the dozens of people in here are middle-aged women. I spot two other males, though, both my own age. Also, I'm using a urinal right now, which has no business being in a women's bathroom. As I'm looking around, one of the other boys says loudly that he thinks he chose the wrong bathroom. The other two of us assure him that there must be something unusual going on, because we made the same mistake. I wonder if maybe this bathroom was designed to be non-segregated. As in, there are two doors, one labeled "men" and one "women," but they both lead to the same room.

Runaway Grandmother

I hand my grandma a walking stick and turn around for a second, surveying the multi-story shopping complex that we're exploring. I hear gasps from behind me, and whirl around to see Grandma falling down the wide staircase behind us. It has a few dozen steps, and she bounces about three times on the way down. Then she gets up and starts hobbling away. She must have tried to put her weight on the stick and accidentally lifted herself off the ground, putting the stick off-balance and causing the whole assembly to fall over backwards, down the stairs. I probably should have given her a shoulder to lean on, or something. In any case, it's my job to go bring her back. As I head down the stairs, someone reminds me to be prepared for her to be stubborn about coming back: she gets recalcitrant if she's just been injured.

I run after her down a hallway and see that she's taken an escalator upwards. I get on behind her, but without missing a beat she climbs over the railing and onto a different escalator headed the same way. Wow, she really is being stubborn. I decide not to climb over--I'll just meet her at the top. But when I look ahead, I see that my escalator bends around and goes back down, while hers just continues straight up. Dammit, what an absurd design! It will be a disaster if she gets away. Even if I can't bring her back, I at least have to keep an eye on her. Now, there's another escalator following the same line as mine that goes halfway down before bending around to go back up. The semicircular railings of the two escalators come close enough that I should be able to climb over both of them. I'm reluctant, because the railing will be trying to pull me sideways as I climb over, so I could easily get injured. But I don't have much choice. I do it.

At the top, I realize that in all the confusion, I've lost track of Grandma. Did I get ahead of her? Is she ahead of me? Where might she have gone from here? Her distinctive gray hair is nowhere to be seen. Someone else from our original party comes walking up to me and asks me how it's going. I'm forced to admit that I think I've lost Grandma.

Pranking Little Kids

An old friend of mine laughingly shows me a small, simple geometric carving (similar to a die) with the word "BOOBS" on one side. He also shows me a table he's made, documenting the reactions of youngish kids when given this carving. These kids are all about the age where they'd be receiving their first sex education, so the idea is that they should be very embarrassed by it. It's amusing to us older kids since theoretically we know better than to be embarrassed by sex. Anyway, his results aren't disappointing: only one kid of the dozen or so he's pranked has managed to get through the encounter without blushing.

Maybe half an hour later, I give the carving back to my friend, joking that I couldn't find anyone who actually wanted to take it from me.

Meats and Sweets

I'm trying to get food at a cafeteria. I've already been through the line once, but somehow I just got a lot of different kinds of meat. Even though I'm not exactly a vegetarian, I feel bad, since I've eaten meat almost every day this week. So I need to go through again, but I don't want to wait patiently in line, so I try to dart in and snag food where there are gaps. After a while I look at my tray again, and apparently I've been grabbing mostly desserts and other simple carbs. Dammit, why is it so hard to put together a decent meal?

Bus Escape

A man's being chased. He passes a building where two female celebrity actors are having a women-only event. It's about to start and there are a whole line of women outside, waiting to get in. Most of them are topless; I guess that's required in order to gain admission, maybe. Anyway, the man pushes his way through the crowd to try to hide inside. They decide to let him hide there for a while. But eventually he has to leave. A city bus driver offers to help him escape, so the man gets in and the bus starts careening around the city. Sometimes there are groups of people visible on the sidewalk that cheer when the bus goes by. They think the bus is coming to pick them up, and they're happy about it because they've been waiting for an unusually long time.

Glacier Simulation

I'm watching an exposition of various different computer models for the behavior of glaciers in the face of climate change. The camera flies over a 3D time-lapse of different glaciers forming and moving, floating on a dark sea. The present model is vaguely unsettling, with swooping camera movements and lots of little ice formations forming and disappearing everywhere. I mutter to myself that it's kind of scary. Then there are people playing in the water, throwing ice at each other, or something. Someone accidentally dies. The creator of this simulation is shocked, saying that he never guessed something like this might happen. He'd just wanted to make a fun game, I guess.

Frags:

• eating pea soup

Gaming for Health

An elderly man is playing a video game, because it'll be good for his mental health. It's a story-based FPS: he has to break into a compound and prevent the men inside from setting off a bomb. I'm watching. I hope he does well.

