International Oneironaut Shared Dreaming Journal

Nephanim's Dreams

Sorry about yesterday. I didn't have a lot of time to type up my dreams in the morning, so I was in a hurry just to post them on my main dream journal and forgot about DV... They're here now, though.

35th Attempt:

The Cause of Low Exam Scores

I was waiting at a bus stop in River Bend with my dad. He asked about my GRE test results. I didn’t know how I did yet, so there wasn’t much to tell him, but I noted that I wasn’t going to tell him if I did poorly. He got really angry as soon as I said that.

“You’d better do well,” he insisted. “There’s no excuse for that.”

“What? It’s a general knowledge test. How can I help it if I don’t do well?”

“It’s the goddamn weed.”

“What?!” I stared at him in disbelief. When his sour glare didn’t falter, I knew he really believed this… “Dad, I don’t smoke.”

“Of course you do. You don’t even try to hide the smell.”

“XXXX smokes… Of course I smell like it.”

“I’ve heard you,” he continued. “I’ve walked by your room when you’ve been in there with her. I hear her say things that don’t make sense, and you’re right there with her.”

“So?”

“So obviously, you’re both smoking.” I rubbed my temple. There didn’t seem to be any effective way to convince him of the truth. My mom walked up to us and asked about the GRE. Immediately, I threw up my hands and warned her that I wasn’t going to talk about it. It was better to leave my parents out of it entirely. They were just going to draw their own conclusions. If I did well, it would be because of them, but if I did poorly, it would be my fault. I walked back to the house and went straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Chelsea followed me in there and tried to rinse something in the sink. It didn’t seem to be working. I could hear my mom and dad arguing outside the bathroom.

The dream jumped. I got in the car with my family. We had to wait for Austin to come out; he was getting to a save point in a game.

Five-Year-Old Math Instructor and the Luffy-Newgate Alliance

I was sitting in a mathematics class taught by a five-year-old child. Halfway through his lecture, he got depressed because it was his birthday and no one had gotten him anything. I walked over and asked if he wanted to go to the candy store. He transformed into a keychain. I was only able to hear him speak when I held it right next to my ear, so no one else really believed he was talking to me. We left the classroom and got in a car.

I recalled that there was a candy store named Fuzziwig’s just next door. We had a difficult time reaching that shopping center, however. We couldn’t drive straight there. The only path required us to take a highway in a loop around portions of the city before coming back to the one way street that went past both the candy store and the school. We got lost in all the highway entrance and exit ramps. When we reached a shopping center, I realized it wasn’t the same one… None of the stores were the same as I remembered. At first, I feared the candy shop had been replaced. I didn’t say this out loud; I didn’t want to upset my teacher.

We went into the mall and started looking for a similar candy shop. Along the way, Nicole found a Japanese import store and insisted on looking through the One Piece merchandise. There were new One Piece figurines… Each member of the crew held a flag with green slash marks beside the Straw Hat symbol. I tried to remember what this meant, but I couldn’t. A dog came up to us and sat down at my feet. Without thinking, I knelt down and started petting him. He looked a lot like a dog I had when I was younger, Sonic. The dog bit the keychain of my teacher and carried him off. I chased the dog around the store until I was able to recover it. Aside from a few scratches and a chunk missing from his belly, my teacher seemed okay. I left that store to keep searching for candy…

The dream jumped. I was watching an episode of One Piece. Luffy met with Whitebeard to form an alliance. They made one giant pirate crew. With Luffy’s name attached to everything Whitebeard did as well as his own antics, he quickly gained global infamy on a scale never before seen. Their new flag was the one the figurines were holding. I was so excited when I saw this that I immediately asked Nicole if she wanted to watch the episode with me.

Become a God for You <-- This one was kind of interesting.. Highly immersive.

I was working at a laboratory of some kind. As one of the head scientists, my job was to keep an eye out for security threats. I couldn’t really prevent them – after all, breaches of security were almost always someone else’s fault – but I could notify the relevant parties immediately and prevent harm from reaching them in most cases.

