It's been four months since I last posted. Everything's been busy lately but this morning's dream (June 9) was vivid enough that it pushed me to post now. Usually when I have a dream, I'd write it down and hopefully remember enough details to post when the time comes. Much has changed over the last few months. Often the dream would reflect something that goes on in real life, either before or after the dream takes place. I still have recollections of 1/3 of my dreams, but about 2/3 are just paper notes now and I have no recall of them. Yet I'll be posting as much as I can, and hopefully in a few weeks the flashbacks to past dreams will join up with current dreams again. Before we continue, I should explain what I mean in my use of the word "facade": basically, it's a word, another memory or previous dream, or a false recollection that triggers faint memories of the actual dream as they slip away. Sometimes the memories fade within 10 seconds of waking up. You have to be careful sometimes - often the blog will log you out while you're trying to do a journal, and even today I had to change my password, after a Russian hacking incident months ago here. It's a real challenge to get this thing started. Let's begin at this morning's dream, when I fell asleep on my sofa around 12:30 am. I'm in a room somewhere. There are these orange vitamin B-12 pills in my hand, and it looks like there are several dozen of them. Should I put these in my mouth, or moreover report just what happened? A tropical weather website comes up, dicussing a low pressure system that was bound to give us a big heat wave in the early part. Not much else was going on, except for that jet stream. I'm sitting somewhere with an old student-teacher friend of mine, who talked about her memory of living in northeastern Ontario, where there are now some wildfires. Not sure if I ever join in on this conversation. Hearing some words being said now, remembering a few. "So when I was up at Algoma University, the weather would really stay pretty much the same. One day, it would be 7C. The next day, 7C and the same the day after that." "It would take 35 minutes to drive up to Timmins, and 65 minutes when there was a big snowstorm and the traffic got heavy". Wait a minute, I thought, looking over at a map. Wouldn't that mean North Bay takes only 25 or 30 minutes? I live in the Greater Toronto Area at this time. Funny thing is, my friend never even went to Algoma. She went to U of T. Now, I'm remembering something about a conversation I had with the principal, or maybe I was having one. I wasn't in trouble or anything; in fact my principal thinks of me as someone who is more mature and responsible than most. There's a lot I didn't get to say to her, though. I wake up with this strange pain in my left leg. Had I been bitten by a spider while I took my midnight nap? It seemed like I'd been asleep for maybe one or two hours, but as I look at my radio clock, it's 3:50 a.m. Without even going to brush my teeth, I return to my room, turn off my computer, and go to sleep. I consider taking my chemical experiment into my room before it gets stolen, but leave it there and doze off anyway. There were these "fake vegetable" pills in a jar, that had both the shape and the taste of real vegetables: carrots, peppers and broccoli, at least two of the above three. Should I eat them? I was asked whether I wanted an ionizing treatment, producing an isotope on my body that might have been radioactive. The isotope had an atomic mass of 188. Of course that's going to be radioactive, I thought, when I woke up much later. Yet doing a bit of research, it turns out the element is probably non-radioactive osmium-188, which is naturally more dense than lead, and maybe a few traces of radioactive iridium-188. Sitting there, I'm looking at a screen off the wall of my classroom, where my geography teacher was giving a lesson using a weather website that I routinely used. Next, we pointed out a small earthquake that had occurred a few days before off the northwestern coast of Ireland. "Belfast!", I exclaimed, literally shouting it out loud. Yet Belfast was in North(east)ern Ireland, and whether I knew this at the time, I'm not sure. The alarm woke me up again. It was just after 6 a.m., but I'd forgotten to turn off the alarm the previous night. I might wake up once more during the next bit, but whether this is recorded is unclear. Still have some assignments overdue for my geography teacher. The next part becomes rather academic. I'm swimming in a lake somewhere, and the water is very tolerable. Whether it's more like a pond or there's a castle in the distance, I do not know, but I keep thinking it's Elsinore, the Danish city on the extreme eastern big island where the Shakespearean play Hamlet is set. Some time is needed to practice my recipe. I had made bread before, but this was something quite different. I have to finish another assignment, I think for the same geography teacher, involving a sled or a toboggan, that would be tested on the snow. Yet the snow had all but melted, and the assignment was overdue. How was I to finish it, then? It's morning, and I'm on a trail with some of my friends. We'd all be university-bound next year, and to my left we see this grassy knoll that has a barn-like house positioned on top. A horse-drawn carriage was nearby, and I get the feeling that I'd seen this place before, but cannot remember where. Maybe I had been there. From where the Sun was positioned, we were walking southwest. There were some people on or near the carriage in costumes, the woman wearing some kind of shroud over her head, the whole family looking agrarian and traditional. "Mennonites", I said. "Yes", one of my friends continued, but... But what? We continued walking. Over to our right, we come across this forested ravine, that has a steep drop-off soil cliff face with some tree roots. One of us, I or a friend, tries to climb down, but seeing it was so steep and there were granitic rocks underneath, we give up. We continue walking. We were on a university campus now. I didn't know they had these types of trails here; maybe we don't. I had debated whether or not to include the names of specific towns or universities I dreamt about. After much thought, I'm deciding to mention these places by name, and will do so in most cases for journals of past dreams. On our right, it was the University of Guelph campus. There were still some tree branches as we approached the clearning. But I knew that none of us would be going here this year in September. Johnston Hall. Some say it's the most well-known landmark. Yet the rock climb had been difficult, and sometime later or earlier, I'm doing an exam for one of my classes. It's my philosophy teacher, and this time I'm struggling to do well in this second-semester class I'm taking. I had gotten 95% in the first class, but was struggling to maintain 83% in this one. Whatever it was, I knew I needed to do well on the exam. The room was beige, the desks far apart, the lighting dim yet incandescent. It somehow reminded me of my old elementary school. What in the world was I doing here? I wake up this time, and it's past 10 am. Time to get up; it was a weekend morning. OK, I know I haven't posted in ages. Yet some powerful recollections have been contained in the past dreams, and many of them go back to February. When I only have figments of dreams, then maybe I'll post as many as five in one entry, which gives overall a clearer picture of whatever that may be. The memories may be hazy, but the dreams provide a glimpse.
