Thread: SD-1: Nephanim

October 10, 2010

Becoming Drug Smugglers

I was in a shack that I recognized as Nicole’s secret house. A suspicious man in a trench coat and a fedora walked in and told me I could make big money trading drugs across the border with Mexico. He said if I would invest one million dollars, I could make six million back – a profit of five million. He said that as soon as the end buyer received the shipment, I would get six times my original payment through Paypal. I told him I would prefer to start out a little lower – around $20,000. That way, I could verify the trustworthiness of everyone involved and still make a fair profit. He seemed okay with this, so he gave me some forms to sign. The forms pertained to a shipment of marijuana from Mexico. I wrote out $20,000 for the price, and he took care of the rest.

The dream jumped. Nicole, her dad, and I were standing by a desk inside the secret house. The shipment had arrived – now we just had to send it to the buyer. It turned out that the one buying it was in Mexico, though… Nicole protested immediately; if we sent it across the border again, customs would almost certainly catch it, and whoever’s name was tied to the package would be thrown in jail. I realized the problem, but I couldn’t back out. We had already invested $20,000 in the trade. Nicole’s dad looked at us like we were crazy and signed the papers himself. He didn’t see why there was anything to worry about. I told him I only wanted ten percent of the money, and he agreed to that. We calculated the selling price at $600,000. That meant $60,000 for me – a profit of $40,000 despite only doing half of the procedure!

Nicole and I went outside the house to talk about the deal. We stood on a deck overlooking an empty street. There were a couple more houses on the same side of the road, but the other side was just open grasslands. Even in this secluded neighborhood, we spoke in whispers… We couldn’t afford to let her dad get caught. They would come to our secret house first, and then we would have to abandon it. I was sure the little house was worth more to us than my profits of $60,000.

Reasons Why Pimps are Dangerous

This dream has been omitted.

October 11, 2010

My recall's been weak the past couple of nights. I think I might be getting sick.

Clashing Reality Frames: CS and Nicole's House

I was sitting in my computer science classroom with Nicole, but she acted as though we were sitting outside on her deck. The other students in the classroom couldn’t see her, and she couldn’t see them. The professor drew a diagram on the board of a wave with a bunch of charged particles spread under the curve. For some reason, a student complained that the way he was drawing the particles didn’t make it clear that they were point particles. I didn’t understand how else they would represent a point particle except as a point… An argument ensued. Some people suggested using stars to represent them, but most agreed that little dots were just fine. My professor agreed to think about it and let us know which convention to use. I read some information on my laptop about utilities I might need while working on my shell. The page instructed me to call my network administrator and ask if a certain program was installed. It was something required to run the shell, so I figured Ada was already using it. Nicole and I talked about going back inside the house, and then the dreamscape flipped to her version of reality. The other people disappeared. I put some Hot Pockets in the microwave for her. She told me not to microwave them for too long, but I jokingly said I would leave them in for hours. I grabbed some water out of the refrigerator, too.

Symphony in the Sea of Shapes

I was floating toward Symphony in a sea of geometric shapes. She called out my name, but I couldn’t reach her outstretched hand. The closer I came to her, the more the shapes around us closed in. They were all icy blue and green. The space between them was perfectly clear, but it was fluid. I tried to reach through the shapes, but they filled in the gap between our hands. When they parted, Symphony was gone.

Three More Hours

I woke up in Nicole’s bed. As I sat up, I checked the time on Nicole’s alarm clock. It was 4:00 AM. I was pleased that I still had three hours to sleep. I remembered some dreams, but I couldn’t motivate myself to write anything down before going back to “sleep.”

Computer Work and Lambo's Clone

As the dream began, I was watching an episode of Katekyo Hitman Reborn on my laptop. I was sitting outside Nicole’s bathroom. I kept pausing and going back as though looking for something, but I didn’t know what.

The dream jumped. I was in a computer lab. There was something wrong with the computer I logged onto first, so I started looking for another one. I got on one full of slot machine games… I deleted all of them and logged off again. This time, I got on the computer next to a girl I didn’t know. It seemed to be available. I opened everything I was working on – some kind of writing project, apparently – and then she asked me to move. She said she had just scooted over for a moment to talk to the friend sitting next to her. I thought that seemed pretty stupid, but I didn’t argue. I closed everything and got back up.

I found my laptop at a computer desk in the room and used that instead. I started talking to WritersCube over MSN. Nicole appeared and took my laptop. She kept trying to send him a link to something, and I got mad at her… I don’t know what it was, but it was really embarrassing. I took her laptop and accidentally broke one of the hinges by opening it too wide. She yelled at me for that…

The dream jumped. I was back outside Nicole’s bathroom. Lambo was sitting on an upturned trash can. One of Dino’s subordinates walked up to him, felt his chin, and announced that it was a clone. Everyone around us started to panic. They didn’t know what had happened to the real Lambo.

Matt's New Girlfriend

Matt came into Nicole’s kitchen, followed by a large woman with short, black hair.

“What happened to Katie?” Nicole asked.

“We broke up a few days ago,” he answered. “She was nagging me all the time…” He introduced us to his new girlfriend while she made him a sandwich.

October 12, 2010

Sure enough, I woke up this morning with terrible recall and a headache. I remembered at least three more dreams during the course of the night, but they were so hazy that I couldn't work out anything.

NSLS Supports Lucid Dreaming

I was reading a printout of a newsletter for the National Society of Leadership and Success. It was focused on lucid dreaming. The front page of the newsletter gave a fairly general picture of what lucid dreams are and why people try to have them and also provided techniques used to induce lucidity. The back page invited members to discuss lucid dreaming at the next Success Networking Team meeting. I was glad I could set dream-related goals for our meetings and not feel out-of-place.

October 13, 2010

Busy day... But I finally got around to typing up my dreams! My recall seems to have pulled back out of its downward spiral, and my headache's going away, too.

Toys-R-Us and a Calling Card

This dream started out in some kind of hotel room. I was with my dad, and he kept telling me we needed to leave for the airport soon. He checked his watch and realized he was already going to be late for a business meeting.

The dream jumped, and we were in the car. He drove on all these crazy highway ramps and eventually stopped at a Toys-R-Us. My dad told me he needed to use their phone to make a long-distance call. I didn’t think they would let him, but he sent me in to find out. I walked straight into the employee offices in the back of the store. There was a red-haired woman sitting at a desk as I headed through the door. She looked up and asked if I needed help with anything. When I explained that I needed to use their phone for a long-distance call. She said that was fine, but I would have to pay them $6 per minute for the call. She reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a bent, blue credit card. She said that was their “calling card.” I would need it to dial the number. She showed me the red phone hanging on the wall in an adjacent room, and after I saw it, I said I was going to get my dad. She stopped me on my way out of the employee area to take the calling card back. If I stole that, they wouldn’t be able to make calls from the store anymore… I understood the problem.

When I told my dad what had happened, he sent me in to make the call myself.

Charles and Erasmus Darwin

I was in line at the register at Home Depot. I understood that the area surrounding the registers was my humanities classroom. The other students were arguing with Schmaus about Charles Darwin’s first name, his parents’ names, and his grandparents’ names. They were throwing random names out for the parents, and my professor had Charles Darwin and his uncle (Erasmus Darwin) mixed up. I was amazed that he was able to teach a class called “The Age of Darwin” while making such a critical error.

Writing More Fake Dreams

I wrote out a page full of dreams in my dream journal. They were hazy dreams lacking in detail – much like the ones I wrote down in the morning, but I don’t think any of them actually happened.

Emails from Sooraj

I was sitting at my desk in my dorm room. I checked my school email for messages from my professors. Instead, I found two emails from Sooraj, presumably regarding our jogging plans this week. I decided to ignore them for the time being. I also had two more emails that seemed important, but I don’t remember what they were about.

Jadusable's Rainbow Rock and Beckman's Books

I was in an auction hall of some sort. Jadusable was selling a bunch of stuff on eBay, and all of the items were displayed in person at the auction hall. Potential buyers could browse through the items, touch them, or whatever they felt like doing. I knew I wasn’t going to win a bid on any of the “haunted” items for sale, so I turned my attention to a beautiful, rainbow-colored rock. It looked like someone had spray-painted all over it in rainbow colors, except the colors were natural! Someone walked over to the rock and picked it up. I heard him say it looked cool, and I was certain that meant my chances of winning it had just gone to zero. Out of curiosity, I checked the starting bid… It was listed as free! A browser appeared in my field of vision, and I clicked on a “Take” button on the item listing. The eBay page warned me that I shouldn’t steal items just because they’re free. It didn’t stop me from stealing the rock, though… I ran off with it and showed Nicole. After passing it between one another, rotating it in all directions, and examining it, we decided it didn’t do anything.

The dream jumped. I was walking down Roosevelt Road in the rain. It was late at night, so everything was closed. I stood under an awning on the side of a building to get out of the rain, and when two people came up to me, I talked to them for a while. I went inside the building after they left. I discovered it was a library. I also discovered they had closed hours ago… The owner was my data structures professor from last fall, Beckman. When I saw him standing in front of all the books, I decided there had to be an open-source C-based implementation of a shell I could look at somewhere, but I didn’t want to look through the books in front of him. I was concerned he would throw me out.

The dream jumped. I was sitting in a viewing area inside the library with a projector screen. An old Disney movie was playing on the screen… I don’t remember what the movie was; I have a feeling it wasn’t a real Disney movie. It was almost morning. Beckman came back to see how I was doing, but when he saw me watching the movie, he just walked away.

October 14, 2010

Great recall last night! I also had one fairly unstable lucid dream.

Examination, Instruction, and Scarecrow Puppets

I was in Siegel Hall’s auditorium. My class was taking an exam on lecture material as the professor taught it. This was supposed to boost our exam scores, but I think it had the reverse effect for most people. The seats were arranged in long tables like a school cafeteria, but they were each on different levels. The professor wasn’t anyone I recognized… He started talking about the energy required to pull a charge (which he called “VBB” for some reason) from infinity to a distance “d” in meters from another charge, Q. I understood this because we discussed it in PHYS221 last year and in Electrodynamics this year. His explanation was horrible, though, and people were starting to get frustrated. I walked down to the front of the room to hand in my exam, and when I came back to my chair, Mike Palarz had pushed it out of the way so he would have two seats’ worth of space. I carefully moved the chair back into place, and he scooted over in a rage. I thought he might attack me. The professor asked him what the problem was, and Mike waved him off. He told the guy sitting across from him afterward that it was just the heat; the building’s temperature wasn’t maintained at all. On top of that, the exam was driving him crazy. I felt the professor wasn’t responding to his anger, though… Rather, he wanted to find out if Mike was cheating since he had seen him talking. I worried Mike wouldn’t talk to me anymore.

The professor used a puppet to demonstrate his point better. It looked like a scarecrow. When he released it, the puppet came to life and jumped up on a circular stage. There was a curtain wrapping around the stage, but the scarecrow pulled it to one side and started dancing. Ten or fifteen people ran to the front to interact with the puppet. They blocked my view of the board. Chinonso Enwerem grabbed the puppet’s arm as it was swinging around. It looked like he did it on purpose, but he really didn’t; he wasn’t even looking at the puppet when it happened. The professor wouldn’t answer his questions after that… He wrote something on the board about grabbing a charge and moving it between two points. The professor didn’t see it. Meanwhile, the scarecrow puppet began explaining in a voice that was an obvious imitation of Shanechi, my ECE211 and ECE213 professor. It frequently used phrases such as “da whole shabang,” “up-a-stairs,” and “down-a-stairs.” After the puppet finished its explanation, it danced for a bit, and then the professor put it away. He walked over to the board where Chinonso had written his question, erased it, and wrote “Pulling” in its place. He circled it. This was supposed to mean that we weren’t moving a charge – but rather, pulling it like a spring.

The professor walked to the board farthest from my seat and started describing something new. It turned out to be a discussion of rectifiers, so again, I already knew what he was saying. A girl in front of me with long, curly, brown hair said she couldn’t understand what he was saying – mostly because she couldn’t hear him. She asked if I would explain it to her. I figured she meant after class, but then she just kept staring expectantly… So I pulled out my electronic circuits notebook. I asked her to consider a typical sinusoidal, AC input signal. I showed her a half-wave signal in the notebook and explained that this was the output after going through the rectifier. The negative portions of the signal became zero. I knew DC approximation with a capacitor filter would come next, so I was going to show her that, too, but I don’t remember doing it.

Playing with Dogs, Bomber in the Hole, and Okami-Sho

I was playing Majora’s Mask. Prior to the dream’s events, I had been looking for four huge dogs hidden in Clock Town as part of a quest. I failed to find the fourth one before my allotted time ran out. As I wandered East Clock Town, I noticed the wooden box that usually spawns near the inn was huge… I also noticed some gray fur sticking out. I figured it was the fourth of the giant dogs. If I could confirm that, I could go back and complete the quest. When I broke the box open, it was just a little brown dog. I put the Bremen Mask on and started marching. The dog followed me toward North Clock Town. Somewhere between the inn and the entrance to the north side of town, I had to walk along a lake… The path was really narrow, and there were random spots where the ground would break, causing Link to fall into the water. I stepped on one such spot and tumbled into the lake. The dog followed me in. He started swimming around in circles.

I pushed the dog onto a stone platform just above the surface of the water. Once I had him there, I climbed onto the platform and picked him up. There were several platforms just like it leading toward the entrance of a cave, each separated by about five feet of water. I carefully jumped from platform to platform until I reached the inner surface of the cave. It was extremely dark just a few feet in – as is typical of doorways in Zelda games. The dog disappeared. Nicole appeared beside me, and I was myself instead of Link. We were inside the game. Nicole started telling me about something she read online; a bunch of Christians were being held on trial for killing Satanists. The Satanists had voiced their opinion that Satan would soon make his return and save the world from the lies of Christianity. I was appalled by the news.

It was Nicole’s turn to play next, so she took control of the game. I just watched her from the reference of the camera. Nicole went into the cave and arrived in North Clock Town as I had originally intended. I told her to pick up the Bomber kid who’s always shooting a red balloon in that area, and she did. He didn’t squirm at all. This naked Goron burst out of the ground at the base of the ramp leading up to the Great Fairy’s Fountain. His arms and legs were really thin and didn’t look proportionate. The Goron shot earthen darts at Link, and he took some damage. Nicole couldn’t attack him while carrying the Bomber. If she put him down, he would run off… So when the Goron burrowed underground, she took that opportunity to run past him. He came up again as she was running by and punched her, but after she got to the top of the ramp, he gave up and disappeared. I told Nicole to throw the Bomber kid into the fenced off area where the Deku Playground was located. After that, I wanted her to carry the kid into the Deku Playground. When she threw him, he fell right into the hole! I was a little concerned that the game wouldn’t register that he had gone into the grotto…

I wasn’t sure what to do next, so she walked back down the ramp and found Irie Shoichi (Reborn) in a bright, red shirt and tight, white pants. He was drawn like something out of Okami. He started babbling all kinds of random stuff about how he was three feet taller than Link (actually, he looked like he was eight feet tall, holy crap), how his hair was awesome, and how much he wanted to kill me. His head squished as he spoke. Nicole and I laughed at the game’s representation of Shoichi. Everything except Link and Shoichi faded to white, and Shoichi ran away.

Valentine's Birthday Song and Shirtless Laundry

It was Valentine’s Day. I was in my dorm room with Amar and Tillman. Someone knocked on the door. When Till answered, a white guy with a black girl on each side shouted “I love you!” at him. The girls turned, bent over, and rubbed a hand between their legs. The guy started singing happy birthday to Till, and once the girls turned back around, they joined in. At the end of the song, Till just closed the door and looked at us with an expression of pure bewilderment. I admitted I had hired them to do that. He misinterpreted it, thinking I was trying to tell him I had fallen in love with him or something. I managed to explain that it was just supposed to be a birthday surprise. Amar and I went back to working on our shell lab. We had a table set up with both of our laptops back to back so we could work more efficiently.

The dream jumped. I had just put a load of clothes in the washing machine. I realized I had put the shirt I was wearing in the wash as well, but I figured it wouldn’t matter; I was just going right back to my room, anyway. I draped my laundry bag over my shoulder and stepped across the hall into my dorm room. When I tried to close the door, two pairs of shoes were in my way. One pair belonged to me, and I wondered when I had taken my shoes off… The other two were neon orange. I assumed they belonged to Tillman.

Nicole Improves Her Japanese

In this dream, Nicole was living in a dormitory at a university. I visited her in her dorm room and found her practicing Japanese. She was using a program that would say a word or phrase in Japanese, process her attempt to repeat it, and give her tips on improving her pronunciation. She had to work on her Japanese because her roommate was from Japan. The Japanese girl was sitting at her desk with big, pink headphones over her ears. She reminded me of Symphony for some reason. I knelt down beside Nicole and watched her practice. The program was giving her a barrage of Engrish words…

“Painapuru… Banana… Puriisu…” it said slowly, giving her time to respond after each word. I asked her why it wasn’t giving her any real Japanese words, and then it changed things up a bit. I saw around seven or eight girls standing on a dance floor with flashing, colored floor tiles. Nicole was standing in the middle. The program started playing a song, and then Nicole had to sing the vocals. The lyrics were total nonsense. I’m pretty sure it was just a string of nouns. The more words she got right, the better she became at dancing. She seemed to be doing pretty well even though her pronunciation sounded horrible… I know she’s better than that.

Working at a Theater without Pants

I was at a theater with Nicole. I got the impression that she was working there, so we weren’t actually there to see anything. The backdrops on the stage weren’t falling correctly. The stage also had a side-scrolling banner consisting of several tiny, overlapping sheets on a string. This banner got stuck as it was rotating around, and it quickly got crumpled up against the wall. I offered to fix it, but Nicole wouldn’t let me. She climbed up a ladder on the stage and pulled the banner out before feeding it in the proper way. She had to restring some of the sheets, but it didn’t take very long. I realized she wasn’t wearing anything except a long T-shirt. She was completely exposed at that height… Lauren was standing next to me suddenly. I almost got mad, but I trusted Lauren not to make any moves on Nicole. When she returned, the dreamscape morphed into Jewel-Osco. I was surprised to see that she was wearing jeans.

Dumbledore Discovers a Cloud

I was at Hogwarts, but it was modeled after Clock Town. I went to the Headmaster’s Office in the southeast corner of the building. It was labeled as the “Gate Barracks” or something on a map I had. The door brought me into a room at the Ministry of Magic. I realized it was Albus Dumbledore’s office. There was a simple writing desk with a black phone, which was hanging from a cord off the side of the desk. The phone was a direct connection to the Minister’s office. I could hear him yelling into the phone, ordering Dumbledore to respond. I left the room and walked all the way down the hall. There was only one more door open.

I found Dumbledore beyond said door. He and Minerva McGonagall were working on a bunch of metal fixtures similar to the Eiffel Tower. Each of these was about eight inches tall. Their positioning was precise, but it depended only on x and y coordinates; their height was irrelevant. They were arranged in a roughly triangular pattern with two towers in each corner and one in the middle for a total of seven towers per formation. There were four of these formations altogether; these made up a larger, similar pattern with one set in each corner of a triangle and one in the center of said larger triangle. Newspapers were strewn all over the floor beneath them. I could see the pictures moving, but I didn’t pay special attention to any of them. Dumbledore and McGonagall didn’t seem to notice my presence.

I listened in on their conversation… They were using these elaborate metal arrangements to transport an astral clone somewhere else and recover my stolen wand. I had come in right after one such attempt; Dumbledore just barely returned with his life. They had discovered a cloud of magical energy hovering over the White House. When Dumbledore drew it on the wall, the image came to life, and I could easily see the yellow-orange cloud frothing around above the White House. It was fairly prickly for a cloud. I walked out into the hall and told Nicole about it, but she said a reporter from the District of Columbia had already discovered the cloud. She told me he blamed the government for hiding it in his report, but really, people just couldn’t see it without the gift (there was a bit of Goodkind mixed in here, apparently). I tried to explain to Nicole that those kinds of “reviews” come from struggling college students.

“They can’t keep their grades up, they never graduate, and they just keep taking classes until they drop out… Every free moment is devoted to attending an event so they can get paid to write about how awful life is.” We were sitting at a wooden table in some kind of old tavern. I really pitied the reporter… If only he would realize that he had the gift, too!

Forgetting the Apple Juice

I was at my parents’ house in Las Vegas. The refrigerator was in the living room by the fireplace instead of in the kitchen for some reason. I got the apple juice out and went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass, which I quickly chugged… After a second glass, I headed upstairs to sleep.

The dream jumped to the next morning. My mom was looking for the apple juice in the refrigerator. She and I saw it sitting on the kitchen counter at the same time, and she got upset. I couldn’t believe I had left it out all night… I had at least remembered to put my glass in the sink. I said I would still drink the apple juice even though it hadn’t been kept at the proper temperature. Sometime later, my mom wanted me to drive her somewhere. I just remember standing behind the car.

