Recent DJ Posts

I'm in a wooden barn, full of light with neat stack of hay close to the wall. The only occupant of the place is a gigantic elk, with a head as large as my torso and a antlers span of at least four meters. Its fur is chestnut brown, incredibly thick and soft. I'm here to put his tack and saddle on, and it's well behaved, giving me its head and taking the bite willingly. I secure the tack behind his antlers and tie a decorative piece made of leaves, whites flowers and silver belt to it next to its ear. I bent down to pick brush and notice that its cloven hoofs are biggers that my feets, even in the boots.

Ritual: Slept from about 1:45 to 6:15am, woke to record a vivid NLD, decided to turn it into a WBTB and try to get lucid. I wanted to use some light supplements but nothing powerful, only alpha-gpc and bacopa... but after wondering why one of the bacopa capsules I'd just swallowed was white, I realized, oh shit, when traveling recently I had put some galantamine in the same bottle! I had no interest in taking galantamine this morning but now it seemed there was nothing to be done. Then I had an idea: since piracetam counters the more unpleasant effects of galantamine, and since it now frequently acts for me as a lucid trigger on its own, what might happen if I took the two at the same time? It had never occurred to me to try this before.

Writing this up after the experiment, I feel like an alchemist who has just stumbled across the philosopher's stone. Wow. After going back to bed 7am I did some prep before falling asleep and then found myself dreaming lucidly for over an hour, waking at 8:30am, probably my longest stint to date. Then I wrote up everything I could remember, lay back in bed to remember and write down some more, went back to sleep, and found myself in another semilucid that presented itself as building on events from the previous dream (though I'm not convinced it actually was). At 10:30am I woke again, feeling thoroughly surfeited and satisfied with so much dreaming.

DILD, "Three Houses": The dream lasted so long that there was even a point midway through it where I thought to myself, "With everything I've already experienced, how am I ever going to remember all this? There's just no way, especially if I keep going. Should I just wake up?" But the answer came readily, "No way! I want to keep experiencing it, even if I can't remember everything later." There were a number of shifts and transitions that might normally have destabilized the dream and woken me, but I felt confident in my ability to navigate them safely.

Although I don't clearly remember the beginning of the dream, I'm sure it was a DILD because I recall having one of those thought sequences like, "Hey... I think I might be drea—yes, of course I'm dreaming. Duh. I knew that." Experiences like these confirm for me that lucidity goes beyond mere dream awareness (which in itself can be non-lucid, as I've experienced many times) to encompass that awareness of dream awareness, a kind of meta-awareness, that enables agency. Once I had agency, it was on to my tasks. I had two main tasks planned, working on the "intellego" technique from Ars Magica and trying this month's bonus TOTM. I prioritized the latter because it is time sensitive.

Random house: Although I was upstairs in a house when I got lucid, I decided that to do the task properly I should start with a fresh one. I went out to the balcony, which looked out over some tall pines bordering the backyard, and easily levitated into the air. I was floating over a residential neighborhood with numerous houses to choose from, so I tried to let instinct guide me. Although the outside of the house I picked didn't inspire any sense of connection—it was an ordinary two-story suburban home in blue-grey clapboard—I figured I should look inside.

My first distinct impression was how heavy the front door was, one of those old ones made of solid wood. I had to manually lock it behind me and the bolt was hard to turn, though even at the time this struck me as mere DR, since the sensation of forcing the bolt was identical to what I have to do currently with my patio gate in WL. After entering, I found myself in a short plain white hallway, and started wandering through and trying various doors.

Although my intention had been to find house that represented me, and I even muttered something to this effect aloud a few times as I wandered through this one, I still didn't feel any connection with this place. All the rooms on the ground floor were vacant and a bit dirty, as though someone had moved out in a hurry. I wondered if I was seeing an empty house because I've never actually owned a house of my own in WL, having always rented, so I never had experienced a house that truly did represent me. I opened one door and it led into an enclosed porch or sunroom, also empty. I went back inside and found an interior room with no windows. I thought that if I did live here, this would be a great place to build bookshelves, something I've always wanted to do if I had a house of my own. This house, however, didn't look like a place would ever really want to live, much less a place could represent me in any meaningful way.