Stuff happens. By the time he reaches the bomb, the timer is counting down from seven or eight seconds--far too little time for it to be defused, especially since there are still people running around trying to shoot him. Instead he dashes over to a small but deep pool (I think it's connected somehow to a nearby lake or river) and dives in. From several feet below the surface, he looks upward to see the air above the water turn red and orange, blossoming with fire. I think that was a good decision: if you can't stop the bomb, at least save yourself. But it was only half a success, so he has to come back tomorrow (in game time, not real time) to try and stop them again.

Somewhere along the line, I start playing instead of the man. As I approach the complex, I see that there's been a flood. Most of the parking lot is covered in water. But as I look more closely, I realize that the pool in front of me isn't very deep: there's still a road under it. So I splash across.

Black Dragon

A girl my age is playing some kind of Minecraft/Skyrim/Portal hybrid. She's opened some portals to travel away from the base of operations to the island where the black dragon sleeps. At first, they're not sure if the beast is there or not, but gradually they realize that they can hear it breathing on the other side of a long, low ridge. They try to carry out their job quietly.

Suddenly the dragon wakes up! The girl dashes back through the portal, knowing that the dragon will be intent on killing her. She goes through a second portal, then pauses to catch her breath in a hillside cave miles away from where she started. She's hidden from view, so it's all but impossible that the dragon will find her here. And yet, with a roar, it soon thrusts its head through the entrance to the cave. It knew exactly where she was. They must be bonded somehow in a way she did not understand. Wasting no time, she runs farther back into the cave, considering taking out her pickaxe to dig even deeper. The dragon will soon reach her, so she decides to go into a dungeon--right into the middle of a battle. Other explorers like her are fighting against a band of skeletons. A couple of the skeletons come at her with swords, and she fights them off. It's dangerous in here, but less dangerous than trying to fight a dragon on your own.

Roommates

I'm back at school, hanging out with my new roommates. First, we eat in the dining hall. I run into some awkwardness where I want to grab some food from a station, but there are other people trying to get around me, so I have to stand off to the side and wait.

Later, we go back to the room. There will be five of us living here, so we all try getting into the bed to see if we will fit. We won't all fit if we lie side by side, so I try putting my pillow on one end of the bed, while the four others decide to put theirs on the other. Hmmm. It's a bit awkward with our feet getting tangled in the middle, and also I think it's weird that I'm the only one on this side. I try to explain it jokingly, saying that I'm lonely over here. Someone suggests that my roommates from previous years switch sides, and I find myself hoping that my old roommate will refuse: I'm already worried that he thinks I'm attracted to him.

Later, I wander out into the halls for a while, then try to find my way back. I don't remember the room number, so I try a door at random. There are girls in this room, but also one of my roommates, so I'm not sure whether it's my room or not. I'm embarrassed to ask, too. Eventually my roommate comes to my rescue, telling me it's the next door over. As I go over to that door, I look around at the peeling paint and splintering wood in the building, and I realize that our house kind of got the raw end of the deal when we were moved over to this building.

Videobomb

Spoiler for Videobomb:

A woman tearfully tells us of a movement to capture videos of creatures with various numbers of legs. Probably she cares about it so much because it has to do with being friends with animals, or something. She tells us that there are still NO submissions about animals with seven legs, nor any for animals with eight legs. And there are barely any for six legs, either. She shows us the single submission they have for a six-legged animal. Bemused, my dad and I watch it.

A girl walks into a room with a couch. For a moment it looks like there are two other girls making out nearby, but the video quality isn't very good. "I wonder what that was about," I say. My dad grunts noncommittally. The girl is now setting up a camera aimed at a jar containing an unusual insect. It has a large, angular, black shell, about the size of a walnut. The plan is to remove the jar and try to get a good picture of the insect before it runs away. But when she takes of the jar, the insect scurries more rapidly than anticipated, and the picture she snaps isn't very clear. Her sister comes in to help her chase down the insect to get another picture. The video ends.

Then Dad and I click on a related video, where the girl explains some of the background to what she was doing. But it turns out she just says, "This is what my friend decided to wear to the video shoot," and then pans over to look at a couple of girls making out on the floor. One of them's only wearing the bottom half of her underwear. After a moment, the other girl comes all the way into the shot, and I realize she's not wearing anything at all. Perhaps it's sexy; I don't know, because I'm mortified to be seeing this at the same time as my Dad. I can't quite figure out what he thinks of it.

Gym Activities

[Warning: This dream makes no sense. Lol. I think I was half awake for most of it.]

