All DJ Entries

I was on vacation somewhere with quite a few people. I think I was in Florida. I was going to go swimming with this guy I met. We were excited because we were going at night and it would just be us in the pool. Something distracted me while getting ready, but I eventually made it to the pool. I remember girls talking to me.

In another fragment, I was working at Hooters. I have a friend who works at Hooters, so this is probably where it came from. Anyway, I don't seem to remember much about this part, just that I was working there.

I woke up around noon and tried reverse blinking to try and LD, but I fell asleep and was with my family. My dad had his semi truck parked outside of the house and he had two other people with him. A young man and a young woman who worked with him. Dad had some kind of gauge hooked up to the inside of the house to his truck on the outside and I was messing with it. He told me it was an improvement and that the girl was checking it right now. I stopped messing with it so I wouldn't mess her up. She came inside and crouched down to look at something and everyone could see her crack hanging out of her pants. This part was strange to dream about. The younger dude just turned away sort of smiling, my dad, being the conservative man he is, giggled and turned to me and said, oh my gosh, her crack is hanging out. lol... So we all turned, I don't know. Anyway, my grandpa showed up, and he and my dad and the two people he lived with were leaving. They were traveling somewhere. They had luggage and everything and I told them I loved them and to have a safe trip.

My mom came up to me then and she had stuff packed too, she said, let's go to Florida. She had brought me some of my stuff, but I wanted to make sure I had all of it, so I asked her to hold on while I went back and checked to see if I had everything. She became really annoyed with me. As I was getting out of the car I yelled at her, not in a mean way, but I said we're going to florida and we're going to have fun so you stay put and Ill be right back. I felt semi-lucid when I said this. Anyway, she got pissed about it but she seemed like she was going to wait for me.

That's when T came in and woke me up, lol. Strange. I'm so glad I remembered as much as I did.

I stole this girl's phone and called her from it. A guy answered and I pretended to have the wrong number. I was walking into walmart. I ran into someone on the way in who I thought was her boyfriend, but he didn't know I had the phone. When we got to the doors he kicked me playfully, kind of to say, hey, I know you. I just shrugged him off as T came up to me with a bag of pictures he had developed. I was angry with him for a second for going through my pictures because it was an old camera and I had no idea what was on it. He just thought it was funny that I was mad.

I also sort of remember the dream before this, but it's still just not all there. We were in a trailer park, the world was gloomy looking, and something about T's dad.

After, there was this pretty asian woman who was crying looking in on this house. In the house, was her husband and she had just found out that he had cheated on her. He seemed to know she was out there, but couldn't see very well. She starts to walk in the house, being really quiet so she can sneak up on him. There's this tall white man behind her with a water bottle and he seems to be telling her what to do. She has this insane look in her eyes. Flash to her and the husband talking about it.

This isn't fair, I was drunk last night.

Non-Lucid


I remembered my first dream since I started practicing lucid dreaming this week. I woke up a couple of times before I had this dream.

I was in my house, just looking out the window when my grandma came into our backyard with two cats. The cats looked like stray cats, puffed up fur, ugly and very ferocious. She told us she had two new cats and my mom started ranting about how cute they were. I thought 'What? You've got to be kidding me! Those cats will eat you alive!'. Then my grandma left again and I woke up, not remembering the dream.

When my alarm clock went off the next morning I didn't remember the dream so I wrote in my DJ I didn't remember any dreams this night. But when I was having breakfast and looked out of the window, I thought I saw one of my grandma's real cats walking through our backyard! It was actually just a bird, but it made me remember the dream so I hurried upstairs to write the dream in my DJ.

Tried to WBTB, no lucid, but I did have a dream for the first time in a week that didn't seem foggy after waking up! yay!!!

Me and T were standing in a UPS office. I was applying in person for a job. T kept messing with me, playing around while I was trying to talk to the woman at the desk. He was making me laugh but I kept telling him to go, to wait outside, but he wouldn't. At one point, I'm not sure how he did this but, he lifted me up onto the counter and was holding me by the ankles. I got him to put me back down after a few minutes and he finally started to leave, he was almost gone when I asked him for a cigarette first. I knew there was a no smoking sign somewhere, but I guess I didn't care. I lit up and began talking to the lady again. She was telling me that I'd have to go to AC (a town nearby) to make deliveries and something about only being paid 5 an hour. She asked me if I would be using one of their cars. I nodded and then an image of a UPS truck popped into my head and I heard a guy saying that they were going to make me do their bitchwork for 10 bucks.

