All DJ Entries

Total sleep time: 8 hrs

Dream recall method: noted key words on paper pad upon naturally waking up during night. Next time will write a sentence instead of key word and try to write more legibly

Dream1 Keywords, 3 hrs after falling asleep: ballet, rain?

Fragment2: I am watching as a famous comedian gets to the stage. As he does so he stumbles and falls and everybody is commenting that. Apart from that the audience loves him. He is participating in a challenge game, where he has to match 16 large pictures shown on a screen to the word describing each, but the word is in a foreign language. There are a few pictures of animals like three pups on the pics. He makes a mistake in his first choice.

Fragment3: I am back to history class (DS) and the history teacher is angry with me because I am late again. One of my nerd classmates is ready just like in old times with a long paper which she is about to read in front of the whole class. I wonder out loud how she manages to do that, to prepare so well, now that she has a husband a son and a job to take care of.

Fragment4: I am in some apartment full of people. I notice that hardcore music is playing in the background. While I do enjoy it, I think it will be too much for my guests to listen to it for such a long time, so I decide to change it. I go to the strange music making device where there is place for like five CDs, and turn the music off. A strange silence follows...
In one of the rooms there is a guy that fixes electrical appliances and stuff like that, there is a queue on the door, people waiting for him. There is a lamp that he repaired so he will bring it out for people to collect. I kind of like that guy, so some almost innocent play starts to develop, but I interrupt the whole thing. He goes to the nearby room and I follow him. I look at him and I know he is an alien, because his shape begins to shift. This is very interesting to observe, very fast his facial features and body color change like on that MJ song, but he retains the same size and the facial features are always male.

Fragment5: I am with my good friend on the streets of my home town. We were supposed to go somewhere, but my mom appears and demands full attention and that I simply abandon my friend on the street. She tells me we are going to where grandma is waiting, a place my parents bought in the dream.
I don't want to leave my friend but still tell her that we are going somewhere else. My friend decides to come along.

We are in the place now, my grandma, mom and me are sitting on a table, food on the table, some delicious cakes. An old pensioner comes and tells me that he would like to eat cake so much but he normally cannot afford it, so whenever he has the chance to buy a cake he enjoys it so much. My grandma asks what the old man just said and my mom replies that he just said that he likes cake. That is so not true, and I become angry shouting that the old man has no money for the cake. My grandma does not care at all. This makes me even angrier so I spill the orange juice on her.

During day: 6xRCs

Total Sleep time: 6+ hrs.

Other info: Went to bed quite late, fell asleep even later.

Dream recall method: DS review

After waking up couldn't remember almost anything, so I went over my DS, checking for a gut/ memory reaction. Got a confirmation with 2 DS. Today I have only fragments

Fragment1: My dad was riding a bike, which later transformed into a skateboard. He was performing some unbelievable stunts.

Drawing a line under water in the same place where other tracks were.

Fragment2: I am in something like student housing, got my own room there. Some guys which I know in the dream leave the room and I lock the door. One of them had to return he forgot something, it is agent Cho from the Mentalist but he looks even prettier. He asks me where the knife is, it is laying on the desk nearby. Some bad guys smoke cigarettes outside, one of them resembles Ross from Friends.

Fragment3: I am having a way too honest conversation with grandma, where I complain a lot and feel like a complete loser. My aunt is lying on a bed, next to grandma, using my blanket, and a pillow I identify as mine. She plays, or just uses as another pillow a toy rabbit which my grandma says is very important to her, so grandma wants it back.

Fragment4: An unpleasant person from my past. I notice her in the midst of a crowd. She is wearing Sari type of clothes, orange color predominantly. She expects to win some kind of award and when that does not happen I see her face convulse with anger.

It was stuffy again so I had a hard time sleeping, and then I woke up out of the blue at 6 A.M. and laid there for a while. But I figured if I could get back to sleep, I'd remember a dream or two at least, and I did.

Dream 1: The first thing I remember thinking when I woke up with this dream was 'Hannibal Lector'. In it, "I" was a doctor checking over a row of patients in bed. I may have been the woman in the Hannibal Lector movies. One was one important guy in particular. [Gap] I'm slipping into a room that the guy is going to be kept in. I wrap an item in a cloth, hoping it won't be found by anyone checking over the room. I need to put something there to identify who left it, so I go look through my desk stuff for a post-it note, but I can't find the ones I'm looking for, so I end up using my "F" letter ones (except they're a solid green unlike in real life, and they're not sticky). I stick it onto something on the bed.