Sponsored by Boringheim: Unstable Dreamscapes (Lucid)

At the beginning of the dream, I was attending a high school. My gym class had just come back from running on the track. This was something like a midterm exam… A kid next to me asked what I thought my grade would be. I said I wouldn’t know until I heard back from the professor (of course, any high school gym coach would give me a weird look if I called him “professor”). We all stopped outside the entrance to the gym to wait for permission to go back inside. We were stopped by Timothy Spall in a new role as an annoying janitor. He asked in a deep, booming voice if this was the gym class. I remembered Nicole telling me about this guy; he just wanted to complain about broken glass on the floor of the gym. I responded in an equally deep voice.

“YES, IT IS!” I shouted, imitating him. He started speaking in a bizarre, Germanic language that gradually sounded more like modern German. He finally introduced himself (still in German) as Boringheim, and I doubled over laughing.

“What kind of name is that? Even for a dream, this is ridiculous!” I realized I was dreaming as soon as I heard the name. The dream quickly collapsed, and because I heard my roommate’s alarm go off, I thought I was awake in bed. The alarm was actually some kind of weird ticking sound… He’s never used that as an alarm. Anyway, when I opened my eyes to write down my dream, I was in my bed… But the bed was in the kitchen of my parents’ old house in North Carolina, right where the kitchen table should’ve been. I got out of bed and walked toward the garage, checking my hand. I already knew I was dreaming at this point, but I wanted to strengthen my lucidity. One, two, three, four, five… After I counted my fingers, my pinky started growing! It ultimately reached twice its original length. All of the knuckles were the same size. I bent it back and forth, amazed at the strange things my mind comes up with… I turned around and walked calmly to the back door.

“Just approach this calmly,” I told myself aloud. “When I walk through this door, I’ll be in Atlas or the Monolith Gardens.” I wasn’t sure which to pick, so I left it up to chance. I opened the door, and… Holy crap! Light! I couldn’t see anything anymore because a sea of intense, white light was in my way. I was able to remain in the dream, incredibly enough, and occasionally, a section of the wall of light would dim enough for me to see past it. I recognized the surrounding environment immediately as Nicole’s living room. I figured I was on the couch. I stood up and tried to dispel the light, but it just turned into all-encompassing darkness. I held onto the dream long enough to make it to a third dreamscape. This time, I was sitting on the floor by my desk. My chair was missing. I looked at my hand to verify that I was still dreaming. It started moving by itself, and I laughed. Weird sensations of mock pain buzzed through my hand as my fingers twisted in weird directions. I stood up, turned around, and saw Symphony standing in the middle of the room. She was wearing sniper gear (Ragnarok) and her usual, golden bells. Her head was tilted forward a bit as though she was tired or depressed.

I woke to the sound of my roommate rolling over in bed. My alarm went off shortly after.

October 15, 2010

The Artificial Brain Heist

Nicole and I met up with Brad and Antonia in a warehouse full of assorted items. We were in a closed-off section of the warehouse, so we only had access to about a sixth of the building. The areas beyond that were visible through windows lining the walls, but they weren’t properly illuminated. I recall seeing an enormous skeleton lying across the floor of the room. Chunks of its skull were missing as though someone had literally taken a few bites out of solid bone. We also discovered something Antonia referred to as a “sandwich mold.” It was important for making delicious sandwiches, she said. Its usage was simple: you just put layers of meat and cheese inside the mold, closed it, and then peeled the food off the inner surface afterward. There was no bread involved. The meat was compressed so much that it couldn’t be pulled apart. Brad kept demanding more food as he devoured his mock sandwich. I tried to keep up with him, but I quickly noticed he was ingesting a lot of cheese… I didn’t have enough cheese to match him. Brad mentioned Star wars at one point. All of this stuff we were doing with the sandwich mold was just to kill time while we waited for the warehouse to clear out. We were going to steal an artificial brain in the next room over. It was essentially a system of three powerful desktop computers linked together. My gut tells me there was a computer for each hemisphere of the brain and one to manage communication between the two. The artificial brain was just collecting dust, though. We were worried the janitorial staff might have thrown it out, mistaking it for a dust ball.

Digital Shelter

Nicole and I were constructing a house from a bit pattern. I think she rearranged some of the bits in an attempt to make the house larger, but she had no idea what she was doing. Naturally, she accidentally broke it. I tried running the binary file, but I couldn’t even get a house. There were just random walls with sections missing, a sidewalk leading to nowhere, and a lone tree in the front yard. The whole world surrounding our dysfunctional home was endless, flat grasslands. The grass was well-maintained – presumably because I didn’t give it time to grow. I succeeded in making a one-story building out of Nicole’s rearranged bits. The roof was messed up, but at least it resembled a house.

Ariel at the Ocean's End

Ariel (The Little Mermaid) sprawled out on a rock on the surface of the ocean. She was near the ocean’s edge, whatever that means. She looked very bored, but she had to wait there for something…

Nicole Seeks Advice on 4chan

I was on the second floor of a big, rectangular building with a balcony on one side. Thick windows lined the walls. I was sitting at a small table with my laptop. As I looked through posts on 4chan, I discovered something Nicole had posted. She included fifty pictures and three videos of herself. The thread basically said that she was tired of being ugly and failing in her duties as my girlfriend, so she wanted tips. I listened to Reborn music while I read through all of it… Some of the pictures didn’t seem relevant. For example, she posted a picture of a bunch of elementary school girls in make-up and provocative clothing. They were sitting in their desks at school. In retrospect, one of these girls may have been Nicole. I thought she looked familiar, but I didn’t recognize her in the dream. I was worried someone would see me looking at it and report me to the authorities, assuming that I was looking at child pornography. Most of this concern arose from seeing a glimpse of an old woman outside the window behind me, but when I looked more closely, I realized it was actually the reflection of Nicole’s mom. She was standing with Nicole nearby.

Apparently, Nicole’s mom was going to a funeral in a white suit. Nicole asked if it was okay to wear white to someone’s funeral, and her mom insisted that it was a horrible thing to do – but some people can’t let black fabric touch their skin, so they have to wear white instead. Nicole asked if my Oma would be there, and her mom said she went back home.

“She’s getting old, you know,” her mom said. She sounded a little upset – like my Oma was dying or something. I wondered what it was like to be her age. Nicole said something about her Ragnarok Online server, and I got the impression that she was Agharta’s owner. So much for Kelsey! I was amazed; I didn’t think she could afford to host a server. Dream data flooded in… It was being hosted for free by Rate My Server. She could use a web-based dashboard for file management purposes – adding and removing scripts, for example. I considered opening my own just because it was such a great deal, but then I realized I didn’t have any interest in coding custom content for Ragnarok… I watched one of Nicole’s videos. As I did, a guy appeared behind me. He was watching over my shoulder. He looked, acted, and talked just like Dan, but his face was blurred, and I knew intuitively that he was just some random Anon from 4chan.

We watched a girl with a blue wig stripping in the video. I wondered if it was really Nicole… The girl didn’t look like Nicole at all. She was wearing spider web-like clothing that barely covered her body. I heard Dan’s lookalike say “Good catch, Anon.” I felt like I should’ve been offended… He was watching my girlfriend strip (allegedly) and complimenting her talents. Surprisingly, I wasn’t bothered by it. I closed the video.

There was another guy in the room with me. He was wearing all black, and I didn’t recognize him at all. We were in Nicole’s living room. These two had contacted Nicole outside 4chan, gotten her address, and come here to teach her to be a better girlfriend. I didn’t really want to know what they had included in their lesson plans… I was surprised when they told me she just needed to learn to cook better. She cooks pretty well, actually… They set up this strange razor-blender-vacuum device powered by a motor. It consisted of a bulky, but portable container which held vacuum bags, necessary mechanisms, and replacement parts attached to a long vacuum tube which was, in turn, attached to a razor – or something more like a nose trimmer. They had to clean off the stove first. Wads of thick, black hair were stuck in the stove and covered its surface. The kitchen and living room seemed mixed together… The machine required two hands to turn it on or off because you have to hold back a lever in order to shift gears on the main part of the device, but to my surprise, they didn’t want my help. I decided to pick up some trash sitting around the living room. I saw Eric and asked him to get me a trash bag. Conveniently, there were two in the room already. He said that Matt had left them there, but I realized that had really been me. I was reminded of a time when Nicole told her mom Matt had a replaced a light bulb, but I had actually done it. In the dream, I struggled to remember the specifics of said memory… I just knew that something similar had happened before. I argued with Eric about who got the bags, but when he protested, I admitted it didn’t really matter as long as I had them.

Nicole was in the bathroom for most of this dream. When she heard me arguing with Eric, she thought I was yelling at her and asked what I was saying. I told her I was just talking to Eric. I filled up both plastic bags and some smaller ones I found while I was cleaning up. Interestingly enough, I cleaned the bathroom as well, even though Nicole was supposed to be in there… I found some empty water bottles behind the toilet. The bathroom looked more like the one at the Starbucks I stopped by today than Nicole’s since the bathtub was missing. I returned to find the two Anons cooking rice on Nicole’s stove. They were boiling water in a pot just for fun. The fire on the stove was where the temperature knob was meant to be… Anyway, I helped pour the rice into a bowl, and I didn’t spill any! The guys started talking about rice.

The dream jumped. Dan-Anon brought his nephew, Damien, to Nicole’s house. He kept asking if we were ready to play even though we made it clear we couldn’t… We were about to go to bed. He somehow managed to lick my tongue, and the taste of warm, second-hand milk made me want to vomit. I scooted over to the other side of the bed and covered my mouth with a hand. Nicole ran out of the room in terror. She came back a couple minutes later, and I asked her to get me some water. She gave me one of those cups of liquid they give you in hospitals. I drank most of it and managed to wash the milky taste out of my mouth. When there was just a little left, it turned brown… What in the world…? I gave it a weird look and set it down. We told Damien and his uncle to leave so we could go to sleep. We learned later that someone had told them we invited them over. They didn’t have a ride home.

White and Black Performance

I was performing in the gymnasium of my middle school in North Carolina. I’m not sure what we were doing, but the girls were all wearing these white dresses, and the guys looked like shadows. Our uniforms were damaged right before the performance, so I got mad at everyone.

Tiger Woods' Grandchild

In this dream, I was a girl. I had just been dumped by Adam Woods, allegedly Tiger Woods’ son. I saw myself sitting on a pink bed with my older sister. We resembled each other quite a bit… We both had long, blond hair. My face was a bit chubbier than hers. She said that she was going after Adam since we weren’t dating anymore. I objected, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Later on in the dream, I was pregnant with Adam Woods’ child. My sister wanted me to give up the kid. I refused.

Attacked by Symphony in the Mountains

I was hiking in the Rocky Mountains with Nicole, my mom, Chelsea, and a couple other people. We were pretty high up the mountain, and I had to walk on the unstable side of the trail right next to the cliff face. I started to get separated from the others as half of the trail went back down. After carefully stepping between stable rocks, I managed to get back up on the main trail with everyone else. We came to a collapsing bridge. Most of it had fallen several meters down the cliff face, but there was still enough to walk across – provided hikers were cautious, anyway. We waited for a family to cross. This included carrying four plastic chairs and an elderly woman in a wheelchair across the rickety bridge. I crossed first after the bridge was clear. For some reason, I wasn’t worried about the others falling. We rounded a bend in the trail, and a mountain villa came into view. We couldn’t get around to the other side of the mountain unless we went through their house…

I climbed up to the second floor and went in through their patio door. The house was completely empty and meticulously clean. I still felt that there were people living there, however, and I worried they would come home before we could get through the house. Sure enough, when I went back to get Nicole and the others, I saw people sitting in chairs on the patio. I knew I couldn’t go out that way. I went to the other side of the house and found a way into the house next door through a window. After jumping in their open window and making my way down to the first floor, I exited into their backyard. They shared the yard with their neighbors, and there were about ten people standing around on that side of the yard. They seemed to be having a barbecue or something. I crept across the yard while trying to avoid detection… They didn’t see me, but someone else did.

A floating, white orb of light swooped down toward me, and bullets rained into the ground inches from my foot. I jumped back. When I got a better look at the orb, I could see Symphony hovering inside it. She didn’t seem to be aware of what she was doing… It was like she was being controlled remotely. I tried to talk sense into her while evading her attacks. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I couldn’t think of a peaceful solution; it didn’t seem like she could hear me. Occasionally, a bullet hit its target. With each successful shot, I came closer to death…

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were playing with two dogs in the foyer of my parents’ first house in Colorado. They were both really tiny dogs. One had black fur, and the other had a gold-white coat. The dogs wanted to be friends, but they were too shy to approach each other. We made them do it. They had a long, but simple conversation about the nature of friendship. It was extremely fluffy. At the end, they announced that their friendship would never end. Nicole and I were amazed that dogs could talk for so long. There was a widescreen television on the dining room wall, and my mom had it hooked up to her computer. She was downloading a torrent for Code Geass II. In the dream, I immediately assumed this was the new Code Geass series and asked my mom if she had seen the first season (by that, I really meant the first two seasons). She said she hadn’t, so I recommended it. I told her it had an amazing ending. For some reason, I started crying. I wasn’t able to look at my mom anymore.

Flat Trains and the Homeless

I was sitting on a platform at Ogilvie Transportation Center. All of the trains were gone. I had some notes and a textbook in front of me. Saelee asked me to explain the Principle of Conversion (or something strange like that) for extra credit. I seemed to be in some kind of physics class – which is odd since he teaches computer science courses. I showed him a diagram of the Zodiac in the book and admitted I hadn’t memorized it yet. He said that was completely unrelated.

“It should light up the whole room,” he said before walking away. The spaces between the platforms were filled with lush scenery, but everything was flat like in Paper Mario. I examined a pond with a grassy ledge, a frog on a little island, and a bunch of mirrors positioned at odd angles. The frog was coated in a shiny material that allowed it to reflect sunlight onto the mirror closest to it like the Mirror Shield in Zelda games. This didn’t bring the light to the next mirror, though… I discovered that after maintaining the correct angle with the frog for a few seconds, the light I put into the first mirror started shining from the second one as well. If I kept providing light, it spread to the third one, and so on. There were eight mirrors in all. By the sixth one, light was beginning to fill the room. My professor looked over as light flashed across his face.

Intense light filled the pond scene, and it became still more intense when all eight were glowing. I judged from the grin on his face that even though I was the first to accurately demonstrate the Principle of Conversion, I wouldn’t get any point. I had already answered once incorrectly.

The dream jumped. The pond scene was replaced by a blocky train. It was a little thicker than the paper scenes, sort of like the difference between paper and an index card, but it was just as cartoonish. Several trains of different sizes followed close behind, and soon, the city was obscured by all the trains. They were overlapping each other and sounding their horns. I told my dad I’d never seen so many trains in one place. We got on one and sat together. He was about half his current age for some reason… The interior was modeled after the CTA’s trains. An old, wrinkled man held out a cup and asked if we could spare $50. I laughed. My dad told him no. When he walked away, I remarked that the homeless were getting greedy. My dad said it was just because Chicago’s such a tough city to be homeless in. I saw a paper version of the cityscape through the train windows. Something seemed to be written in the sky near the sun…

The dream jumped. I was about to cross State Street at 33rd when a homeless man walked up to me and asked for change. I refused to give him any, and he positioned himself really close to me. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. He was easily a foot and a half taller than me, and his hair was worked into thick dreadlocks.

“No, sorry,” I repeated. I considered getting the police.

Nap Fragment: Water Adventure with Nicole

I was with Nicole somewhere with a lot of water… We were indoors. It was sort of like a sewer system.

October 16, 2010

My sleep schedule was so weird last night... Nicole and I went to bed a little after midnight, I woke up at 2 AM with one dream to record... Then we went to bed around 6:30 AM, and I woke up at 8:30 AM with another. I went back to sleep, woke up at 11 AM or so with a couple more dreams... My sense of time has been so distorted, heh. Anyway, I took a break from my computer science homework to type this stuff up. Dreams are just refreshing like that.

A New Kind of Dream

In the two-hour interval I just slept, I had a dream about some kind of intricate mental formatting. As I awoke from it, I decided there was no need to write it down because it was “a new kind of dream” (according to my thought process) that “wouldn’t make sense on paper.” Because I didn’t write it down, it doesn’t make much sense. I was also convinced that I would easily remember it because it was so revolutionary. The dream consisted of a hierarchy of thoughts in digital form. The thoughts branched out in hundreds of ways, linking with other thoughts to form a massive web of awareness. I was able to easily traverse this web. There were no other people, but that was just fine – I was part of the web.

Emily's Torment

I was visiting my mom at the new house in Texas. Although I told everyone in the dream that the house looked like the old one in Texas, the first floor was almost identical to our old house in Louisiana… Except for a few dimensional differences (and the obvious addition of a second story), they were indistinguishable. I don’t see much resemblance in the dream environment to our Texas house now that I’ve awoken. My mom said she kept losing things while she was unpacking boxes ever since the recent move. I set three sealed boxes down in a stack on the stairs leading from the first floor up to the second. When I turned to look at my mom, she pointed behind me. I whirled around and saw that the boxes were gone! She said they just disappeared as though they were swallowed up by the carpet. Intrigued, I went down into the basement… They were sitting in the same stack on the basement floor. I decided I must’ve awakened some kind of psi powers unintentionally. I went back upstairs with the stack of boxes and apologized to my mom.

“Strange things always seem to happen when I’m around,” I said with a shrug. She was pale-faced, and I couldn’t figure out why. I went back into the basement and saw Austin sitting around down there… He looked bored. I asked what he was doing, and he said he was spending a lot of time in the basement lately. No one would use the basement bathroom, though, so he always had to go upstairs when nature called. I decided to take my family’s advice and use the bathroom upstairs to shower. This bathroom was divided up into three rectangular sections. The first was the actual shower. The second had a sink, a mirror, and a window overlooking the front of the house. I don’t know why the sink was positioned further in than the shower… That sounds like a problem. Anyway, the last section just had a toilet. There were black shower curtains separating all of these. I didn’t think anyone would notice, so I urinated into the shower drain. I quickly noticed that the urine wasn’t draining, so I reached over to the shower control knob and turned the water on. I needed to at least dilute the urine… The temperature range went from -240 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It switched temperature systems somewhere in the middle, but it wasn’t labeled… Rather than complaining about using two different scales, I questioned its ability to give me water below freezing. I mistakenly decided that as long as it didn’t go below absolute zero, it was okay. I turned the shower up to about 70 degrees (in whatever temperature system that corresponded to) even though it felt amazing cold, too.

I soon realized why the water wasn’t draining. The shower was actually more like a giant bathtub. The water was supposed to fill up the first section of the bathroom. The door was sealed at the bottom so water couldn’t escape, and it wouldn’t drain unless I flipped a lever by the temperature knob. The urine seemed to have disappeared, so I just ignored it… The water filled up to my chest before I stopped it. I noticed little blue spheres floating under the surface of the water… Some of them had blue lines sticking out of them. There didn’t seem to be any order to their arrangement. I called these “fate spots.” If I was doing what I was fated to do with my life, I would be able to make all of the lines of energy in the water disappear, leaving just the disconnected dots. I crouched under the water and started messing with them. Try as I might, I couldn’t do it. My hand just passed through the lines when I tried to touch them. I heard a voice saying I was an incompetent electrical engineer. I worried one of my friends would be able to do it… Then they would take my degrees before I finished my undergraduate curriculum.

I went into the adjacent section without draining the water. Go figure: the water just disappeared without moving into the rest of the bathroom. I’m not even sure how the shower curtain was enough to keep it in the first section. I wanted to use a real toilet – not a sink or a drain – so I went into the third section. While I was in there, I heard a faint scream. I quickly put my clothes on and left the bathroom. My mom said Austin was missing, so we started looking all over the house for him. I went down to the basement bathroom. It was empty except for a green trash barrel full of water and another stack of three cardboard boxes. I peered into the open trash barrel and saw it was also full of trash. I heard Austin screaming in mortal terror. Yikes… He was inside the trash can. I spilled it over on its side, and a ton of cotton threads, waterlogged paper, and a body tumbled out. Austin stood up shakily. His face was as pale as my mother’s had been earlier in the dream.

“She trapped me in there…” he said after taking several slow, ragged breaths.

“How did you breathe in there? You must’ve been in there at least ten minutes.” He didn’t respond. I decided I would stay down there with him for a bit, but he wouldn’t stay in the bathroom, so we had to go out into the main part of the basement. My mom found us downstairs, and I explained everything that had happened… She didn’t seem to understand. Austin refused to talk to her about it, too. From then on, we started seeing shadow figures in the basement. My mom and Chelsea would no longer go below the first floor. I went down there with Austin when he calmed down a bit – he was going to explain what happened in more detail – but the walls started bleeding, and shadow figures swarmed us. I saw one sitting on the floor of the bathroom, but it was too dark in there to make out any details. The closer we went to the bathroom, the darker everything became. We were physically unable to enter the bathroom. Really, it was like there was a solid wall blocking the doorway…

After Austin and I gave up and went back upstairs, my mom complained that more boxes had gone missing. A thorough search of every part of the house from the attic to the basement revealed that they could only be in the basement bathroom. No one denied it was some kind of haunting at that point, but what could we do? Austin couldn’t stand being alone anywhere in the house – even in his own bedroom. He started murmuring the name “Emily” whenever he got scared. We could only assume that was the ghost’s name.

