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"Don't see why we had to take a job on this bo shui kueh piece of rock." I grumble to myself.

Mal steps onto the loading ramp. "Who's in rutting command here, Jayne?" He doesn't wait for an answer.

"All right everybody," he says to the crew assembled inside the ship. "We've got 'til nightfall before anything needs doing. With the exception a Jayne, here," he slaps me on the shoulder and ignores my growl, "You can all enjoy the benefits of civilization until that time. Kaylee? I believe you had something you needed to pick up..."

Mal goes over to Kaylee and discusses specifics of cost and necessity, and I pick up two 20-liter buckets full of water and start trudging into the muddy rainforest.

The first group of people I run into turn out to consider this a sacred duty or something, and decide not to kill me for this reason. That's really all I can remember up until the point that I join forces with a younger girl and go climb up a tower that just appeared. My boots have been traded out for the running shoes that I wear in real life.

The tower turns into an insanely high jungle gym, of the fall-off-and-you-die variety. The four people I'm with turn this into a game, describing the best way to get to the top. There are posts built into certain places for no reason, and these turn out to be part of the puzzle. I run up a 45 degree angle and slip, barely catching myself. I keep jumping upward until I'm climbing the underside of a slide. I've reached the top, and I'm just about to pull myself up -

I wake up.

Welcome to the Jungle. Scare Factor: 3. You know, Mal, as it is my dream, technically, I'm in command.

bo shui kueh: ...a restaurant? Apparently, I need to work on my Chinese.[/QUOTE]

My team saves a little girl's life while we steal something from her father.

I'm cycling away from Vancouver, eastwards. There are people shuffling down the road on foot, heading into the city. One of them makes a grab at my bike, and I punch him, knocking him over. A few people pass me, on bikes themselves, and an older woman tells me I shouldn't hesitate to take them out if they try to grab me. A skinny bald man further up the road is moving into my path, and I hold out an arm to clothesline him, but he stumbles away at the last second.

People are still shuffling around, but they're a little more zombie-like now. Two people are holed up in a lab, a guy with shoulder-length black hair wearing a leather jacket, and the main character from Zombieland. We have a few frantic fight scenes. I end up throwing hard punches at the zombies and wishing I had a shotgun, but punching them tends to stun them for a few seconds, so that's something. A zombie with tangled curly hair, a bigger guy, rushes us, and I accidentally tear off the bandages covering his mouth. He tries to bite me, and I swing a computer moniter into his head repeatedly, until he stops twitching.

We have to get something from the control room, so I'm rappelling down a wide chute, in circles around the wires coming from the centre. I realize too late that going in circles means that I have less rope, and I'm several metres from the ground when I run out. Climbing out the vertical hole, about twenty metres, would be practically impossible, so I untangle myself from the harness and drop to the floor. I land easily. I see a flash of what's on the other side of the exit, a conveyor belt leading to the zombie from before.

I hurtle out of the chute at full speed, launching myself at the zombie and aiming a punch at his jaw. My punch barely connects, and I realize too late that it's too weak to do anything. The zombie looks at me, and I've used up all my momentum; I panic. I push back at the zombie, telekinetically blasting it into the wall, splattering its brains over the metallic surface.

Abruptly, I realize that I'm dreaming, and I walk to the control room, throwing zombies through the walls as they try to approach. I'm having so much fun, and the remaining zombies scatter like leaves, though their landings are bloodier. I reach my destination and find a zombie!GIR and zombie!Yoda standing there waiting for me. They've gotten bigger. I try to toss them away with TK, but the move barely pushes them a few centimetres. The pair stalks menacingly toward me.

I'm lucid, though, and decide this is a complete waste of time. I decide to ignore the pair and go look for Walms. I look away from the bizarre zombies and make for the exit. Zombie!GIR is a green couch bumping up against my leg.

I'm waking up. I try to stabilize, but fail.

New dream. We're survivors in an art gallery IN SPACE while running a pet shop. We find other survivors on earth and establish an alliance. My cousins want to look at the fish.

I have the wrong prescription for contacts and I'm running away from a government conspiracy with my family. Or monsters, maybe. My brother wants to know why this is necessary.

My luggage is too heavy, after I get off the bus, but I find that if I lean a certain way, I start floating along automatically. I run into Milly's mom, Pat Green*, and we go for lunch at a vegetarian cafe.

*From high school. You realize I'm making all these names up, right?

Zombieland. Scare Factor: 3.

I'm wandering around Quickton. There might be some kind of business convention going on. I temporarily will a giant tower into existence over the highway, to defend/attack something.

My old high school. There are teachers and students milling about in the hallway, and I'm standing outside near one of the entrances. I'm hooking fingers and toes into the brick of an inside corner, climbing onto the roof. At one point, I'm near horizontal, and climbing in dreams is so much fun.

Apparently there are some parkour and climbing classes going on in June (in the dream). I want to sign up, but there are people trying to kill me, and I'm trying to lay low.

Climbing Classes. Scare Factor: 1.[/QUOTE]

The dream takes place several years (decades?) into the future.