This time, there was nothing anyone could do.

Beings from another world with faces like masks with spiderwebs pulled over them and slender, jagged limbs appeared in the laboratory. I only received a brief report from one of my assistants before he was killed. Autumn, another of my assistants, helped me send out a lab-wide warning message. The invaders were here to kill anyone and everyone. The only solution was to lock oneself in a secure area and wait for them to leave. I wanted to do just that, but I had to wait for confirmation that everyone had received our warning. We went from room to room, knocking on doors and checking with people inside. As long as they locked the doors when we left, they would be fine – in theory, anyway. We came to a corridor where janitors were cleaning cockroaches off the wall. The roaches were trying to crawl through the door frame to get past the locked door. I let them take care of their business before we tried to speak with the people inside. Though we knocked, no one answered. We were just about to leave when a scruffy man in a lab coat opened the door.

“How many people are in here?” I asked at once. “Have you taken the necessary precautions?”

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “About twenty of us. Why don’t you come in here, too? I’m sure you’ve done enough already.”

“Can’t,” I said with a sigh. “We need to brief the executive board.” Autumn frowned. She, too, realized that this was basically suicide. The scruffy man gave us a look of pity before closing the door and locking it again.

The dream jumped. We stood around a circular table with several bald men in suits. One of them walked up to the board where I had written down some figures.

“So you’re saying most of the people in this facility have already been killed?” he asked, waving his hand over the proportions.

“Yes,” I answered bluntly. “If we don’t think of something, they’ll kill us all eventually. I don’t think it’s reasonable to wait for them to leave, but we don’t have a plan B.”

“Or maybe we do…” Autumn murmured. All heads turned to her. “Well, it’s just a hunch, but… You know that genetics experiment we wanted to do? The one we couldn’t get test subjects for?” Chills danced up my spine. I knew exactly what she was thinking of. It was an experimental procedure that would create a god. The side effects of failure were fatal at best. No one in the facility had been willing to try it out, even with such a high reward. I slipped my hands into my pockets.

“That would work,” I said. “I’ll do it.” She looked like she was going to cry.

The dream jumped. We made it down to the seventy-fourth basement level where the genetics lab was located. I thought the number was ironic, but I didn’t say anything. I stared at a vat of turquoise liquid while Autumn made the preparations. There was some kind of faintly human thing floating in it. Its body was bent forward in what looked like an uncomfortable position. I assumed the malformed being was female because of her long hair, but I realized that wasn’t a very good indicator. I supposed I would find out soon enough… I was going to have to climb in there with it.

“Almost ready,” Autumn said behind me. I crossed my arms.

I found time slipping on its tracks, so to speak. I entered a timeless world in which I was confronted with various propositions about the nature of magic. The flow of the philosophy was like something out of a Terry Goodkind book. It seemed to make sense. I wondered if I there was any truth to it. I’m not sure how long I was lost in this timelessness; the world was nothing but darkness with blobs of white light that occasionally flashed in and out of existence. When I returned to the normal flow of time, the mask-faced creatures were standing in the lab with us. They were all wearing black suits. Autumn screamed when she saw them. The one in front reached into his pocket and withdrew a deck of cards. He began throwing them in our direction in rapid succession. Autumn backed away from the cards as they fell to the ground, but I shook my head.

“The cards aren’t going to hurt you,” I explained. “They’re just a warning.” I had a sense that the method of their killing was literally random. This was their way of explaining that they had no control over our fate except that they would make an attempt to destroy us. Deciding to seize this brief window of opportunity before I was forced to climb into the vat and become with the malformed god inside, I took a step forward. “Why are you here?” I asked our guests. One of them tilted its head like an animal.

“Ri…ch…argh…” it said slowly.

“Richard?” I frowned. “Richard Rahl?”