I was annoyed with how empty and uninteresting the ground floor was, so as I went upstairs I reinforced my intention for the house to represent me. At the top of the stairs were two rooms, and these were cluttered with scattered boxes of junk. Might this represent a cluttered state of mind? I looked around at the seemingly random stuff, but once again I felt no connection with it. There were big boxes crammed with vinyl record albums... but I've never owned any vinyl, having grown up in the era of cassettes and then CDs. There was a smaller box containing smaller records, and I tried to remember what that format was called. "Eight-tracks" was what I came up with—clearly I didn't have full access to WL memory, because I'm well aware that eight tracks are those big chunky early cassettes, and only after waking did I remember that the miniature records are properly called "singles." I've never owned any of those either. When I saw that another box on the floor contained an open bag of what appeared to be maxipads, I started to get annoyed. This is just random junk! Sure, I'm a woman, I occasionally use maxipads, but I really don't think they have any special meaning for me... apparently the dream is not cooperating with my intention. That part, at least, is nothing new. My dreamstate has never been entirely cooperative.

I went back downstairs and out through a garage. It was mostly empty, but there was a chest of drawers there, where I began to try out my second task. "Intellego," I said, touching the wood (I wasn't sure if the Form should be "Corpus," so I left it blank.) All I could read from the chest of drawers was a vague impression of the craftsman's hands, and a feeling that it might have been made in India. That made sense, I figured... how much information could I expect out of furniture, anyway?

I went outside and looked up into the sky. It was full of fluffy, almost cartoonish clouds. "Intellego auram!" I shouted. I got no response, even when I repeated the command several times and focused specifically on the wind. Well, what did I expect to learn from the sky? The current strength and pattern of wind currents? What possible meaning could that have for me? I suppose it was a failure of imagination, but "intellego auram" produced no impressions at all.

Aspirational house: I wasn't happy with my first house attempt, but figured I should try again. I tried to find a house that looked more like something I would actually want to live in. Stone walls, of course, something old and solid and dignified. I "located" such a house but it felt a bit fake, like I was forcing the issue, maybe even creating an overlay of what I wanted to see over what was actually there. I tried to remind myself this is dream, nothing is "actually" there, and went through the front door.

This front door was also pleasingly solid and heavy, and it latched shut on its own, a big improvement over the last one. I found myself in a little coatroom or antechamber, and from there passed through another door into a spacious kitchen. As I walked in I was still determined for this to be the house I was hoping for, so at first I felt like my impressions were driven more by imagination than dream. But after a moment dream took over, and my vague wishes solidified into a magnificent kitchen. It was long and narrow, and over to my right I had the impression of a stove range where a woman was cooking. To my left was the food storage area, consisting of a large refrigerator, floor-to-ceiling stainless steel doors that turned out to be the cupboards for dry goods, and the glass doors of a built-in freezer that also occupied a whole section of the wall. Although I had created the basic structures through my own deliberate imagining, as I now opened the doors and peeked at the contents, I was satisfied that dream had followed through and spontaneously filled in the details. When I opened the door of the refrigerator, there was even a beautifully frosted white cake, and although I thought I heard the woman across the room warning me not to touch it, I couldn't resist lifting up a corner of the plastic cover and using my finger to swipe a bit of the frosting. The vivid taste made me glad of my mischief... just like real buttercream!

I don't remember the other rooms of this house as clearly as the kitchen, though in contrast the last house it was furnished and even peopled. Upstairs I ran into a guy with a beard and mustache and decided to work on my ongoing attempt to summon game characters. I wondered if it would work better if I started with a character I had less interest in, so that I'd be less concerned about "getting it right." Last night in DA:I I had some conversation scenes with Blackwall in which I basically friendzoned him, so I tried to transform this DC into him by visualizing the scene I remembered. The voice was easier than the face; it wasn't a complete success but not a complete failure either. Unexpectedly I ended up kissing the DC (which was not in the original scene), and it was at this point that he seemed most like the game character, though I didn't take our interactions any further.