A muscular announcer has just adopted a new stage name. He's discussing it with another announcer. They're throwing back and forth ideas for other, more awesome stage names that he could have chosen. One suggests "VenusMercury." The man admits he likes that one a lot, but he couldn't choose it because of trouble in some Chinese provinces named "Venus" and "Mercury." A map appears, showing that these provinces are at the western extreme of China. Then the video cuts to a field correspondent, hiking through the mountains in that area. She talks to the camera as she descends into a very, very deep crevasse in the earth. It's so deep that I suspect the video must be fake. Anyway, they reach the bottom, where there are two very long "flat escalators" (People Movers?) running parallel to each other in opposite directions. So you can ride them around in circles. They start doing an activity where the correspondent puts tape on the floor and the other person has to pick it up. Soon other people are playing the game, including myself. There are so many lines everywhere that it's ridiculous to imagine we'll get rid of them all. And you can't just erase them, because they're all outlined in black and you're supposed to leave the outline in place.

After a time, I try picking up another line, but the gym teacher cuffs me on the shoulder. Apparently class is over, and the basketball team needs those lines on the floor for their practice. I stop. I just watch as the team comes in and starts practicing. I contemplate practicing archery. It would be cool to be able to shoot an arrow while doing a cartwheel. There are a bunch of little kids in the room, and sometimes they get in the way of the basketball players.

I try to leave, but through the door there's just another gym. I'm not sure whether to try another door in the current gym or try another door in this new gym. I'm lost. I ask someone where the principal is, since chances are he'll be in his office, and if I walk in the opposite direction of the principal's office then I'll probably make it outside. The person points at a wall, and a green light appears. I know that the light is floating over the head of the principal. So I walk to a door on the opposite side of the gym. Now, I don't like the basketball players, so before I go, I make a bunch of bugs appear on the wall. Ten spiders, fifteen flies (to feed the spiders), and twenty bitemes. Hah! That should keep them busy. It'll probably also make the principal mad at me, but I'll be gone long before he gets here.

The door leads to the back yard of the school. There's a playground nearby, but no one's around. It's a dark, overcast day, and it's drizzling. I walk along the side of the building towards the front.

Counter-Bullying

I'm sitting at a desk in a high-school classroom. The teacher is an athletic-looking male, and it's a math class. But I'm not paying attention to that, because I feel something hurting me from behind. Some dumb kid thinks it would be fun to bully me, eh? I half turn in my seat, then casually and carefully bite the finger that's hurting me. I only catch a tiny bit of skin in the bite, but I think it's enough.

"Thank you, for not doing that again," I say. No reply.

A few minutes later, I feel a prick of pain in one of my shoulders that won't go away. Apparently I didn't scare them off last time. I have no idea how they're causing this particular sensation of pain, but I try to get rid of it by rubbing my shoulder against the seat behind me. It stops. After a second, I decide it's time for a confrontation. I turn all the way around and grab the kid behind me by the front of his clothes. He looks to be about fourteen or fifteen, with his hair cut long, a bit like Justin Bieber. He had been laughing quietly to himself, but he's not any more.

"What's your name, kid?" I ask. He just keeps looking around, shifting his eyes and not making eye contact. He doesn't look particularly scared. I'm trying to give him an angry, threatening look, and I'm surprised at how successful I seem to be. It's not a look I've had much experience with.

I look around to see if he had an accomplice. The guy sitting to the kid's right seems to be laughing to himself as well, so I ask him, "How about you, huh? What's your name?" He too stops laughing, but he doesn't answer, either. I notice that both kids have the same basic haircut, and also the same hair color: light blond dyed a faint purple. Anyway, since neither of them are responding, I suppose I should start thinking about how to deliver the rest of my speech.

I get up to walk a few feet away, conscious that other people in the room are probably about to start noticing the confrontation. When I turn around, I'm surprised to find things have escalated: an ally of mine's found a friend of his, and they've ganged up on one of the boys who was bullying me. One of them is pinning the boy's arms behind his back, and the other is winding up to punch him. I suppose they figure they'll get him to talk by torturing him. But that's no good, so I run back and shove them apart with my hands. Now the teacher's definitely coming, so I only have a few moments to finish dealing with the situation my way. I start lecturing the kid from the seat behind me, even as the teacher runs up and tells us in an exasperated, angry voice to get back to our seats. It's clear he just wants to end the disruption; he doesn't really care what caused it. I think I should finish my lecture, first.

I [falsely] wake up. I spend a few moments trying to remember the details of the dream, then I open my dream diary. I'm surprised not to see a date on the page: I usually write tomorrow's date right before I go to bed at night. But then I look at some of the text already on the page and remember that I've already written down some dreams from earlier tonight. So I put down a new bullet point and write down some details from this most recent dream, including "slight purplish hair." My handwriting is unusually small. I hope I'll be able to read it later.