“Rich…argh…” it said again, holding out its jagged arms. I glanced over at Nicole in disbelief. They had come looking for a fictional character. Or maybe he wasn’t fictional at all… Either way, he wasn’t here to prevent our deaths, so I would have to take matters into my own hands. I put a hand on Autumn’s shoulder.

“There’s no time. I’ll become a god for you.” I forced a light smile.

Drawing and Teeth

Nicole and Alex were watching me draw… They were both really impressed by the level of detail. I’m not sure who I was drawing, but his mouth was wide open in shock, and all of his teeth were visible. I put a lot of emphasis on them for some reason.

“This is about the skill level I was at last year,” Alex said. “How did you learn to draw this well so fast?”

“Well, I’m good at drawing teeth because I spend so much time looking at mine and wondering why they’re disgusting.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” she replied.

(I forgot to brush my teeth before bed. I'm pretty sure that's what this was about.)

36th Attempt:

Karl's Calculator

I was in my dorm room… It seemed like Karl had replaced Jherome as my roommate. In the background, I heard Karl talking with Chris in the adjacent room. Karl was looking for the cover for his TI-83. He claimed that Chris borrowed it. Actually, Chris said Karl borrowed his calculator because he lost his own. Karl got upset and ended up back in my room. He started searching through his backpack, but he couldn’t find it. I checked to make sure that my calculator had its cover and was securely hidden in my desk. When Karl left, Chris decided he would just ask his parents for another one – although it was the third calculator this semester…

Future Lab Gadget #74: Life-Bringer Gun

I was watching TV… A bunch of women from various TV shows including The Nanny and Roseanne joined forces to form a superheroine team. It didn’t seem like a very popular show, but I knew Nicole would love it. Appearing on-screen, Peter Griffin commented that it was boring. He somehow turned off the TV, and I was in a laboratory. One of my assistants handed me a futuristic-looking gun. Actually, it seemed like it was made to resemble the remote control for Okabe’s alpaca TV. As I accepted the gadget, I understood that it would bring anything I shot to life – so I animated a wooden chair nearby with a well-aimed blast of energy. The chair’s legs gave out underneath it. Once it regained its footing, it started sliding around on the floor. The little chair bumped into the legs of mine repeatedly as though it couldn’t understand why there was an obstacle there. Before leaving the lab, I also did this with a white doll that looked sort of like a dog. The gun couldn’t give objects muscles, so it just sort of slumped forward without the benefit of neck support. It could clearly feel things, but it didn’t see or hear very well.

I took my new pseudo-dog into the car and fastened its seat belt. For some odd reason, the driver and passenger sides were reversed. I was in the back seat because I didn’t want my artificial dog to fly into the windshield if anything happened on the way home. It took a while for the creature to figure out how to sit up in the car. Its whole body just kept slumping against the seat belt, occasionally falling to one side. Just when it discovered how to support itself with an arm, a rough-looking man tried to climb in the back of my car.

“Hey, I’m gonna dump a load right down there,” he said. He pointed at the floor on the passenger side. I informed him simply that he wasn’t allowed to relieve himself in or around my car, pushed him right out, and dove for the lock button on the door. Unfortunately, he managed to get around to the other side and take the passenger seat before I could lock the doors. Naturally, I left my keys in the ignition… Smart, right? The hairy jerk hijacked my car. I thought about making him crash the car since my insurance would cover it – I had telekinetic powers, after all, so causing the car to veer off to the side would be no trouble – but I decided to let the man drive himself home. He insisted it wasn’t even far away… But then we were driving for a long time on a straight highway. We reached the ocean and kept going…

For a brief moment, I was in the car with Chris’ parents. They couldn’t understand why his calculator needed to be replaced so soon. His mom said something about making him wear stilettos instead of sandals in public to save money, but she admitted he wouldn’t go for that. I wondered if Chris was actually gay.

Whisper Me to Sleep

I had a false awakening. I was amazed by the number of dreams I remembered and how long some of them seemed to last. It was almost like I had more of a presence in my dreams than usual. In reality, much of what I remembered was probably conjured as part of the false awakening. I sat up and started writing my dreams down. Nicole saw me writing and was clearly impressed by my recall.