The dream jumped. I went with my family (plus Nicole) to a restaurant to get away from the house. No one wanted to eat dinner there. As we walked in, I wondered why this had happened to us. There were plenty of paranormal investigators who would love the chance to document a haunting like ours. What made us so special? I looked at everyone as we passed by them and wondered if the ghost was there at the restaurant, watching us. Would she look like a normal person? I considered asking random people if they had any suggestions… I decided against it. Anyway, it was a Mexican restaurant. Our waitress seated us at a tiny, white table that was much too small for six plates of food. We managed somehow. Austin mustered up his courage and went to the bathroom. I could see him sitting on the toilet from our table for some reason… How unsightly. My dad started asking questions about Emily. Since he hadn’t been there when all of this started, he thought I had brought her there. Then again, I wasn’t so sure he was wrong.

Austin came back from the bathroom crying. He seemed like he was losing weight… It had only been a day since I discovered him trapped in the basement bathroom, so that’s saying something. He said he couldn’t use the restaurant’s bathrooms. They were too easy to see into – no kidding – so Emily would see him, too. I tried to give him confidence by using one of their bathrooms, but… I discovered what he meant firsthand. Everyone on the front wall of the restaurant could see me standing over the toilet. There wasn’t a wall, door, or curtain preventing them from staring at me. I decided I would just go. It was the restaurant’s fault for failing to prepare a suitable bathroom. A waitress standing near our table saw me and freaked out. She started yelling something at me, and then a bunch of other waitresses came over and dragged me away from the toilet while I was spilling my bowels. Apparently, I had dumped my waste onto someone’s table rather than into a toilet. I didn’t see how that was possible… I was clearly sitting on the toilet. It was revealed then that the bathroom was just an illusion created by the ghost. We were thrown out of the restaurant.

Outside, Emily appeared behind us. I stiffened when I saw the girl’s long, black hair and vacant expression. Her eyes were truly dark, much like the basement bathroom had been when the shadow beings surrounded it. She seemed about sixteen or seventeen, but maybe older. We tried to get away from her on a six-person tricycle (wow), but she easily kept up. She told us we were getting close to the truth, but we would never uncover it if we couldn’t remember the day she died.

The dream jumped, taking Emily’s cue. I was Austin as an infant. We were standing outside a hospital by a lone tree. My mom gave me a stuffed sheep to hold. Its head resembled Sakutaro’s (Umineko). The rest of it felt fake somehow… I knew the sheep was going to be destroyed soon – not quite burned alive, but it felt that way. I walked over to the tree and put my hands on its trunk. My vision left Austin’s body and entered my own. Unlike Austin, I was the proper age. Lightning struck the tree. I thought for sure that Austin was dead. My dad ran toward the tree to retrieve him. No, I thought – I remember this.

“No!” I shouted. “Dad!” He heard me just in time and stopped to look at me. Lightning struck the tree again. If he had gone any closer, it would’ve electrocuted him, too. Lightning had struck the same place twice before our eyes – and it would do it again, I knew… The third lightning bolt cracked against the tree, igniting still more flames in its branches. There was a long delay, and we decided it was probably safe to approach Austin… Two guys ran to the tree and picked him up. They were electrocuted when they touched his body, so their arms and legs weren’t functioning properly. They almost dropped Austin’s unconscious body on the pavement by the road. My dad helped them steady themselves, and I took Austin. We started walking toward the hospital. I remember thinking we were lucky to be by a hospital… I had already forgotten that this was all in the past.

Once we entered the hospital, I went straight to a desk in the middle of the building. I told the receptionist we had an electric burn victim. He already knew Austin was a child, but he confirmed it with me before sending us to a panel of healthcare experts in the hospital’s basement. I could see them through the floor. They seemed to be addressing an audience of a couple hundred people in an auditorium.

The dream jumped. We were at a playground contained within a sandbox. Everyone except Austin was the correct age. As we discussed Emily’s hold on Austin, I suggested that we might have to get an exorcism. I could force Emily out by scaring Austin. We decided to try it. What did we really have to lose? Austin was easy to find. As I pointed out to my mom while we were considering our options, he was as far away from us as he could get without leaving the playground. I crawled under a slide and crept toward Austin’s back… I heard Chelsea say something about Emily catching me in the act. A little black bug surfaced from the sand and jumped onto my face. Austin turned his head, and Emily’s vacant expression was locked on me. More shadow bugs came up out of the sand and covered me.

The dream jumped. I was running around as Nicole in an empty version of my parents’ house. I ran upstairs, downstairs, all over the place looking for a hint that might help us save Austin, but there was nothing… Agharta’s patcher music was playing in the background. I knew I didn’t have much longer to get rid of Emily. The clock was ticking. I ran upstairs into Austin’s room. It was still empty. When I turned around, Eric was standing in the doorway. He was looking for the answer, too, but his luck was just as poor as mine. I threw my arms up and shouted to Emily, wherever she was.

“There’s nothing Austin can do! He wasn’t part of this! Why don’t you haunt me and Nicole instead?!” The music stopped.

“Then I will,” she said. I woke up as she spoke, and it was clear that this had been her intention all along.

Martha's Memory

This dream took place a few years after Emily’s Torment. My dad invited me to his house in Louisiana. I accepted the invitation and showed up at his house in an old car. He was waiting outside for me. My dad looked like he had aged ten years since I last saw him. The house was my grandparents’. I guess they were deceased. He was suddenly overtaken by fear and started running down the road. I followed him to a tower isolated from the rest of the houses. I understood that it was supposed to be a replica of a building from Silent Hill 13, but it almost perfectly matched the house from my previous dream. I followed him into the equivalent of the bathroom I had showered in three years ago. I told him I was really getting creeped out. He told me he hadn’t shown me the worst yet. My dad led me down the hall to a small room at the back of the building. He stood in the hall while I went in to investigate… I looked up at the ceiling and immediately noticed the gaping hole. It went all the way up to the attic. There was a writing desk with a ton of papers stacked up. Many of these were envelopes. When I examined them, I discovered that I had written them. Well, that was impossible, I told myself – I didn’t remember writing any of the letters. The return address was correct (Nicole’s house); I triple-checked it. They were addressed to someone named Martha. I even found an invitation to a leadership society meeting, complete with a fake ID card to get her into the meeting. I wasn’t sure it was fake at all, though… It just looked really old and flimsy. I glimpsed at some of the letters to Martha, but I was too disturbed to read through them. When I walked out of the room, my dad guided me toward the door without a word. In the driveway of my grandparents’ house, I asked him about Emily. I was still calling her that since I didn’t know what to think of this “Martha.” He seemed reluctant to answer my questions.

“I invited you here to see if you had figured out the truth,” my dad explained. After a pause, he continued. “I was wrong – you’re no closer than you were three years ago. Until you take the next step in unraveling that girl’s past, I can’t answer your questions. You’ll be back for that soon… I’m sure of it.” I wondered what he was talking about. He got into a red convertible and pulled out of the driveway. I forgot about my car and started walking toward the street. I almost bumped into a brown-haired girl in a white dress. She looked like someone I knew in my junior year of high school. I laughed at how stupid it would be if she was somehow related to Emily-Martha. I didn’t know where to go next. The dream replica of Shady Grove was true to the original. I started walking toward Sun City Elementary. Soon after I started down the sidewalk, Morgan Freeman began to narrate in the background.

“Little did he know that the menacing start of his unfolding adventure was speeding toward him…” Much like Harold Crick in Stranger Than Fiction, I became a bit paranoid after hearing this. I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing, but it was eerily quiet. There was a stillness in the air – that calm before a ferocious storm rolls in. I watched hundreds of tiny leaves falling from the trees above me. Then I heard an engine. A monster truck equipped with a steamroller’s drum came speeding down the road. I broke into a run. That wouldn’t do much good, I realized, but I had to do something. The next time I looked back, it was on the sidewalk. In the words of WritersCube: bugger! I found a bike on the side of the road, stole it, and started riding for my life. The monster truck split into two men on motorcycles while I pedaled at full speed down the street. I knew they were going to catch up shortly, so I circled around, drove between them, and caused them to crash into each other instead of me. Morgan Freeman started to narrate again, but he was impossible to understand. I ignored him this time because he wouldn’t speak clearly.

I started to walk down the road again… Then my dad drove up to me and demanded that I fix my mom. He was his normal self – which throws into question the identity of the aged version of him I spoke to at the beginning of the dream… Anyway, my mom had been turned into a skeleton. I realized I was a skeleton, too. We both had Brook’s jaw structure (One Piece). I got in the car, and he drove us home. I noticed Austin wasn’t in the car. No one explained what had happened to him. When we stopped at the house, I concluded that it looked wrong for some reason… I didn’t want to go inside.

Straw Hats Gather in Termina

I was watching One Piece with Nicole. The anime had reached the story arc following 3D2Y, so the crew members were all heading back to Sabaody – except the archipelago was replaced by Clock Town (Majora’s Mask). Usopp descended from Snowhead, but it seemed to be on the eastern side of the world in the dream. He met up with Nami near the base of the mountain. She was played by Regina. Her hair was blond and more like original Nami’s hairstyle. Then some random Heartless, Akuma, and shadow beings appeared. Usopp pretended to be scared at first, but then he pointed a finger at the enemies and shouted something in Japanese. I thought he was going to fire a pop green at them or something, but he pulled out a keyboard and started playing it. The music notes flying out of it killed the monsters.

The dream jumped. It felt more like we were playing a video game at this point. Luffy and Usopp were skydiving. Usopp found Luffy in mid-air and glided toward him. They landed in the snow to the east. There was some kind of elevated train system separating Snowhead from Termina Field. It didn’t serve any functional purpose. The same cutscene with Usopp and Regina-Nami played. Nicole complained, but I assured her that Regina would be a better person in a few episodes. After the cutscene, Luffy was still with them, only he was in chibi form. I realized this was really going to mess up the story.

I remember telling Nicole that the game developers had known about the crew members’ new looks almost a year in advance.

Explosive Hockey Match of '97

I was watching a hockey game with Nicole. It was a recorded match from 1997. The game was played in a pool instead of atop an ice rink… I watched the losing team put floating duck bombs on the surface of the water. They nearly blew up one of the winning team’s players. Nicole and I were horrified. The other team retaliated by shooting missiles the size of siege rams at the duck bombs. I told Nicole this was probably why the rules of hockey were changed in 1998 to keep players from using explosives. The sport’s coordinators feared that the audience would be put at risk if they allowed such violence to continue.

October 17, 2010

Took me a while to get around to these because of schoolwork and other things...

Left Something in the Future

The dream started out in a forest. I wandered around in the rain until I came to a small table. Rokudo Mukuro was sitting there with an open umbrella resting against his shoulder. I heard him chuckling quietly to himself. He spoke to Chrome telepathically.

“Sweet, stupid Chrome… You’re so easily manipulated.” Nicole gasped upon hearing this.

The dream jumped. I was at Madison Meadow. The people surrounding me were all Katekyo Hitman Reborn characters. We seemed to be developing an alternate storyline which took place during the Shimon arc. Before long, Tsuna was the only member of the Vongola who could still stand, and the enemies were all still in fighting condition. I was sure Tsuna was going to be killed. I saw Chrome standing behind them… She began to speak in Mukuro’s voice. I didn’t understand; it was all Japanese. She swung her trident, and a black rift opened up, separating one of the enemies from the rest. Ryohei dropped down from a high ledge and punched the isolated guy several meters across the field.

“You haven’t fought our true selves,” he announced. Lambo dropped down next to him and shouted something, apparently taking credit for the blow. A baby version of Gokudera appeared on Ryohei’s shoulder… He said something about being put through the Ten-Year Bazooka in reverse. It was similar to what happened early in the series with Verde’s invisible suits. Tsuna was taken to another location somehow where an ancient sage spoke to him about a ripple in the fabric of time. When they returned from the future, their memories were transferred to their past selves, but the physical effects of their battles – namely, strength, neural connections, that sort of thing – had not been sent back. Tsuna was the only one who successfully returned. The sage attributed this to the length of their stay in the future. He showed Tsuna a dying sakura tree. That was supposed to prove his point… somehow… After that, he pointed out some white socks with Tsunayoshi written on them. Tsuna was alarmed to have left his lucky socks there – wherever there was.

When Tsuna returned to the battleground, I knew what had happened: the Vongola guardians in the future had managed to send the strength their younger counterparts left behind through time, allowing the present guardians to instantly regain their vitality and fight with more power than ever.

Dethklok at the Schweppe Hall Wedding

As the dream began, I was waiting outside Austin’s room at my parents’ house. He and his girlfriend were making out on his bed, and I didn’t want to disturb them. We were going to an event at “Schweppe Hall Auditorium” somewhere on my campus. I asked if he thought I should bring a walkie talkie so I could find out where it was. Austin and his girlfriend only came with me because they wanted to buy some wheat bread to use as a doorstop. I did a hand reality check while I was walking, realizing it had been a while since the last time I tried it. My hands looked normal… I decided I wasn’t dreaming. I remember something about talking to my Omi outside the auditorium.

When we went inside, I became Murderface from Dethklok. The whole band was going to a wedding. The other members insisted on making me wear underwear to the wedding… I begrudgingly accepted on the condition that they would wear underwear, too. I was worried they would come to the wedding without wearing any and force me to wear extra pairs. They were really annoyed that I didn’t just assume they were going to wear underwear.

Wealth, Symphony's Light Arrows, and Glitch Volumes

Steven was talking to me and Nicole on MSN. He wanted to show us a Ragnarok Server he had played on recently. We easily connected to his server. Nicole and I swam through an ocean behind him and came to an island with a bunch of identical NPCs. It reminded me of all the NPCs surrounding the blacksmith in Payon on Agharta; a bunch of them look alike. Steven cracked a whip at one of the NPCs. This one was standing by a cave of sorts built into the island. When the whip hit him, he shot out a green rupie. Another crack of the whip, and out came a blue rupie… Steven gave it one more try, and he got the Mask of Truth. I saw that he had thirty of these in his inventory. He climbed up onto the island and went into the cave. There were merchants all over the place inside. He sold a bunch of items for billions (if not trillions) of zeny. I didn’t count the digits.

The dream jumped. I was playing as Symphony on Agharta. Nicole was playing a male character… We stood outside the orc dungeon, and her character asked Symphony if it was scary inside. I got the impression that they didn’t know each other. Symphony said it was, but she had no reason to fear orcs. After killing a few of the orc warriors patrolling outside the dungeon, they went in together. Nicole’s character had a lot of trouble with the orc zombies, but Symphony was dropping them like flies. She shot light arrows at them, producing an effect similar to the Grants spell from PSO. Needless to say, she killed the orcs in one hit. A couple of familiars and a drainliar went after the guy, but I didn’t want to waste any SP, so I ran up and hit them with a staff. After most of the orcs were dead, a monk appeared. Symphony hit him once, and he started running. We were in the cathedral from .hack instead of the orc dungeon at this point. Two more hits were sufficient to knock the monk down, and I saw a message indicating that I had received “Othello, Volume IX.”

“Only fourteen left…” The voice was Haseo’s. I understood that I was playing a new .hack game for PS3. Haseo was referring to fourteen “glitch volumes” we needed to collect. I explained this briefly to Nicole. The fallen monk mistook Symphony for Tri-Edge in his final moments.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were talking in the kitchen about the dream up to that point. She said she had a dream just like it, so it was probably a shared dream.

Meeting at Subway, Trainscape, and a Frog

Nicole asked Andrea to meet her at the grocery store, but we drove to a Subway nearby instead. While we waited outside, watching cars zip down Roosevelt Road at 50 miles per hour (all of them going west, what the hell), I reminded Nicole to tell Andrea we were actually waiting at Subway. She didn’t realize Andrea had no way of knowing where we were. Andrea was taking too long, so Nicole’s patience ran out… We went inside the restaurant. The workers were changing shifts because it was 8 PM. I decided the store must’ve been open until midnight or something, but even then, that would only give them a four hour shift!

The dream jumped before I gave it too much thought. I was on some railroad tracks with Nicole in the middle of a silver landscape. It was a dreamscape from a dream I had a long time ago, but I didn’t realize it until now. I wished that I could take over the world. The wish was apparently granted – although it just resulted in me getting stuck to the train tracks. A train sped toward me. As it came close, I realized the answer: I could rule the world from beneath the train! Oh, dream logic. I flattened myself against the tracks and let it pass over me. I was nearly killed by a dangling pipe at the end of the train, though.

The dream jumped. I was a frog in a forest pond. I told Nicole about how one day long ago, I decided I didn’t just want to eat flies anymore. I ate all kinds of plants, small insects, and mushrooms. The insects grossed me out a little, though… I still felt my human mouth, and the thought of a grasshopper sitting on my tongue was repulsive.

October 18, 2010

Hazy recall... Less sleep than usual, alarms, etc.

Soda Vectors

I was writing code for my systems programming class. I wrote a program that would print out its name and manipulate a bit vector in a soda machine on campus. Depending on the bit vector, different soda dispensers would be turned on or off, so the program allowed the commons staff to disable drinks when they ran dry.

Caterpillar Plus Rotten Egg

Nicole’s dad came into her room while she and I were sitting in bed. He started complaining about a smell, but my nose was too stuffy to smell anything. Right after I told him that, I tasted rotten milk in the back of my throat. It became more repugnant when he moved Nicole’s desk away from the wall. The room was mirrored east and west, so the desk was against the wall shared with the stairwell. He found a broken egg on the floor that had probably been sitting there for weeks. A purple caterpillar with black spikes all over its body was eating the green-white remains of what could’ve been a chicken. Her dad took the egg and left to throw it out, but he didn’t touch the caterpillar. Nicole got down on her knees by the little bug and tried to play with it, but I wouldn’t let her. I was certain it was poisonous. It reminded me of a caterpillar we found once and named Ron (in waking life).

Regina's Dreaming Questions

The dream started out with me and Nicole in a tiny room full of books. She opened a door along the back wall, and we walked into a place she referred to as her mom’s favorite “smoke bar.” It was certainly a bar… As we walked in, a couple of guys in folding chairs asked us if we had used cigarettes or alcohol recently. They were doing some kind of survey. We both said no. I got the feeling that someone was checking for our IDs, too, but we got in even though neither of us was old enough. I didn’t think that through quickly enough; before I could realize it didn’t make sense, Nicole pulled me over to the bar. She asked the bartender for a “cuppa da watta” in a mock Italian accent. Since Nicole’s mom was a regular customer, he knew exactly what this meant. The bartender handed her a syrup dispenser full of water, which she passed onto me with a nod. I drank a little of it… I didn’t have to do anything fancy with the lid, though. It just came out like an ordinary glass. It was refreshingly cold. Nicole had to go look for her mom, so she told me to wait at a table. I went around to the back of the building and found a free booth along the wall. Regina showed up with her mom. While her mom went off to order a drink and mingle, Regina sat down across from me. She said hi and asked how I was doing. Before anything else, I let her know that while I was alright with talking to her, I would pretend I had said nothing to her if Nicole came back. I felt guilty even saying that, but I didn’t want to stir up more trouble between them. Regina seemed annoyed. She started asking me all these questions about lucid dreaming; she acted like it wasn’t possible! I wondered why she had changed her mind about it… She used to enjoy hearing about my lucid antics.

I answered all of her questions in order, pausing once to do a quick math problem on a napkin. Regina moved to the seat next to me and started talking about… kidnapping me or something. I was worried Nicole would see us sitting together and misunderstand. Fortunately, Regina’s mom came back, and she moved to the other side of the table. The barrage of questions resumed. I told them I was surprised they hadn’t asked any questions about shared dreaming. Lucid dreaming was an established scientific fact; they could read books on it if they had questions. I started explaining shared dreaming, but then Nicole came back and started arguing with them… I was happy when they left so the argument could stop.

Battling Through a Castle

Nicole and I were playing an RPG. The fighting system was almost identical to Kingdom Hearts. We even had the same spells. The game started out in a castle. Nicole was already a fair bit into the first area. I told her the boss was coming up. There was a trap door leading two stories down into a room she had already gone through. I told her not to fall in, but she already knew. She showed me a barrel in the room two stories below us. Weird – the room looked like the one I found the letters in from Martha’s Memory. After continuing, she came to the wall lining the castle perimeter. We were fighting green ghost blobs that floated in the air. I took over and found out that using a fire spell on them killed them instantly. At least, it did the first couple of times. After that, they started to develop a resistance to fire! I started whacking them in mid-air with my sword. While doing so, I accidentally fell off the castle into an endless, white void below. I tried to glide like I would in Kingdom Hearts, but it didn’t work. After I respawned on the castle wall, Nicole took the controller back. She continued along the wall, fighting only when necessary. I saw her reach level 10, and we talked about how it was easy to level up. I said this was because the endgame content was ridiculously hard. Even after reaching level 100, most people still had trouble with it. I couldn’t remember whether or not 100 was the maximum level.