The Library is falling apart in the absence of a Librarian. The Library itself is a vast compendium of past knowledge, mostly accessible through computers. It's a surprisingly busy place, in this future, filled up with mostly young people, but it's dying.

I already know how this is going to end. I slam open the door of my house (the library is inside) and walk out. It's a well lit night, and snow is falling lightly from the sky.

"OKAY!" I shout at the sky, "I'll be your fucking Librarian!" I pause at the flicker of a curtain across the street. Most people would think I'm yelling at God or something, but I'm actually communicating with a highly advanced intelligence that has full control over... never mind.

A question forms somewhere in my mind, asking what it would be like to stay in this one place for years, contrary to everything that I am (a traveller). Stubbornly, I continue to assert that I'll do the damn job if I have to - time is fluid in this place, anyway.

I don't receive an answer.

---

I'm in a location I dreamed about last spring. It's almost identical. The local aquatic centre is fused with a rock climbing gym, which we don't have here in Quickton.

In the dream, I'm wondering why I thought we don't have any rock climbing here, since we so obviously do (we don't).


Map


Colour of the walls

Silence in the Library. Scare Factor: 2.

I was going through some old dream journals and thought I'd type up a couple for reference. The first dream occurred shortly after I heard that my family had been in a minor car accident. Everyone was fine. Well, except for the wildlife involved.

August 2009

I'm rock climbing at the local crag (but in a different city) when I get the call. Mom hands the phone off to a grief counsellor or something. She tells me that my dad has passed away, but do I want to see my huge birthday cake? Hey, do I want to have the phone held up to the body's ear so I can talk to him? I'm watching the head get cut off of the body, presumably having to do with cremation. I close my eyes, nauseous.

Scrambling down a steep trail now, made of granite and overgrown with tree roots. I'm thrown into what seems like a very vivid memory on top of the dream I'm in. I'm a black man in South Africa, and I'm brandishing a knife, trying to fend off two men who attacked my wife.


Except with roots.

My dream-ego, still looking on from the first dream, hopes that I'm not going to hurt anyone.

My strike goes wide, and I injure my wife instead, watching with horror as her blood spills to the red ground. She's dead so, so quickly. Our local equivalent of a doctor appears, and she tries to slice my wife's body down from the roots that are binding her, thinking she might still be able to save her. She won't. Our son! Our son us still here. I take him and run.

Mortality. Scare Factor: 8. I remember chalking up this one as "The Nightmare of 2009".

I didn't remember the dream until I read about it though. It's not quite so scary when I remember "Dad's fine; I saw him yesterday."

Within the dream, the dream-within-the-dream was a memory of a previous life. It was so vivid, I practically felt the same way when I woke up.

Game. Tree. Spy. Babysitting.

It feels like I might be playing a video game. There are two characters: the main character is following a mentor archtype through a forest filled with ruins and caves leading deep below the surface. I'm not sure if I'm the mentor or the MC; I might be both. We're searching for a series of gemstones or charms, consulting witches on the way. On some level, I know the MC won't go for the mentor's final goal. It's far too diabolical.

There are something like four dimensional levels of this tree, and we're exploring them all. I recall at least two characters (though I'm sure there were more): the theoretical expert, and the practical one. Again, I think I'm both characters. Somehow, climbing the tree leads to different dimensional gateways, though I don't remember where they were all located. Dimensions below the surface still had branches and a fall that would probably kill you. I remember that TE is very well protected via anchors and harnesses and carabiners, presumably because the various dimensions can be so disorienting. I remember being the TE, and being left on one of the explored levels, then being the PE and actually exploring a deeper one. When we get to the final level, we find another gateway. We go back to the surface to recoup.

Spying is involved. A guy of about my age may have information that our organization desperately needs. Me and another female friend get ourselves invited to... watch movies or something in a group. We're sitting in a basement on a bunch of couches. Then everything is flooding. I stay behind to grab all of my things that are scattered below the water (seems to be my swimming stuff and a coil-bound notebook containing instructions). An older man, maybe the other guy's dad, is back for me, scolding me for not evacuating and leaving my stuff behind - is it really worth my life? Considering how incriminating that notebook is, it very well could be.

I think I'm found out later, anyway.

"If we're babysitting tonight, why are we here in the morning?" Apparently the parents don't actually need us until 9PM. I resolve to put the brats to bed VERY early, and enjoy the party in the meantime.

Third Person Narration. Scare Factor: 2. It's annoying for dream recall.

March 2010

I'm one person in a large group of people who have collectively decided to go swimming. When we appear at the swimming hole [that never really existed] outside of my hometown, most people stand around, looking suspiciously at the water. A guy who I remember being a grade younger than I was [whose name I saw in a journal entry yesterday] jumps straight in to the south side of the pool.

I'm wearing a red lifeguard t-shirt, and one other lifeguard and myself are inspecting the north side of the pool. Some days you can swim in it, other days it's really just a puddle of stinking mud. Like today. I lose my balance when the edge of the crowd jostles me. A few titters, and I exchange words with one of the bystanders.

Obviously, I'll be swimming in the clean side of the pool then, if only to clean off.