Note: The bed made me think of my aunt's, and I use her room as a loci in my memory palace so I wonder if it came from there.

Dream 2: I'm drawing on a big whiteboard, except it's like an online drawing board so I'm not physically drawing on it. It seems I'm leaving a specific message for someone. A woman comes up to the board and looks at it, and says something about how to draw the zodiac symbols - she proceeds to draw them in black marker, except they're just regular shapes, like circles and triangles. I am confused.

Dream 3: Me and mom are in a building, I think we're looking for my sister. I had given her this card to save on something, perhaps for $3, but she said it wasn't a good deal or something and I was a bit miffed at her. Either it was already dark, or the power then went out as I tried to catch up with her.

Dream Fragment 1: I'm a male DC struggling to survive in a dystopic world. I distinctly remember thinking about Lost and something similar to but not The Walking Dead. It's like I was trying to narrate my own story but couldn't decide where to make it take place. Me and a few others are making our way across a hazardous area and I lose my brother (though I think we meet up again later). Later, I see a little girl wandering around alone. I go up to her to help her, even though I know I should be keeping on, and there's someone ahead of me waiting. She doesn't know where her parents are or anything, so I take her up to a house and put her inside.

Dream Fragment 2: My grandma on my dad's side has passed away*, and I find out that I inherited all of her things. Me and my mom are in a sad state as we go to my grandma's room to spend the night. There's a big white bed, and some gifts from well-wishers, and there's a package from my grandma. I can see a letter inside and kind of want to read it, but mom seems to want to just go to bed.

*: She's long since passed away in real life.

Notes: I had the worst time getting getting to sleep (again), even though I'd taken some sleeping pills. I ended up remembering some fragments anyway (enough to put them in my dream palace at least), so I thought I'd go ahead and type them up today (unlike yesterday when I couldn't even put my dreams into words, much less imagery - ugh).

By now I already know I can hold a lot of information in my memory palace (I'm at 121+) and I have three dream "clusters" stored (I link all the dreams into one chunk each, so that's three days worth of dreams), so I'm thinking of removing dreams as I type them up here at DV, unless they are particularly memorable.

These are all muddled so I'm just going to type them as one - but they may be separate dreams. When I woke up, there was already no order to them.

---

I'm looking at Alistair and Zevran from Dragon Age: Origins on my computer, and dad comes up behind me. I flip through an image of one of their abs. We have a conversation about them that leads to dad calling one of them a 'she' (I think there was a picture of them together?), and I hesitate and start to let him think that, because he's against homosexuality, but in the end I stand firm and say "they're both guys". I think he says that it's fine.

Side-note: In one of my loci, for remembering dad's phone number, I have my dad coming up to me and commenting on a porn scene on my screen - I wonder if that caused this dream? :O

A little later, I'm doing something and I hear mom yell at dad, "Your religion is so sexist!". I hate when they fight in real life, but I was pretty into what I was doing and didn't seem to care in the dream.

I have this man watching over a website of mine apparently, and I am in the room with him (maybe checking in). I look at one of the pages, and see that it's full of inaccurate Japanese. I express my dismay and exasperation.

I believe the scene changes here a bit - me and a/the man are talking amiably, but at the same time we both know that we're just pretending for the sake of 'my sister' (I can't remember if she's in the room at the beginning, but she isn't in this next bit).

We give up the pretense and talk about the task I have to go do, because the man is a demon who was put with my sister to have a hostage. I'm not worried that when I leave, he'll hurt her, but still a thought comes up from somewhere above my dream character - "Won't he hurt her while I'm gone anyway?"

My aunt is leaving the house with a black camera, and I'm like, "oh, is that to get a better reading on the Japanese?". Mom, standing somewhere to the right, gets a mischievous look on her face. There's a few bits I couldn't remember.

A trans* char (FTM I think?) was talking to someone in a room about what if someone they liked found out. Later, they're talking to that person and it turns out that he heard the conversation through the vents and knew, and was fine with it. He had blond hair. It's possible that DC!me from the demon part was trans* too and the demon had an inkling?

I'm not sure what order these come in, which makes me realize I need to add in a number peg in the future to keep dreams in order. One that can't be mistaken as being part of the dream itself, I mean. =P

Dream 1: Me and mom were at my sister's, and we ask about a puppy, only to hear that Duke (her biggest dog) has killed it. As Mom and my sister talk, Duke comes up to me and starts nipping at my hand. I say, "Duke is biting me!". Just then, he takes a big chomp. I'm crying out, but mom isn't even paying attention, still just chatting away. I think I had a visible, bleeding wound.