October 19, 2010

I woke up after the first dream feeling pretty bummed out, and then some text message communications threw me off the deep end for the night, so a lot of these dreams were kind of... depressing. I felt fine when I woke up for class, though.

Diode Crystal Structures and an Exam

I walked into a tiny classroom with four traditional seats behind white tables, two armchairs along the side wall, and a couch along the back wall. Right after I sat down, Beckman came into the classroom and started teaching us about “diode crystal structures” using a Powerpoint. The slides consisted mostly of diagrams and images from the textbook. Basically, he told us that there was a newly discovered, naturally-occurring crystal structure that functioned as a diode. It consisted of a bullet-shaped cathode on top, a threaded shaft, and a chunky, regular polygon with about fifty sides on the anode end. Even without a figure, you can probably imagine what it looked like… I didn’t realize how awkward it looked in the dream, though. My professor reminded us that the image on the projector screen wasn’t to scale; the shaft was actually much shorter than the two ends of the diode crystal. As long as the bullet top was able to slide up or down the threaded shaft, the diode would conduct. It entered the reverse-biased condition when it touched either end of the threads. In this manner, the diode crystal really provided three states instead of two – but since two of them were reverse-biased conditions, I wasn’t sure it made a difference. My professor insisted that he could explain ways in which those two cut-off states differed.

The dream jumped. I was on my way to the classroom with a slip of paper telling me where to sit. I was assigned to seat 96. As I walked in, I actually counted the eighteen or so spots to sit in (assuming no one tried to hang from the ceiling). Of course there weren’t 96. I sat at the end of the couch. There was a white blanket set out in front of me, and I decided I would use it if I got cold. When Beckman walked in, he started handing out an exam. I was surprised; I didn’t think we would have an exam so soon. My shock turned into horror when I realized I hadn’t even looked over my notes before class… Forget studying. I had no idea there would be an exam. I hoped I wouldn’t bomb it. When I got it, the paper became my field of vision. The exam was fifty minutes long, it said – rather short, I thought with a smile.

There was only one problem. It required me to design a rotating annulus structure that would serve some practical purpose in outer space. Weird… I thought of space stations, but I didn’t know enough about the particulars of that design to use it. Anyway, I had to explain the concept of an annulus in writing first, apparently… I started wondering what kind of class this was. It incorporated multivariate calculus, physics, material science, and circuit theory. I drew a cool diagram that rotated on the page. It felt like I was explaining the concept of a Laurent series… The exam instructed me to recolor Link’s tunic in order to transform it into his fierce deity form from Majora’s Mask. I was given two compressed tar archives (tar.gz files) to work with: one of Link’s original outfit and another of the fierce deity version. I couldn’t find the files, though… My field of vision kept switching between the exam and a blank web browser effortlessly, as though I was alt-tabbing between the physical and digital worlds. I was using the browser to look through directories, so I worried my professor would think I was using the internet to cheat on the exam… I kept getting hentai advertisements, too.

I gave up on recoloring the tunic for the time being… It was taking too long, and I still had to do the design part of the problem. I have no idea what recoloring video game graphics had to do with the exam. It had only been about five, maybe ten minutes, so I wasn’t worried.

“Five minutes,” Beckman announced. Huh? I looked up in shock. As soon as our eyes met, he spoke again. “Okay, that’s it. Pencils down.” What kind of crazy time compression was this? As instructed, I put my paper and pencil down on the desk. As he took my exam, I knew I was going to fail it. I sent my mom a text message saying that I was going to fail the class. I felt there was no point in trying anymore… It would be better to just rot somewhere, I decided. Beckman dropped a pamphlet on my desk after he collected all of the exams. It was some kind of research assignment I’d done on applications of the diode crystal structure. He gave me an 80 and left a note in red ink that said “second portion not attempted.” As I recalled, I had skipped the second part of the assignment because of time constraints.

Secret Wedding Plans and Poor Preparation

I was on the third or fourth floor of a building. The room I was in functioned as the reception of the tiny chapel in the connecting room. Both of them combined were about the size of one floor in Nicole’s house. I knew it was my wedding day. Once I prepared everything, I would bring Nicole there and hold a small ceremony… I only invited a handful of people, but most of them didn’t come… Just Sooraj. Regina also showed up for some reason. I didn’t invite her, though, for fear of ruining Nicole’s wedding day. They each gave me wedding gifts in plastic bags, and I thanked them. I figured they had just gone to Target on their way to see me… But I was grateful for whatever they thought to get me. Sooraj asked about parking at the chapel. Apparently, he was worried his car would get towed because he parked along the wall of the building. I went over to a window along the back wall of the reception area and indicated a parking lot spanning half a block. It was right across the street. This seemed to be the same parking lot from the start of Lining Up for the Beds. The area in which we waited in that dream was to the right from my perspective. Anyway, I reminded him that I didn’t have a car, but that was probably the best place to park. I realized soon after that I still didn’t have a ring to give Nicole… How were we going to hold a wedding without rings? I thought about cancelling everything before she could find out; that’s right, I didn’t tell her she was getting married! I grabbed my phone from the windowsill and left for Nicole’s house.

The dream jumped. When I walked into Nicole’s house, her mom was sitting on the bench near the front door. She told me to stay inside for the rest of the night because it was too late to go anywhere. I didn’t think that was really fair, but I agreed. The wedding was a secret anyway. I held onto Nicole’s phone for her, and we went into the living room. While she drew something in her sketchbook, I tried to come up with a way to make the wedding work. I could do it without the ring – maybe – but I doubted Nicole would be happy about it. I started getting really anxious and pulled out my phone to text Sooraj. I was going to cancel the wedding after all. The phone looked like a cross between mine and Nicole’s. Sooraj’s number wasn’t in it… I pulled the other phone out of my pocket; that was Nicole’s. When she asked what I was doing, I said I had taken someone else’s phone instead of mine. My phone was still back at my dorm. Obviously, I couldn’t tell her I had left it at a chapel… She wasn’t supposed to know about our wedding. As I wondered whose phone I was holding, I got a call from “Josh.” Okay, perfect. I picked up, and…

Regina’s voice came through loud and clear even though I was holding the phone at arm’s length. She giggled quite a bit, and I found it annoying. I somehow prevented Nicole from destroying the phone. I agreed to go back and trade phones with Regina. When I arrived, I knew I was going to have to talk to the priest about cancelling the ceremony. I felt like dying.

Playing Dream Chess Against Myself

I was lying down on the floor with my chin resting on my arms. I looked over the giant chessboard sitting in front of me. Nicole was technically playing against me, but I pretended she and I were working together to defeat the black side. I should’ve known I was dreaming; she never plays the white side! Anyway, I took a lot of her pieces, but she got some of mine every now and then. I noticed our queens were missing the entire game… I let Nicole make some naive moves since it was in my interest to let the white team win. The giant chessboard we were using shrunk. It was just a normal board. Suddenly, as I began playing for the black side again, I realized Nicole was beating me. She had nearly twice as many pieces as I did, and I was left with my king, a bishop, and a knight. How had that happened? Oh yeah, I did that. She had two pawns one tile away from my end of the board. I knew she was going to get her queen back. She moved one of the pawns on her next turn, but she didn’t ask for any pieces back. I was confused.

Burning Holes in My Wallet at Subway

I was at Subway with Nicole. I wasn’t eating because I didn’t know if I could afford a sandwich. Nicole got a foot long BMT like always. She also ordered a slurpie and a rainbow cookie. The guy working there insisted there weren’t any more rainbow cookies even as he pulled one out of the cookie rack. I asked him about that one, and he said it was for display purposes, not for sale. Hmm. Nicole decided to get cheesecake instead of a cookie. They had her favorite: black tuxedo cheesecake! I wondered if she was sticking to her diet goals, but I didn’t want to say anything in public. The guy got her a huge piece, too. As he was pulling it off the rack, it flipped over and landed on the counter. I trusted that the counter was clean, so I told him not to worry about it. My total came out to $21.26… That must’ve been expensive cheesecake.

The guy tried to hand me the money. I laughed and told Nicole he was paying me to take his food. He realized his mistake as I reached out to accept the payment, and I was forced to pay for the food. I pulled out a $10 bill and a couple of $5 bills. All that remained in my wallet was $8 in singles. I told myself it would be okay if I didn’t spend too much money before summer. I still had some money in the bank if I needed it.

Rurubell the Fairy

I was Link. A green fairy followed me around Kokiri Forest. Her name was Rurubell.

Doomed to Heaven

I was talking to my mom on the phone while sitting at my computer desk. I was in a really crummy mood, so I didn’t feel like talking. My voice was weak and sickly. Even when I tried clearing my throat to fix it, I couldn’t. My mom started talking about dying. She seemed to think she would die soon, so she wondered what I thought about the afterlife. I made up some stuff about going to heaven, though I didn’t believe my own explanation. She was happy to hear that. I was disappointed when she brought up the idea of angels guiding her through the gates of heaven into paradise.

“In case you die and go to heaven, then,” I said sarcastically, “I’d better leave you a message now. Goodbye.”

“You’ll see me in heaven when you die, though!” she said in a cheery tone. I let my head drop backward and sighed deeply. That’s right, I thought. I gave my soul away when I was a kid. I was doomed to go to heaven.

“Whatever…” I muttered almost inaudibly under my breath. I was glad she didn’t hear it.

Dream Journal 8647

I was counting my dream journal entries from last night in a dream. I counted eight the first time, then six, then four, and finally seven. Looks like I was right in the end, heh – but only if you count this one.

October 20, 2010

Poor recall last night. No surprise... I slept horribly.

Alien Encounter and Joining the Military

I was walking down an empty street in the mountains with my dad and Austin. It resembled a dreamscape from an old dream I haven’t posted here. As we were heading home, my dad pointed up in the sky. A UFO was soaring through the air at a low altitude. Amazed, I stood there and stared at it. That was all the proof I needed; either extraterrestrials were real, or the military had some crazy technology a hundred years ahead of the public. The UFO started to fade into the distance, but then it swooped back around and hovered over us. It consisted of a central ball and two concentric disks surrounding the ball. One disc spun clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. A bright light shone from the bottom of the ball, scanning the ground… It stopped on us. The light paused for a few moments before moving away and turning off altogether. My dad lost interest, and Austin was nowhere to be found… They walked ahead of me.

While I was walking by myself further down the road, I saw the UFO again. I was pretty close to our house at this point, so I was sure the aliens had figured out where I lived. The light turned on again, and the UFO started to scan me in fuller depth… I felt as though I was floating off the ground, but I really wasn’t – it was just an intense feeling of weightlessness. The UFO hovered around me, keeping the light fixed on my body at all times. When it had sufficient data, it left just as before. I went inside the house.

As I walked in, two girls ran over to me. One was Nicole, but she didn’t look much like herself. Her hair was a little longer and blond. She was also skinnier. The other girl had darker skin. It could’ve easily just been a dark tan. Her hair was long and black. Both of them were wearing pointlessly skimpy clothing that reminded me of Jagang’s slaves. They argued about something, but eventually, they each took an arm and walked with me through the house. Everyone gathered in the living room, except it was modeled after my parents’ bedroom from our old house in North Carolina. There were stacks of paper everywhere… Many of them had information on UFO studies and extraterrestrial races. I tried to hide these instinctively, and when the military showed up at our door, I understood why. They sent two soldiers in, each with a live pistol. I was pretty sure I had hidden everything related to the UFOs, so I didn’t think there would be any trouble.

They asked how we were, what we were doing, that sort of thing… Neither of them questioned Nicole and the other girl’s manner of dress, not even the female soldier. They started rifling through the stacks of paper, but everything important had been moved. I picked up a stack in front of me and flipped through it. To my disappointment, I saw two pages with alien symbols all over them. The face of an Egyptian pharaoh was in the middle. I casually dropped the stack back down on the ground as though nothing had happened. When they weren’t looking, I slid it under the coffee table behind me. The female soldier gave me a look that said she knew I was hiding something. It started to look like she was just playing dumb… Indeed, she reached under the table and pulled one of the symbol sheets straight out.

“Take him away,” she said to the other soldier. He grabbed me under the arms, separating me from my two girlfriends. The female soldier said goodbye to the others in the room and followed us out. When we left the building, I saw a row of tanks with their turrets aimed right at us. Between the tanks and on the roof all around us were soldiers with rifles locked onto my head. There were easily a hundred soldiers in the area. What were they so scared of, I wondered? I brought my hands up in surrender, thinking that was probably the right thing to do… They said they were going to kill me. I proposed something more useful: if they would allow me into the military, I could use my knowledge to help them. The male soldier who had restrained me started laughing and shook his head. He said he couldn’t see me in the military. Then he said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. Then he said it might be a good idea. Then he decided he’d like to see me in the military. Everyone started voicing their consent. I hoped they didn’t mean throwing me on the front lines…

The dream jumped. I was sitting in an old university auditorium. The class on ufology the military had forced me to take had just ended. I knew I would graduate a semester late because of this, but at least the money was pretty good. They were paying me handsomely to take the class and give the professor my feedback. I talked to the professor after class about extraterrestrial engineering. He wasn’t an engineer, though; the course was in the humanities department. He said he couldn’t hold an intelligent discussion about the mechanisms responsible for the UFOs’ flight.

Party of Four in the Fire Dungeon

I started out playing one of the N64 Legend of Zelda games. I was in a fire temple, but it was nothing like the one in Ocarina of Time. It felt like I was in a volcano rather than an actual temple. There were shadow beings crawling all over the floors, walls, and ceilings. If I broke open a pot, shadow-based monsters usually jumped out instead of hearts. There were also a few coffins positioned in random places. I didn’t dare open one. Although my attacks worked the same way they do in most Zelda games, the fighting system was taken from Kingdom Hearts. I was amazed to find that I could jump as Link. I walked around to a pit of lava, and a bunch of small, roughly spherical chunks of coal rose out of the pit to form a stairway up to a cavernous hole in the wall. I jumped up from block to block, but when I tried to make the last jump, I accidentally swung the Kokiri Sword and struck the wall, throwing me backward. I landed on a platform isolated from the others just above the lava pit.

At this point, the sprites became Ragnarok-based. I was a wizard with an eye patch and an old-fashioned pipe in my mouth. I also wore Sherlock Holmes’ hat. There was a champion waiting for me. I understood that he and I were conquering the temple together. If we failed, the world would remain veiled in darkness. We had already come most of the way, and it was a trying journey… But the stretch of work remaining was still daunting. The only thing keeping us going was our teamwork. For some reason, I pulled out my ocarina and played a variant of the Song of Time. It was correct except for the last note, which was just labeled “C.” The song name was given as the Song of Devastating Moons. I received a question asking if I wanted to accelerate the fall of the moon. Without waiting for my input, the game selected “Yes.” Time rushed out of me, and I heard violent tremors fill the temple. The champion punched me and took the ocarina.

“What are you doing?! I knew it! You’re one of them!” He played a constant note for eight seconds, and the effect was reversed. While he yelled at me after, Nicole jumped up onto the platform from… the lava? Interesting. She looked much like Elita – particularly the assassin cross clothing, captain’s hat, and hair. She even had a metal arm. She didn’t have a missing eye, though. Before the champion could strike me again, she told him to stop. We had to work together if we were going to save the world. Yoruichi jumped out of Nicole’s cleavage and landed beside me. She was a little taller than all of us… She referred to Nicole as “Tera” when she spoke. Yoruichi insisted that it wasn’t Tera’s fault they had taken so long to arrive. The champion insisted we were all useless… He just wanted to act alone. We all considered working independently, but I secretly knew it wouldn’t work. I would get farther than all of them, but I wouldn’t be able to seal away the boss.

One of those black sphere things from Kingdom Hearts appeared, and we fought together to kill it. I was Link again. I almost fell off the platform while swinging my sword wildly. When the fight ended, I reverted to my old self. I started making perverted faces at Nicole-Elita-Tera. It felt like I was reading from a script, though.

October 21, 2010

Ah, much better.

Dream Logging, Math Soda, Coding, and Animals

I was visiting my mom at my parents’ new house in Texas. It was designed like Uncle Chuck’s old house. I was with Chelsea and Austin in the basement. They kept asking if I wanted to do random things – like play billiards, to which I was particularly opposed – but each time, I said I couldn’t because I hadn’t written down my dreams for the previous night yet. I didn’t want to forget them. After they left the room, I realized I couldn’t remember any dreams and walked into the living room. They were sitting with my mom on the couch. When my mom saw me, she showed me where I could find a ton of fruit and other foods. I took some pineapple back to the basement and tried to remember my dreams again. It still yielded nothing. When I went to the living room to put the pineapple away, I got “1+Soda” out of the refrigerator. I don’t mean it was soda named that… I mean I had a soda, but with the addition of the numerical value of one. As I drank the soda, I could taste the number one trickling down my throat as well. It was invisible, but it was attached to the can and had a weight of its own. I decided the soda tasted much better this way. I decided I would program a game from scratch just to improve my talents. I didn’t know what I wanted the game to be about, but I figured it would probably be a roleplaying game. I sat down on my laptop and started constructing a database for all of the statistics.

The dream jumped. There was someone at the door. Nicole and I were the only ones home, so I answered it. It was an old man with a pair of sunglasses and a shady-looking hat. He had a small dog on a leash. I closed the door on him, but he opened it right after. I closed it again. This repeated until he got angry and shoved the door open. He threw the dog – leash included – into the house and ran off. The dog disappeared. After I closed the door, a cat walked up to me and rubbed against my leg. She looked up at me and said she wanted to go outside. It was Nicole. I didn’t want to let her leave the house, though… I was worried she would never come back.

Banjo Vie

I was sitting in a room that looked similar to the one I had in Nevada. The furniture had been shifted around a bit, though. I went over to a Nintendo 64 sitting on the TV stand. There was a cartridge set up to the left of the N64. It was a copy of Banjo Tooie with a very depressed-looking Banjo on the front label. There was a cartridge with the same label in the N64… Except the name of the game was Banjo Fiveie. I was amazed that they had already made a fifth game. I retrieved Nicole and Eric to show them what I had found. Eric was unimpressed… Apparently, it was his game, and as they pointed out, it really said Banjo IVie – so it was the fourth game. I asked if there were any plans to make a fifth game, and Eric said he had seen something about it.

Sleep Paralysis - Dreaming and Waking (Brief lucid)

I had a highly unstable lucid dream which started as a false awakening with sleep paralysis. I would’ve suspected it of being a real awakening into sleep paralysis if not for the fact that my arms branched out of each other like ghostly afterimages when I tried to move them. Anyway, I kept trying to look at my hands to do a proper reality check, but every time I did, they ended up further away. I started slipping off the bed somehow even though I wasn’t moving… I regained mobility then and rolled back onto the bed, but I woke up into actual sleep paralysis in the process.

I tried to go straight back to sleep to reenter the dream. I don’t remember anything else.

Poor Driving, Broken Physics, and Dead Babysitters

I was in my dad’s car with Nicole behind the wheel. I don’t know where we were going exactly, but it was some kind of emergency, so Nicole was speeding. She must’ve been going at least eighty miles per hour. I told her to slow down. The best excuse I could come up with was that she would scare my dream recall out of me before I could write anything down. Apparently I was still trying to write down dreams in my dreams… Anyway, she was sitting in the driver’s seat, and I was in the back on the right side. I never sit in the back unless there’s someone else in the car with us, so that was weird. She drove off the road and slammed into the back of an eighteen wheeler. We both flew threw the windshield from the impact. While Nicole flew straight into the truck, I somehow fell along a diagonal and hit another truck next to the first one. Furthermore, my impact did about five times as much damage as Nicole’s. I was trying to estimate how severe the impact should have been and modified the level of damage accordingly… Nicole didn’t seem concerned by the twisted metal holding me eight feet off the ground.

We walked between the two trucks and found a man who looked a bit like Spanner (Reborn) walking toward us. Before either of us could mention insurance (which I wasn’t sure applied to Nicole at all in my dad’s car), he told us to follow him, so we walked back to a small building on the side of the road. It was like a miniature library. There were only a couple hundred books, but most of them were thick. My dad came in through a door on the other side of the building. He was holding a six-pack of beer. As he set it down on the librarian’s desk, he looked at me in shock and asked what I was doing buying beer. I told him that was his, not mine; as I pointed out, I’m not even old enough to purchase alcohol. He didn’t seem convinced, but he let us off the hook. My dad left after that, and Nicole and I started discussing how she needed a new babysitter. The old ones – named Chuck and Jim – had died in a recent car crash. The Spanner trucker guy volunteered himself to babysit Nicole (as if she can’t take care of herself). He started talking about a “Brazilian Institute of Academia,” which I clearly remarked had nothing to do with the conversation… I was sitting on a laptop at one of the small library tables. It felt like I was just reading from a script. I was also on my phone.