In further exploring the upstairs of this house, I opened a closet door and found myself in—I'm not sure what to call it, maybe "the labyrinth," a kind of claustrophobic dream space that perpetually replicates itself. In the past I've experienced it when I've portaled and accidentally found myself trapped in a seemingly endless series of tiny doorless rooms. This time it wasn't even rooms, just a texture like pebbly pastel-colored styrofoam that was pressing in on all sides. Wherever I pushed through in any direction, I found myself in another identical space. I even "airlifted," a technique of rising vertically that usually extricates me from unpleasant or threatening situations, but was still stuck in the labyrinth. In the past, the only way I've gotten out was to wake up, but this time I was determined to keep cool and persevere. Sure enough, eventually the sense of claustrophobia receded and I found myself in a new scene. Maybe the labyrinth is no more than a virtual rendering of unconstructed dream space.

I was now outdoors on a street far too narrow for cars, and cobbled. It was pleasingly archaic, and I wondered if I could work on the DA:I theme some more. The only distraction was the brightly colored balloons that were attached everywhere for some reason... a festival? At the end of the street I climbed a steep staircase to the second floor of an unpainted wooden building, and on an inspiration, I thought, "When I turn the corner, I want to see my dream lover." (I've been thinking it over in WL, and decided that I might prefer this over a mere "guide." But my DCs have been so inconsistent that to date I've identified neither.)

I turned the corner and... sitting in a rocking chair was a drab, ugly old woman. (I already mentioned how perverse my subconscious can be.) I didn't want to be rude, so I approached her with questions. At my wondering why she appeared in this form, she answered, "We take different appearances." I had the feeling that the "we" included both of us. Although I was not attracted to her in this form, I thought there was something familiar in her eyes, so I kissed her anyway. Around this time another DA:I character, Sera, came climbing up a rope onto the balcony of the room, and I thought perhaps the dream was suggesting that we take a stand for lesbian love. I was up for this, so I yelled at the young man pursuing Sera up the rope that he had better climb down as quickly as he could, if he hoped to stand a chance of surviving when I cut it. I pulled out my knife and let the taut rope brush against the sharp blade, severing some of the strands to show my threat was serious. The man started climbing down again, but the rope was not as durable as I thought, and my knife hadn't cut through more than a third of its width before the rest of it broke and unraveled, dropping him to the street. I peered down anxiously but was relieved to see him stand up again, apparently unharmed. "Sorry!" I shouted, and genuinely meant it.

Things only got weirder from here, and at the point where the jockey told me, "They should tape our warm hands to the wheel," and I was going over this line trying to make sure I would remember it, I started to wonder if I should wake myself up. Hell no, I decided. So there were more things I don't remember clearly, and I'm not sure how I found myself in my old house.

Old house: I was in the house where I lived from the age of ten until I left for college. This was so far into the dream that I can't be sure if it was another attempt at the TOTM that brought me here, but once I found myself in the house, it definitely felt relevant to the task... of all the places I've lived in my life, this was the one I felt the most connection to, and it lives very intact in my memory. I floated through it like a disembodied spirit, mostly impressed by the accuracy of what I saw. But there was something drab and empty about it, too, perhaps because I was aware that everything I was saw no longer existed: the house was sold shortly after I finished college, so although it still stands, it is no longer the home I remember.

I started in my bedroom, floated through the upstairs playroom I shared with my brother, drifted down the stairs, and then made a circuit through the dining room, into the parlor, through the closet that connected the parlor to my parents' bedroom, and through the adjoining bathroom. Everything looked ordinary and intact until this point, when I saw the first oddity: a white enamel woodburning stove, a kitchen model, was in the bathtub for some reason. I continued floating into the kitchen, where we did have such a woodstove—original to the house—though the real one was black cast iron and much too large to fit in any tub. I concluded my tour in the living room, having made a complete circuit of everything but my brother's room, the pantry, and the workroom.

