International Oneironaut Shared Dreaming Journal

Nephanim's Dreams

Sorry this took so long. Today's been busy!

Gentler Awakening

I awoke to the sound of my phone ringing. I looked on the floor beside the bed and saw that Nicole was calling me. The time said it was 7:35 AM – exactly what I set my alarm to. I decided she was calling me to wake me up. That way, I wouldn’t be rudely awakened by the alarm! I smiled at how considerate this was. When I picked up, however, I could only hear noise on the other end.

Local Deforestation

I was in the back of a car with Austin. My parents drove us around an old neighborhood we once lived in. I noticed that many of the trees were gone… Some portions of the neighborhood looked totally different because all the trees had been chopped down. The surrounding area had a tendency to turn into a swamp. I showed Austin one spot where thick woods had been turned into a treeless swamp stretching back as far as the eye could see. He didn’t seem as upset as I was.

Community in the Tower

I was scaling some sort of tower with Nicole and Chelsea. As a rule, we encountered Scamper on every floor – even though none of us brought him to the next level. To quote myself in the dream: “I can’t even pick him up to take him upstairs without him snarling at me, so I don’t know how he’s following us.”

One of the lower levels was Matthew’s house. Lauren came up from a floor below us with her boyfriend. She didn’t seem pleased by the news that we were going to spend the night. I helped myself to some apple juice. Meanwhile, Scamper gathered everyone’s socks and destroyed most of them. My mom saw what happened and scolded me for allowing Scamper to get my socks. I walked over to the corner of the living room where he’d gathered them all and picked out my socks. I didn’t mind wearing them as long as they had dried… I just didn’t want dog slobber between my toes.

The dream jumped. Several floors later, we met Jenna Marbles in a room with several thick pillars supporting the ceiling. We also encountered Scamper again, but he was definitely in worse shape than before. I found a few more tumors on his back than I remembered… We agreed that we wanted to move on, so we went upstairs.

The dream jumped. Eventually, we reached the floor we were looking for. It operated like a private community. The ceiling was so high that the people living there were able to construct miniature houses inside the enormous room. They had an arcade with all sorts of video games ranging from classics to modern hits. They also had a trampoline and an elaborate tunnel system which connected all of the buildings. Surrounding all of these things was a fragile layer of plant life – trees, produce, and some wild grasses. The environment sustained a number of unique animal species I’d never seen before. I met with Nomad and learned that the people living there had no respect for the environment or the animals living in it. They wanted to turn the trampoline into a dump. Besides the fact that it was a waste of a perfectly good trampoline, I didn’t like this news. Nomad and I got on the trampoline and started protesting. We hoped that our attempt to reason with the locals would prevent devastation to the environment.

Instead, when they heard what we had to say, they started pulling springs off the trampoline and throwing them at us. Nomad gave up immediately. If they wanted to attack him, he said he would just move on rather than letting them steal his energy. I decided to hang in there a while longer, but it was useless. They ganged up on me and started pelting me with multiple springs at a time. The hooks on the ends tore me apart as they fell down my face, throat, and arms. It wasn’t long before I threw up my arms in defeat.

“I give up!” I announced. “I would offer to vomit on the trampoline to get you started, but I’d rather keep the food in my stomach.” I climbed off the trampoline and left them to their abusive lifestyle. When I found Chelsea and Scamper, we decided it was best to take him to a safe place. The people on this floor were prone to animal abuse in addition to their destructive attitude toward the environment. We set up a system of passwords with a keypad on the door to Scamper’s safe house. Using the position of letters in the alphabet as a code system, we periodically came up with a new password for the door.

The room was too small for Scamper… He quickly became restless, but we couldn’t allow him to go outside. He was dying quickly enough because of his tumors without the interference of the cruel townspeople. I was touched by how excited Scamper was to see us even though he’d just been with us on the previous floor. He put his head in my lap and went to sleep.

Sometime later, Chelsea agreed to watch Scamper, and we switched the password on the door. I went to look at arcade games for a while. Most of the games had been modified to allow multiplayer over the local area network. I saw someone doing this with Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. Immediately, I thought to suggest this to Nicole, but I couldn’t find her. I kept looking at games for a few more minutes before returning to the tunnel system. I noticed a black puppy following me around. When I knelt and pet the dog, it wagged its tail excitedly. Although the tail was longer and some of the details were different, the puppy’s behavior was identical to Scamper’s. He even responded to the same name. I concluded that Scamper had died, and this was his reincarnation. I took the puppy straight to Chelsea in the locked room.

It turns out that Scamper wasn’t dead yet. Two clocks on the ceiling indicated the dogs’ remaining life force. The puppy was full of life, obviously, but Scamper was really running low. His clock stopped. For a few more minutes, he lay with us however he could without irritating his tumors. Eventually, the light in the clock faded out, too, and Scamper was dead. I held him in my arms for a while as I mourned his death. The black puppy started acting like Scamper again… No matter what, I knew I had to get this puppy out of the tower. I could bring him back to my parents’ house and give them the chance to raise Scamper a second time.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I approached Oma and Opa’s house. When he saw us outside, Opa warned me that he needed to take me to the airport. My dad told him that I would have to start school soon. I checked my phone and saw that it was August 28th. It surprised me that school hadn’t started yet, but I assumed it was only a matter of days. We went inside and told my great grandparents all about what happened in the tower, including Scamper’s death. I still found myself in tears over it. What really bothered me was that most of the problems in that community near the top of the tower were easily preventable. They had a trash chute… They certainly didn’t need to sacrifice the health of the environment. Opa told us about a man he knew from that tower community. The man sold hot dogs for a living. After ten years in the tower, he was a millionaire! Nicole talked about some moldy food she found there…

I set up my flight to Chicago. Initially, I thought it would be expensive to book a same-day flight, but I found a special offer on Southwest Airlines’ website for $10 flights to Chicago.

Promotional Event at Chick-fil-A

I was waiting in a line outside Chick-fil-A for some kind of promotional event. Nicole, Kunle, his husband, Joel, Kaitlin, and some new guy from Dreamviews sat with me at a table outside the restaurant. Nicole and I ate a creative dessert called Yesterday’s Trash that consisted of assorted candies from the past five decades in a candy shell that was designed to look like a plastic candy bar wrapper. It was good enough that I was disappointed whenever I accidentally dropped some of my candy. A woman with a number of tattoos told us about how she came up with the idea for the dessert. After she left, a second big group came to wait in line. One of the guys in their group complained about Chick-fil-A’s connection lagging. I had no idea what he was talking about. Kaitlin insisted that it was probably just his computer since Chick-fil-A didn’t offer a wireless connection… He wasn’t convinced.

“When you have thousands of minutes of lag every day, it’s definitely not your computer,” he argued. I started paying more attention to the inside of the store. Some of the employees were cleaning the tables. We had already been waiting there for several hours – from sometime in the morning until evening. An elderly couple went inside; the door was unlocked. A couple more people went inside and sat down. Out of curiosity, I joined these people inside the store. We sat down at tables inside, and one of the employees informed us that he would get everything outside ready for us to start. I stood at the window and stared at Nicole. I couldn’t remember if she had her phone… The guy from Dreamviews saw me first and ran inside. I couldn’t see Nicole anymore.