The dream jumped. We were walking through a parking lot with my mom so she could drive us home in her car. Austin and Chelsea were already in the car waiting for us. As she tried to back out, she almost hit the car on our right… Then she couldn’t figure out where she was going and tried to turn into the end of a car wash. I pointed out the white arrows painted on the pavement and told her she couldn’t go that way. The people coming out of the car wash were surprisingly patient with her as she backed out… From there, we drove down the road. I got the impression that we were in some kind of national park, and we were on our way to the exit. There were a few stoplights, but they were all linked to the railroad crossing signal at the exit. A voice echoing from loudspeakers all over the park announced that the next train would be arriving in seven minutes. Since we didn’t want to get stuck behind the train, my mom sped most of the way. As we came into the final bend in the road before the railroad crossing, the voice told us that the train had arrived. It had only been a few minutes.

Age of Darwin with Lord Rahl

I was in my Age of Darwin class, but Nathan Rahl was my professor. The class was taking place in Nicole’s dining room, and my dad was sitting at the table with us. Nathan folded his hands and addressed the class.

“And what is cement?” he asked. There was a brief silence, and then that one girl in the back who always answers questions responded with her usual Middle-Eastern accent.

“The farthest thing from God.” I remembered hearing my professor say this in a previous lecture, and it seemed to make sense. It had something to do with gravity and the undiscovered magnetic “charges.” My dad thought it was a strange claim to make at a technical school and asked what book we were reading. I looked down at a book on the table. The cover showed a man standing in the distance by a streetlight. The rest of the environment was dark purple. The title was “NY Banker.” I explained the story to him in vague detail. It was basically the same as the plot of my Poor Driving, Broken Physics, and Dead Babysitters dream. In fact, when I woke up, I almost got these two dreams mixed up!

Unstable - Chocolate and Cheeseburger Duck People

I was at my parents’ house again. My mom sent me to the store to get chocolate for her. I didn’t bring my phone, wallet, or any coupons, so I’m not sure how I expected to pay for it… I went to the checkout empty-handed. Although it was late at night, the lines were long… I was unable to find an empty line. One of the cashiers waved me over when she saw me. She handed me a sheet of coupons, which I reluctantly accepted… I didn’t really want to carry them around. I started looking through some chocolate bars set out by the register. There were a couple of Hershey bars (that was what my mom requested), but they were too small. Most of them were Twix bars. I walked back toward the main part of the store. As I spotted the school supplies, I reasoned that the candy would probably be close by – that way parents could shop for their kids’ supplies while the kids looked for candy. At first, I thought I saw a bunch of bouncy balls in quarter machines, but I realized they were actually jawbreakers. I had found the candy aisle. I got my mom’s chocolate.

The dream jumped. I was in the pitch black darkness of my parents’ bedroom. My dad was gone, and my mom was asleep in bed. I didn’t want to wake her up, but I didn’t know what to do with the chocolate. If the room had windows, the curtains were so thick that I couldn’t see any light. I gave up waiting for her to get out of bed. The dream jumped again, and I was outside by the garage. I forced the big, metal door open and shouted something in frustration. One of our neighbors, a plump black woman, walked up to me with her arms crossed.

“I’m gonna tell yo mama,” she threatened. She looked just like the cashier who gave me the coupons, but she wasn’t as nice. She walked into the dark garage to try to get in the house. Unfortunately for her, the door to the kitchen was locked. I considered trapping her in the garage… I understood that there wasn’t an automatic mechanism inside the garage to open the door. The woman looked scared, though, as if she realized what I was thinking. I decided not to lock her in. I just told her to get out. She refused until my mom came out into the garage to talk to me. She said she heard what I had said in her bedroom. I couldn’t remember saying anything. I gave her the chocolate.

The dream jumped. It’s gotta be that chocolate. I was setting up a Nintendo 64 in my Omi’s computer room to play Diddy Kong Racing for some reason. I realized pretty quickly that I had no interest in playing the game… So I turned to Austin and asked what he was doing. He gave me a list of all these games he had played recently… Then he left the room.

The dream jumped. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the chocolate. I was on my laptop in my mom’s bedroom for some reason, and the light from my monitor was keeping her awake. I agreed to move into my room. It was suddenly a desktop computer, so that made it much harder to transport. I figured I would just make multiple trips to get all the components. The cords were hideously tangled.

The dream jumped. I was lying down on my bed with Nicole. We were about to watch a movie on my laptop. Nicole started complaining about leading a meaningless life, and I told her to stop. The movie started playing, and I showed her that it was in 3D.

“It’s not the kind you need glasses for,” I explained. “This is real 3D.” It was, in fact… It felt like I could’ve reached into the monitor and pulled one of the characters out. Eric came in the room to see what we were doing. He sat down on the edge of the bed where the laptop was, and when he got up to leave, he knocked the laptop off the bed. I just barely caught it. “Hey, Eric! Watch what you’re doing…” After I pulled the laptop back up, I felt bad for shouting at him, but it was still a bit ridiculous. I noticed the keys on my laptop were really tiny… As I focused on the laptop as a whole, it became clear that the whole thing had shrunk by a factor of two.

The movie continued playing. It was like a cross between Reborn and DC comics. Tsuna had turned into Captain America, and he was extremely buff. Gokudera was still himself, but he was just as buff as Captain Tsuna. They glided through the air and landed on the back of a moving pick-up truck. Kyoko was sitting there in tears, helpless. She was safe upon their arrival, however! The scene changed immediately, and we watched a badly drawn Goku try to remember the correct hand position for one of his old attacks. A disgruntled narrator complained that in Dragonball GT, Goku seemed to forget some of his most important techniques.

“For example,” the narrator said, “if I was Goku, I would’ve used my kamehameha to blow those plant bastards away.” I watched Goku shoot a beam of energy at a plant creature standing on the other side of the room.

The dream jumped. I was designing three-dimensional Ragnarok characters. They stood in the orc dungeon while I fiddled with them, often in rows of four so I could see two example male characters and two example females at any given time. Some of them were ugly, slutty girls with neon hair colors. A lot of their heads were really wide. Nicole complained that they were gross, so I moved the camera to the guys. I was stunned when I saw that they both had duck bills. The character creation menu referred to these as “weaves.” It cost fifty zeny to change the bill. I paid the price and elongated the bill, turning it into this weird, worm-like thing that wrapped several times around the man’s body. He started to turn into a cheeseburger. I laughed, but Nicole was ashamed of me.

The dream jumped. I was back on my bed. Nicole was sitting at my desk on her laptop. I understood that I was impersonating someone and talking to his dad on a paint chat. I wanted to write out sentences, but every time I tried, the dad would just erase them halfway through and write stuff of his own. The guy’s dad kept asking for a heart, so I drew one… Then I drew a stick man asking for a hug. I told him I had a girlfriend, and he was shocked. All this time, he believed I was his son. Nicole and I shared a laugh over it.

Found Your Pig Hole

I was on a small peninsula trying to catch mudcrabs (Morrowind). The entire peninsula consisted of sand. The mudcrabs scuttled off into the water when I tried to grab them. We were able to lock onto them and track their movements even under the water, so Nicole was amazed when one disappeared underwater. I told her that happened often. I chased one along the edge of the beach until I reached the shoreline. It brought a powerful current of water with it, and I remember thinking that was odd… I realized I could command mudcrabs walking around in the water to jump out like dolphins. They usually landed a few feet from the water and then bolted right back in. I wondered why I had this ability, but then I worried Nicole wouldn’t believe me if I told her, so I decided I was just imagining it. Anyway, something jumped out near a boathouse, and I realized it wasn’t a mudcrab at all. It was a pig with the skin of a sea lion! I chased it for a bit, and then it doubled back, knocked me over, and (apparently) violated me. It was more of an impression of the pig molesting me than actually experiencing it. I told Nicole the pig had found my pig hole. I rolled out from under the pig as soon as I was able.

Great recall!

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

Great recall!

Thanks! I'm looking forward to more of the same.

October 22, 2010

Okay, so it's not October 22nd here anymore. I have no idea why I'm up this late.

Bathhouse and Wooden Symphony

I was in the backyard at my parents’ old house in Texas. There was a small shack set up in the northwestern corner of the yard against the fence. Inside was a small bathtub, a desk, and a window with a ledge. Nicole and some people were standing outside the window while I took a bath in the tub, and I talked to them through the open window. We were discussing roleplaying ideas or something. When I got out of the tub, I forgot to drain the water… I put my clothes on and sat down on the edge of the tub, still talking to the people outside. I got some soap bubbles on my sleeve. I grabbed a small rag that was sitting on the closed toilet lid and used that to wipe the soap bubbles off, but in the process, I accidentally dipped it in the water… Since it was wet, I meant to hang the wet end over the inside of the tub, but the whole thing fell in the water. Oh well. I walked over to the end of the tub, rolled up my sleeve, and reached in to unplug the drain. My sleeve rolled back down and got wet. I figured it wasn’t that big of a deal after I pulled my arm back. I was wearing the same shirt I went to sleep in, but it was highly water-resistant. It didn’t soak up much of the water. I took another washcloth I found on the toilet lid and used that to soak up what little water was near the surface of the sleeve. Someone had left their makeup on the toilet, too. It looked like it had been recently used and then forgotten. By this point, it was clear that I was just in a bathroom. The shack had slowly morphed into a room with white, tiled walls.

Lining the bath tub was a series of wooden figurines… I recognized that they were all hand-made, and when I touched one, it would come to life. I picked up a figurine of Symphony and set it down on the floor of the bathroom. She grew to her full height and followed me out of the shack. She wouldn’t talk to the others – even Nicole – but she said hello to me, at least.

Sonic Fights Robotnik

I was fighting a weird, blob-like version of Dr. Robotnik as Sonic the Hedgehog. Robotnik was about half his usual height, and since he was floating around in that hovering egg vehicle of his, he reminded me of Giannini (Reborn). The battleground was a steep hill with sloped grasslands surrounding it. A big, stone wall prevented me from leaving the area. The only time I was able to hit him was while he was shooting these yellow balls of energy out of his egg vehicle. I had to be standing on top of the hill. When he fired them, the idea was to jump right where he was going to move and punch him in the face. I messed this up three times before I got it right. Every time I made a mistake, I lost quite a bit of health… The health was displayed in terms of hearts like in Zelda games. When I finally hit him, I broke his vehicle, and he fell to the ground. The fight was much easier from there, but I only had three hearts left. I fought him in hand-to-hand combat. For every hit he landed on me, I got around ten on him. I had to roll away occasionally to avoid a big blast of energy he could fire out of his hands. The hill served as a barrier to protect me from the attacks. Nicole kept warning me that my health was low… When I only had one heart left, I rolled away from him again and healed. I guess I was abusing the fact that my Ragnarok character has a Rudra bow equipped. I stopped healing at five hearts and ran back to finish him off. The killing blow split him into three miniature versions of himself, and I had to chase them down and kill them, too.

Mom Returns to School

My mom decided to go back to school. She and I shared at least one class – ECE311. We didn’t sit by each other, though; she was in the front on the left section of seats.

The dream jumped. After class, we met in the living room of my parents’ old house in Texas. I was sitting behind the couch. My mom said she wanted to finish college even if it took her more than the usual four years. She was already planning to drop a class called “Biochemistry” because it was too hard. I told Chelsea and Austin it was an important class for my major. My mom went into the kitchen, but it was the Pickles’ kitchen from The Rugrats. My mom was making deviled eggs. She said there was too much spice on them, but those of us who planned to eat the eggs didn’t care. Somehow, we started talking about chemistry and soap. I said my mom would be much better at chemistry than me because I couldn’t wash anything properly except dishes.

The dream jumped. We went to the commons for dinner. I agreed to help an elderly couple find a local pizza restaurant. I said I would help them find one close to a train stop. My family came to sit with me. My mom and I started talking about what makes college difficult – studying for exams and time management. Of course, I warned her that I probably wouldn’t study with her in the usual sense…

“I don’t do those normal study sessions… Like… ‘What is blank? What is the equation for blank?’” I explained. I said I preferred to study the concepts alone and to do textbook exercises in study groups. My mom said that was what she would need the most help with, so everything worked out. On the other hand, my dad was disappointed to hear that I wasn’t doing late-night study sessions before my midterm exams. I admitted that I usually just look over my notes a couple of days prior to the exam; that’s typically enough preparation. For some reason, I wrote this confession down in my dream journal while I sat at the table (complete with a <_< emoticon). I got up to look for something cold to cleanse my palette – some apple juice or fruit, preferably. On the way, I saw a clock on the wall and remembered a lab I was supposed to finish. I saw the laboratory manual as it covered my field of vision… It was the lab we’re doing in two weeks on MOSFETs. I realized Amar and I had skipped two measurements in the first portion of the lab… Oops. I considered going back to the lab room to finish, but it was 4:40 PM – much too late for that!

I walked over to the fruit and salad area of the cafeteria slowly. There was some orange fruit available, presliced and skinned. I took a bowl full of fruit. It was called “prime fruit.” I found out my family had left without me… They weren’t sitting at the table where I had left them. So I walked around the commons aimlessly while eating my fruit. I stood outside the women’s restroom and felt a bit awkward. This Japanese girl with pigtails went into the bathroom, totally ignoring me. A guy went into the bathroom next to it – which I assumed was the men’s restroom until I saw a duck on it instead of a man. I also saw two more restrooms, but these were for employees only. A commons employee pulled a folding wall out of the floor, turning the area into a room separate from the cafeteria. I understood that they were closing soon. By the time I finished my prime fruit and headed out of the bathroom area, the commons looked totally different. Totem heads lining the walls served as the dish return. The employees were rushing people out because some kind of event was starting at 8 PM. They insisted that all participants had to be covered in mud. After I left, my family was waiting for me by the entrance. Chelsea complained that I took too long.

The dream jumped. Chelsea, Austin, Nicole, and I were in the car. Austin was driving… Which wasn’t so bad since he was seventeen already in the dream (he’s sixteen). Nicole asked me his age, and it took me a moment to figure it out. Austin had to drive between cars parked on both sides of a suburban street, and he slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting them. He crawled through the gap between the cars as Chelsea groaned. I understood he was actually a very inexperienced driver. He leaned his head out the window to see if he had room and then zoomed through.

“Crap,” he said. “Crap, crap, crap, crap…”

“What…?” I asked with a furrowed brow. He pointed out the cop behind us. Austin made a left at the next street without using his turn signal, but the cop didn’t signal either. I was just glad we didn’t get pulled over. There were a bunch of parked cars up ahead, many of them in the middle of the road. Austin had to swerve to avoid them, and all the while, he picked up speed. I warned him not to speed in front of the cop. When he ignored me, I yelled it at him. Nicole had switched seats with Chelsea at some point, so she was in the front passenger seat.

“He’s not a bad driver. Maybe he knows what he’s doing,” she said. I wasn’t convinced. I saw a billboard in front of a hotel that said: “Consider putting money on him! He could be a NASCAR driver someday.” I knew right away that it was referring to Austin, and I explained it to everyone. I wondered how the hotel had put the sign up so quickly. They must’ve been listening to our conversation… We stopped at a horse racing track… Apparently, my mom wanted to bet on a horse race. She had never placed a bet before, so she was clueless. The ticket master helped her place a bet of $20 on a horse. There was a $1.60 betting fee. I asked how old I needed to be to place bets in Chicago… I just didn’t want to be bored for two hours.

The dream jumped. The elderly couple from the commons came to my dorm room, and Nicole let them in. I haven’t looked for pizza restaurants yet… I pulled up Mapquest and tried to find somewhere along State Street.

Pretending to Share Dreams

Nicole told me she had the same dreams as me, but she wouldn’t go into specifics. She just said that she read my dream journal and knew her dreams were exactly the same.

Trying to Record Dreams in Bed (and Failing)

I wondered if it would be possible to type up my dreams in bed when I woke up… I realized my cooking pad would be in the way. I apologized to Nicole when I realized I couldn’t talk to her on the computer and write my dreams out simultaneously; I would have to write them all out on paper as usual.

I've gone a few days without posting these... But they're here now!

October 23, 2010

Impassable Sentinel

This dream took place in the One Piece universe following the time skip. Luffy’s crew members were trying to find a way across a small district in a town similar to Veins. There was just one enemy preventing them from waltzing through the town – a man in a black trench coat sitting on top of a building in the center of the town. He looked a bit like Magellan, but I knew he wasn’t the same person… He could shoot arrows anywhere within the district, so if he spotted them, they would be attacked immediately. Their rest spot was just out of his range. Even once they got past him, they would have to watch their backs until they were the same distance away on the other side of the district. They had a magical bunny headband that resembled the mask from the Legend of Zelda games. Anyone who wore the bunny headband while sitting would be ignored completely by enemies – well, most of the time. There was a finite chance of failure. This sitting position was referred to as “karma” for some reason.

In the dream, I was Sanji. At first, someone suggested that we should just wait it out; the guy would eventually fall asleep, and then we could just walk through without a problem. I warned them that we were low on supplies and in the middle of a desert. Without sufficient water, we would all die of thirst. Some well water was available to us, but it wasn’t safe to drink… It didn’t help that we were pirates. Anyone who might’ve given water to a thirsty band of travelers would be far less friendly to a pirate crew. Anyway, we decided one of us would venture into the district alone first. I volunteered. Luffy let me borrow the bunny headband as a precaution. I made sure everyone knew the “karma” pose before I left… From what I observed, it was actually quite difficult to get right.

I jumped from building to building, keeping my eyes on the huge marksman in the middle of the area. Canyon walls surrounded the town and framed our exit. If I could make it there, so could most of the others. I could even bring back water to buy us more time. I got too close, though, and the marksman shot an arrow the size of my head. It grazed my shoulder, but I hopped into karma mode with my bunny headband on. The guard looked away. I took the headband off, experimenting. The guy shot another arrow at me, but I ducked to dodge it and put the hood back on swiftly. I told the others that one of us could sneak up on him and attack from a distance, preferably with a bow. I said I would use Symphony for that. As I prepared to head back to the others, the enemy tossed me a big metal drum. It looked large enough to fit a person inside. I flung it to the others with a well-placed kick.

“Compliments of Emily,” the man said. After wondering briefly who he was talking about, I brainstormed ideas. We could use the barrel to roll across the district, but only if two people his inside it at the same time. There was quite a bit of fresh water inside. I knew we had to use it carefully. At the same time, we needed enough water on the other side of the district for the people who got there first… Just in case water wasn’t readily available. I wondered if we were going to put people in the drum with the water still inside… At any rate, the bunny headband was no longer working, so I had to jump down behind the building for protection as a stream of tens of arrows flew toward me. I doubted he could really see me; I believed in the headband’s power. It was more likely that he had thrown the drum to make sure I was still there and just fired at what looked like empty space.

Trip in the Mountains

I was going on a trip in the Rocky Mountains with my Omi. I just remember being outside the car with her. It was cold.

False Accusations at Andrea's

Nicole and I were spending the night at Andrea’s house. We were in a tiny, white room. Andrea found a mouse and tortured it until it could only flop around like a fish. She tore all kinds of furniture lining the walls of the room apart in the process of abusing the mouse. Afterward, she went to tell her dad. When he came into the room, I saw that he looked like Alex’s dad. He shook me violently. Apparently, Andrea had blamed everything on me… I tried to explain the situation, but he just told me to get out of the house. I decided that was fine… But then he took my headphones and computer mouse!

I followed him into his bedroom and stole back my stuff while he was sleeping beside Andrea’s mom. Their bedroom looked just like the master bedroom at my parents’ old house in North Carolina. I also turned the bedside lamp on and left without turning it off… I just wanted to annoy him. After I gathered my things, I met with Nicole in the living room. It was like my grandparents’ living room. Her stomach was hurting, so I offered to drive, but she never gave me the keys.

Disappearing of Upper Class Art

I was driving around town in an attempt to find the zoo. Instead, I ended up in a neighborhood in which every driveway had a motorbike the size of a small house. These weird, twisted metal arches were positioned over the street. It was supposed to be art, but I didn’t like it. Looking at them made me sick. I came to a dead end and had to turn around. Someone else who wanted to go to the zoo did the same thing. We made fun of the rich people. Neither of us knew which way to go.

“If I find the way to the zoo, I’ll let you know,” I told him. It was a promise.

Capturing a Woman

This dream has been omitted.

Spiderman Trading Card

I was sitting in an auditorium while waiting for class to begin. I talked to Kevin Liu for a bit, then Eric Andoe. Class started, so I went to my seat with Nicole. She handed me a pack of bubblegum with a baseball player on the front of the packaging. When I opened it up, an old Spiderman trading card was inside. It looked like one of those traditional collectible cards, so I wondered what it was worth… I brought it over to Kevin during class to show him, but he didn’t care. I decided it was because he was trying to listen to the professor.

Signs of Infidelity

I was in Chelsea’s bedroom; it was taken from my parents’ old house in Texas. It was Nicole’s room instead, however. I asked Nicole why she was upset when I saw her lying face down on the bed.