There was something festive about the decoration of the living room, perhaps because of the many wonderful Christmases we had enjoyed there, and another oddity: a giant pair of elk horns, which when I looked closer appeared to be attached to an actual elk, although it was standing as still as a statue. I assumed the elk horns were DR, since I had recently been impressed by pictures of the giant Irish elk, an extinct species (neither specifically Irish nor actually an elk, to be pedantic) that sported massive antlers. It reminded me of the elk that Thranduil rode, and my earlier successes inspired me to attempt another thematic summoning. I clambered on the back of the giant elk and rode it outside (conveniently ignoring the fact that there is no way its antlers would have fit through the the ordinary-sized door that led outside from the living room.)



Outside it was winter, everything covered in snow, and I found myself in a hilly landscape with no connection to my old yard. I focused on finding Thranduil and saw him up ahead on his own elk, actively battling a pack of large winter wolves. He was alone and I feared that if I did not intervene I would lose the chance to talk to him, so I charged ahead using fire magic to clear the pack. When the battle was done and we stood alone again, surrounded by the fallen wolves, he gave me an imperious look and said coldly, "No Lothian tickets will be given to see me." Although I wasn't sure what he meant by "Lothian" (or why I feel like it should be capitalized), I had the impression that he was telling me that he was not someone to be summoned at whim by a mere dreamer. So I changed tactics, presenting myself as his sister. According to the lore I don't even think he has a sister, but it worked.

"So, our father in the middle of a storm brought anzu fruits for our hunters," I informed him, pointing to a cache of green and orange spheres buried under a patch of ice. Thranduil accepted my new identity and greeted me with a prim brotherly kiss, to which I responded with somewhat more than sisterly affection, though I tried not to go full Lannister on him. It was here that I awoke at last, delighted to have finally made some progress in the character summonings that, to date, I have found the most difficult type of tasks.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was a hot day. I was walking up a slope in a desert forest. The soil was grey and dry. There were pine trees, well-spaced, and shrubs and boulders.

I somehow sensed an animal stirring behind me. I looked over my shoulder to see an animal I first thought of as a deer starting up from behind a boulder.

The deer seemed to be afraid of me, so that it wouldn't move. So I turned around and walked away, hoping to calm the animal.

The deer now rushed out from behind the boulder and past me, coming a little close. It was probably still afraid of me. It scared me a little, too. It was very big. I now thought of it as an elk, even though it was colored like a deer.

I now turned to my left and was walking toward a path or road. There were no trees in this area, and the sun was bright. From behind a smaller boulder sprung another deer-like animal. This one was dark mahogany, almost like an elk. But it only came up to my waist.

The little animal was really friendly. So I decided to pet it. It began licking me. But then it got too clingy with me. It began kissing and sucking my hand. I couldn't escape from the animal. It almost seemed to be coiling around me. And it was slobbering all over me.

I knew people said that wild animals with rabies first act really friendly with people. I wondered if this animal had rabies. If it did, and it was slobbering all over me, if was probably exposing me to rabies.

I managed to free myself from the animal. I was now on the path. There were a black man and woman on the path with me. Off to my left was a small, nice, wooden bridge that overlooked a wide, shimmering valley or gleaming lake.

The woman was telling me how she was poor and hungry. She was trying to get me to give her money so she could get some food. But I had a feeling that she only wanted to feel me out to see if she could use me to get a lot of money.

But the man told the woman to stop complaining and to get onto assistance. The man said that where we were, in South Africa (?), people could get really good food assistance.

Dream #2

I was watching a true-crime TV show, kind of like "Unsolved Mysteries," probably with my family. The segment was about some woman who had been murdered by her boyfriend.