Now, I'm not sure what time it is, and I'm not sure whether I have school today. It's the day after I flew back to Chicago for school. [IRL, I'm still on summer vacation.] I'm mostly moved into my room, except I'm pretty sure some of my stuff is still in storage elsewhere in the city. I'd planned to get that before classes started, so I really hope it's not Monday. But then, I'd planned to fly back on a Friday, so maybe I have the whole weekend left? I'm not sure, so I look for my cell phone to check the date.

The room is large and rectangular, the headboard of my queen-sized bed midway up the longer side. My first cell phone tells me nothing. My second cell phone, a red one, confuses me. [IRL, I don't have a second cell phone.] I can't find the date or time anywhere. Then I see the word "recording" on the screen, and I realize I must have left it recording video all through the night. I wonder what size the file is by now.

Legitimate Theft

A high school friend of mine is running around the house, but he's not supposed to be here. I chase him outside and confront him on the driveway. He's holding a roll of Smarties, and he's already opened it to start eating. Those were my family's Smarties. I'm just so confused as to why he'd do something like that. I try to communicate to him that if he asks nicely, we'd be happy to give him the Smarties--but that it's really not okay to steal them. He agrees. I tell him that he can keep the Smarties this time, but he can never, ever take anything from my family's house again. He agrees again, but then he confidently asks if he can just tell me something.

Uh oh . . . maybe he knows something that I don't. Indeed, he continues on to inform me that he already sent an email to my mom, to explain that he would be coming by today to steal some Smarties. He sent this yesterday, so she had plenty of warning. Hmmm. His use of the word "steal" in that email is strange, but if he got permission from Mom, I guess he didn't do anything wrong. Looks like I've just made a fool out of myself by lecturing him so much. I try to save what little face I can, keeping my confident tone of voice while I back away and admit that this was "my bad," and that everything he did was perfectly legitimate.

Chess and Orchestra

Five or six of us are outside, playing a chess game together. One of my friends from high school moves a knight into the middle of the board. As I look around to see what that move did, I realize that he's successfully blocking almost everyone else's pieces. That was a really good move. It's basically a foregone conclusion that he's going to win.

After the game, I walk back to my room. On the way, I notice a lot of people I know are wearing orchestra jackets and walking in the opposite direction. Shoot, I forgot about the orchestra concert tonight! I dash back to my room and try to dress for the concert as quickly as possible. I have trouble finding my dress pants. My roommate is there working, and he asks me what I'm doing. I tell him that the back-to-school concert is tonight, since it's the end of the first week back. He says no, the concert's at the end of the second week. After a moment, I decide he's right. What a relief.

Garden Path

The Dragon walks along a garden path. There's a wall covered in ivy, and a foot-wide dirt track leading up to it. His wife is dead: apparently she committed suicide by slitting her own throat. But she positioned her body in such a way that he wouldn't realize she was dead until he was close enough to the wound that when he did see it, it would be traumatic. She was evil, you see.

Housemates

I and a bunch of my housemates from school are living together in a big house. Right now, we're playing a game. But I want to take a shower, so I go upstairs and get in. But the stall is really, really cramped: it's just a little triangle in the corner of a room, and the ceiling is low. I have trouble finding enough space to bring my arm from below my waist to above it.

Later, one of my housemates' friends is in the house talking with me. He mentions sigmoid curves, so I show him my laptop's wallpaper, which I think is a cool example of the artistic use of those curves. "Oh yeah?" he replies. He shows me a graphic he's been working on with 3D rendering software. There's a sigmoid curve floating in the middle of a big rectangular room. There are spotlights all over the walls, directing beams of light at the curve. Clearly this project is an exercise in realistic lighting, because the reflections on the curve look really good.

Math Aerobics

On the third floor, there's a math aerobics class. On each count, you switch between an aerobic move and a math-related move. There's also a class being taught by Professor S, and I'm not sure which class I should be attending. Then I get stuck on the other side of the door. In order to get back to class, I'll have to walk all the way down to the ground floor and find another way back up. I don't remember how I got to the third floor in the first place, so this could be difficult. I just walk around for a while, letting my thoughts wander. Eventually I realize that I'm sitting in a chair, sipping a drink. That must mean I've arrived, since otherwise I'd still be looking. I stand up and look for the classroom door.

Infiltration with Hank

Hank Green and I run down the hallway towards the room that is our destination. My hands are clasped together with the index finger and thumb pointing out, pretending I'm holding a gun. We reach a T junction.

"I'll take right, you go left," says Hank. We split up.