“There’s someone else!” she yelled. I thought she meant I was interested in another woman, so I objected… As she explained, however, I realized she just wanted to leave me and pursue Ben. I didn’t take her seriously. I asked why the light bulb in a chandelier hanging from her ceiling kept changing from red to purple and back to red. I thought the red flashes of light meant she had become a prostitute.

Broken Hinge

I broke the left hinge on my laptop, and the screen fell back. I told Nicole I was going to have to buy a new laptop… It was even worse that Regina’s old laptop.

***

October 24, 2010

Nicole and Asuzu's Moon Dreams

Nicole was talking to Asuzu on Agharta about dreams they each had about the moon. Nicole seemed to be putting off telling Asuzu the specifics of her dream. I didn’t really understand why.

Mechanical Breakdown

I was meeting Nicole at the mall for something. As I drove into the parking lot, everything felt fine, but then I parked by a woman in a turban… She gave me a weird look, and the engines in our cards switched. She left before I realized what had happened. I turned on the car, and the engine sputtered ferociously. It made a constant humming noise as I moved the car to the other side of the parking lot. The brakes were failing, too… I had trouble stopping when I came to a three-way intersection, and there were cops everywhere. Anyway, I accidentally drove past where I meant to and had to make a U-turn.

The dream jumped. Inside the mall, I went into some kind of tavern. There was a notice posted on the wall about sled dogs. It said I could hire a team of dogs to pull me around the parking lot. I asked if any of the dogs were missing. Since they weren’t, I left the tavern. Some guy stopped me as I was walking toward the stairs and tried to sell me beer in one of Nicole’s Cubs glasses. I ignored him. After walking back upstairs, I found three open elevators. Screens above the elevators indicated which floor they were headed to. The screens read 16, 20, and 26 from right to left. I got into the middle one (bound for floor 20) because it was closest to the floor I was shooting for. Tony (from my physics classes) was in the elevator with a briefcase. I tried to push the button for floor 21, but the buttons were organized in a strange way… There were two sets of buttons numbered from zero through nine. I guess the idea was to use the top set for the most significant digit, but when I figured this out, I realized the elevator was already stopping at floor 21. It already knew where I was going. A couple other people got in after me and couldn’t figure out the floor buttons. The elevator went up to floor 20, and everyone except me got out. As the doors began to close, the elevator lurched downward.

“Uh… Guys?” I called out to the people walking away from the elevator. Tony looked, but he didn’t seem bothered by what was happening. The elevator dropped further without warning. I feared that the cable would snap, sending me plummeting to the ground level. It just zoomed down to one of the lower floors and stopped, however. When I got out, I was in a grassy area separated from the main walkways by glowing, cylindrical fence posts. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there. Nevertheless, I walked around in search of a way out… I wasn’t about to get back in the elevator. A girl recognized me and asked if I wanted to go for a walk with her. I agreed, and we walked back in the direction of the elevator. Another girl showed up, and she was angry that I was holding the first girl’s hand…

The dream turned into a Gameboy game. It looked like Pokemon with Dragon Warrior monsters. I had to choose my party by changing their sprites with a keyboard. I discovered that one of the monsters could shoot forked lasers. I could also transform my party members into Kirby. Anyway, we got on the elevator despite my concerns.

Leaving the Mall the Wrong Way

I was walking through the mall with Nicole. She parked outside a store on one side, but she wanted to leave on the other side… I brought up the obvious problem; how would we get in the car from the other side of the building? Logically, we would have to move the car first or walk all the way around the mall. Nicole said she preferred to walk around. Imagining how long it would take us to do that (and in the cold) annoyed me. I wanted to suggest turning around and walking out the way we came in, but I didn’t. At least the mall was properly heated, I thought.

CS Creeper

I was walking across 33rd Street toward my dormitory. That guy in systems programming who seems to always know most of the material put his arm around me and sighed happily. It was a little creepy.

“Hey…” I said. “Did you finish testing your shell lab?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “but that last trace file was a pain.” I didn’t feel like doing it… I felt bad knowing that other people were getting better lab grades than me, though.

Life Expectancy Linking Curse

I was at my Omi’s house. One of her grandchildren was being a pain in the neck, so I put a curse on her. She would live only as long as Oma. As someone pointed out, that probably wouldn’t be long.

***

October 25, 2010

I Won the Lottery

I was in a car with a lottery ticket in my hands. It was a winning ticket, but I noticed it also said I was being charged $1608 for winning. I asked Nicole’s mom what that was about, and she said that instead of taking money out for taxes, they just had lottery winners pay the place they bought the winning ticket from a portion of the winnings.

Lesbians and the Bird Hives

I was walking down a street in North Carolina near where my parents used to live – but closer to the neighborhood pool. Several of the houses had been torn down and removed, but there was a wooden cabin standing in the overgrown field. As I approached it, I saw Matt and Katie in the distance. They were trick-or-treating… Matt was Satan, and Katie was one of his succubus slaves. I waved at them briefly and then went inside the cabin. At this point, I became Symphony. I was standing naked with Elita near the corner of the room. I wrapped my arms around her waist and put one leg in between hers. I smiled at her, and she smiled back… We were visible through a window on the side of the cabin, but neither of us cared. We were consumed by our bliss.

The dream jumped. We were sitting on Nicole’s deck. Fallon came to visit Nicole’s house in a Halloween costume. I think she was some kind of fairy. She hugged both of us, and I became aware of a huge hat on my head. It weighed about as much as a pillow. Nicole pointed at me and asked if Fallon could tell what my costume was. When Fallon failed to guess correctly, Nicole explained that I was Toad from Super Mario Brothers. I tried to imitate Toad’s voice, but it came out sounding more like a sick frog.

The dream jumped, and we were in Nicole’s kitchen. I looked out the window and saw ganders flying into the wall just above the window overlooking the trash bins… It looked like they were hurting themselves. I noticed a moment later that they were forming some kind of weird hive… It functioned like a bird nest, but it looked more like a bee hive. I asked Nicole about it, and she didn’t know what to do.

The dream jumped. I was in my parents’ old house in Louisiana, armed with a bow and a quiver full of arrows. I marched out of the kitchen with my whole family and found hundreds upon hundreds of birds flying through the living room. Their hive was the size of a small child, and there was a big pile of hatchlings sitting in the nest with the queen duck. I shot the hive, knocking several birds out of it. A counter appeared in the upper left corner of my field of vision to indicate how many birds I had killed, and the assault began. The birds swept down at us, scattering feathers everywhere. As they did, I shot arrows at big clumps of them. By the time we had finished off most of the bird population inside the house, I had over seven hundred kills. I took down the queen duck and walked over to the old TV sitting on the floor of the living room.

“We need to destroy this,” I told Nicole. Until we did, they would keep coming back. I tried kicking it, but that didn’t work. She pulled out a pair of katars and started hacking at the wooden frame while I continued to kick the front panel.

Lifestyle of the Wealthy

I was in Nicole’s front yard with her and Regina. They didn’t seem to be arguing or anything. I overheard Nicole talking about all the things she wanted to buy with my first year’s salary once I got out of school. I told her I would prefer to save as much of it as I could for the first few years in case of an emergency.

October 26, 2010

I used Apheri last night and didn't realize what that meant... Oh well, I'll get it eventually.

Zeus' Weak Spot

I was busy doing homework on my computer, but I had left Agharta open. My character was idle in the middle of Prontera. Kelsey kept summoning weird MVPs that don’t actually exist. One was a mummy named Veins. It just wobbled around and smacked people with its head. Another one, a knight whose name I don’t recall, fought by charging into characters. She summoned these a couple of times each. At first, they kept killing me because I wasn’t paying attention. Once I figured out what Kelsey was up to, however, I was able to fight all of the MVPs, including the last one she summoned: a marble statue at least ten stories tall named Zeus. He didn’t really do much except stomp on people. The fighting system switched to that of Kingdom Hearts, and I fought Zeus with the keyblade. After I killed Zeus the first time, he respawned. I told Nicole I had heard that Zeus’ rear end was his weak point. I decided to fight him that way and compare the two methods. Sure enough, I brought him down much faster the second time.

Loss of Momentum, Bathroom Photos, and Choice

I was in a locker room with a gym coach. I suggested a new method of exercise, but it was shot down.

The dream jumped. I was running on a track outside. Everyone had to do leg lifts while running, but only with their left leg. This was clearly disadvantageous for certain people. After running the first quarter mile, I was confronted by a group of guys holding a big, white cloth. They asked if I wanted the aid of science. I realized they were going to launch me like a slingshot pellet and see how much they could improve my speed. I reluctantly agreed, and they held the sheet while I backed into it. I secretly wanted to prove them wrong. They flung me out of the cloth sling, and I glided for about ten meters before bouncing off the ground. I slowed down each time I touched the track. Eventually, I was barely moving through the air. I calculated my remaining momentum each time I hit the ground so I could explain their mistake quantitatively. I didn’t finish the mile. I carefully explained their bad physics to them on the side of the track. I also bought a blue vibrator from them. Interesting… We finished running the mile after all of that was settled. I went to the bathroom right afterward.

A woman appeared in the bathroom and started opening the stall doors one by one. I noticed that the area outside the bathroom looked like the west cave of the Beach Dungeon on Ragnarok. When the woman got to my stall, she pulled out a tiny, silver key and touched it to the door. I was sitting on the toilet with my pants down to my knees, but I acted like I didn’t know she was there. She pulled out a camera and started taking pictures of me. I glared at her. Obviously, that was unacceptable. She somehow took my clothes from me and wouldn’t return them until she was done taking pictures. I walked out of the stall, and everyone was watching me. I felt like I was going to be arrested.

I found a six-sided die near the bathroom with a bunch of weird symbols on it. I said that they were the symbols used in Choice (Reborn). Byakuran was arranging a game of Choice with me. I understood that the girl who had taken pictures of me in the bathroom was responsible for making the die. Two of the faces had been left blank…

1.5 Hours of School

Nicole sent me a text message indicating that she had slept in. She was happy to know that she only had to go to school for an hour and a half since she missed so much of the morning. I saw that it was 10 AM and wondered how long she would wait before going to school… If she went right away, that was still five hours.

Darwin's Battle Exam: Survival of the Most Lucid (Lucid at the end)

I went into my Age of Darwin class and discovered that we had an exam. Schmaus wasn’t the professor; it was Musial. I didn’t believe him at first – even though he clearly said it – so I didn’t bother looking over my notes. I accidentally took Eric Andoe’s seat, but I was surprised when he confronted me about it since he wasn’t supposed to be in that class. After that, I sat next to Water Tower Karl (who’s not in the class either). The test began. As soon as I got my exam, dread flushed through me. I hadn’t prepared at all. I wrote my name on the paper and…

I was teleported into a room with a headless cerberus. It had multiple necks, but no heads. I pulled out Apheri and defeated it quickly.

“Wasn’t that much easier than last time?” the professor asked. His voice echoed in the background. I said it was; I vaguely remembered that being the final boss of a previous exam. I was teleported into a private study where a man was petting his dog. He was wearing a monocle and a soft-looking, red robe. The dog walked over to the door of the study, opened it with its paw, and then walked out. As I was commenting on how the dog was intelligent enough to use the door, it started scratching at the door on the other side to be let back in. So much for that. I went into the other room to talk to the dog. An Okami-style fight broke out.

The dog basically stole its moves from Link’s wolf form in Twilight Princess. I got hit the first couple of times it charged at me, but after that, it was easy to dodge its attacks. My sword worked more like a bat for some reason… Anyway, when the dog’s health dropped below 25%, it rolled onto its back and began whimpering. I stabbed it in the stomach to finish it off. After my victory, I was teleported elsewhere again: this time to Crescent Isle. I don’t have the dream posted here, but it’s a dreamscape from a dream I had years ago. The island was shaped like a crescent with buildings lining the edge of a beach. There was also a boathouse by the beach in this dream. When I started walking toward the water, my professor’s voice boomed at me.

“Look at all the things that should’ve made you lucid!” he exclaimed. “It’s unbelievable…” Stunned, I looked at the boathouse and saw Olimar (Pikmin) trapped inside. He was banging on the window and pressing his face against the glass. Since we were in a breathable atmosphere, he wasn’t wearing his helmet.

“Yeah, I’m dreaming,” I laughed. It was a pitiful sight. I looked out over the ocean and discovered everything was fuzzy… Like I was seeing things in a low resolution. I tried to increase the clarity, and that manifested in the form of a bunch of red buttons which appeared in my field of vision. I mentally clicked the “Lucid” button – although I wasn’t sure what that would actually do. Everything became much clearer. I lost the dream after that.

New Adam Sandler Movie

I was driving Austin home from an airport. Nicole and I had been staying with my family for a while. I told Austin we had gotten a new movie, and he became extremely excited. Even in the dream, I felt he was more enthusiastic than the situation warranted. I pulled the car through the front wall of Nicole’s house and parked it in her living room. The movie was already playing on her TV. It starred Adam Sandler. I saw him scooping noodles into a bowl. My dad explained that he had watched it non-stop since he bought it. He was slouching back on the couch… It looked like he had put on about fifty pounds.

***

Took at nap from 9 PM to 11 PM. It was really more like 9:30 PM onwards, and I had trouble sleeping. I figured I'd go ahead and put this in here so I don't forget it tomorrow.

Just Me and You

Nicole and I were the only people in existence. There were no people or animals except us. We ran around together in an empty wheat field. We might have been wolves, but I’m not sure.

I woke up about a minute before my alarm went off and remembered this dream faintly. I lost much of what I remembered when it went off. I need a gentler alarm for naps and waking up early.

October 27, 2010

Correspondence with the Judge

I was walking down an empty street when I noticed a bunch of people gathered around a section of the sidewalk. I took a peek, but I couldn’t tell what had happened because of all the people blocking my view. A circular section of concrete had been pushed two or three feet into the ground. The surrounding area looked like something had bitten a chunk of the sidewalk off, though. I walked further down the street and found a group of teenagers inspecting a long skateboard and some black streak marks on the sidewalk between them and the other group of people. One of the kids proposed that the culprits had put the victim on the skateboard, pushed him at a high speed down the sidewalk, and then released him. The force of the release created the crater. So it was a murder scene, I realized…

I put one foot on the skateboard and rolled down the sidewalk as fast as I could manage. At the end of the skid marks, I let the skateboard coast. It didn’t make it all the way to the weird impact site. The teenage investigators followed me and explained their theory to a woman in black. Her red hair was tied up in a bun, and she had brown-rimmed glasses. She asked them if they had obtained correspondence with the judge. I interpreted this as permission to gather official evidence to use in court… They said they hadn’t.

“The other side can use your evidence against you if it’s not approved by the judge,” I warned them. The woman agreed. She called the judge on her cell phone. My field of vision showed both of them simultaneously, but the field wasn’t split or anything… I was just seeing two places at once. The judge was a big, black man with graying hair. He pretended to be his own voicemail. As he spoke, he requested that all questions be case-related and concise. It seemed like there would be legal consequences for anyone who failed to get to the point… The woman explained her situation. The judge interrupted with a direct rejection of the evidence. He thanked her for calling, but she hung up on him. He was surprised that she had figured out it was really him.

Looking for Rudolf

I was a foot tall, possibly a worker elf. I was trying to find Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer in Santa’s Workshop at the north pole. I got lost in a room full of stacks of presents and started crying. Santa Claus appeared and showed me a door on the ceiling that led to Rudolf. It was made of chocolate, so I had to eat the chocolate to get through. I stuffed my face in the door and ate as much as I could, but I couldn’t get through the door. I got stuck in the doorway and got upset again. Santa pulled me out of the doorway and patted me on the back reassuringly.

The Bus Can't Tip

I was on a bus that was controlled by an artificially intelligent computer navigation system. The bus drove to a high school, parked behind another bus, and then abruptly fell on its side. I felt like I was about to die.

The dream jumped, and I was discussing the event with one of the people in charge of designing the computer navigated buses. He said that fortunately, the buses were equipped with rubber beams on the roof which prevented them from falling over. If they ever fell on their sides, the beams would cause the bus to bounce back onto its wheels. I was impressed by the design’s effectiveness.

Karaoke Hookup Bar

This one was a bit fuzzy… It took place in the first half of the night, but I didn’t remember it until after I got out of bed this morning.

I was with Nicole at some kind of dating service building. The service used karaoke events to bring together potential couples. There were several booths for singles to go sing in together. Nicole disappeared, so I just kind of walked around. They had set out food for the customers, so I ate little bits of food whenever I walked by the catering tables. I noticed the employees were starting to give me weird looks as though they might throw me out, so I went upstairs to a balcony. I found Nicole there.

The dream jumped. I was walking in the suburbs toward Nicole’s house. I tried to guess based on the street names how far away I was. I was pretty sure I was headed in the right direction, at least. A couple of old men asked me which way the karaoke hookup place was, and I pointed somewhere behind me. They didn’t seem to understand, so I walked them all the way back to the building.

Sleeping for Three Years

This dream has been omitted.

October 28, 2010

One really, really short bit of lucidity and a mess of other stuff.

Life's No Pie

This was the first thing I remembered this morning – but it was also the last thing that happened during the night.

I heard a girl say “Life’s no…” before she was cut off. Immediately after, I heard Symphony’s voice nearby.

“Three point one four one five nine…” she recited – pi. The numbers continued, and I realized I was awake in bed. It was my morning alarm. Life’s no pie, indeed.

Breaking Stuff at the Museum

I remember breaking something valuable, probably a vase… It was sitting on a pedestal in a building that resembled a museum. When it broke, my dad grabbed me by the shoulder.

In the Sewers of Vivec

This dream has been omitted.

BDS Lambo

I was looking at the characters available on a new fighting game based on Katekyo Hitman Reborn. It boasted a selection of six different versions of Lambo… One of these was labeled “BDS Lambo.” Someone explained that it referred to “10-Year Bazooka Lambo,” or the fifteen-year-old Lambo. Despite having so many versions of Lambo available, it didn’t have his twenty-five-year-old self. I voiced my opinion that everyone wanted to play him much more than some of the alternatives: for example, one character was called “Fat Lambo.” I could hardly imagine how that was relevant at all.

Edinbough and Elsewhere

My dad drove me from my parents’ new house in Texas to a store in Edinbough, Texas. On the way, the road caused us some car trouble… We also got stuck in traffic in the middle of a desert. When we arrived, I walked straight to the back of the store and asked a Chinese man about a specific game. I picked up a Super Nintendo cartridge and showed it to him. This was the game I wanted, but I didn’t think of it as an old game at the time. Although he had the cartridge right there, the Chinese guy said he would have to import it from Japan. He had a lot of trouble understanding me.

The dream jumped. I was sitting in a classroom. Instead of our usual teacher, a child was standing behind the teacher’s desk. He started teaching calculus. I saw a vision of Richard Rahl and Kahlan Amnell standing before a wise sage. He said that now that Kahlan was pregnant, Richard needed to learn calculus. It was important in calculating the duration of the pregnancy, the timing of morning sickness, and other things. Richard said he would learn it. When the vision ended, Nicole’s dad was standing before the class instead of the kid. He said he understood that we were all probably confused and wondering why our teacher would bring a little kid in to teach calculus. Remembering what I’d observed just a moment ago from the Sword of Truth vision, I suggested that the teacher probably wanted us to be prepared for pregnancy. Nicole’s dad grinned.

“Maybe!” he said. He started erasing the chalkboard. Class was dismissed. I had another class in the same room, so I stuck around… I walked over to the other side of the classroom for something, and when I came back, my dream journal was sitting on my desk. The pages were soaking wet. It had been ruined… What’s more, all of the dreams written in there were now illegible. Roger Klotz (Doug) was laughing in the desk next to mine. I knew he was responsible… I complained, but he denied responsibility. There was nothing I could do. I threw the dream journal out instead of attempting to salvage it.

The dream jumped. I was on a football field. Several guys and one girl were playing a strange variation of football that used a mouse ball instead of a football… The girl put the ball in her pocket, and while the guys were looking for it, she slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans. I walked toward the end of the field to score a touchdown. Before I got there, I saw a huge, wooden totem pole on the side of the field. The pieces of the totem were labeled with important events. I don’t remember exactly what they said, but the first one was about me. I realized they were in chronological order, starting at the bottom… It was the Chinese salesman’s spirit totem. A ten foot tall tree man appeared in my path. He wore a white mask over his face – or maybe that was his face. His arms and legs were jagged pieces of bark. He was one of the leaders in this place, I understood… He told me it was time to leave, and I obeyed. I walked toward what appeared to be my high school. As I neared the doors by the German classroom, I bumped into a blond-haired swordsman. He wore a red scarf. He seemed pretty important, too. When we brushed shoulders, he complained about dream characters getting in his way… I heard him say something about dreaming. He continued walking toward the field.