Next dream, I was standing in a house with my son in my arms looking out a window. A girl I went to high school with ran inside the house wearing this blue summer dress. There was a boy of about 9 or 10 years standing near me now and she went up to him and hugged him, playfully smothering him. She seemed fairly happy. I remember saying something to her, but I don't remember what it was. That's when I woke up.

I attempted to be lucid last night, but alas, I was not. I did dream, though.
My dream was a short one. The first thing I remember from it was finding a very fat centipede under my refrigerator. I named it Penelope, even though I hate centipedes and probably would not take the time to name them. Then, the centipede laid eggs on a picture frame, and I picked it up, and the eggs were so sticky that my hand got stuck. I got really grossed out and began shaking my hand in an effort to get it off. Had I remembered to look for anything out of the ordinary on my hand, I probably would have been lucid by then. Unfortunately not, but I wouldn't have had the chance to because then I woke up.
I tried to WILD in the morning at around 7am, but I was too woken up by then. I got into mid-transtition, though. Good for a first time, I guess.
I will try a FILD tonight.

Dream | Non-dream

Background:

This was my Friday-to-Saturday's night dream. On Saturday, I go to the same supermarket I dreamt of. However, in my dream, it is a bit different -- it's organized differently.

I was already in the supermarket. Everything was all black, but I hit someone. I heard some guy saying: "Hey, this is our private meeting, get out!", but then, the whole shop lit up and I saw LOTS of people arriving. There was an official announce (government) but I can't remember what it was. I was at the enter of the supermarket, and decided to buy a few things. The first foods I saw were different types of ham. There were two or three rows of them, but one weird thing appeared right up: two rows of video games... most precisely Warcraft III Collector's Edition. I didn't realize this was wrong. I could have gone lucid :/ My parents and I went to the hanging wardrobe where we'd deposit our coats for free, exceptionally, as it was one of the supermarket's offer. It should have cost us $686 precisely, but we only paid $6 'cause they said 6 out of the 7 coats we deposited had hoods.

This is all I can remember from tonight. I'm quite surprised that the stand with the video games and the ham at the same place didn't tilt in my head... Furthermore, I looked a long time at the video games, which is even more annoying ^^.

Anyway, I hope I'll soon have a lucid dream!

I was already in the supermarket when my dream started, clearly at the enter. I saw lots of people. Apparently, there was something going on -- I could not know what it was, but the government had announced something.

Since the last dream I recalled, I had the impression that I wasn't dreaming anymore, this is quite annoying... Anyway, here's another dream.

I found myself in a special intervention unit w/ Jack Bauer and some other teammates. I must lead an anti-terrorist mission.

First, I see a black military helicopter flying over a bright-green lake, then some film-makers who are talking around a table. I see a female who looks like John Galliano (at least she has the same clothing style).

Then, I find myself into a HUGE party room (with rich people and all, you know), and Jack Bauer is onstage. He chooses his weapons for the mission (on the back of the stage are hung up lots of MP5 and a few AK47s), but he gets angry cause they don't wanna give him both a MP5 and an AK47, and he just goes with the MP5. I'm sitting in the back of the room (which is, indeed, opposed to the stage), in a dark corner.

Afterwards, my teammates, Jack Bauer and I are in a really dark space, only surrounded with a few red lights (looks like a military place); I hear Jack swearing he's going to take revenge against someone because his sister died. We run towards some small grey-black metallic platforms. I now am in a kitchen, in the morning, with a teammate. The windows' shutters are half-closed, so some sweet bright light comes in the room. We wear some military clothes and have some huge protection & weapons. We find once again two of these platforms and we kick them. They lead us into a yellow room, with the name of a general written on a wall. We once again kick two platforms and find ourselves on the top of a roof.

There are two terrorists; there's one in a cage at the left of the roof, with a little black/white globe (it looks very pixellized) near him. We shoot him down. There's another terrorist, in a cage as well, at the center of the roof; he leaves before we can shoot him. His cage goes down a huge building structure. I jump in an attempt to follow him even though I don't see the cage anymore, but I hit myself and a health-bar appears (just as in video games) telling me I've got 1 HP remaining. Then I don't stop falling, but I wake up.