Nicole and I were playing on a Minecraft server together. We ventured into an unexplored area and found some strange, circular platforms floating in the ocean. They looked like targets. Assuming the administrator had plans for these, I decided building on them was pointless; the buildings would just get destroyed. We walked back in the other direction, and I found an old cabin I had built previously to survive a night. I decided I would stay there until morning. I was glad I found it when I did since skeletons were already patrolling behind it. I looked around the cabin and quickly discovered the basement. I couldn’t remember why I abandoned the cabin… Until I saw the creepers hiding in the basement, that is. There were at least seven of them, and they all noticed me. Only one jumped up to the ground level, though. I backed into a corner to try to force it to blow up where the damage would be minimal. I knew I couldn’t fight a creeper in this small space. Unfortunately, the creeper knocked out nine blocks on the south wall, exposing me to roaming zombies! The open space was three blocks high, so I quickly placed a line of wood across the middle to keep the zombies and creepers at bay. This didn’t protect me from skeletons or spiders, though. I tried to find materials to use without going into the basement. I tried typing “/give Nephanim diamonds” to see if I had operator rights on the server for whatever reason. The dream didn’t seem to care that I typed the command incorrectly. As I worried that someone would see the request for items and complain that I was cheating, I got a red error message back from the server. It said that I had received a warning from the staff, and the item request had been denied. Boo… I decided to brave the basement for some dirt. To my surprise, it was now empty. Dirt was better than nothing… I don’t know why I had thought to put diamond blocks up instead of something less valuable. Anyway, while I was down there, I found these long, skinny lego blocks and put them together to form a red and yellow striped wall. It still wasn’t wide enough. The corners of the hole were still open, and skeletons were shooting me. I saw that my health was empty. I was alive, but not for long. Another arrow hit, and my items burst from my body. Apparently, my spawn point was close tot he cabin even though I expected to have to run across the island. I carefully returned to the building, collected my belongings, and went on my way. I met up with Nicole again, and we found a water purification plant beside a street. We filled buckets with water from the clean end and sampled it. The water was horrible… On top of that, we were stealing it. We laughed about all of this as we roamed some more. We found a car, I guess… Some people called Nicole and told her to pick things up from Chick-fil-A. We went there, but we didn’t buy anything for these people. Nicole spent $14 on something applicable to her diet. I saw that $5 of it went toward adding extra bacon. That plus my food and two drinks came out to $21.45. I misheard the amount, so I only pulled out a $20 bill. The drive-through was reversed as if we were in Europe, so I had to pay. To my immense surprise, when we pulled up to the window, the cashier handed us $21.45 instead of taking our money. Speechless, I put the money away. She passed our food over and closed the window. As Nicole drove off, we argued about what just happened. Nicole seemed to think she had gone to the wrong service window, but there was only one. “They just paid us to take their food,” I said. “That’s all there is to it. It’s not really stealing if they don’t ask you for money… They didn’t ask you to pay when you ordered, right?” Of course not – the woman just said the total was $21.45. It really was our lucky day! Free water, free food, free money! As we continued driving, I became aware of another reality overlapping with this one. I was on a modern pirate ship as we sailed away from the coast. The farther away we went, the more I worried about dying and being too far away to retrieve my belongings. I remembered that I could set up to ten warp points, though, so I kept resetting one warp point as we continued south of the shore. My crew mates discovered stitches on my arms just below the elbow. I explained that I cut them off in order to switch my arms with Nicole’s. I would probably have scars for the rest of my life. For some reason, my crew decided this was traitorous, so they dragged me toward the back of the boat. I was shoved overboard. As I flailed in the ocean, I returned to my former reality. I was in the same car, but my mom was driving instead of Nicole. Nicole and I moved from the middle seats to the back and sprawled out on top of a bunch of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I kept lulling Nicole into sleep so I could carry her. It worked. She almost fell into a sea of stuffed animals behind the seat, but I caught her. Meanwhile, I swam back to the ship in the pirate reality. I don’t know why I bothered to go back there, but it was the only place I knew to go. Once I was safe, I switched realities again. Nicole stirred. She looked like she had lost all sense of time and place. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, either. I told her about the overlapping realities. She seemed impressed. I tried to have my way with her, but she refused. I kept asking until she suggested something else. She turned me into a child and herself into a babysitter (although we were like small action figures instead of people). We were going to roleplay. While we entangled ourselves together under a thin blanket, I began to wonder where we were going. We had been driving in one direction for a while. I looked at my mom beyond the shadows of the blanket. She made eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. I saw an infinite stretch of interconnected highways in front of us. There were street signs all over the place, and no matter how far we drove, the dream was always able to fill in the space with the same amount of detail. It could continue indefinitely, I realized. We were in a dream. If nothing changed, my mom would keep driving forever! I tried to use my intent to bring us to WritersCube’s canvas void by car so could get out and try teleporting to his Monolith Gardens dreamscape. I didn’t want to bring the car along. Strangely, I lost some time here… That doesn’t happen very often. The next scene I remember was non-lucid, but there wasn’t a rough jump in the dream like there usually is. I sensed that a police car would pull up beside us on the highway soon. I was lying across the area behind the back seat with all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I knew this wasn’t legal – for one, I didn’t have a seat belt on – so I tried to keep still to avoid drawing attention to myself. Sure enough, a cop car merged onto the highway right beside us. My mom ordered me to come sit in the middle seats once we passed the patrol car. She explained where we were going at last: to a mental hospital. I understood immediately that I had been tricked. I grasped at fleeting questions in my head, but I didn’t know how to respond. I would be kept in solitary confinement for my own good, she said. “This will keep you from polluting your mind on the computer all day,” my mom continued. “Think of it like this: you’re decontaminating your mind and body until you can function like a normal person in society. You don’t need all that bacteria.” I wasn’t sure I agreed (if I even understood what she meant). It didn’t occur to me that I was free to say no. Rather, I wondered how I would finish school… We pulled onto the side of the road beneath an overpass where a bunch of other cars were parked. My mom and dad got out of the car (when did my dad show up?!) and started moving luggage to a man sitting on a white couch. My dad put all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals in a suitcase. “Do you really need all of this?” he asked me. “Those are Chelsea’s, not mine. Ask her.” I looked over and saw that the guy on the couch hand his hand on a zipper. I thought he was opening a suitcase to see what was inside. “Don’t screw with my stuff!” I yelled. Everyone stared at me, clearly prepared for me to attack one of them. I realized the guy was just zipping up a compartment in the bag that had been open. “Sorry. I thought you were going through my stuff.” “Don’t you want these gloves?” my dad asked, showing me a pair of new winter gloves. I saw an old pair of gloves on top of one of my suitcases. “Those old gloves are falling apart… These are flame-resistant, too, so they won’t burn in the summer.” I quietly accepted the gloves. I still felt awkward because of my previous outburst. I walked over to a woman sitting in a chair. She had a computer monitor for a head. She asked if I had any questions about the hospital. “Yeah, will I have internet access…?” I asked. No response. “Because… Well, that’s how I keep in touch with people… And I keep a dream journal online.” At least one good thing came of this, I realized. I would be able to devote most of my energy to dreaming. I had argued briefly with my mom about this in the car, but the more I thought about it, the less I felt like struggling. If everyone felt I belonged in a mental hospital, I wasn’t going to fight it… The computer woman still didn’t respond to my question, though! I scrolled through a list of frequently asked questions on her screen. It seemed the hospital made every effort to provide patients with internet access, so I was basically content. An IRC window popped up. I saw “Tande” at the top of the chat and thought Kelsey was running the hospital until I scrolled down and saw Nicole’s IRC username in the user list, too. “Oh… IRC just recognized me as Elita.” I closed the chat and walked away from the computer woman. I heard a girl screaming behind a closed door. When I opened it, I saw a large rat jumping around in a garage. The girl was terrified of it. I grabbed a broom and said I would save her, but I had to wait for the rat to move away from the door so it wouldn’t see me. The rat chased her into the corner. Then, it came back toward me. I slammed the broom down on its back, pinning it to the ground. If I could just hold it there, I could kill it with something… It was a perfect hit, but this rat was tough; a broom wasn’t enough to bash the life out of it. The rat squirmed free of the broom. It went straight to its attacker, jumping onto my chest and sinking its teeth through my clothes. I swatted at it. As I awakened, I sat up frantically in bed to get away from the dream rat. I did this twice before I realized I was in a different reality.
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