I see a woman walking down the hallway towards me. I take cover and fire with my "hand-gun." I look away for a moment, and when I look back, she's not there. Just disappeared. I suppose that's what you'd expect an imaginary gun to do. I continue down the hallway until I reach a sort of open area. I can see over the top of some low walls into some rooms where lots of people are working on computers. They seem really focused. I would feel bad about running in there and disrupting them for the sake of this game I'm playing. I hesitate.

Then I see the people in the room on the left looking over towards the room on the right (my target room) and smiling delightedly. Hank must have reached this side of the room. And they aren't annoyed at all! They must have known about the game, and agreed to it because they thought it would be fun. I look over to see what's happening in the right room. There is colorful, fish-shaped confetti flying in the air. The employees are standing around a spot on the floor, jumping up and down, and clapping. Uh oh. I guess they brought Hank down. I should have been in there to help him.

Anxiously, I walk into the room. I ask a tall, dark-haired man what happened.

Later, I'm walking back out of the building, escorted by the building employees. A guy my own age, someone I know, is ranting about a woman who works in this building. She was somehow responsible for ruining our game, and she's also the head of the elementary math education program, even though she hates kids. One of the employees starts looking calculatingly at the ranting guy, and I realize that she must be the woman he's talking about. Uh oh.

Stealing from Nynaeve

I "accidentally" run into Nynaeve and engage her in conversation. Meanwhile, I cleverly steal from her an important artifact. She'll be mad at me when she finds out, but hopefully I'll be ready for her.

I hide the artifact in my locker. I also have a blanket and a cloak of hers, made with cloth of the same pattern. She's managed to take back the cloak, but in order to hide the blanket, I have to rearrange a lot of things in my locker. For instance, I add an extra blanket to my bed and put something else on my desk. A friend comes up to ask me why I changed the color of my blanket.

Missing a Soul

I'm late to orchestra, but before I can go, I need to save my game. But when I try, it tells me that I have no soul. I need to use a soul gem on myself. I try to do so, but when I resume the game, it loads a new chapter, sort of thing. There's a menu that explains the new scenario and a video in the corner where the bad guy is threatening to do something. I don't have time to listen to all of it, so I just click through the screen. I'll look back over it later. I also skip the first objective of the scenario, so I start in the middle of training something called an ADHD. I don't know what it is or why it's important, but apparently it's a creature used by the enemy that we can train to work for us. I'm able to rearrange the letters in "ADHD" in various ways before training it, and presumably that's important. But since I skipped everything, I have no idea how.

Frags:

• I pick my nose, and out comes almost a complete ring of dried boogers. This happens several times in fairly quick succession.

Bottomless

Towards the end of the women's choir concert, a soloist walks on. I don't recognize her as one of the members of the choir. Her first few notes have pretty bad tone, which I realize must be because she hasn't done any singing yet in the concert (so she isn't warmed up). As the song goes on, she doesn't get much better--although she does have a nice stage personality, so the song's still enjoyable. But eventually she stops and goes into the bathroom. It's kind of dark, so I'm not sure about this next part, but . . . when she comes out of the bathroom, it looks like she's not wearing any pants or underwear.

Dreamer's Tales

I'm reading from a random dream journal on DV. The writer uses a large, boldface font. The basic story is that he's incapacitated the leader of the bad guys, but he's still looking around for the rest of them. Then he realizes that in the time he's been looking, the leader may have woken up again. For all he knows, the leader could be standing right behind him, right now. The DJ entry stops there. I'm delighted to realize that I understand why: the sense of being followed is sometimes scary enough to cause the "Abort! Abort! Nightmare!" response. Overall, I'm impressed with this dream and with the way it was told.

Revelry

My dad is laughing about something he just heard from one of his friends. Apparently, that friend just received a call that his son was arrested in Philadelphia. As far as anyone knows so far, he got drunk with some friends, and they decided to fly over there to watch our state football team play an away game? Either way, it's hilarious.

Gaps

I'm writing in my dream diary when I realize that I'm running out of space: there are some more notes in the diary, below where I'm writing right now. I must accidentally have written on that page one time when there wasn't enough light to see what I was doing. I have plenty more stuff to write, though, so I need more room. I look back at the previous page and notice five or six blank lines on the bottom. I have no idea why I skipped those, but good thing I did! Now I have enough space to finish my entry.

Accio Glasses

I'm home between classes, working on something. When I look at the clock, I realize that it's way past time for me to be heading back to school. Class has already started. Even worse: I just remembered I have a worksheet due today. I meant to work on it during this break, but it completely slipped my mind. Hurriedly, I gather up my things from the room and start towards the door. I notice that everything looks a little fuzzy, and I realize I've forgotten to put on my glasses. I run back to the room in which I left them. They're all the way on the other side of the room, and my sister's sitting in an easy chair, reading a book. I suspect she's irritated about all the noise I'm making, so I try to make a joke.