“And it’s only 4 AM,” I said. “I still have plenty of time to sleep.” I kept hearing things whispering to me after I finished recording my dreams. They helped me fall asleep.

Laughter of a Cow

Nicole was talking with Phil. Apparently, she had just finished the Sword of Truth series. I figured she would go on to read the Omen Machine next. As she and Phil discussed how Richard’s thought process approaches a problem from all angles simultaneously, he cited an example in one of the books. Goodkind had made reference to an analysis by a professional war commander as part of Richard’s analysis of the war with the Imperial Order. The date was even included (2003), but the book was published in 1998. I stared at it in wonder. Phil seemed to have reconciled this somehow, but I didn’t understand how he could’ve put the result of an analysis in his book if it wouldn’t be made for five more years…

I went into the living room where my family was gathered. Chelsea was also reading one of the books in the series, but she was only five chapters in. She got mad at me for saying she was still reading the part where the car got hijacked. I think this was actually a reference to another dream I had last night.

A cow lying on the floor at the base of the sofa looked up at me. This was Bessie Pea, our pet cow. She chewed on a granola bar with chocolate fudge filling contentedly. I sat down beside Bess and stroked her behind the ears. When I smiled at her, she started laughing. It was the strangest thing… I wanted to hear her do it again, so I faked a laugh. I quickly had the cow in a chain of laughter. My family stared over at her.

“How did you make the cow laugh?” Chelsea demanded. “That’s so weird.” Bess just kept going. I smiled at her. If only they’d stop feeding her these fudge bars… She could stand to lose a little weight. Just as I was thinking about it, my mom tossed me another bar for her. It was actually just a pencil with her favorite filling inside – peach. After I gave it to her, I realized the lead was still inside the pencil! That couldn’t be healthy…

“Just take it out,” my dad said. I waited until Bess stopped chewing on it and broke the pencil in half. I had to break off a little more lead by snapping it against the wood of the short end I broke off, but separating the peach from the lead was pretty easy. I gave the healthier half back to Bess. While I threw the useless part of the pencil away, I heard my dad making creepy jokes about me and Bess. They bordered on bestiality. Nicole and Chelsea both gave me sympathetic frowns. I just sat down on the couch and hugged Bess. Obviously, I wasn’t interested in whatever my dad was talking about. She was the family cow, so she deserved some attention – probably much more than she would get without me around. Bess started laughing again and climbed onto my chest. I groaned at how heavy she was.

“Holy crap,” I muttered. “Get off me…” The cow started licking my face, so I turned my head. It was hard not to laugh. My mom took a picture of this to show everyone on Facebook.

I had a false awakening. Nicole agreed to write out my dream for me, so when I explained the bit about the family cow, she needed clarification on Bessie’s name.

“It’s Bessie Pea,” I said. She wrote BESS E.P.

“No, Bessie. Just write Bessie.” She couldn’t seem to get that right, either. I started getting confused on the name and telling her to write Sess’s name instead. We just couldn’t get the correct name on paper.

Sky City and Moving Again

My parents were moving to a city in the clouds. I had the chance to sit on the edge of the cloud for a while before my dad needed help moving furniture out of the old house. I rode some kind of slide to the world’s surface.

The dream jumped. I was in a supermarket. Members of Fairy Tail strolled around, many of them arguing about magic and comparing their strength. I bumped into a new guild member and chatted with her for a while. She was shocked by how powerful Happy was. With a sigh, I assured her she had a lot to learn.

The dream jumped. I made it back to my parents’ house. The only way in was through the back door. I was glad it hadn’t been locked; the clouds overhead were beginning to spew acid rain. Inside, since no one else was there yet, I decided to take a bath. I’ve just been taking showers for the past four years, so it felt really nice to relax in a bath for once.

Portions omitted.

When I got out, Austin and Chelsea were arguing about a game they were playing together online.