International Oneironaut Shared Dreaming Journal

Nephanim's Dreams

Poor recall due to fragmented sleep and having to wake up two hours early... Better luck next time!

Late Dining and the Late President

I was visiting my parents at another new house. This one was still under construction, but they had already moved in. The driveway was jagged and unfinished, and the roof had yet to be tiled. I watched a bunch of construction workers filling a pit at the end of the driveway with cement to make the correct angle. It was vaguely interesting, but I kept getting the impression that they were doing it wrong and wanting to yell at them, so I walked inside. Chelsea was snacking on something in the kitchen. She accidentally dropped something on the floor near the wall. When she saw where it landed, she was too disgusted to pick it up and eat it. She seemed worried that it was infected with bug spray. My dad assured her that he hadn’t sprayed the kitchen yet. He only sprayed the rooms with carpet in them. As long as she ate in the kitchen, she had nothing to worry about. She still wouldn’t eat it. Instead of throwing it away, she gave it to Scamper.

The dream jumped. I was walking around the lot while eating Chex Mix. Evidently, they had switched to a dog food brand, but the food was exactly the same. I doubted Scamper would be satisfied with a couple of wheat chips as a treat. I ate nearly half the bag before it occurred to me that this was probably more expensive now that it was labeled as dog food. I didn’t want to cost my parents money, so I stopped eating them and headed back to the house.

The dream jumped. Since the house was right by the beach, we all went down to the shore to relax. I saw that Autumn had left hundreds of dollars sitting in the sand near the water. I quickly gathered the money and put it in my wallet so she wouldn’t lose it. Meanwhile, the rest of my family played tag or something similar. I wasn’t interested.

The dream jumped. I was driving a truck with Tom Cruise in the passenger seat. We talked about what it was like to be famous and how he even had to deal with his fans in his dreams. I was glad I didn’t have that problem; the world in which I was gaining fame couldn’t significantly influence the waking one. Somehow, Tom Cruise ended up on the front of the vehicle, so I pretended to crush him against a wall when I parked at a restaurant. A reporter took a quick photo of this.

“You could’ve killed me!” Cruise laughed.

“But I didn’t!” I replied. We walked inside.

My family had decided to eat at a restaurant so my mom wouldn’t have to cook. There were doors and mirrors everywhere, but the restaurant was really just one giant room. It felt strange walking around so many mirrors, and I didn’t have a reflection in any of them. My dad greeted the owner of the restaurant. I understood that they were close friends. The place worked similar to a buffet. We got there an hour before closing, though, so we were really paying for less than some of these people… The first edible thing I noticed was a huge sandwich for $2.50. It had eight different meats, two kinds of cheese, and freshly baked bread that put the likes of Subway and Jimmy John’s to shame. Did I mention it was bigger, too? The only catch was that it included sushi, and most of us had never tried it. Fortunately, the owner was clever and put some sushi sample trays out by the sandwiches. Austin tried it first and went to spit it out. I took a bite of the sushi and mulled over it for a minute or so before deciding it wasn’t my favorite seafood. I still wanted one of the sandwiches, though. My dad started munching on the sushi samplers instead.

The dream jumped. We sat in the corner of the restaurant after finishing our food. I kept getting refills on my lemonade. I could never seem to quench my thirst. It didn’t help that no matter how little ice I put in my glass, it always ended up full of ice cubes… I felt like I was making several times as many trips as I should’ve been. We talked about Austin for a while. A guy came back from the kitchen and announced that someone had just died. A man at a nearby table thought he said Obama had been shot. Someone else shouted a similar name, but I had never heard of the person before. Enough of the customers missed the start of the announcement that we shouted back “Who?” as the guy tried to return to the kitchen. He thought we said “When?” and told us “just now.” Frustrated, I pulled out my phone to try and figure it out. I couldn’t find anything on recent deaths. There was a big news story about an escaped convict, though. I watched a report that said he was on his way through Little Italy, a booming town in Oregon dominated by the mafia. Rather than driving into the heart of the city as police expected, he swung south and went through the outskirts of town. All of the traps they’d set for him were completely useless. The reporter explained that in order to keep the public from overreacting, they had limited the number of officers chasing him to two. That meant no helicopters, so they kept losing his trail. I didn’t understand their decision… The guy had already traveled from the northern end of Washington without trouble. If he was so dangerous, why didn’t they just get it over with? The reporter was shown on the scene as a couple of fire trucks whizzed by. He seemed to think that was the next big scoop, but the news station wouldn’t switch the camera back to the anchorwoman. He just sort of shuffled in place for a while and kept repeating that he was standing by for updates to the story.

The dream jumped. My dad and I discussed the death that had been announced earlier. There were already plans to create a series of bills with his face on them in his honor. I still wasn’t totally sure who we were talking about, but people were still murmuring about “the late President,” so I guessed Obama was right after all. I couldn’t believe someone would shoot him. I kept thinking of Lincoln’s assassination.

Some Japanese girls walked up to the front of the store and saw us through the window. They giggled when they saw me, and I understood that they were taken in my by charm. I wasn’t interested in them, so I just kept sipping my lemonade and reading stuff on my phone. They sat down at the table next to ours. I was shocked by how rude they were… They shouted things at the owner of the store even though they had a waiter to answer their questions, and they didn’t seem to understand how placing orders worked. Their waiter showed them a device similar to an abacus with all the current orders on it. It had two stages – one for orders that were ready to be delivered and a second for orders that were being prepared. He would take a round of orders when the first set was delivered to all parties. I was confused… This was supposed to be a buffet, right? Anyway, I tried to help explain the system to one of the girls, and she just stared at me.

“Shut up, Josh,” she finally said. I blinked in bewilderment.

“I don’t want to,” I said sorely. I took a deep gulp of my lemonade. It didn’t occur to me to ask her how she knew my name. As we continued to sit at our table, closing time passed. The owner decided to keep the place open just for us. I took Austin’s orange juice when he wasn’t looking and drank that too. My dad and I figured out a way to drink Austin’s juice without taking his glass… It involved using three straws to overload the physics engine or something like that. Austin was reasonably annoyed by this.

The dream jumped. It was already 11 PM, meaning that the restaurant was open two hours later than it should’ve been. Austin and Chelsea made quick friends with the Japanese girls, and they were all washing dishes in the kitchen. I walked over to the owner and apologized for staying so late. He didn’t say a word to me; he just nodded slowly with a solemn expression. He had huge bags under his eyes… I decided to go help wash dishes so the guy could get some rest. There wasn’t much for me to do, though; the dish washer was already full when I got there. One of the Japanese girls said this was the third load of dishes she’d done since she arrived. I found some dirty clothes piled up and realized they belonged to the owner’s wife. He would need to wash her clothes, too… I couldn’t find a washing machine, so I just folded them up and put them in a sink.

The dream jumped. Someone directed me to a washing machine after they put the load of clothes in. I kept checking on it to make sure there wasn’t anything paper in there (like the hundreds of dollars Autumn left on the beach). Austin kept bringing me little slips of paper with discount coupons and advertisements on them. I had several stacks before I managed to stop him. The Japanese girls giggled at his bizarre prank. I set the stack of paper slips aside and checked on the clothes again. It was getting really dark in the kitchen even with the lights on, so I couldn’t see very well inside… I pulled out my phone to check with my flashlight. I wanted to show it to Austin, but he wouldn’t stick around long enough for me to find the right application. I was really paranoid about dropping my phone in the wash, too.