Dream 2: Me and a guy are running in a gym. We're running so fast, it's amazing. I think we come around this bend and stop, and someone is coming. For some reason, I have to hide, so I crouch down and walk around a wall partition to leave.

Dream 3: I'm in the shower and see little black pellets near the drain. One of them is bigger and starts moving, and I realize it's a round, fat bug. I back away, and use the overhead to start spraying them away.

Notes: I'm not sure when to consider things as dream signs now. Children and animals will inevitably be on the list though, I guess I can go ahead and start bolding them. And stores. And vehicles...

Sex with My Cousin (LUCID)

[Okay, yes, awkward subject. The label "lucid" makes it seem like incest was a dream goal of mine, which I assure you is not the case. And it should go without saying that in waking life, although I do think she is attractive, we are certainly just relatives, with all that that entails. Please don't shun me!]

I'm outside, near a cottonwood tree, when I realize that I'm dreaming. I try to force things to happen, but the dream blurs, and I remember that it's better to try to work within the dream logic. How might I fly into the air within this system? I notice a strong wind at my back: perfect! I let myself be blown into the sky.

What next? I know that it's considered cliche and unrefined to try to have sex in a lucid dream, but at the moment I feel like doing it, and to hell with what everyone else thinks. Again, I try to think of how to make this element come naturally into the dream. Where would I find an interested girl? Hmmm. Probably I can just imagine that she's flying in the sky somewhere out there in the distance where I'm going. And indeed, I soon notice a distant speck growing larger, which turns out, unexpectedly, to be my cousin. We hold on to each other to keep from flying apart. Clothes disappear and not much copulation happens, because I wake up.

Frags:

• playing a really awesome new platformer

Previous hours:
Feb 15, 1:40-3:25
Feb 16, 3:50-9:00
Feb 17, 23:56-9:26

It was raining heavily, and I think we (me, mom and dad) decided we needed to stop at grandma's because it was too bad to drive in. I think I was worried about driving on her road when it was so wet, because it's so narrow and gravelly.

Apparently we hadn't heard from aunt Dimple in two days. We were really worried and it was like we already knew that something had happened, that maybe she was close to death and this meant she had passed away. One of us brought up the question that, "wasn't grandma sick right now?".

However, we got a text from Dimple just as we were pulling in to grandma's road. Just as we saw that it was her, we passed by Dimple's white car.

We're in grandma's house, and we brought our cats with us. Only there are some kittens too. I see one of us trying to put down a kitten near a dog. My automatic reaction is, 'No, our cats don't get along with dogs at all!'.

I was in my grandma's room, settling some kittens in I think (I remember a fluffy orange and white one), and there's someone sleeping on the floor. I look over to see that they're naked, and I look away and head towards the door to leave.

I'm nibbling on a corndog on the porch but I don't want it anymore. My sister suggests I use it to get the dogs to go in their kennels. I tears off a chunk and throw it in one 'kennel' to get her dog, Duke, to go in, but he gobbles it up and leaves it. (They don't look like dog kennels at all, more like scrunched up boxes)

My sister is like, "no, no, you have to use the *something I don't remember*". She touches a yellow mark on the wall, and Duke stands at attention. Then I do the food thing again? Don't remember.

I repeat the treat-throwing exercise until a few more dogs are in kennels. I remember feeling frustrated dealing with all the them.

Real life notes:

Dimple is passed away.
Grandma doesn't let any dogs but her little one in the house, and they only have one other dog anyway.
We only have three adult cats.
I don't like corndogs.
Grandma's road has caved in before so it was a valid fear.
That's a lot of dreams involving water lately. I don't think it's because of having to use the bathroom - I just have bathroom dreams then.
I didn't take a melatonin last night because I was worried it was causing nightmare flashes again, but I did end up taking a small piece of a sleeping pill.

Privacy

I'm walking to a party in my dorm. There are these two girls following me; first-years, I think. They seem kind of giggly, possibly drunk. I'm not sure what they're up to, and I don't think I want to find out. I speed up my steps to get to the party before they can catch up to me.

I stay at the party for a while, then leave. I'm only a few steps down the hallway when one of the girls follows me out. Just one, this time. I'm not able to find a group of people in which to hide, so she catches up to me. She proposes that we have sex. [I don't remember the exact wording, but that's the gist of it: she's in the mood to have fun, somehow I caught her eye, and she thinks we should do it.] Immediately, I feel that I should escape. She doesn't really seem in control of herself, she's probably at least two years younger than me, and I really don't want my first time to be under these circumstances. I go into a different room, but she follows me, still talking.