I woke up early this morning without recalling my previous dreams. It was early enough for me to just sleep in and hope for more dreams anyway. When i dozed off, I appeared in this all-terrain battlefield. There were explosions and gunfire all around. I looked around but saw no clear teams, just a free-for-all. I'm not sure why, but I rushed to the other end of the battleground in a semi-circle pattern. (I had to leap over waist-high platforms and duck behind cover when it got too heavy) I heard a female voice, but i forgot what she said. I looked up in the air and spotted a helicopter. (maybe she was screaming about the helicopter?)

When I woke up, it was a few hours after i dozed off. I was incredibly satisfied because i hadn't had any dreams in 2 or 3 days

I saw Symphony standing in front of me. I blinked, and then there were two. I blinked again, and then there were endless clones of Symphony as far as I could see in the incomparably large room. My heart started racing. I blinked again, and it was just one Symphony again. I started to calm down.

“Complete me,” she said in her flat, high-pitched voice.

“I will as soon as I can,” I answered. She reached forward. I blinked, and she was in front of me, gripping my shirt.

“I am already complete,” she responded. I didn’t understand. “I have waited forever, and I will wait forever. Time is not a hindrance.”

“What do you mean, you’ve waited forever?”

“Forever.” She stepped forward, fusing with my body. I felt a rush of energy, and then it all vanished. I looked behind me, but Symphony wasn’t there. Chunks of metal started falling from the impossibly high ceiling above me.

I had a dream in which I was part of a group project about completing group projects. Alex and a girl from Japan whose house was destroyed in the recent tsunami were my teammates. Alex and I had most of it planned out. I recall a strange period of time during brainstorming in which I couldn’t remember who I was. A strange jumble of identities flowed through my brain, and with every passing second, I was convinced I was someone else. When we managed to decide what we wanted to do for the project, all of this stabilized, and I remembered my true identity. We were going to have the Japanese girl stand up with a poster that said: “I just can’t wait to start part (a)!” We interpreted it more as a project on procrastination than anything else. It was fortunate that we finished our project in time; our instructor announced that we would be continuing the discussion of DSM criteria for dissociative disorders.

I was talking to Ben about him visiting us in America and us visiting him in Australia. There was a canyon in Australia that I was particularly interested in seeing, but for some reason, he wouldn’t talk about it. We went through a list of reasons why it was a bad idea – too far away from Brisbane (either twenty-five minutes or five hours, he never specified which), food for the trip, silly things like that which are rarely the biggest factor in planning an international trip. He and another Australian guy debated how well the car would hold up on such a long drive. We were in some kind of virtual reality world. Ben had spent a lot of time converting image data to 3D models of scenic places in Australia, but he wouldn’t let us see them… I was confused, so I pressed this a bit. I finally told Ben flatly that I wanted to see the natural beauty of Australia, and I would see it with or without his help. He wouldn’t talk to me or Nicole after that. We got involved in some kind of weird mind meshing game where we turned Ben’s brain into a marble and rolled it around in our thoughts, making him rethink his decision. He eventually decided he would cooperate with us after all. As we learned, the only reason he had argued was because he thought my request to see the sights in Australia was my way of criticizing his appreciation of nature. Since it was settled, we apologized and settled our disagreement. We missed each other’s company too much to hold out alone anyway. Ben made what was supposed to be a bold statement, then – he would buy a bike in Australia and ride it proudly to show the world how much he loved natural beauty.

The dream jumped. Ben and I were meeting up at a restaurant and hotel. We were all going to stay there together. One of the employees at the restaurant, a woman with blond hair in a sophisticated, black uniform, asked if I needed any help. I declined any assistance; I was waiting for someone, I said. I stood in the middle of the busy restaurant as waitresses zoomed back and forth between tables. I observed that the hotel was separated by a swamp-like stretch of gooey, red organic tissue. I dared not step on it. I asked the blond woman from before how I should cross it. She pointed out a narrow path made of stone that led across. All of this was clearly a reference to Althea’s swamp in the Sword of Truth series. I thanked the woman for her help as Ben appeared in the distance… He was riding a bicycle! When he approached the restaurant, he hopped off the bike. He asked me which coins he was allowed to use as payment in America.

“The American ones,” I laughed.

“The quarters, dimes, and nickels, then…?” he asked, nodding.

“The pennies, too!”