"Accio glasses!" I say, pointing my hand across the room. That way, she'll realize I'm in a hurry (since I wish I could just summon my glasses, rather than walking to them). Hopefully she'll also think I'm in a good mood ('cause it's a joke), and it'll put her in a better mood (since it's a Harry Potter reference). Anyway, my glasses case rises from its resting place and floats across the room to hover in front of me. It opens, and my glasses float out and unfold themselves. Bemused, I reach for them. But apparently they were expecting me to reach for a different part, because they helpfully dart a foot to one side, causing me to miss. On the second try, I grab them.

Cast Iron

I'm being chased by a wild animal, a bear or something. Right in front of me is an alley guarded by a cast iron gate. If I can climb over the gate, I'll be safe. But the bear is right behind me, so I have to climb quickly. Once I start climbing, my arms and legs suddenly feel like they weigh fifty pounds apiece. They get tangled in the gaps in the cast iron, and I know I won't make it up in time.

I decide to try again. This time, I'm being chased by a gorilla with tentacles on its chin, like Davy Jones from PotC. But it's also farther back and I'm already halfway up the gate. I manage to get over in time. I watch as it runs up to the gate and starts climbing after me. Uh oh. I run to a door at the end of the alley, just a plain rectangle of wood, painted white. It opens inward, but the space behind is almost entirely filled by the door itself. I try to hold the door at just the right angle to squeeze around the edge, so that I can shut the door behind me.

Presentation Day

I walk into my English class, and the teacher says "Let's talk about [insert author here]." I'd completely forgotten about that reading. I remember him assigning it almost on the first day of class, but I thought he would remind us at least once before the day it was due! Apparently he expects us to keep track of everything we should be doing. Which is fine, except that I've failed that expectation. I'm supposed to have read an entire play, but I have no idea what it's even about.

A small group of students goes to the front of the room to do their presentation. Sometime during the course of class, I accidentally scratch a girl's ankle.

I wake up [falsely]. Taking a long, sharp metal stick, I go into the front hall and begin scratching the wooden floor, writing down my notes for the dream I just had. My sister walks by just as I finish writing the name of the girl I accidentally scratched. I notice she's looking at the name, and I'm worried she'll recognize it, or perhaps mistakenly associate the name with someone else she knows, who just happens to have the same name.

Pop Quiz

We have a pop quiz today. One sheet, front and back, short answer questions. There were a few short activities at the beginning of class, but apart from that we have the entire period to do the quiz. Which is a good thing, because I'm having a hard time with it. After what seems like a very long while, I check the time and I see that I still have an hour left to finish. That's better than I thought I had, but it will still be close. Some time later, the teacher (a woman) announces that there are still forty-five minutes remaining. A lot of kids behind me laugh at this. I know it's because they're already done, so they have forty-five minutes to do nothing. Well, good for them, but I know I'll need all forty-five. I keep trying, but I don't finish in time.

After a break, I return to the classroom. One of my high school math teachers is teaching, but he's in a very odd mood. Irritable. Impatient. Sometimes he laughs sarcastically for no apparent reason. He's probably unhappy with the way we scored on the quiz. I try to walk up to him and explain, but he's hardly paying attention to me. Eventually he bursts out, "I'm fed up with"--here he does a violent hand gesture--"mediocrity!" I'm not sure what to say to this, so I settle for saying in an angry undertone that people make mistakes sometimes, and he will just have to deal with it. I go back to my seat. Class starts.

Once, I answer one of the questions he addresses to the class. I get it right. To my surprise, he walks over and puts a jelly bean on my desk. I wonder if he's trying to apologize to me, or if he does that for everyone who answers a question.

Random Video

I've found a YouTube channel that does parodies of and/or tributes to various TV shows. I'm not sure which show inspired the video I'm currently watching. I wonder if it might be Legend of Korra, but of course I have no idea what that show is like. A man and a woman are talking. I think they are (or maybe were) a couple. The man is planning something, but the woman is one step ahead of him: she strips him naked, then tells him that she plans to kill him. Not because they're enemies, but because it is, regrettably, the only solution to a dilemma they've been facing.

The show jumps back in time to explain how the woman engineered this situation. The pair are having another conversation. She promises to show him something if he'll follow her. She also cuts off his clothing with expert use of a whip. He says something about the One Power, but then she reveals that she can channel it as well. The man travels to the location from earlier in the show. As he looks around, the woman appears about fifty yards away. Her arm is raised above her head, seizing something invisible, and it's clear that she got here using the One Power.