"How drunk /are/ you?" I ask. In response, she proposes a race: first person to touch the ceiling of the room wins, then we can have sex afterwards. While I'm contemplating whether to do the race just to humor her, she starts climbing. The room is a big warehouse, with shelves and piles of foam cubes of various sizes. It would be a difficult thing to climb, but it might be fun. After hesitating another fraction of a second, I start up after her. She has a huge head start. I'll have to go fast to catch up, but she's drunk enough that I might still win. Quickly, I clamber over piles of cubes and stumble around on top. She's up ahead of me. She hasn't reached the highest point yet, but for some reason she's stopped, and she's trying to jump to touch the ceiling instead of climbing higher. I run past her and touch the ceiling an instant before one of her jumps finally succeeds. I'm dumbfounded for a second about how well that played out. It was almost cinematic.

"Wow, that was close," I say.

By now, I've decided that I should stop being so phobic about sex. I should just accept her offer so I can stop making such a big deal out of it in the future. So now I have to find a comfortable, private place for us. The first place we try is an outdoor swimming pool. I wade around for a bit while she runs off to do something or other. I'm not wearing a shirt anymore. When she comes back, she walks right up to me with a grin and starts feeling my torso. This girl is nothing if not forward. I'm reluctant to let her find out that I've gone hard, but it might be interesting to see how she'd react. Probably she'd start groping me. But somehow this pool is unsatisfactory (for one thing, there's a poolside restaurant with big windows that look right out at us), so we leave.

We go into a nearby museum. It's basically empty. There are a few security staff members around, locking things up for the night. We avoid them and go to a higher floor. But then a man sees me and says, "Sir, we're closing for the night." I have no choice but to turn around and leave, but in the spirit of exploration I decide to leave a different way than the way I came in: the fire escape. Hopefully the guard will understand. As I'm leaving, he remarks incredulously, "Wow, you're comfortable from the waist up!" By which he means that I'm again not wearing a shirt. I'd forgotten. Somehow I laugh it off and walk down the iron staircase to the sidewalk.

As I'm walking down the night-darkened streets, suddenly there is a violent male scream and my head starts vibrating as though caught in the jaws of an angry dog. After a second of this, I wake up with my heart racing.

[Similar things happened on 8/22 and 9/14 of this year. I'm not sure what to think about them, yet. Maybe I have some kind of condition?]

Frags:

• something about relatives [I know I woke up earlier last night right after a dream, but I decided not to write it down or try to remember it. I guess I was tired.]

You get what you pay for (7:08)

A couple of my cousins are in town, and Mom is driving all of us plus my youngest sister to a class. My sister and I aren't in the class, so we're just coming along for the ride before Mom drives us somewhere else. But when the class starts, to my surprise, Mom starts lecturing. It's a class about conducting an orchestra. Quietly, I remark to my sister that it seems like we'll have to stay for the whole class. She looks outraged.

I decide to open my brand-new conducting baton. For some reason, it's hard to see from the outside what the baton will look like. When I tear open the plastic-and-cardboard packaging, I discover that it's some sort of assembly with a handle and four identical attachments that look like big hexagonal construction nuts. The handle emits a broad-angle red laser, which you can focus to a narrower beam by adding one or more of the nuts (which are apparently lenses).

After testing this out, I'm angry. I just read somewhere that conducting batons work by blocking the light from objects behind the baton, so you can see it. But this baton just emits light of its own, and there's no way it's effective. I'm mad about what I got, as I'll tell anyone who will listen. Honestly, instead of all that fancy laser stuff, it would have been even cheaper to make a typical white plastic dowel, or whatever. Why couldn't they have done that? Mom stops her lecture to come down and see what's bothering me. I realize that I only paid six or seven dollars for this baton, which is really cheap, so I shouldn't expect good quality. You get what you pay for, I suppose.

Recreational Vandalism (7:08)

While riding the subway with a friend, I happen to have a couple of baby carrots. I wonder if they're strong enough that if I stuck them into the window, it would open and close a few times and break off entirely (sort of like jamming a gear with a wrench). Even before I say so out loud, my friend suggests we have fun and vandalize the train. Well, okay. So I do the thing with the carrots, and my friend does something similar about six feet away, and it turns out to be really effective. Half the side of the train on our side breaks off, exposing us and the rest of the passengers to the wind. The train pulls up to the next station, and I try to act nonchalant as I get off, despite the fact that the car around me is completely destroyed.