“No…” he said in sincere disbelief. “Really?!” He came into the restaurant after paying some kind of bike fee. Even inside the restaurant, he rode that bike everywhere. He nearly fell in the living swamp water as I was showing it to him. I warned him about it… At best, the water would just creep us out. I didn’t want to find out it was deadly and acidic. Anyway, we went to the winding stone trail. Naturally, Ben had to ride his bicycle over it. He nearly fell in twice; one of the stumbles put most of his weight over the edge, but Ben somehow floated to safety. I asked if he was feeling alright… He was having a lot of trouble with balance. Although he assured me he was fine, he seemed very dizzy… He started coughing and eventually vomiting bile. I invited him to sit on a bench with me and rest before we continued onward. He accepted the offer. I took photographs of the swamp.

The dream jumped. I had a false awakening in Nicole’s bed. The room looked as it did before she rearranged the furniture. I understood that this room was connected to the hotel from before. I kept hearing sounds like a squeaky bike outside. I tuned it out as I relaxed in bed. It was a bright, new morning… Nicole stirred and immediately asked about the strange, periodic bouts of squeaking. I told her I would check it out. The next time we heard it, I saw up and looked out her window. In the street was a metallic figure attached to bike wheels – one big, one small. It cycled freely down the road. I figured out what was going on instantly and ducked out of view.

“You can’t be serious…” I said, mostly to myself. “Get under the bed! Now!” I urged Nicole. She and I managed to squeeze under the bed together. It looked like it would be easy for the robots to detect us if they checked the house; the bed seemed higher up than it actually was from our low vantage point. Anyway, the moment I saw the human-like design in what otherwise could’ve been an interesting vehicle, everything came into place. I knew it was an artificially intelligent robot. The fact that I heard several on the street – but no cars, frighteningly enough – indicated that they were large in number. I suspected they had built up their forces in secret and overwhelmed our society. They hadn’t checked our room while we were sleeping, I decided, or we would be dead. Our robotic overlords had no reason to allow us to live. I explained all of this quietly to Nicole. We watched, terrified, as a robotic sentinel walked past our door on its metallic legs. They didn’t have feet – just long, narrow legs. I wished I had Apheri.

Once the coast was clear, we knew we had to get Ben. Nicole and I went to the bench outside where he stopped to rest the previous day. A fleshy cocoon surrounded it now. I gestured for Nicole to follow me in. It was empty… I didn’t want to imagine what the robots had done to him when they found him. Order is a disturbing foe… We heard the squeaking of metal joints as a robot sentinel approached the cocoon. Nicole told me to hide, but there was nowhere to hide! I prepared myself for a fight. The robot raised its arms when it saw me and opened fire. Bullets filled my body. I tackled the top-heavy machine and tumbled with it into the murky water outside. Nicole gasped, fearing the electricity would kill me as the robot’s body began to crackle. Fortunately, it didn’t. The robot turned into a small bug on my arm. I crushed it with a finger, but like a cockroach, it seemed to come back to life despite seemingly fatal injury. I crushed it again, and it took flight. It bit me, injecting nanobots into my body. I couldn’t destroy it.

“They’re immortal…” I laughed uneasily. What was I going to do? I basically resigned myself to my fate. I couldn’t fight this… I couldn’t imagine how, but the robots had conquered us overnight, and they would exterminate us without fail. I saw them marching toward us. “Go hide, Nicole.”

“What about you?”

“I have something to do… It’s our only chance.” My body was full of bullets. There was no way I would survive – but maybe I could save Nicole.

The dream jumped. I was walking around in tunnels built in a Minecraftian style. I was just above bedrock. Everywhere I looked, I saw robots mounted to the floor or ceiling. When the first one saw me, a white laser trained itself on my forehead. Intense battle music started playing. Inspired by this, I ran for my life as bullets rained on me. I turned away from the few that were shooting me and nearly fell to my knees when I saw hundreds of robots staring at me. There was no escape. They had me trapped. I ran for my life past one of the three in front of me. It shot a boomerang sword at me, cutting off my left arm. Blood spurted out.

“No way…” I choked. It shot the sword again after it returned, taking off my head this time. The bloody head rolled as my body slumped forward. I heard Nicole commenting on how cool the weapon was. I saw her standing by the lighthouse on Sailor’s Isle (Skies of Arcadia). She practiced throwing the sword. It was nearly Apheri’s length and probably just as heavy, but it moved through the air like a phantom.