The dream jumped. I was back in the car with my dad. We were on our way home, but I soon realized I had forgotten my laptop at the store. We drove back, and I went inside… The store was closed; I had to sneak into the back room. The laptop was sitting on a table. As I walked into the small room, the Chinese guy came in from behind a curtain. I told him I had forgotten my laptop. He had trouble understanding my English again, but we negotiated via gestures what I meant. I found two cell phones on top of the laptop. I guessed these were mine and Nicole’s… When I looked at them, though, they were both red like Nicole’s. I wondered where my cell phone was… The guy took one of the phones, explaining that it was his. He said it was broken, however. When he let me see it, I opened the phone up like a music box. Actually, I’m pretty sure it turned into a wooden jewelry box or something like that… He said I had fixed his phone. As a reward, he drew Symphony’s likeness on the wall. I wondered how he knew Symphony.

On my way out, I was confronted by a man who made “escort” robots for a living. He wanted me to try one out in exchange for a ride home. I realized my dad wasn’t there anymore… I would have to walk back to my parents’ house. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to have anything to do with his robots. I turned into Mr. Potato Head. At that moment, I realized I had a grudge against this man. We had fought once in the past, and when I failed to use my special technique correctly, he defeated me. I had improved since then… I pulled out a bunch of black poker chips and started flinging them like boomerangs. The area around me became a weird mess of stairs and rafters. The chips bounced off the walls, making little clicking sounds. I knew I was doing everything perfectly even though it didn’t look logical. I decided I was lucky the room was set up exactly the way it was… Any minor difference would’ve ruined the ritual. The chips began to pile up on top of a bookshelf. The guy fell asleep because he was bored of my attacks. That would be his downfall, I thought. One book fell on him, then two, then five… And then the whole bookshelf came crashing down on his head.

I walked down a staircase into a basement with a fireplace. The fire was blazing. There were half-eaten pizzas in boxes all over the floor. I thought about eating some, but I wasn’t sure who had left them there… So I combined the remaining slices into as few boxes as I could and stacked the empty ones on the floor. Nicole’s dad spoke about his hatred for criminals; he would never show them mercy, he said, even if they were only guilty of a parking violation.

Roaming a Three-Tiered Town (Lucid for about ten seconds)

I drove Nicole’s mom to a park and left the car there. Melissa, Sandy, and Ross were also at the park. I walked around town after that since I couldn’t leave without Nicole’s mom… The town was set up in three tiers – like a giant building. I went to the dentist at the back of the first floor of the town. It was closed, but I saw Eric Andoe standing outside. He said that he was working for the dentist’s office and that they would be opening soon. After he let me in, I had to wait in line… A black woman and her kids rushed in right after me and pushed me aside. I wasn’t in a hurry, so I didn’t really care. After Eric answered her questions about her appointment, I went up to the desk. I asked if the preparations for Nicole’s dental work were done. She was having some kind of surgery. Eric said the tools and such were ready, so I could take her into one of the patient rooms and help get the dental chair ready if I wanted. I told him that was impossible since she was at school. I couldn’t take her out of school without her mom’s permission, either.

I left the dentist’s office and called Nicole. I explained what had happened to her; basically, she already knew everything I had found out, but she was glad I went to the trouble. After I got off the phone, I walked back to where I thought I had parked the car. I remembered parking it beside a hotel on a hill… So I went to a hotel on the west side of town. I was on the third floor of the city. When I got there, I realized there wasn’t a parking lot; it didn’t look like the right place, either. The sun’s rays were painfully hot… I was also really thirsty. I dripped with sweat as I walked toward the east side of town. There were a few places I could’ve bought a drink from, but I didn’t want to spend much money… I found the hotel I had parked at before and went through a door labeled “Employees Only.” I had used the same door before, so although I was a bit confused, I didn’t think anyone would get mad. I still tried to sneak past the maids walking through the halls. They were fairly high-class for hotel maids… Like they could’ve had whatever job they wanted, but they chose to clean hotels. They were dressed like Alice (Alice in Wonderland).

I walked down a staircase into a big facility on the second floor of the city. There was a long line of people leading into a dark room. Obvious screams echoed in from the room… I got the feeling I had been in this room many times, and it was a dangerous place. I saw Alan LaMore standing in line, but he didn’t recognize me. I continued downstairs to a grocery store at ground level. I started talking to Nicole on the phone again and reminded her not to miss her appointment. She said she would go right after school. I heard Ben talking on the phone after I grabbed a water bottle off a shelf in the crowded store.

“Bethany would like to know if you’re an ‘A’ or a ‘B’ in your relationship, Josh,” he said in his familiar, Australian accent.

“What do you mean? Would ‘A’ be like the dominant position in the relationship?” I asked for confirmation.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“I guess I’m usually an ‘A’… Sometimes I fall more into the ‘B’ range, though.”

“Yeah, sounds like me, too. Sometimes I like to be held in the cold.” I thought his response was really deep. Anyway, I stood near the cash register lines waiting for a register to open up… There was one person at all of them. When I saw an opening, I started walking toward that register, but another cashier waved me over. She made the customer she was servicing leave so she could ring me up. Weird. The woman was pretty old, and her skin was a dark, pasty tan. Her hair was just as short as it was messy. My total came out to $1.86 (for a bottle of water, wow). I paid with a $5 bill, and she handed me $3 plus at least a dollar in change… She dropped a dime, and then I dropped some coins while I was trying to pick the dime up. No one made any effort to help me pick up the change. I saw that the cashier was wearing a long dress. She was barefoot. I worried people would think I was trying to look up her dress as I struggled to scoop dimes off the floor. On my way out, I counted the change and realized this had to be a dream. No one would screw a transaction up that severely! I was about to do a reality check, but…

The dream jumped. I was outside a hotel with Nicole. We were far away from the three-tiered town. She and I sat together on the curb in front of the hotel, waiting for something… Apparently, I predicted that Melissa would show up in Rob’s car at 7 PM, and she did! She parked diagonally across two parking spaces. She and Ross got out of the car. Dream knowledge told me they had just gone on a date at a movie theater. I wondered what Mike would think of that… Figuring I would drive them back to the park in Rob’s car, drop them off, and then take Nicole’s mom’s car, I decided to walk over there. I found myself in the driver’s seat of Nicole’s mom’s convertible. It was in drive. Since I hadn’t anticipated being in a car in the first place, of course my foot wasn’t on the brake pedal. I coasted into the parking space next to Rob’s car.

The parking space was longer than normal, so it extended into the street by the hotel. Nicole got mad at me for pulling up too far because she said I would get arrested. I didn’t believe her… I mean, the parking space was clearly in the road. That was the city’s fault, not mine. I backed up anyway. She still wasn’t pleased by my parking, but it was better. I started to wonder why we needed to take Rob’s car if we had the convertible… I guess that was the end.

Ben's Stuck at 220

Thanks go to Theo and Shade on Agharta for reminding me of this dream!

Ben was complaining about how he could never get his attack speed to go above 220. He asked if I had the same problem, and I realized he was using the berserk guitar – which I understood gave his character the maximum attack speed. Of course he couldn’t exceed the maximum speed, but my attempts to explain failed. He just didn’t understand.

Just a note: the maximum attack speed value was wrong, too.

October 29, 2010

A little late again, but at least I'm posting these before going to bed.

Living with My Parents Again... and Middle School?

I woke up in my bed at my parents’ original house in Texas. Ben was there, and he asked why I had wet the bed. My pants and sheets were soaking wet, but it seemed more like sweat than urine. I don’t think I could hold that much urine anyway. I told him it didn’t stink like urine, either, and when I put my face up to it to prove that, he grimaced. There was no convincing him. I went out into the game room and found my mom sitting on the couch with a bunch of boxed sets of books. She said I could use them as material for my research paper. They were beautifully illustrated books – particularly on the bindings, but I’m only saying that because I didn’t see most of their cover art. One in particular depicted a snow-covered mountain scene. This spanned over the bindings of three books. My mom said that the publisher also sold huge posters with the cover art, but she preferred to just have the books. There was some kind of problem with the posters… They didn’t line up well or something. Although the books were all gorgeous, my mom pointed out the ones that weren’t as good – for example, one with an image of a cliff face slick with water. It just looked like a bunch of muddy rocks if you didn’t know what it was.

She told me that the books with the snowy mountain on the bindings were the ones with the most useful material, so I copied down the necessary information for my bibliography. I tried to copy from the format I used for journal articles, but some things were clearly different. I realized I hadn’t used any books as sources yet, so I decided I would check the format online later. I left the notebook with all of my citations on the coffee table in the game room. I told my mom she could write down citations while I was at school. I grabbed my backpack and headed for the door. I was going back to high school for some reason… As I reached the door, however, I saw a bus go by. I guessed I had missed it. My mom called out to me as I walked outside.

“You’d better wait if it doesn’t come!” she said. I told her I would. As I walked to the bus stop, another bus went by. It didn’t bother to stop. I waited at the bus stop on the corner, and another bus came by. There was a sign on the side that said Arigato Megaman Convention. I wondered if they were going on a field trip… That bus didn’t stop, either… After waiting for a while, I saw Austin messing with a car in the middle of the road. I walked over to the side of the car to watch. With another kid’s help (possibly Matthew’s, but he had black hair), he would turn on the ignition, smash some kind of lever with a hammer, and then turn the engine off. The lever wasn’t supported well during the few seconds between turning the engine on and its steady state condition, so he was able to break it off gradually. At this point, I noticed oil spilling out of the hole he created by removing the lever. I backed away from the vehicle… Chelsea was doing the same. We agreed that he was probably going to blow himself up. Austin turned the car on again, and oil spilled all over the front seats and one of the middle seats. There were three rows of seats, though, so I asked to sit in the back. Austin decided to sit back there, too.

It wouldn’t really be correct to say that Chelsea was driving, but she was definitely in the driver’s seat. The car seemed to move on its own. The second and third rows of seats had merged into one. The car drove toward the community pool, then past it toward the neighborhood’s entrance. Along the way, I asked what we were doing in the car in the first place. Since the objective was for all of us to get on a bus and leave for school, it seemed like having the car would pose a problem. We would have to park it on the side of the road somewhere and leave it there until after school. I doubted our mom would be happy about having to walk to pick it up… If she took another car, she would need a second person to help her. Anyway, I figured we had already missed the bus, but I told Chelsea to just drive to the school. She and Austin agreed that they didn’t know the way. I didn’t either, obviously; I haven’t been back in Texas in years. Besides, I was pretty confused at this point since they were all talking about middle school… Why would I be in middle school? I don’t remember what Austin did, but he really made me mad. I started yelling at him.

“I didn’t move back to Texas with you guys for you to give me this crap,” I said, resisting the strong urge to strangle him. I started crying to myself afterward. There was some kind of construction going on, so two guys stopped our car. There were tens of pedestrians trying to cross the street, too, but he wouldn’t let them across. When he gave the okay, the people started walking, and the car started driving, too. We weaved in between groups of people on the road and the sidewalk. I kept checking behind us for a bus, but there wasn’t one.

The dream jumped. We were at a restaurant. The entire restaurant was outside the Subway I used to work at. I slouched in my chair with the back of my hand against my jaw. My parents were talking about how we had missed the bus. I suggested that one of them should either drive us to school or give me directions so I could take Chelsea and Austin. My dad interjected; apparently, Chelsea and Austin were worried about some kids beating them up, so they didn’t want to go to school. That explained their strange behavior. I knew the problem wouldn’t be solved by skipping school… The best thing for them to do was to confront the bullies directly. They couldn’t miss the last three quarters of the school year because of a couple of delinquents. We were all sitting at different tables for some reason, so I walked over to my parents’ table… My dad said I had developed “engineer’s arm.” I quickly figured out he was referring to the way I rested my head against my hand. I told him I’ve done that since high school, but he didn’t believe me. He said it was because of Subway. There was a sign on the table that talked about the “sandwich artist’s arm pose,” described as “elegant and professional.” It was reserved for managers, though… So I didn’t understand why I would be using it. Nevertheless, I thought that was hilarious.

Things started to get a little weird after that. My dad moved to where I had been sitting before and showed my mom his best George Washington portrait pose. It wasn’t very good. Then he plucked out one of his eyes and said he was Orthello Washington, George’s brother. My mom laughed at this, and when she saw that I didn’t get it, she explained that George Washington pulled an eye out while drunk at a party and turned it into a recurring gag; he supposedly developed a second personality named Orthello who was missing an eye. I wondered if there were any credible sources for this information… Probably not. A woman in a huge, white dress across the restaurant saw my dad imitating Orthello Washington and started staring at him. She was obviously interested in him. My mom moved to block her line of sight, but then my dad moved, too. They started arguing, and then my dad ripped off his leg and put it on the table.

Dormitory Chore Chart

I got out of bed to go to the bathroom and saw two sheets of formatted paper taped to the bathroom door. They were chore charts. My name, Till’s, and the names of the two guys in the adjacent room were all on the charts, and a vertical column listed various chores that needed to be done each week. I noticed that one person took all the chores requiring him to buy things – restock toilet paper, restock laundry detergent, restock fabric softener, and so on. His roommate took all of the cleaning tasks – including cleaning the bathroom sink, which explained why it was spotless when I came back to my room the previous night. Till had a few chores assigned, but I noticed my name wasn’t written next to anything. I wondered if they expected me to take initiative and agree to do certain things… I wasn’t sure what to pick, though.

Buying a Trench Coat

Someone asked Nicole where they could buy a trench coat. I thought about possible choices, but she answered before I could come up with anything that made sense. I couldn’t stop thinking about Target.

“Sears should have some,” she said. I realized I was on the floor of my dorm room…

Room Intruder

One of the guys in the room connected to mine opened the door between my room and the hallway. Till and I turned our heads to look at the door. How he had gotten in the room was a mystery… He said he had forgotten his key in his room and spent the night in our floor’s lounge. I felt bad, but at the same time, it was pretty funny. I didn’t understand why he didn’t just knock on his door and ask his roommate to let him in.

Somehow, as he was walking into the bathroom, Till and I were suddenly in bed and asleep as though we had never seen him come in.

Disney Movies and Writing on the Wall

I was organizing a bunch of movies on the floor of my dorm room. Most of them were Disney movies. We had several copies of the second and third Shrek movies, but we didn’t have the original. I noticed the same thing with the Toy Story movies. I found some stuff written on the wall where my dresser should’ve been… The dresser had disappeared, and the refrigerator had been moved. It looked like I was writing a note to myself about someone named Shelly. I moved the movies into the corner so I could hide the writing on the wall behind the refrigerator. Satisfied that my roommate wouldn’t see it, I stood up. I wondered why I hadn’t been charged for the damage to the wall…

Disney Movies and Road Rage

I was driving on a busy road. Construction made traffic horrible, so it was difficult to get into the left turn lane. I didn’t put my signal on because I knew no one would let me over. I still had a few more intersections before I needed to turn, so I wasn’t worried. I noticed myself spending more time watching the cars behind me than watching the road… Honestly, it seemed that paying attention to the road ahead of me paid off in more ways than one; all the cars behind me disappeared, allowing me to switch lanes right after an intersection. I put on my signal and pulled in front of a slower car behind me. I saw a construction sign up ahead requiring everyone to get in my lane… There was a barrier set up behind the sign. There was a smaller road on the right, so they could also go around the traffic, but most people seemed willing to deal with it. Since I knew the bottleneck was going to cause problems, I slowed down.

I was behind a blue car as I approached the construction sign. An orange car in the middle lane started moving toward the blue one… Then they collided and drove alongside one another toward the barrier. There wasn’t room for the orange car to squeeze through, so he slowed down. I almost honked at the person in the orange car, but I didn’t want him to hit me. I was relieved when I passed the car up… At least he was behind me. The guy in front of me started honking repeatedly. I understood his frustration; he wasn’t likely to get the other guy’s insurance information. I wished I had honked at the orange car then, but considering how shocked I was (I actually gasped), I didn’t have a chance to react appropriately.

Anyway, the blue car sped up and rammed into the car in front of it. The driver kept doing this, so I slowed even more to keep my distance. I didn’t want to become the target of his road rage. We passed a cop standing by the median. He was talking to someone on the other side of the median. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t responding to the obvious threat the blue car’s driver posed. As I drove a little further, I found the drivers of the blue car and the one he rear-ended a few times walking along the road together. The latter was a woman with long, curly, black hair. He smacked her around a bit, and she apologized profusely.

Oversleeping with Sensitive Skin

I was sleeping naked in my computer chair with my blanket (not really, I mean in the dream). I checked the time on my computer to make sure I hadn’t overslept… Holy Moses! It was 10:40 AM. I quickly put on a pair of socks and some boxers. I looked over at Till and explained to him that I always sleep naked because of a medical condition… Something to do with sensitive skin. It seems that he was sleeping, but I kept talking anyway. I warned him that he shouldn’t let his girlfriend come to our door at night; after all, she would inevitably see me sleeping naked, and I didn’t want to mess up their relationship. I was positive she would fall for me immediately. My legs were itchy, so I inspected them… There were bug bites all over my inner thigh. I woke myself up so I would still have time to get ready.

When I checked my phone in waking life, I found that it was only 9 AM. Doh!

Your Room Looks Like a Prison

Chelsea knocked on my door. I told her she could come in since I had the impression that she needed help with her homework. She looked around the room with concern as she walked in.

“I can see why you’re always so depressed,” she said. “Your room looks like a prison.” I laughed and told her that I always thought the same thing. She seemed a bit older in the dream, but only by a few years.

Blue Screen Dreams

I was talking with someone who thought dreams didn’t seem real. She said it seemed more like she was real, but the dream environments surrounding her were just “blue screened” in. By this, she meant something more like “green screened.” The woman was a professional psychologist, so I felt I had reason to debate it with her.

I saw a red corvette driving down an empty road in the desert. The sky was abnormally blue, and everything looked like it had been hand-drawn. This crazy jazz music was playing in the background. The sun was throbbing in the sky to the background rhythm, and all of the plant life was dancing. I insisted that dreams were more real than the psychologist made them seem; in fact, I added that I felt dreams usually felt more “real” than waking life.

I realize I fell a few days behind on dream journal posts... Some of these showed up on Nocturn Core on Friday, but I didn't get around to posting the rest until today. I figured I would just wait until I got a chance to type everything up. Also... My recall's been fine, but I've been having trouble motivating myself to get out of my blanket during the night to write my dreams down. It's getting colder outside, and the blanket's always so warm... I'll get used to it soon, I'm sure.

October 30, 2010

Mom's Basketball Game

I was talking with Nicole about wedding rings. I had read something online that said most chapels had vending machines for the groom to buy a ring at the last minute if he forgot to. We went to a chapel and found such a machine, but the contents weren’t what we expected… The machine had a bunch of colorful wristbands near the top, some power-ups for basketball (more on that in a moment), and an assortment of candy and dry-erase markers near the bottom. Since I had saved up money for a wedding ring and couldn’t buy one, we decided to spend the money on the stuff in the vending machine instead. My mom mentioned having a basketball game coming up, so we bought her an “extra shots” power-up that allowed her to shoot three basketballs at once every time she made an attempt on the hoop. We also got her a “lightning” power-up. This was intended for use by members of the audience. It had five charges, each of which would cause all of the opposing team’s players to be electrocuted for a few seconds. We also got some Sour Patch Kids (which my mom said she was going to eat even though I intended to get them for myself) and a couple of black dry-erase markers.

The dream jumped. My dad was driving us to my mom’s basketball game. He turned onto a side road and drove through a neighborhood. We hit a dead end, so he teleported the car back to where we started and tried again. This time, he turned a little sooner, but we ended up on the same road that brought us to the dead end before. He turned the car around and pulled onto the highway right in front of a speeding car. My mom freaked out, so he warped the car back to the side road and tried again. This time, he still cut the car off, but he went into the middle lane. My mom wasn’t as upset this time.

The dream jumped. My mom was in the middle of her basketball match. I watched from somewhere high up in the stadium… I could see my dad near the top of the home seating section because he kept using the lightning charges. He went through three of them in the first minute of the game. I was really irritated by this… We wouldn’t be able to get more before the end of the game. The other team dog piled my mom every time she tried to make a shot. Apparently, there weren’t any rules against this. Her team was losing pretty miserably, so I joined the team as Chibi Symphony. I ran around the court at ridiculous speeds, but the ball seemed to be repelled by my internal electromagnetic field. Every time I got close to it, it flew out of bounds. I felt like I was actually making things worse.

Two Classes and an After-Party

I had two classes in the Siegel Hall auditorium back to back. I also had the same professor for both classes. At the beginning of the first class, he passed out a bunch of sheets with numbers written on them. The numbers were different for everyone, but the message was the same.

“To those of you who got something greater than 60… Awesome.” I wondered what the number corresponded to… Mine started out at ten, but then it changed to one when I tried to show someone. I had an uneasy feeling they designated the order for presentations of some kind. The professor went back up to the board with a big ball. He attached it to the board and rolled it around, highlighting colored edges with a marker. He explained that two was the winning number. He was going to enclose a random number of boxes with his marker to decide how much we should add or subtract from our current number. Each time he enclosed a box, people murmured in the background. Someone said he was cheating by making two boxes out of one he had already formed. I doubted I was going to win since I was so close to the winning number.