Of course, there is an investigation. My sister is very angry with us for having done what we did, so she helps the investigation assemble evidence against us. Once, I come across a big pile of evidence on the floor, and I wonder what would happen if I just took some of it. I'd probably get in trouble for obstructing justice, though, so I leave it. When the day of our interrogation comes, my friend and I try to be extremely friendly so the investigator will be on our side.

Frags:

• Two of my cousins have come to visit. I have a sort of friendly crush on one of them.

[I must have woken up after just about every REM cycle last night. Not sure how I pulled that one off.]

Soiree

Some of my cousins arrive for a function my family is hosting. They brought cupcakes--chocolate and one other flavor. They ask which flavor I prefer, because somehow the arrangement of cupcakes in the baking tin will reflect the seating chart for the event. I reply, "Probably chocolate."

I've agreed to contribute to the evening's entertainment by playing a short (two page) piano solo by Gershwin. I know I haven't played piano in ages, but everything on those two pages looked sightreadable when I glanced over it a while ago. However, when Dad discovers my plan, inexplicably he freaks out. I guess he's really concerned that I'll embarrass myself in front of the relatives. It's annoying, though. In fact, Dad's been annoying me a lot lately. For instance, he's recently gotten it into his head that he should learn to play piano himself, and he expects me to sit down with him to prepare piano duets. That does not sound like fun at all.

The previous group finishes performing, and now it's my turn. I figure the crowd is busy socializing, and they won't mind if I take a minute to look at some of the tougher chords. But to my horror, I open the music and discover a third page. What I thought was the end of the music is just a thin double bar! The third page isn't unplayable, but it has a lot of fast arpeggios over several octaves which will be very, very difficult to sightread. I probably should have taken a closer look at this. I start to feel uncomfortable about the amount of time I've delayed, now; the audience is probably getting impatient.

John Green the Sponsor

I've just finished TAing for today for a two-week class for math teachers in primary education. I and the teacher for the class spend a few moments calculating in percentages how close we are to finishing the class. It's towards the end of the second week.

It's dark outside as I walk through the quadrangles on my way home. On the way, I pass someone who looks exactly like John Green! I didn't know he was in Chicago! But I pass him without getting the courage to ask for an autograph. Mere steps later I consider turning around to chase after him, but I don't.

Inside a building, I run into one of my students from a previous summer math program. We talk for a bit, but we both have to be getting somewhere, so he leads the way out of the building. The building's door is rather heavy, and I feel bad that he tries to hold it for me. The pathway outside is narrow. I follow it into a smallish quad that's packed with people. I learn that it's called "Jones Quad," and it's a popular after-hours gathering place for students. I also know that I've been this way before. A girl from my house waves at me from inside a pack of her friends. I wave back--rather saucily, to my own surprise (namely, by lifting my left hand and repeatedly bending and unbending the last two knuckles of each finger simultaneously). Someone else waves at me, but I don't recognize her, and she makes a disappointed grimace. I run into someone else from my house and we remark upon how many housemates seem to be on campus tonight, despite the fact that it's the middle of summer.

It occurs to me that the John Green I saw might just have been a very close look-alike to the famed vlogbrother. I decide that I should go find him again and look more closely. As I wander around, something weird happens with the lights and the music in the building, and I guess that must mean it's about to close down for the night. No one seems in a hurry to leave, though. When I come back a few minutes later, everyone's still there, though they leave soon thereafter.

Back outside, I walk around a street corner and see a pizza place across the street. On a screen above the building, an advertisement plays. It's this same John Green guy. He's basically sponsoring the pizza place. I guess the pizza company must have heard about the Pizza John shirt and decided to capitalize on it. I still can't decide if the guy is actually John Green, though. It seems unlikely that he would do something so commercial.

Locker Checkout

It's the Saturday after finals week, and I'm trying to do my last bit of packing before going home. I've been storing some stuff in a locker on campus, so I head over to the building to pick it up. To my dismay, the building is locked. Apparently Friday was the last day to remove your belongings from this building. I spend a few minutes mentally cursing the idiot who thought that was a good idea, but then I decide I'd better try to do something about the situation. Using cleverness, I'm able to reach the first of my two lockers, which contains a fairly new car battery. I've been switching this one in and out with my car's old battery. Only, it seems like doing the swap would be a fairly complicated operation, and I can't remember ever having done it before. Oh, well. I must have known how at some point, and it's just been so long that it's slipped my mind temporarily. It'll come back, I'm sure. I put the battery in my backpack.