I was in the living room of my Omi’s old house in Louisiana. Austin was playing old video games. I went into the bathroom to relieve myself. Sometime later, I flushed and realized the toilet was clogged. Not only that, but a massive lump of waste (about the size of my head) had somehow ended up in the bath tub full of water beside me. I fished it out with a plunger, but I kept dropping it back in the water and on the floor of the bathroom. Every time I dropped it, a little chunk fell off. Eventually, it was small enough to fit in the toilet, so I put it in there. I didn’t clean up the mess on the floor. I put the plunger back in the bath tub, and suddenly, I was floating on the surface of the water with a fishing rod. A message appeared at the top of my field of vision, warning me that something was approaching! I tapped a button on a controller several times and pulled a Gyarados out of the water. The traditional Pokemon battle screen appeared. I didn’t have any Pokemon yet, so my health bar appeared. I only had 19 HP. The Gyarados had several hundred. I knew this couldn’t possibly end well, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d saved my game, so I fled. I got away without any problems. As I swam to the edge of the bath tub to get out, I had another random encounter – this time with a Magikarp. It was much weaker, obviously, but it had some abilities other than splashing around like an idiot. I ran from that fight, too, to save time.

I encountered a Rattata on the tiled floor of the bathroom. I decided I was going to catch it. I punched it in the face when it was my turn, and then it bit my arm. This continued for a couple more turns. After that, my health was getting low, so the game asked me if I wanted to use pills to heal. I started popping pills. The rat did the same thing. It wouldn’t give me the choice to stop taking pills every turn… The Rattata and I both restored ourselves to maximum health. Interestingly, I had seven health bars, and the Rattata had nine of them… When I punched it once, eight of them disappeared. I prepared to throw a Pokeball and capture my first Pokemon…

The dream began with me driving home in Texas, reportedly from my job. My parents still lived in their old house, so that was the neighborhood I went to. All of the stores in the small shopping center clustered around the Subway were gone. In their place was a huge supermarket. The parking lot was a mess of broken slabs of concrete. I went into the store, and Nicole called me. I could hear the cast of Glee in the background; she was watching it while talking to me. Just from the actors’ voices, I was able to reconstruct the episode in visual form in my head. I laughed when Will suddenly swept Emma off her feet in a rare moment of manliness. She giggled and pleaded with him to let her down. When he did, she calmed down a bit.

“What was that?” she asked. “Some kind of… fatherly instinct, Will?”

“I’m gonna beat my children…” He said it so calmly, so unabashedly! It was almost as though this was supposed to sound romantic. I cracked up laughing. The show went to a commercial break without a comment from anyone else. Nicole didn’t think it was funny at all, but I was enjoying the chance to see how pathological Will’s perception of life had become over the course of the show. I grabbed a can of pasta off a shelf and waved it around in the air as I joked with Nicole about how that was the best line in the whole episode. The can was covered in something sticky like orange juice, so I switched it with another one. I went straight to the checkout. I guess pasta was all I needed… A plump, black woman waved me over to her register. She swiftly processed my single item. When she printed a receipt for me to sign, I just wrote my first name. I carried my one grocery item in a bag back to my car. Instead of getting in the driver’s seat, I climbed into the back of the car… The air conditioning turned on as soon as I closed the door.

“I’m so glad it does that,” I murmured to myself in relief. It was a warm, humid night in Texas. I wondered briefly how it was possible for my car to do that, but I didn’t worry too much about it. I locked the door. I didn’t want to get mugged. Only then did I lean into the front of the car and turn it on. I quickly flipped on my lights and popped the car into drive, then spun around to the only exit onto the road I could see. My side of the exit was horribly ruined; huge slabs of concrete blocked the way. I swerved around it and angled the wheels so I could easily turn that way. I made a right onto the street once it was clear. Basically, the street was divided by a huge median with trees growing all over it, so in order to get to the correct side of the street, I had to make a U-turn about thirty yards down the road. I must note that this U-turn was impossibly tight; my car pivoted around the narrow, three foot wide tip of the median without any difficulties. I found myself in a turn-only lane going left and had to switch. Then I saw a yellow light.