The murder was pretty gruesome. But, for some reason, what struck me more was how irresponsible and neglectful the woman had been in her life. I took as a sign of this the woman's obsession with collecting little "cute" toys.

One of these toys stood up on a bookshelf. It was a little, black rabbit. I somehow knew that the rabbit was controlled by a stylus, as if it were something like a touch-screen Game Boy.

I was standing -- somewhere -- with my sister. I was showing her that I knew how to play with these "cute" animals as well. The "cute" animal was basically a screen like an iPad screen, surrounded with white fur.

I was now walking around outside with a tall, fattish white man. The man had stubbly cheeks and wore a baseball cap and a too-tight, pale yellow t-shirt. We were walking through some small mountain town that looked partly lke an old western town and partly like a modern town.

The man and I were crossing some bridge from one section of town to another. After that we walked up a hill of buildings that kind of looked like Old West buildings.

I was telling the man about my job. The man said that my job sounded pretty good. I started to worry that the man would think I was bragging and either try to cut me down or take my job away. So I thought I should tone down my enthusiasm.

I told the man that the job was good for somebody like me because it was a project that was just starting out. It was good for people like me who had volatile emotions. I found it physically hard to say "volatile emotions."

The man asked me what I meant. I explained -- while shrouding my head with a towel (???) -- that I could suddenly get angry really easily.

I was still talking to the man when he veered us into some building that looked partly like an Old West saloon and partly like a modern cafe. I hadn't even quite realized we'd gone inside.

The man veered off to the left and left me behind. He told me he wasn't trying to avoid me. But he just had something important to take care of. He went to the counter.

I stood around for a bit, then decided that maybe I should get something while I was here. But I needed to get money first. So I went to an ATM just to the right of the counter.

Just to the right of the ATM was a table at which sat three ladies. The ladies were all dressed like from the Old West. I felt like I owed the ladies something. So it didn't seem right that I should be getting money out of the ATM right in front of them.

The man walked over to the table and I followed. Apparently the man and I had done something for the ladies. Now the man was looking for our repayment.

The head lady addressed the man. The lady was tall and stately, with a firm, shapely figure. She wore a dress with red and maroon stripes, a corset-like waist, and puffed-out sleeves. She had her greying hair up in a very fancy coiffure.

The lady handed us two tickets as repayment. I looked at my ticket. It was white with peach-pink writing. It said that it was good for any one sporting event, anywhere in the world, at any time.

The woman said she had discussed our repayment with her lawyer, and that this type of repayment balanced being the best for us and the most convenient for her. And since she'd discussed it with her lawyer, it was legally protected. So we shouldn't try to fight her for any other type of repayment -- such as, I guess, the money we'd probably expected.

The man and I walked away. We were probably back outside. The man was disappointed at first. But then he said that this gift was actually good, and quite a feminine gift, because it balanced the boyish and adult sides of a man.

I thought the gift was cheap, and I couldn't figure out why the man seemed satisfied with it. But, either as or after I woke, I began to realize that I could go to any sporting event in the world, at any time. I began trying to decide what sporting event I would go to.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

A view of some area almost like a tarmac, though with no visible airport. A building more like an apartment complex stood off in the distance and to the left. Some structure like the shelter for a train stop was in the foregroung.

On the concrete ground lay four or five people, living or dead, face down. They all seemed to be adult men. They weren't wearing any shirts, and their pants looked like pajama pants. The men were all really skinny and pale.

A military man, a white man in a green, official-looking uniform and a round, hard helmet, stood at the right end of the row of bodies. Two soldiers stood on the left end. The two soldiers may have been holding up another one of these emaciated men. The man probably wasn't old, but his face looked old.

The soldiers let the man go. The leading military man told the man that if he complied, he'd be let go, so that he shouldn't be afraid, and he should just lie down by the rest of the men.

As the man did this, the leading military man may have shot him in the stomach.

A narrator's voice came on saying that during the years of (World War Two?) this was the way of life for many male college students in America. They would be taken to these camps and put through all kinds of torture. They'd be promised freedom, but it would only lead to more torture.