The man's chest features some smallish breasts, and somehow this seems appropriate to me. The woman is wearing a white, unbuttoned vest without a bra, and she doesn't trouble herself much about making sure that the vest stays in place. Her breasts are about the same size as the man's.

Frags:

• A vertical antenna capped by a sphere the size of a ping-pong ball sticks up from the middle of a large metal dish. The ball bursts in a sort of molten, fiery explosion. This means we've finally defeated the enemy.

Worms

The world's being invaded by evil worms. They move orthogonally through 3D space, and they're composed of luminescent, transparent red air. (These worms are the same thing as those white threads of light that Rand al'Thor sees in the sky in Book 2 of WoT, in the place where he first meets Selene, so it's a good thing they didn't notice him then.)

There are only a few homes that haven't yet been invaded, each defended by one lonely human who knows the cause is lost. The worms obey a strict turn-based warfare and the territory of each side is well-defined (so it's like a game). But the worms just keep coming, so even with the best strategy, all of the defenders will eventually be overwhelmed. In the house we're watching from right now, a worm has just tried to enter through the window.

Alternate Universe

I'm living in an alternate WoT universe where Rand hasn't yet met Mat or Perrin. Everybody also has different names, and I have trouble keeping all the names straight. For instance, Perrin's name is something like "Satch."

There are two buildings in the woods, fairly far apart from each other. One of them is sort of our base of operations. While investigating the other one, I learn that it's about to be attacked by a dragon. I hurry back to the first building to warn the others, but when they run off to defend it, I hang back. I know I'm probably supposed to help, but I think they can manage on their own.

Some time later, I walk over to see what happened. My team lost, but most of them are still alive, sort of hanging around the building with the people they were fighting. Mat and Perrin aren't there, though; they must have fled underground when they realized the battle was lost. A woman walks up to me and tells me to find one of them (Mat, maybe), because she's his girlfriend. So I head into the basement, where there's a long, dark hallway. It's kind of scary, but there's enough light to avoid crashing into things, so I decide that for fun I'll go down the hallway without turning on the light. I run most of the way.

At last I see light in the hallway, spilling in from a doorway on the side. I go inside, intending to tell Mat and Perrin how much fun it is to go down that hallway in the dark. My words die on my lips, because I seem to have interrupted something. Both Mat and Perrin are fully clothed, but they seem to be trying to have sex on the couch, doggy style. After a moment, I tell Mat of the woman's request. With a rueful grin, he gets off of the couch and follows me out the door.

Once in the hallway, he becomes one of my high school friends. We walk back down the hallway, trying to remember which of the side doors will lead to a staircase that will take us where we want to go. Eventually we try one at random, probably not far enough down the hallway. We end up outside, on a city block. The sidewalks are crowded with people, so I have trouble keeping up with him. Then my Mom appears and starts asking me about something. Whatever it is, it makes me feel really stressed about all the things I'm supposed to be doing right now, and I almost start shouting at Mom about one of them. Then I recognize this stressful feeling: it usually happens when I'm dreaming. Half of me believes that I can escape from these imaginary obligations by waking up, and the other half still thinks that I can't wake up yet because I have work to do! Then my alarm goes off.

Stealth

I'm walking around an indoor courtyard. Children live in rooms nearby. Some of these children are part of a prophecy which is soon to come true, though they don't know it yet. There are some dead children in the courtyard, including one that has apparently been hanged. Clearly evil forces are at work here, so I'm going to have to do my part stealthily. I sneak out of a side door, trying to avoid being seen by the children.

In another room, there are some open-topped vertical pipes sticking out of the floor, about four inches in diameter. They are all full of water, though not all to the same height. I'm trying to scoop water out of the pipes with a higher water level and put it into the pipes with less water. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it's important that I keep trying, because it will have some kind of important effect on the building around me.

Frags:

• reading a poem in a novel

Water Damage

It's time for my lesson to start! The instructor and the one other student are already swimming out from the shore. I hurry after them, but then I realize that I'm still carrying the 600-page novel I've been reading. Water damage! I panic and get out of the water, extremely grateful that the covers of the book are laminated. Only the first quarter inch of pages seems to be wet. I don't know how many pages that is, but I sit down and start peeling them apart one at a time, blowing on each of them, for all the good that will do. This is a library book, and I have to save it, and my lesson can wait. By looking at page numbers, I notice that sometimes the pages are stuck together so closely that I flip three of them at a time without realizing it. That just goes to show how dangerous water damage is.