The clean side has Jay using the natural rock formations on the other side as diving boards and such. I don't pay mutch attention to him. Rolling my eyes at the group that collectively won't even get in the pool, I jump into the clean water and eye the rock formations on the other side. From where I was standing, there was no way to walk across like Jay did, so I need to do some rock climbing to get to the impromptu diving board.

I'm in my element when I get to the other side and pull myself out of the water. It's been a while since I got to do this [because it's very flat and boring where I'm living now]. There are plenty of easy handholds in the rock, and I work my way to the left, where I'll be able to climb up to the ledge.

High School Classmates Near Water. Scare Factor: 7 because I hated high school 2 for normality, with a point for the fun of rock climbing and annoyance of public humiliation.

Original dream dated 5/18/2008:

Had 2 nightmares the past 2 nights.

One of them was about college. Sort of normal. The usual - I'm taking a class, paying for it myself and running myself into debt to do it, yet can't get to class on time and never get my homework done. I can't get the motivation to do it, and have missed so many classes that I can never catch up. I live 30 minutes away by car and want to move closer, but can't afford to. My lease is coming up, but I don't want to sign a new lease when I'm failing the class.

Then, for some reason, I'm wheeling a motorcycle through the university buildings. Nobody notices. I get it up several floors, when I realize that the elevator I intend to use to get farther up only has a weight capacity of 250 lbs. and can't possibly support its weight, and the stairs are too rickety. Somehow, I wind up wheeling it across a narrow beam several hundred feet above the lobby floor.

Which brings me to the weird thing about universities in my nightmares - I'm always on the edge of some high precipice, because for some reason they have many many floors but all of them end at sheer drops with no railings, or else they're in bizarre configurations that you have to climb from floor to floor like a bug... I'm almost always terrified of falling when I'm in a university-like building in my dream, and the drop is always hundreds of feet. There are always narrow, rickety stairs, or broken elevators, etc. It's an ongoing theme that bothers me.

Anyway, the next dream involved Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All, who was for some reason on a cruise ship fishing for squid, and was talking with her friend via text message before her parents showed up with her brother and her friend's brother. I have no idea what the point of the dream was.

Mom, Aunt Jenny, six-year old neice Miranda and I are going up huge, snowy mountain. I think my Dad, brothers and cousin Peter are there but they stay at the foot of the mountain for some reason. There are three plateaus where climbers can stop and rest, or catch a red tram that goes from the foot of the mountain to a chalet at the second plateau. There is a stop at the first plateau where people can take a bathroom break in a facility that has been carved into the mountain side.

My mom and Aunt Jenny go on ahead while I am left with Miranda to walking up the first part of the mountain (which is also the least difficult). At the first plateau we have a quick rest and watch people getting on and off the tram before continuing on our way. Because the mountain becomes dramatically steeper, there are stairs cut into the side of the mountain to assist people who decide to walk up. We are almost at the second plateau when Miranda slips and begins to slide down the mountain side. I throw myself after her and act as a human sled so that she will not be hurt. We slide all the way back down to the first plateau on our butts (well, my butt actually). Miranda thinks it is great fun but I am sore and frustrated.

It is very late in the afternoon and soon it will be dark, so rather than waste our time trying to climb again, we agree to take the tram. We quickly go to the bathroom (we only have two minutes before the tram leaves), get on and ride it up to the second plateau, where Mom and Aunt Jenny awaits us in the chalet. I want to stay there for the night but Mom and Aunt Jenny say that Miranda has school in the morning and they take the tram down the mountain. The entire family leaves and since I no longer have a ride home, I decide to continue climbing the mountain myself.

The next day I am eager to continue on. Since the tram does not go up any further, I have to climb the steep stairs that have been cut into the side of the mountain. The climb to the thrid and final plateau is the longest and hardest, but it doesn't seem so bad because there is a steady line of climbers trudging up the mountain. I see a few people fall or slide off, but since there is nothing I can do to help them, I have to keep going. I reach a peak and grab the slippery ridge just as I lose my footing. I cannot see what's on the other side but I assume it is the final plateau because I can see what appears to be a wooden roof. A hand grabs mine and pulls me over the ridge and I find my self under a small gazebo where an elderly lady with pink coloured eyes is drinking hot cider with two old men. One of the men is completely blind and the other has one eye missing.

Behind the small gazebo there appears to be a small town where many people are walking around. The buildings are just shells (four walls and a roof), with padded floors. There are no windows and no doors so the buildings offer little shelter from the elements, though I suppose they were better than sleeping outside. People can buy, sell and live in these building for as long as they want. I cannot see what or where the source is, but there is a steady and abundant supply of food. The little town sits in the shadow of the summit, and many climbers think it is so great that they forget about reaching the top and stay in the town instead. I have grown tired of the mountain and want to leave. I have lost my desire to reach the top but neither do I want to stay in the town. I buy some skis and start down the other side of the mountain from the plateau town. The view is exhilarating but the decend is long, isolated and dangerous. There is no one attempting the decent but me.


I was only half way down the mountain when the dream suddenly ended and I woke up.