Unfortunately, the second locker is definitely unreachable. I check the building's hours, and unfortunately it won't open again until long after I've left town. By that time, they'll probably have thrown out my stuff. "My stuff" includes my Tae Kwon Do uniform, so I definitely don't want this to happen. Then I suddenly notice a sign on the window proclaiming the location and hours of this department's interim office. It's open today! Until 4:00! I hurry in that direction, checking the time. It's 4:11. Just my luck. Well, maybe there will still be someone around. My mom hurries to follow me.

I enter my target building to find a stark concrete entryway with stairs going both up and down, and hallways going in a few different directions. For a moment I'm disoriented, until I remember that the interim office is in a basement room. I go down the stairs, which twist and turn a few times before depositing me in a hallway only slightly more furnished than the original one. Along the wall to my right, dozens of cardboard boxes have been haphazardly stacked. Incredulous at my good fortune, I run down the row of boxes until I find one that's been labeled with my initials: last initial first, then first. Opening the box, I find my Tae Kwon Do uniform, along with everything else that's supposed to be there. Well, that's a relief. But I should probably talk to someone before taking it, else they'll think I stole it, and I'll be in trouble when I come back next term.

I continue down the hallway into the interim meeting room, which is actually a concert hall. That's kind of funny, but unfortunately I don't see anyone in the room except a female custodian up on stage setting up the ghost light. I turn back and try searching the hall in the other direction. I manage to flag down a dark-haired woman just on her way out the door. She seems to know me from somewhere, and it turns out she's coincidentally the one who's been answering my questions over email about Study Abroad. She tells me she's not the one to talk to about locker checkout. Fortunately, she says that the right woman to talk to is still in her office; it's right back there in the direction I've been going.

Wading

It's the day after finals week, but some of us are still hanging around to hang out. A girl from my high school class invites me to visit the forest with a group of friends.

"What forest?" I ask. You'd think I'd know the forests around here by now, so I'm a bit embarrassed by my question. Oh well.

She replies with the name of the forest, which I don't recognize. I agree to come anyway, and we head out. Soon after, we enter a restaurant on the outskirts of campus. While we eat, some housemates start planning what they're going to do to earn points for a big school competition which started today. For instance, apparently this restaurant (or the hotel it's a part of) is a sponsor for the event, so you get a points multiplier for eating here. I wonder why it was decided to hold the event after the end of Autumn Quarter, when there are so few people around. Vaguely I recall that it has to do with avoiding conflict with a big Study Abroad event happening in the middle of Spring Quarter, but that still doesn't explain why they didn't decide to do it during Winter. Oh well.

We leave the restaurant. Most of the group is heading back to campus from here, but I take a different path, one that leads toward the forest. At some point, I'll have to cut across the grass. But the grass is actually flooded quite deeply with water. The water's clear, but due to refraction it's difficult for me to tell quite how deep it is. Would this be an okay place to wade across? Tentatively, I start lowering my foot into the water. But even by the time the water reaches the top of my knee-high waterproof boots, I still haven't touched bottom. I retract my foot.

My friends are calling to me from across the water, telling me to go around the way they did. Yeah, their way was probably smarter. Meanwhile a boy from the group that decided to stay on campus is trying to tell me not to wade across anywhere, because it's all too deep. But I don't listen to him, and when I try the route my other friends suggested, the water's only about a foot deep.

All three of us are in werewolf form (from Skyrim) with the silver pelt and claws of an Ancient Behemoth (from Heroes III). I splash up to them and I attempt a growl. It is rather feeble, and one of the girls giggles. I introduce myself to her, and she shakes my hand, although she points out that she thinks we've met before. "No doubt we have," I reply.

Jumping Ahead

My dad and I have been taking turns playing a 3-D platform game while one of my high school friends watches. The gameplay of this game is a lot like rock climbing. You have to move each arm or leg individually, trying not to put too much strain on any one of them for more than a split second. We're trying to get to the top of an outcrop that has a sort of half-enclosed tunnel zigzagging up its vertical face. There's this one tricky spot where you have to jump over a gap, but one of the most attractive handholds actually attaches to a section of rock that swings down on a hinge. It can really upset your balance if you're not careful. Also, in order to get enough height, you need this section of rock to stay in its upright position.