Yellow, I thought. Yellow, yellow, yell – oh! I realized I was supposed to stop at the intersection up ahead! The light turned red, but I was still going too fast. I slid right into the middle of the intersection. Oops. I figured it was better to just keep going, so I put my foot back down on the accelerator. Almost as soon as I passed through the intersection, I saw a cop coming the other way. I was horrified. He must’ve seen me – how could he not? I knew he would pull me over as soon as he could turn around. I had to act swiftly. In order to evade the police, I planned to take an unusual route back home. I turned left onto a small street, disappearing from the main road before the cop could find me. This road bisected another in a place that looked like the suburbs of Chicago. I started talking to Ben on the phone. I didn’t have to hold it up… I could just hear his voice. This is probably a fortunate side-effect of using headphones when I’m on the phone lately. Anyway, Ben complained that it was snowing in Australia, but we somehow determined that it was actually raining because it was forty degrees in Brisbane. Ben pretended to be confused about the temperature. He said it was 40 to 100 degrees outside – first in Fahrenheit, but then in Centigrade. That didn’t sound right at all. If he was using the Celsius scale, much of that range would be intolerable, even lethal. I turned onto the next street. Traffic lights and driving in general were beginning to pose crippling difficulties. I couldn’t focus my eyes properly on the lights, and some kind of weird, yellow dot appeared in my field of vision to direct the car. On top of keeping the wheel straight, I had to keep this light in the middle of my perspective with my mind in order to keep the car going straight. Anytime I looked away from the middle of the road, the car turned in that direction. The only way to counter it was to turn the wheel in the opposite direction at the same time. As one can imagine, this wasn’t easy. It was incredibly difficult for me to multitask in this dream on top of everything else, so it’s no surprise that I went through three red lights in succession before finally stopping.

Ben explained that he needed help with a quest. The road took me along the edge of a massive, red curtain – the kind used in theaters. I knew there was an abandoned hospital inside. Ben needed to get into the hospital and retrieve something. I stopped the car, got out, and slipped under the heavy curtain. The hospital was dark, and many of the doors and windows were boarded up. Ben transformed into Goofy (Mickey Mouse). He started going to the main entrance, but I insisted that I knew which entrance was the right one to use. I had done this quest before, I said. Actually, I was just attempting it for the first time – but with Ben’s help, I knew we would be fine. We circled around the building to a small back door. Inside, we found two elevators and a door to a stairwell. The stairs were the obvious choice… The building probably wouldn’t have any electrical power to spare, considering the state it was in. Despite that, Ben went for the first elevator.

“I don’t think that’s going to work…” I said. He pushed a button. The elevator dinged at us as it opened. Nervously, I followed him in. “What if we get stuck in here? This is a bad idea… I hate elevators.” The door slowly closed. Ben picked a floor, and the elevator began to drop. The walls were made of mirrors. Staring at reflections of reflections of myself wasn’t helping my sanity. Ben apologized for choosing the elevator; he hadn’t intended to disturb me. We would take the stairs back up, he promised. When the elevator stopped, I stumbled out. Moving was difficult down here for some reason… Ben didn’t have any trouble, though. We were inside a small Minecraft level. The path curved around a pit of sharks before coming to a slide. I almost slid straight down, but there was a lava pit at the bottom! That would have meant my death. I had diamonds and quite a bit of iron in my inventory, so I was glad I hadn’t fallen. I had to slip into a tunnel on one side of the slide. I found it difficult to make any progress… I got my legs in the tunnel, but the rest of my wouldn’t move at a normal speed.

Ben started arguing with another guy in the room with the shark pit. The guy said that the official Minecraft system made dirt grow infinitely high over time, simulating growing grass. Anyone who still played the old Minecraft was in denial, he claimed. Ben made jokes about dirt reproducing like guinea pigs as he hopped across the shark pit. He ran past me into the tunnel. I followed him as a point of awareness as he jumped skillfully across a couple pools of lava, then trudged right through a tunnel half full with lava without taking any damage. I thought he was doing this because he had food to heal himself afterward, but I realized after he emerged that he was wearing chain mail. He was invincible! He came across some kind of harpy woman and didn’t realize she was an enemy for a few moments as she slapped him with her wings. He killed her in a few seconds.

My awareness returned to my body, and I followed after Ben. Since I didn’t have anything to protect me from the lava, I planned to build a path through it. When I got to the tunnel of lava Ben traversed before, however, I saw that it was just steaming water. I figured I would probably be okay… I waded to the other side without taking any damage. A puddle of water on the ground just past the tunnel (where Ben encountered the harpy before) took the shape of a woman. It was a water elemental. I struck her with a bolt of lightning, but the damage was paltry. She was resistant to magic, being a creature of magic herself. I knew cutting her wasn’t going to do me any good. What did I do in the past when I encountered these, I wondered? I vaguely remembered running. I considered calling Ben for help, but he was way ahead by now.

