International Oneironaut Shared Dreaming Journal

Nephanim's Dreams

Recall was gradual and fuzzy this morning. I got too much sleep.

Road Trip and Private Gas Pumps

I was in the convertible with Nicole as she drove around the country. She insisted on driving ten miles per hour over the speed limit at a minimum, often faster than that. We pulled into a private parking lot in front of a tennis court and an apartment complex. There were self-service gas stations placed her and there in the parking lot. Nicole couldn’t get into the right position to pump the gas, so she kept having to pull around for another attempt. Eventually, she parked in a position that she deemed satisfactory, but I realized she had actually just backed into a parking space. I wasn’t sure the pump would be able to reach the car. When she got out to refuel the car, she left the engine running. I climbed halfway into the front seat to turn it off, but then I heard a woman talking to her outside.

“You can’t park here,” the woman said. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“I’m just getting gas,” Nicole said, waving her hands.

“Oh… Okay then.” The woman walked away with no further comment. I sighed and turned off the car. After she filled up the tank, we drove toward Tennessee. I wasn’t sure why; Nicole wouldn’t give an explanation for our road trip across the nation.

Burying Dogs and Halloween Festivities

Austin, Nicole, and I took Scamper and Meg for a walk during the night. They were really able to talk. Austin got tired of listening to Scamper whine about everything, so he grabbed a shovel and started digging a grave.

“What is this for?” I asked him suspiciously, holding both dogs’ leashes in one hand.

“I’m burying the dogs,” he said. “It’ll be fun.” I pulled the dogs away from Austin’s hole and started looking through a dresser that was just sitting out in the yard. There were gigantic, stained briefs in one drawer… I decided not to investigate anymore.

I had a false awakening. Nicole’s house was decorated with Halloween-themed streamers, cobwebs, and dangling skulls. Her mom came into the living room wearing a convincing skeletal reaper costume. She told us to get into our costumes before the party. Nicole gave me a costume to wear… Somehow, I didn’t realize while I was putting it on that it was basically a princess dress… Nicole’s mom came back and saw me wearing it.

“That’s silly,” she said. “Why are you wearing a skirt?”

“It’s a princess dress, Mom!” protested Nicole. I stared down in horror at the pink frills in the front.

“I’m not wearing this…” I warned them both, especially Nicole. I pulled the dress off, revealing jeans and an orange T-shirt. “I’ll just dress normally.”

“He can be the undead teenager,” suggested Nicole’s mother.

“That’s boring!” Nicole complained. “Come on, just wear it!”

Slaying of the Shogun (Portions omitted)

I watched as various people interfered with each other’s private dreamworlds. Leela and Zapp Brannigan constructed a field of flowers together. Ironically, Zapp’s perception of the dreamworld was more cutesy than Leela’s. She sent him on a quest to find good entertainment. Zapp jumped down a green pipe (Mario style) and appeared before me. I advised him to look into the Muppets. As evidence of their entertainment value, I showed him a live performance. Kermit was eaten alive by a shadow monster on stage. The other Muppets turned his bloody corpse into a substance like ketchup and used it with their fries and fish nuggets. Zapp was enthralled by the sight of this and decided to get Leela immediately. When he returned to her world, she was talking with house people. They were miniature versions of cookie-cutter houses with beady eyes and toothy smiles. She ordered him to leave, but he fell to his knees in the flowers and begged her to forgive him. He started telling her about the Muppets, and she accused him of killing a dream character. Somehow, she decided the Muppets were real people – and this made it acceptable. She was opposed to the senseless murder of dream characters, however.

The dream jumped. Nicole, Andrea, and I were investigating an invisible assassin who kept bothering Nicole in her dreams. Andrea called it a shogun. We walked into an empty diner, and Nicole waited by the door while Andrea and I went to the back of the restaurant. We found this closet area that she said would be perfect for destroying the shogun. After she closed the closet door behind us, Andrea gave a quick explanation of her plan. I was to bury my face in women’s lingerie to attract the attention of the shogun. Meanwhile, she would track down his body and prepare a weapon to slay him. We had to leave the closet and come back to get the undergarments to appear. Andrea made an attempt to summon the shogun to the closet.

“Okay, now pretend there’s a woman here. You need to attract the shogun with your senses.” I buried my face in the blue-and-white striped panties to mislead the shogun. After a minute or two, Andrea fired some kind of blast of energy at an invisible form in the closet. The robed figure became visible as he slumped to the ground. To finish him off, she jabbed a white stake into the back of his neck. His body dissolved into shadows and disappeared again.

“We got him!” Andrea announced. “Let’s go tell Nicole.”

“I’ll be out there in a few minutes,” I said. Andrea gave me a weird look, but she shrugged and walked out, closing the closet door again. After a moment, my privacy was interrupted.

“Hey!” I sat up halfway. The door was open, and Austin stood with some kind of thick manual in his hands. “Come here! Chelsea and I need to ask you a few questions, sir.”

“About what?”

“About the aragon.”

“What aragon…?” I muttered. I walked out of the closet and joined him and Chelsea at the bar of the diner. They were looking at information on various magical beings in the dream realm.

“She doesn’t understand what it means to kill an aragon,” Chelsea told Austin as we approached. I understood that it would just regenerate from the fabric of the dreamworld. An aragon was an immortal entity.

“It wasn’t an aragon, though,” I explained. Chelsea pulled up an image of one on her laptop. It looked sort of like a monk from Tibia. Although the appearance was similar, I shook my head. “Andrea called it something else…”

“What did she call it?” Austin asked. I couldn’t remember.

“It was similar, but… It wasn’t aragon…” I looked through their manual for anything that looked or sounded familiar. I couldn’t find anything. Austin started telling Chelsea about a Dragonball programming language. Chelsea refused to discuss it because there were so many rules for each of the instructions offered by the language. She didn’t want to memorize that much information. I followed them at a distance into a back area of the diner that merged with my parents’ new house in Texas. The hallway leading to Chelsea’s room had been replaced with a bathroom. I asked my siblings to excuse me for a moment, handed Austin the manual, and stepped into the bathroom. I took care to lock the door. I heard voices outside... My mom called my name.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I replied. I saw Chelsea standing beside me. I thought I was just seeing her through the wall, but I quickly realized the wall was gone. Oma and Opa came upstairs and asked if I was ready to go.

Neluna Isn't a Robot

Aeolar and I were discussing our dream characters after a successful shared dream. He misread something I posted on Dreamviews about Neluna and Symphony. For some reason, he thought I said that Neluna was a robot. Having met her already, though, he knew otherwise.

“Neluna isn’t a robot,” he reminded me. I frowned at his post. When did I say that? I glanced back at the jumbled mess of words I had just posted. Symphony’s name wasn’t mentioned anywhere. I just described her as “the robot.” For clarification, I edited the post to use Symphony’s name instead.