I try it for a while without much luck, then hand it over to Dad. My friend points out that we don't actually have to go up this way; there's an easier place to ascend a little bit farther along this switchback. But I'm kind of stubborn, and I'd just like to prove that it can be done this way, even if it's not what the game's designers intended. Unfortunately, it proves to be a bit too much for Dad, and he falls off the edge to his (cartoon-style) death. That means we have to start over from the beginning of the level, which is frustrating, because I really thought I would get past that section on my next try.

But Dad's bored of this level, so he jumps way ahead in the game to the last level he did on his own. That's his style: don't bother with continuity; as long as you finish all the levels eventually, you're golden. Oh, well. The level selection screen is itself a 3-D environment, and the levels are yellow dots lined up in a path laid out along the ground. He realizes that he needs to buy a new "computer," since he lost the old one when he fell. When he does, the dots change to yellow rings, rather than filled circles. Also, two new "assistants" run in from the side of the screen, get a powerup of some kind from his character, then run off again.

He selects the level he wants. A bunch of enemies start running at him from all sides, so he starts beating them up using combos. Somehow he discovers a new combo--something like "knee in the face, punch, power kick"--which sends the unfortunate recipient flying backwards for about fifty meters. He encourages me to try it, but I have trouble until I realize that I'm doing a regular kick. For a power kick you need to hold down R1 at the same time. I feel a bit overwhelmed, but it's kind of fun once you figure it out. The animation's also cool because my character looks like a Star Wars bounty hunter.

Later, we're part of a larger party in the middle of a battle, trying to help the weaker members level up. This involves passing around 5-foot playing cards from character to character, which we all hug to our sides using our arms. The cards also double as protection from enemy characters, so there's some strategy involved in how you distribute your cards. Unfortunately, I'm running low on cards right now, and a thickset, bald thug is advancing on me in a rather intimidating manner.

Frags:

• dictating to my dream diary in Spanish
• other various false-awakening-dream-journal-writing

Car Theft

I'm in a car with my family. I recognize the license plate of one of the cars in front of us--it's one of our own! The car must have been stolen last time my sister took it for a spin, and now we're following the guy who stole it to see where he takes it. I hope he doesn't notice he's being followed. After a while, he pulls into a parking lot off of the highway. We lose sight of him for a bit, but when we pull into the parking lot a few moments later, we quickly spot the place where the car is parked. I jump out of our car and dash towards the thief, quickly followed by my sisters. The thief--a heavyset man with dark hair--tries to run, but we surround him and get into a fistfight. I have a tendency to wind up my punches for a second or two before throwing them. It's dicey for a few seconds, but in the end we subdue him and frog-march him into the building he had been walking towards before we intercepted him. It's a bar or a restaurant of some kind, run by an ugly, middle-aged woman. There's a police officer inside, but she doesn't want to bother with the criminal. She hands me two pairs of handcuffs, so I can take care of it myself. When somebody asks me what's going on, I proudly reply that "This man is under arrest!" I have a bit of trouble getting the cuffs around his wrists. Fortunately there's a button on the side you can press to release the cuffs and try again, and I get it on my third try. As we're leaving, I realize that the woman who runs the place is probably a car launderer of some kind, one of several in the Chicago area, and she might change locations now that she knows the police suspect her.

Churning

Spoiler for Churning:

I trade devices with a girl my age. We're supposed to do thirty iterations with each device, then pass them back. The device I'm currently working on involves moving a wooden dowel in and out of a wooden ring. I decide to count in groups of three thrusts: ONE-two-three TWO-two-three THREE-two three, etc. I realize about five counts in that this means I only need to count to ten. I decide to count to fifteen, just to impress her, but it turns out to be too much, and I wake up messily.

Game Over

While playing a game (very similar to Skyrim), I come across a cave and decide to explore it. Now, I'm not new to this game, so I'm understandably frustrated when I run into some level 2 creatures inside the cave that JUST WON'T DIE, no matter how many times I hit them with my sword. I figure there must be some special weakness these creatures have that I can exploit, so I try using my fire spell. It works! But I'm low on health, so I run back outside anyway. Some of the creatures follow me, but it turns out they're weak to sunlight as well. They remind me of fireflies, burning in the air. I go back inside the cave, where my cousins have already figured out the secret to defeating the creatures, and are nearing the main room of the dungeon.

In order to exploit this weakness for these creatures, I have to travel without any kind of light source. I feel foolish bumping into walls all the time, so I'm happy to remember that I have Night Eye! Quickly, I switch to it on my favorites menu and activate it. Soon, I'm down in the main room with the rest of the party, which consists of about a dozen of my relatives and neighbors, of various ages. There is a row of five deep, dark alcoves on the upper front wall of the room and swiveling mirrors all around the back. The floor is uneven, and it contains lots of concrete buttons for us to stand on, plus one white button we can push. Clearly, it's a puzzle room. I help the party pick up all the loot in the room, then ponder what to do.