I befriended a black man named Bob. At first, he seemed pretty normal… I understood that a number of people I knew on campus had warned me not to associate with him, but I didn’t see what the problem was. He said he would show me his house. Instead of taking me to a residential area, he led me to the shore of the Chicago River where he had a mat of old, hardened newspapers set up under a bridge. I quickly observed that he was homeless. Immediately, I lost interest in the friendship; my positive experiences with homeless individuals were few and far between. I stared at the long since faded ink on the newspapers as I pondered a way to lose Bob. He would follow me if I tried a normal method of escape. I came up with a plan – I would take the train! Since he was homeless, he probably couldn’t pay the train fare. While I finalized the plan in my head, Bob asked me about random people. I didn’t understand his questions, but I soon figured out why – he thought the people were standing there with us! Bob was having serious hallucinations. I was glad I had figured out a way to distance myself from him… That wasn’t the sort of company I needed. When I told Bob I was going to the train station, he said he knew a shortcut. Rather than insist on just walking to the nearest one (the Green Line was only a few blocks away), I gave in and followed him.

The dream jumped. I was in an underground passage, following Bob with next to no idea where we would surface. He stopped me before a ladder and asked if I was sure about going on the train. Something about it frightened him. I insisted on continuing. I needed to get somewhere, I said. Bob started growling to himself in rage, but he cooperated. He had to release at least ten trap doors on the way up. These were intended to lock people out of his secret passage. He complained the whole way up about trains. When we emerged, I was stunned. We were on a train platform. My plan had been completely foiled by Bob’s clever shortcut… Of course he wouldn’t pay the fare – he could just skip the entrance! A quick look around revealed that we were on the Green Line, but a bit further west of the river. I wasn’t going to lose him so easily, it seemed… Surely, he wouldn’t be able to follow me onto a bus to the suburbs. He couldn’t tunnel his way into that one. I got on the next train to arrive and sat down close to the operator in case of an emergency. I still wasn’t sure what to expect from Bob. He took the seat next to me. As soon as the train started moving, he burst into sobs. This drew quite a few stares, but I let him cry. I did my best to seem like I didn’t know the guy. This continued for a few awkward minutes before he calmed down. He asked if I liked his new boots. Confused, I stared at his feet. He was wearing sneakers, not boots. He showed me his hands, and I realized he was supposed to be holding something. He was hallucinating a pair of fine boots.

“Oh… Yeah, they’re very nice,” I said in a kind voice. I came up with some kind of oxymoron to describe them, and he doubled over in laughter. I sensed that he might be on drugs. He was one of those people who don’t breathe when they laugh, so his chuckling was coupled with wheezing noises. Another black man walked up to us during this fit of laughter. He was wearing a baggy, black jacket, baggy jeans, and white sneakers. He was also half-wearing a baseball cap; it looked like it might tumble off his dreadlocks any moment.

“Shut up!” he shouted at Bob. He continued with a stream of vulgar, obscene name-calling before finally calling us both annoying. I tried again to pretend I didn’t know Bob, but the association had been made. I suddenly realized I was blind. It didn’t bother me much for some reason… I focused on what I could hear of the situation. The vulgar man came over to me and put his hand on my head. I’d rather not transcribe verbatim the ultimatum he gave Bob, but in essence, he wanted me to publicly pleasure him, and Bob had ten seconds to convince me to do it. I wasn’t going to have any of this. I teleported to the other end of the next train car over and pressed the emergency assistance button. I could see into the first car from my current position.

“There’s someone dangerous on the train,” I said. The guy stared at me from the first car with wide eyes. He started walking toward the second car.

“Attention, passengers…” an automated voice began over the intercom. “A dangerous customer has been identified. For your safety, lease be watchful for threats to yourself and others as we work toward removal.”

“He’s on the second train car,” I told the operator through the assistance system. The guy was approaching me in long strides. Instead of attacking me as I expected him to, the guy brushed past me on the way to the next car. “Make that the third,” I said. “He’s trying to get away.” The train stopped at the next station, and a bunch of people got off. I kept an eye out for the guy who threatened me and Bob, but I didn’t see him.