Despair

For the last week or so of class, the instructor is alternating days between individual work and group rehearsal. There's one piece that we'll all play together as an orchestra, but all the other ones we must each prepare on our own. Today's for individual work. I feel like I've been pretty productive so far, but I'm still worried that I only have half an hour of class time left. My project doesn't feel close to finished.

I get an unexpected call on my cell phone, so I walk over near the doors to the auditorium while I answer. It's a young boy, I'd guess about thirteen or fourteen years old, and I can't quite figure out what he wants. He says something about a ScanTron, and he seems to be asking my permission for something. He's not very coherent, and whenever I ask him a question, there're about five seconds of silence on the line before he answers. Other people in the auditorium are staring at me like I'm being rude, so I leave to go pace around the hallway instead.

Eventually this boy says, "Your answers were very helpful," and with a shock I realize what he must be talking about. Not long ago I took a short quiz for this class, and I turned in my ScanTron by dropping it into a slotted box in the room. This kid must have taken out my ScanTron and copied my answers when he went in to take the test, and then his parents found out about it, and now they're making him call me. I hadn't realized that the test I took--questions from the 11th grade ACT--used the same set of questions as the actual ACT for eleventh graders this year. This is not a good situation. But I don't see that there's anything I can really do about it at this point, so I don't react strongly one way or another.

Another voice comes on the line. It's an older man, probably the boy's father. "You've been surprisingly nice to my son," he says.

"Nice?" I ask.

"Yes. We were worried you might press charges for theft."

Theft? Wait, did this kid actually steal my ScanTron without putting it back in the box? That would be bad news; that test is a significant portion of my grade for this class. I ask the boy if he put my test back. He doesn't seem to understand the question. I sometimes hear an indistinct voice in the background, as if his dad is coaching him about what to say. I try asking him other questions, but he has trouble with all of them. Eventually I back up and ask if he's even in eleventh grade. That, at least, he answers in the affirmative, though he doesn't enunciate very clearly. He eventually says something that reassures me that my test is still safely turned in. That was all I wanted to know, and I'm fed up with this horrendously ineffective conversation. But I don't like this kid, so before I hang up, I give him an angry, rapid-fire lecture about everything he's done wrong. I tell him to answer more quickly when people ask questions over the phone, and I tell him never, EVER to take anything out of boxes with slots on top. I also threaten to come after him if there are any problems with my grade on that test. I hang up without waiting for him to answer (though I wonder if maybe I spoke too quickly for the slow-minded fellow to understand anything), and I go back into the auditorium.

Another student is just finishing giving his presentation (a slide show about something from physics), and people are packing up to leave. Crap. The instructor must have asked for volunteers, since presentations weren't supposed to start for another day or two. That this guy was already prepared makes me feel even worse about my own project.

A friend of the presenter's drops some review worksheets on the seats at the back of the room, near the exit. I grab one on my way to get my things, even though my chances of being able to do the worksheet without having heard the presentation are very low.

When I try to put the worksheet into my backpack, I knock a hose loose from a glass jar, and the hose starts filling my backpack with water. I'd stuck the hose in the jar earlier because I couldn't figure out how to turn off the water. And now it's ruining everything in my bag, taking my progress on the project from "very little" to "absolutely nothing."

It's too much. Maybe I should try to turn off the water or control the damage but it's too much. I give up. I seize one of my juggling balls, hurl it across the room, collapse tumultuously into a chair, and start sobbing. Some of the nearby students are looking at me; others are trying to ignore me. I see people throwing my juggling ball around the room. At my feet, the water coming from the hose thins to a trickle, then stops, and I know the instructor has shut off the water supply. Moments later, he comes to look at me from the next row forward, frowning.

"I've seen a lot of reactions like this in the past few days," he says.

It didn't work, I realize. Despite my complete breakdown, he's refusing to show me any extra sympathy. What an unfeeling world this is.

My dad comes to drive me home. Suddenly I realize that, in my distraction, I've forgotten to put on my seat belt, and my dad is careening straight towards some cars stopped at a light. With my free hand, I seize the strap and pull it across my body, hoping that holding it in place will be useful even if I haven't managed to fasten the buckle. Dad swerves out of the way, narrowly avoiding an accident, and explains that he was trying to do a live performance arrangement of "Jingle Bells" using sounds that a car makes. Shaken and annoyed, I tell him irritably that that was a really bad idea. He seems to think it's my fault, though, since I was humming the tune earlier.

Back in my room, I decide to do something really simple to convince myself that I'm not a complete failure at life: I put on my glasses. But the glasses don't work. I can't make the world come into focus. I can't even do that. I try reviewing some German instead. I stare at the word "ssssssssut" for a time, but it doesn't make any sense even though I know it should. At this point, basically the only emotion I'm feeling is despair.