There were now scene of military people driving around on this tarmac-like area in civilian 1970s-style cars. The military people would drive over camp inmates who had been laid down on the road. The inmate's emaciated bodies would generally split right open.

One scene showed how at least the top half of an inmate got caught in the back right wheel-well of one car, or actually got stuck to the wheel itself, so that it was just thudding along with the car.

The narrator's voice said that these camps had all been part of a CIA mind control experiment. Part of the experiment had been to see how much the prisoners could take. But the main part was to see how far they could brainwash the soldiers to do any cruel, or even absurd, thing.

Another scene showed soldiers in some green-walled area that looked partly like an airplane hangar or garage and partly like a 1950s-style diner. A leading military man stood off to the right. A row of prisoners lay on the ground. And two soldiers stood over the prisoners.

Again, the prisoners may have been dead, but I could't tell. The two soldiers were pacing back and forth, pointing vanilla ice cream cones at the prisoners' backs.

The soldiers were acting like they had convinced the prisoners that they were only going to threaten them with the ice cream cones as long as they played along. But they really were going to shoot them. Or the soldiers may possibly have thought they really had guns, while they only had ice cream cones.

Dream #2

I was out with somebody else in a grassy clearing in the wilderness. We were doing something like consulting somebody about getting the person's car fixed. It seemed like this was going to take a while, so I decided to go for a walk.

I walked down a small slope on a dirt path. The path was well maintained and smooth. The soil was a pleasant shade of brown. On either side of me was tall, deeply green grass with some glimmers of orange or tan grass. To my left the land sloped down a bit. To my right, it sloped up a bit. It was late afternoon, and the sky was silvery-blue, getting dim.

For some reason I looked behind me, as if I'd expected to see something. I did. A deer seemed to be peeking its head out from the tall grass. Either I'd startled it or it wanted to cross the path but was waiting until I was no longer looking at it. The deer's head was huge -- like the deer was twice as big as a normal deer.

Either this deer or another deer now walked out onto the path and slightly up the slope. This deer was normal sized. But her coat had traces of green and orange in it, as if to help her blend in with the grass. And she had a huge cone coming out of the back of her head. The cone looked like the rest of the deer's body, but it was as big as a giraffe's neck!

I turned around and continued walking along the path. The slope up to my right was pretty gentle, and I could just see over it. It appeared that there was a road just past the slope. On the other side of the road a group of animals stood just at the edge of a dense stand of trees.

These animals looked at first like deer to me. But they were a bit too big-bodied. I then assumed they must be elk. But their coats were largely white, with cloudings and splotches of red-brown fur.

The slope seemed much steeper now, so that it was much harder for me to see the "elk." It seemed like the elk wanted to cross the street, but that they were afraid to cross while I was around.

I called to the elk in a high, kind of motherly voice, hoping that would make them less afraid. But I then felt that if they felt threatened by my heightened activity, they'd stampede.

I felt like they might stampede anyway, so I was trying to get past this area quickly. But I didn't know how wide this herd was -- herds of elk could be huge, I thought. It was also getting harder for me to walk.

For a moment I thought I would get off the path altogether, go up the slope so I could see how many elk I was dealing with. But the path had become a trench, kind of difficult to get out of. I worried that the elk would stampede and trap me in the trench, trampling me to death.

I thought I had to get out of this trench right away. But now the trench had gotten even deeper, maybe 4 meters deep, with flat-vertical walls. There was no way I could get out. But I thought the narrowness of the trench might now save me: the elk might just jump over.

Dream #3

I was walking through some kind of gigantic warehouse. The warehouse had tons of rooms. The rooms were all huge, like aisles ina big box warehouse, like a Sam's Club. There were shelves, all filled with both boxes and clear, plastic containers. The boxes and containers were all about a meter long and half a meter wide and deep.