I push the white button. A passage opens in the front wall. I'm second through the opening, after one other guy. It opens into a tall hallway with several 50-foot doors along the right side, all draped with translucent plastic tarp. The other guy seems to have run through the first one, and there are terrifying sounds coming from the room beyond--roars, growls, loud crashes, and the clang of steel. After a few seconds, a boss crashes through the doorway, scattering stone everywhere. It's forty feet tall, with a body that swivels all the way around and sharp appendages, claws, and teeth sticking out in every direction. It hurtles down the hallway away from me, but now there are more of the same kind of creature coming out of the doors from further down the hallway. Dozens of them, headed straight for me. I swear there must be some kind of boss spawner down that direction. A boss spawner!

I don't recall exactly how it ended, but next thing I know, we're back in the puzzle room from before the catastrophe. Clearly I was not supposed to push the white button. Presumably we've got to find a light source and reflect it into the correct alcove(s) on the front wall. Nobody else seems to have the patience for the experiment, though, and before long there's only one other person in the room with me, one of my older female neighbors. We exchange a few words, and then I think she leaves as well.

Loading

I'm exploring a large area of the game map with my dad. He walks straight off the edge, though, and seems to be floating in midair. I'm confused. But then the ground beneath him pops into existence, and I realize there was just a loading error in my game client. We find a series of wooden scaffold-like buildings on the side of a cliff. We split up, and I find a sign that encourages me to try "ladder jumping," which I gather means jumping across a gap in a desperate attempt to grab the ladder on the other side. The sign also explains that this ability was a controversial addition to the game, since Assassin's Creed almost has a copyright on that kind of athletic move. But the sign also explains that the addition was justified, somehow.

June 11.

An eatery. A lesbian couple complaining to the waiter. He answers back unkindly. The couple got all the more irritated. I told them to stop, and to carry their argument outside the place. I ended up lecturing them. The couple understood my point, but the waiter did not, feeling that I was favoring the couple. I left. I thought to myself, that's one place I'll never eat in again.

I was in Cavite, with relatives. Classmates from high school. Saw Mike G. He gave me a laptop/iPad gadget for use for work.

So there has been something that I've noticed about my dreams lately.. So far they have all had something to do with a cousin of mine who passed early January. He never speaks in my dreams but He always looks at me and smiles as if he was saying "I'm alright." I'm honestly 100% okay with this but soon I want to go lucid when this happens to see how that goes.. Maybe I'll find out that it's really him coming down to give me closure. Or maybe it's just my mind showing me what I want to see. Either way I'll be happy~

Bike Ride
I'm riding my bike from home to Target, but I somehow get mixed up and take a wrong turn. I end up at a business complex. I ride my bike on the uphill sidewalk past the buildings when someone rides past me. "Hey, do you need help?" He asks. I look up and see it's a kid from my Bible class. "No, thanks." I reply, awkwardly.

We continue to ride when we approach some cliffs that overlook Lake Michigan. There is a lagoon that drops off the cliffs, forming a waterfall. It's very beautiful, but the fact I've been a bit clumsy on this bike ride makes me really nervous I'll fall off. A naked girl approaches us from the lagoon and starts talking to the kid from Bible class. The dream tells me that there is a movie being shot here, and the residents of the village have been complaining about the nude women in the film.

I look down the cliff and picture myself falling off. It doesn't look too fun. I drop the bike and walk into the lagoon, where my aunt and four cousins are playing. I consider leaving before they see me, but I don't. There is a lapse in time, and I am in the kitchen of some non-existant relative's house. My grandma is here, and a few things happen which I have forgotten, and then I wake up.

Theatre Awards
I am at school, and during my lunch hour I'm helping set up for the theatre awards. Theatre troupes from schools all over the county are coming to VHHS for the awards. The officers have decided on a theme for the banquet, but it has not been unveiled. I am setting up blue folding chairs when Brian unrolls a large banner. "This year," he says, "the theme of the banquet is death!" Everyone seems to be pleased with this, but I find it strange. Brandon looks over at me and says, "What are you doing here??" everyone looks at me, expecting an answer. I don't know why no one wants me there, so I leave angrily. I enter fifth period and learn that they took my name off the excused list. Maybe I really wasn't supposed to go to the banquet. I'm so confused, and still pissed off.