I was slowly transforming into a robotic spider. My tongue was extremely sticky and removable. For some reason, I gained the ability to scale vertical walls with ease after licking them once. I used this ability to sneak into Nicole’s house through a window. This seemed to take place about five years in the past… Nicole and Jess were much younger, and they were still friends. They were sitting together in Nicole’s room. I crawled in and hissed awkwardly. That was my form of speech. Jess wanted to kill me and flush me down the toilet, but Nicole stopped her. I probably had it coming to me for letting that cat get flushed halfway down the toilet…

“He’s kinda cute…” Nicole argued. “I wanna keep him.”

“You want to keep that?” Jess scowled. Nicole knelt in front of me and gently stroked my head.

“Let’s teach him some tricks. Come with us, okay?” She and Jess went into another room. I followed obediently. They helped me correct my robot spider speech impediment, and I regained the ability to speak normally. I informed them that I needed to be at school at 8 AM, but I wanted to see Nicole before leaving. Nicole insisted that I could ride the bus with her. We started waling around outside. When I asked her about it, she admitted her bus driver probably wouldn’t let me ride to school with her… I was sorely disappointed; before I realized I wouldn’t be able to, I was enjoying a flashback to that giddy feeling of interacting with a crush. I tried to cling to that simple happiness.

“Well, at this point, I won’t make it back home to catch my bus… I need a ride one way or another,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me, “my mom will take us.” A bunch of people came out of the garage together. Everything smelled like smoke. Nicole smiled widely at them. “Oh, you were doing that thing!” she laughed.

“What thing?” asked her dad.

“That thing!” Nicole repeated. They still pretended not to understand (if they did understand in the first place). Mike and Eric were walking together. Eric mentioned something about being good at video games.

“You know what that means…” Mike said.

“Uh… No,” Eric said, shaking his head.

“You can reach into the fabric of the universe and bend it to your will! Space and time are your playthings! And rainbows? Don’t even get me started on rainbows. Wow. Just kidding, Eric – you can’t do that stuff.” Eric seemed confused. We continued looking for Nicole’s mom. I couldn’t remember what she looked like, so every time we saw a woman, I wondered if it was her. We decided to go in the garage, but Nicole went off on her own by the time we got to the backyard. Jess started laughing at me. She challenged me to destroy a glowing, black pillar in the yard. I punched it with all of my might several times, but I couldn’t break it. I continued into the garage. It was shaped like a barn. Once I was inside, I saw that they were on a platform near the ceiling. It took me a few tries because I was starting to lose my robot spider powers (it seemed to be caused by getting my tongue dirty), but I climbed up onto the ceiling and dropped down onto the platform. Something inside my body shattered. A console attached to my robot spider body sent out an error message.

“OV/OL,” Nicole read. She and Jess puzzled over what the error message could mean until a woman came up onto the ledge. She picked me up and sighed.

“Over voltage overload,” she said, explaining the console output to the girls.

“Oh no!” Jess cried. She seemed genuinely upset. I couldn’t figure out why. “We broke him!”

“Not to worry…” the woman said. “I’ll take care of it. You two should get ready for school.”

The dream jumped. I was my normal self again. Nicole and I lay on the floor in the living room (except it was my Oma and Opa’s living room). There was trash everywhere… Spilled drinks (grape soda on white carpet, jeez), half-eaten candy… I tried picking it up while Nicole and Jess played a fighting game. Justin was at Nicole’s house, so he played, too. He explained all of the unique headgears available in the game when I started watching. Nicole was playing as an incredibly powerful wizard with refined command of electricity. Scamper walked into the room and started eating food and toys left in his reach. I didn’t want Nicole’s family to get mad at me for things my dog did, so I made him drop the toys. One looked like Eric’s Guile figurine. A bunch of people had to leave again. I saw Beckman walk by. He complimented my talent for programming, and I took it to heart. Justin joked that Beckman seemed to be into me. I told Justin that I had a history of guys falling for me.

“Like Justin,” I said. I didn’t realize I was talking to Justin…

“Justin?” he asked, bewildered.

“Tynne. Serenity.” He fell onto his back in shock. Then, he started to cry.

“Serenity never gave me a chance…” he wailed. I hugged him to calm him down. After that was settled, I went into the kitchen to organize the refrigerator. I sorted the fruits with care. Nicole’s mom finally showed up. She asked if we were ready to go. I replied in the affirmative – just as soon as I was sure the refrigerator was in order.