I knew that every resident in an apartment complex was being moved out. They were all probably being moved to another specific apartment complex. Each resident (i.e. every person in each household) had been given one cardboard box and one clear plastic container. Everything each individual wanted to take had to fit into his two containers.

For some reason I imagined a litte, Mexican girl and her brother running happily around their house, figuring out what stuff they wanted to take with them.

All the families were now packed up. The boxes were all in the storage area. And at some point all this stuff would be moved to the new apartment complex.

I walked around a bit, looking in through the sides of the clear, plastic containers. I didn't see anything of interest. The boxes and plastic containers had all been set really haphazardly on the shelves. Some of them weren't even set right side up.

Dream #4

A young, blonde boy with slightly tanned skin was in some place like a warehouse or factory. The boy had kind of warped himself here. He had discovered a time machine, which wasn't exactly a time machine, but something more like a dimensional warp machine.

The boy had warped himself into a dimension like earth, concurrent with a different time on earth, but with some different physical laws. But the boy was using the physical laws here to help change things for the better in his own dimension.

But the boy was slightly worried. It seemed like some of the stuff he was doing here to benefit his own dimension was actually hurting this dimension. But, then, he didn't seem to care. He took a kind of troublemaker attitude and revelled in messing things up.

The boy ran around the factory. There were rows of boxes, huge pipes, vats, and other mechanisms. There were also some kind of mechanical pits that the boy would occasionally jump into and out of.

The only effect I could see the boy having on this place was that whenever he acted with "too much energy," he left bright green and bright pink tracers or shadows or silhouettes of himself in the area. Sometimes these tracers were slimy. But these tracers had the effect of tearing through reality. This could destroy both this and the boy's dimensions.

There was then another scene, unrelated to the boy. I don't remember anything about it.

The scene then returned to the factory the boy had been in. The boy was no longer there. He may now have been a man. But the man had gone back to his own dimension. A woman remarked that the man could, however, accidentally be brought back to this dimension, which would be dangerous for him.

The woman, some kind of Xena-like Amazon Queen, now stood in a blue, temple-like room with a man who sort of looked like an evil wizard. The two stood before a wall that had sloping-up shapes in them, like the upward sloping of a huge organ. In the center of this was a round, dark doorway. This was a "time machine."

The woman and the man spoke about how it was good that the humans had decided no longer to use the time machine. As they spoke, the view of them became a view from a television screen.

My view was in a dark living room. It seemed to be backing and backing away from the screen, until it was finally in my body again. I was sitting on the floor, with my back against a couch. The couch may have had a plushy, pale beige fabric. But it may have been covered over with a white sheet.

I was now sitting up on the couch. My old friends R and L were laying together on the top edge of the couch, leaning against the wall against which the couch was set.

L (a woman) commented that she thought it was good that the humans and the people from the other dimension were learning how to cooperate using the time machine technology.

R (a man) said, "No way! If I were the people from the other dimension, I'd act like a Mock (or Lock), like in the book The Time Machine! I'd just act like a beast to that time machine, and bam! bam! break it up!"

As R said "bam! bam!" he slammed his arm down twice on my face. He slammed my nose really hard, leaving it hurt and stinging.

I was about to yell, "What the hell are you doing?" But I calmed down immediately. I knew if I yelled, R would just act like he didn't know why I was so mad.

I turned around to R, who was wrapped up to his face in a white sheet with L. I got right in his face and very calmly said, "I know you meant to do that. You meant to hit me in the face. You meant to be an asshole."

R very calmly looked at me. He said, "You're right. I did mean to do it to you. And you know what? From this day on, I'm just going to be a terrible person to you."

I said, "Oh. Okay." I knew I was living here with R and L. So I figured I'd have to get out of here as soon as possible, hopefully even by the coming day.

I started working through my thoughts, while still looking at R, trying to figure out how I could get rid of everything I didn't need, and how to move everything I needed as efficiently as possible.

I couldn't believe how young R looked, as young as he looked when I first met him, sixteen years ago!