That class ended, seemingly without any resolution to the number game. The next one started, and Amar sat next to me. I felt like the seats were too close together… The professor went straight into lecture material, drawing a circuit diagram on the board. It contained two OR gates and a battery. I wondered where he was going with this… When he drew another one on the board next to it – this time with just a battery and a diode, my eyebrows shot up. He claimed that the two were equivalent. I took his word for it, but I didn’t see how that made sense; you need multiple diodes to create a single OR gate. He started talking about a building project he worked on with these two guys who were in the class. They looked like Indians, and they were identical. They sat with one seat in between them. When he started talking about them, they climbed over the front row and ran up to the board with markers, writing equations and drawing stuff on opposite sides of the professor’s second diagram. I shook my head in disbelief. The professor asked them to sit down, but I got the impression that he had asked them to do that. They weren’t really in the class. They ran back to their seats like mirror images of one another and sat down. I accidentally kicked some guy’s head… He was sitting between the identical twins. The guy got up and left the classroom only to come back a few minutes later, rubbing his head.

Amar saw my notes and warned me that I was going to fail because they weren’t thorough enough. I thought I might tell him to bug off, but he had the professor for another class before, so I figured he probably knew what was expected. I tried to write little notes beside the diagrams… There wasn’t much to write, though, because the professor hadn’t really said much about it… It didn’t help that I didn’t believe him. I accidentally kicked the same guy’s head, and he started crying. I apologized way too loudly… I think the whole class heard me. I asked the guy sitting on my right if he needed any dry-erase markers… Apparently I still had these from my Mom’s Basketball Game dream.

The dream jumped. I was in the professor’s office after class. It looked like a pretty high-class office. There were books everywhere, and the carpet was really fancy. A bunch of students were gathered there… Because we were the “A” students, we had to be the professor’s friends. Ugh. I hoped we weren’t going to do this after every class. Christina Aguilera’s younger sister was there… She called herself the Pasta Princess because she wrote all her songs with noodles. To demonstrate, she got some ravioli sauce and wrote a bunch of rap lyrics on the carpet. The professor laughed the whole time.

The dream jumped. I was walking toward State Street to catch a Pace bus. It was Friday, so I was headed over to Nicole’s… I knew I was going to be much later than usual since I had two classes and an after-class party. My phone said it was already after 3:00 PM. When I got closer to State Street, I realized I hadn’t taken the train yet. There wouldn’t be any Pace buses there, especially not the route I wanted. I turned around and walked past my dorm building toward the train platform.

Super Kirchhoff Brothers

I was playing an old, 2D Mario platformer… Except it was based on circuit analysis principles. I showed my dad a circuit diagram on the board in Nicole’s kitchen to explain the game to him. At first, he didn’t believe the circuit would work. I asked if he thought it violated energy balance laws, and he said he wasn’t sure. With an air of confidence, I announced that I would teach him to analyze circuits. I showed him Ohm’s Law and Kirchhoff’s Laws – particularly the current law. I had to explain the concept of nodes to him. Using the usual procedures, I proved that my circuit was valid. I was already on the seventh world of the Mario game, but I started over so I could show the whole game to my dad.

I played through the first six worlds pretty quickly. In between worlds, Mario received advice from his spiritual hero counselor. His quest was the same as usual – to save Princess Peach from Bowser. The tutor was surprisingly Spartan… When Mario failed to complete the first six worlds fast enough, the gun told him to shoot himself. So Mario reluctantly put the barrel of a revolver to his head and shakily pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. He did it again. Click. The tutor guy stopped him before he could find a bullet. He gave Mario a speech about how Peach didn’t want “some Saltflake super hero.” She wanted a true hero, one who could get through anything to save her. For this reason, jumping on things’ heads and shooting fireballs had become obsolete. The tutor gave Mario a magic sword with the ability to fire beams of energy. Sounds like Apheri.

The seventh world featured flying creatures with similar swords and turtles (not the koopa kind) who carried six swords. I died several times trying to fight the turtles. Finally, I figured out that I could negate sword attacks at point-blank range by spamming my sword swings. I told my dad as I went on that I hoped the game had a bit more of an emphasis on circuit analysis toward the end. So far, it had just used circuits as a metaphor for Mario’s journey. I was halfway through the first level of the seventh world and making steady progress. I hoped to show the whole game to Nicole later. That meant I would have to start over, but I was alright with that.

Tera Emerging, Neluna Caged, and Heartbroken Lunette

I went into the basement of a hotel with Nicole. It was built like a bar. There were corpses all over the floor, but those who were living didn’t seem to care (if they even noticed). Nicole got on a computer behind the spiral staircase leading into the bar. I went to the other side of the room with a guy who wanted a channel on my IRC server. People had to apply to receive a channel… I agreed to let him have one for free, and I would even configure it for him. He wanted to name it POW – “for that original Super Mario Brothers feel.” His name was Chris Lou, so I registered it under that name. I left all of the other configuration settings at their defaults since I doubted he would ever need to change them. It took a really long time to set up for some reason… I just stared at the screen like I was waiting for something. I told him I would have to make him an administrative account and that I would email him the information. He gave me Mike Tyson’s email address instead. Apparently it wasn’t Chris Lou’s channel at all… He had just come to me as Mike Tyson’s representative. Tyson gave the guy the name “suffering_shadows_ffx” as his desired administrator name. I didn’t want to make the account, so I walked over to Nicole and asked her to do it. SHe said she would, but the bar was closing. I didn’t think we would be able to do it after hours.

The dream jumped. I was visiting a bunch of celebrities in their homes with Nicole and my family. We went to a woman’s house first, and she told us about her business life. I pretended it was interesting. My mom enjoyed the story, at least… I forgot to thank her for speaking at my school – but in reality, she never did. We went to visit Mike Tyson next. He was actually Nigel Barker, but we still referred to him as Tyson. I explained everything he needed to know about his new IRC channel while we stood next to a canyon. The rock we were standing on looked like it could fall at any moment. We ended up in his mansion somehow, and he took us down to the wine cellar. I declined his offer of wine. My dad had some, though. Tyson started talking about how Nicole and I seemed perfect for each other… Then Nicole punched me for taking too long to propose. She started yelling in front of everyone. She followed up on her first display of violence by strangling me. I managed to pry her hands off my throat, and she stopped. When we left, I thanked Mike Tyson for speaking at my school. Since he was actually Nigel Barker, that made a little sense. We briefly talked about some “other comedian” whose name eludes me.

The dream jumped. We were at a big hotel. Everyone except Austin and Chelsea had gone ahead of me. Since I didn’t know where our hotel room was, I had to follow them closely. A group of four girls stopped me. They were all lying on their stomachs, feet toward me. One had brown hair – she was more like background information, though. The girl next to her had shoulder-length, black hair which she held in place with a little green clip. The girl next to that one had messy, blond hair and didn’t even look at me. The last one had long, white hair. She stared at me like I was a god. I asked what they wanted, and the black-haired girl asked if I was staying at the hotel. I told her I was.

“We’ll see you around, then,” she said with a seductive smile. I started walking again; I had already lost Austin and Chelsea. As I passed by the white-haired girl at the end of their line, I saw that her leg was in my way. I traced a finger from the heel of her foot to her toes as I walked around her. The other three girls giggled.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll look out for you, too.” They all erupted in excited murmurs because I had touched the fourth girl’s foot. I regretted doing it; I didn’t want them to get the wrong idea. I walked until I came to a restaurant and an escalator going up. The restaurant had an open entrance with thick, cylindrical pillars spaced evenly, about ten feet apart. My mom and Nicole came out of the restaurant with smoothies. They knew where the hotel room was, so they agreed to show me.

The dream jumped. I was in a huge room that felt much more like a hotel than the busy, convention-like environment I was in before. There was a giant sculpture above us… It was a brown, skeletal sphere defined by a series of overlapping rings, some of which curved irregularly in wave patterns. We walked down a set of stairs in the middle of the hotel lobby. Our room was the first one on the left. Nicole wouldn’t go inside the room. She started to push me around and complained that I was always looking at other women. I tried to defend myself, but she just threw her ring at me and walked away. I told my parents I was going to look for her. They didn’t seem to care.

The dream jumped. I walked down a long hallway into a sand-filled room with a bunch of swinging, circular platforms. There were swings suspended from the ceiling above each platform. A bunch of people – mostly women – were trapped in cages dangling from the platforms or half-buried in the sand. I made my way from platform to platform with a grappling hook. Before I could get to the last platform, I realized I couldn’t get enough speed to jump to it… On top of that, the angle of my swinging was way off. I fell into the sand below. Neluna was in a cage above me. She screamed a warning about the beasts in the sand. A green, scaly version of a bull rose out of the sand pit and charged toward me. I was fast, but it was faster. I thought that going to another room would save me (since monsters in video games are rarely able to move between areas), so I went into the hallway that brought me there. The bull just broke through the door and kept chasing me.

The dream jumped. I was outside a tower surrounded by concentric, circular bleachers. The four girls from before were following me around the base of the tower. I asked them to stop several times, but they wouldn’t go away. They said that Lenette had fallen for me. It was the white-haired girl who never spoke. I managed to escape them. I was confronted by Tera, Nicole’s other self. Tera bound me in chains on the ground and asked what our room number was. She was going to kill my family and then herself. Naturally, that would kill Nicole, too. I admitted I didn’t know the room number, but she wasn’t convinced.

“How do you know which room is yours, then?” she asked. “Are you going to sleep out in the lobby?”

“I just remember where it is… You know how you can find somewhere you’ve been before even without knowing the address?” When she pulled my chains tighter, I gave her my best guess. “From the main entrance, you go down the stairs… It’s the first door on the right. If you go the other way, it’s left.” I couldn’t remember which side of the lobby was the main entrance, so I wasn’t sure I was even telling her the truth. Tera laughed and walked away, leaving me in my chains. I called after her, but she ignored me.

The dream jumped. I was sitting in the bleachers outside the tower with Nicole and my family. Nicole had come to her senses at last. We held hands. When I looked to my left, I saw three of the four girls from before. “Lunette” was missing. I got a phone call from someone named Lu. The name was registered in my contacts. I sent it to my voice mail, realizing it was Lunette. The last thing I wanted was for Nicole to misunderstand my intentions again.

***

October 31, 2010

Peer Pressure

This dream has been omitted.

***

November 1, 2010

Lightning Planet and a Lost Phone

I caught a 6 PM train headed for Chicago. Well, it was really more like catching up to the train than catching it; I had to fly several miles before I reached the train. Along the way, I worried that I would run out of energy to keep me airborne. Although I lost some altitude toward the end of my flight, I made it. I rode on top of the train cars instead of climbing inside. The train stopped in Forest Park for a bit, and I thought about the terrible service. For a moment, I thought I was on the wrong train. I found a cell phone on top of the train and pocketed it.

I saw two moons in the sky… They were both being eclipsed by a much larger celestial body. A green ball of electricity shot down at Chicago from the huge object in outer space. The electricity began to orbit around the object next. I became aware of the fact that this had happened many times recently and wondered if it was a black hole. I approached a monument that resembled the Eiffel Tower, and this was struck by lightning, too. I found myself standing on the moon. The larger object was actually another planet. I knew I couldn’t do anything to stop it. There was a girl up there with me.

The dream jumped. I walked into Zachary Glass’ house in Louisiana. It was a daycare. The woman working there said she had lost her phone, and when I told her I found one on the train, she said it was probably hers. I doubted it. Nevertheless, when I showed her the phone, she snatched it from me, insisting that I had stolen it from her. She thought I had been sending obscene text messages to people using her phone… I promised her I had hardly used it.

“In fact,” I explained, “I only used the end and return buttons.” I showed them to her. I realized I had used the volume control buttons, too, so I added those to the list. Her volume had been too low when I found the phone.

Nicole with Cat Ears

This dream has been omitted.

November 2, 2010

Two Trips to the Zoo

I drove to the zoo in my dad’s car. Nicole and Andrea came along. Near the zoo, Nicole switched places with me. She almost hit a parked car in the parking lot while driving. We waited a bit before getting out of the car. I carried a bunch of twelve packs of soda to the zoo’s service desk to pay for it.

The dream jumped. We were back home after spending a day at the zoo. Nicole and I decided to go again the next day.

The dream jumped. I was singing random nonsense songs in the car. Chelsea was with us this time, and she made fun of me. I was having too much fun to care, though. I started messing with stuff in the back of the car. Andrea complained that the back window was open – indeed, it was. I assured her that it had only been open for a few minutes at most, and nothing could have fallen out. She took my word for it. When we reached the zoo, Andrea parked at the front in a handicapped space. I objected briefly before spotting her mom’s handicapped sign dangling from the rear view mirror. I got out to look at parking prices. A sign by our car said it was $10 for normal parking and $6 for a handicapped space. I was suddenly in a supermarket-based environment, but there wasn’t a break in the dream. I walked over to an open register, gave the cashier all of our stuff, and paid with a $10 bill. She gave me a $9 bill and three shiny “magic” dollars. I wasn’t able to collect our things before the next customer approached the register, but I just pushed him aside, put everything in a miniature refrigerator, hoisted that into my arms, and carried it out to the car. I unloaded everything from soda to candy to ice cream and left it in the back of the car. I knew the doors weren’t locked, but I didn’t think anyone would steal our stuff.

The dream jumped. I was in a restaurant with Nicole, Chelsea, Andrea, and Eric. They teased me for being late. Andrea told Nicole to send me a bunch of text messages during my finals, but since I would have my phone on silent anyway, there was no point. Andrea was disappointed when she heard this.

Elita Supports Robot Clones

Elita, Symphony, and Alan Whitecrow were talking with a foreign diplomat about handing over a violent criminal. We said that he was in Geffen’s magic prison where he could cause no further harm. In essence, we were worried that the diplomat’s home country couldn’t control such a criminal. If he escaped, more people would die… Elita suggested making a robotic clone of the criminal for the diplomat to bring back – that way, the general public wouldn’t know he had returned empty-handed. Someone behind us voiced their disgust at the idea, but I still felt it would work.

Writing on the Canyon

I was at some kind of political rally. Barack Obama and I were shooting hoops together; apparently, I was his son. I made every shot until he started watching, and then I kept missing. Meanwhile, my brother (who wasn’t Austin) kept scoring. Because so many people were watching, Obama came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

“You’re embarrassing me, you know,” he said. “Try a little harder.” His poor attempt at encouragement didn’t change my accuracy. After we finished playing basketball, he walked over to a private jet. Before he got on the plane, he said that he was going to try to stop the public from looking at pornography. I followed a bunch of people onto the plane. As we flew over a canyon, I saw that there were words written on the wall of the canyon. Obama said that some of his opponents had suggested that God had written those words – but he denied it. They weren’t a sign of God at all, just the coincidental effects of erosion.

Ben's Diseases and Wooden Symphony

This dream took place at my parents’ old house in Louisiana. Nicole and Ben were there, too. My parents were both sleeping in their room. Ben told us he had contracted herpes and syphilis, so I knew that if Nicole ever cheated on me, it would be obvious. Nicole went into my parents’ room and asked my dad to help her treat Ben’s sexually transmitted diseases. He refused and went back to sleep. She found my lying on the floor outside the hallway bathroom when she came out of their bedroom. I had a bunch of wooden blocks. After asking for Nicole’s permission to do so, I carved them into spheres and cylinders and began making a wooden doll to resemble Symphony.

Ghost Hunting and Eating Pizza

I went ghost hunting with the cast of Ghost Adventures. We walked up a set of creaking, wooden stairs to a boarded-off doorway. Zak pulled the boards off the wall and cast them aside. He turned to us and put a finger to his lips, indicating for us to be quiet. As he crept into the building, he suddenly started screaming and pointing at something none of us could see. He was only pretending to see a ghost, we realized.

The dream jumped. We had moved further into the building, and it was more like a gigantic food court at this point… The place had four levels which all shared the same central space, so you could see all of the restaurants from the middle of the ground floor. All of the seating was on the first floor except for a balcony on the second floor. There were lots of potted plants. I noticed that the entire ground floor was serving pizza… When I asked someone about it, I heard that they hadn’t prepared any pizza for lunch that day, and everyone had complained… So to make up for it, they were just serving pizza for dinner. I talked to Amar; he said there were cinnamon rolls available on the second floor, but the line was ridiculously long because no one wanted pizza. I got in the line for pizza anyway. I just wanted to eat.

***

November 3, 2010

I got about two thirds as much sleep as I usually do. My recall certainly reflects that.

Worst Response at NSLS

I was in the Siegel Hall auditorium for some kind of NSLS meeting. The chapter president read a poorly written letter from an educator to the audience and then asked us to write a response. The “worst” of the replies would net the author $500 in cash and other prizes. In my reply, I pretended to be another educator whose English was just as bad as the first guy’s. My reasoning was that neither of them used spell checkers or followed grammar rules. Sooraj was sitting on my right. He wrote one, too, but I don’t remember what it was about. It seemed really dumb. We passed our papers down to Brenna Scurlock at the front of the room. Sooraj forgot to hand his in, and he didn’t realize he needed to until Brenna did a final call for entries.

Brenna quickly skimmed them and picked her three favorites. Mine didn’t make the cut, but Sooraj’s did. In fact, he got the most votes from the audience, so he won $500 and a bunch of other stuff. I didn’t feel like he deserved it, but I didn’t say anything.

Scaling a Four-Story Tower

I went to my parents’ new house in Texas, but the power was out, and no one was home… I knew I could restore the power by bringing my mom’s computer out of sleep mode. Sure enough, it worked – but I didn’t know what to do after that.

The dream jumped. I was waiting for something a few blocks away from Nicole’s house. A fire truck pulled up to the corner. The firefighter got out and replaced a broken headlight at the front of the truck, and then he drove away… I wondered what I was doing. I knew I couldn’t be waiting for a bus; I wasn’t at the bus stop. When I saw a route 309 bus approaching, I became really confused. Why was it on route 313? I decided it didn’t matter… I was probably trying to catch a bus after all, so if I waited at the town’s exit gate (it was surrounded by a stone wall for some reason), I would be able to catch one headed downtown.

The dream jumped. I was trying to climb onto the roof of a four story tower. It was raining outside, and the top of the tower jutted outward, so scaling the exterior was too difficult. I tried it from the inside instead… Unfortunately, when I got to the fourth floor, I realized I couldn’t get through the ceiling. There was a ladder built into the wall that seemed to lead up to the roof, but there was no way out of the room. I kept trying to find ways to get onto the roof and make the tower a floor taller, but I had no idea what to do. Nicole asked me what the maximum height a person could jump from and still survive was. I told her not to jump off the tower, and that seemed to invalidate her question… I guess she was seriously considering it. I googled it and found out someone survived a fall of 1.7 miles into a running river. I didn’t tell Nicole about this, though. She asked me later if a fall of 3.7 meters would kill someone, and I told her it probably wouldn’t.

The floor of the fourth level had been reduced to a small section in the middle of the tower, so I could no longer reach the iron bars that formed the wall-bound ladder. I tried to use a rope to latch onto one of the bars, but considering I was several yards away, it just didn’t work. I fell down to the first floor and gave up trying to climb the tower.

November 4, 2010

Annoying Truckers and Spare Change

Nicole was putting gas in the jeep while I waited in the passenger seat. She stopped after putting 2.64 gallons in, complaining of a headache. I agreed to finish for her. When I walked up to the pump, I put my credit card in – apparently not realizing that I was paying for the $6 of gas Nicole had pumped rather than the whole transaction. When I realized what I had done, I just shrugged. Other than boosting the length of my credit card statement for the month, doing it twice wouldn’t really affect anything. Someone pulled up next to the jeep in a huge truck while I was filling the tank up. I was shocked by how close he parked to the jeep… His side mirror was almost touching Nicole’s door. I thought about telling him to move his truck, but I didn’t see the driver anywhere. I turned back to the pump and saw a couple getting gas on the other side. The guy complained under his breath about not having exact change. He waved a $20 bill at me and asked if I had change. I told him I didn’t, and the girl asked if I had twenty cents instead. I didn’t have any coins, either. When I looked back at the jeep, the truck was gone. An eighteen wheeler pulled up next to it, and a construction worker hopped out with one of those super-sized slurpies.

Traversing Schools - Homecoming and Pedophiles

I was in a math classroom. My professor had scheduled a midterm for the following day. He asked if he had handed out blank sheets for us to use on the exam; when I told him he hadn’t, he left the room. He returned with a thick stack of blank printer paper. I got fifteen pages and a copy of the exam. Because I had been so helpful, I was allowed to use my notes on the exam. He told me to return it to him before the scheduled exam the next day.

The dream jumped. I was in another lecture, this time in an auditorium. I recognized it as the one from the elementary school by my neighborhood in Louisiana. A woman on stage talked about the “real” cost of imported labor spanning from production of raw materials to the retail market. According to her, trains in Mexico were consuming as much as one million watts of power per hour. I talked to Ana after the lecture and explained how amazing it was. I walked into an office afterward; this was located where the cafeteria in that same school should have been, but I felt that I was at my old high school. I walked up to a long, white counter and asked about homecoming dance tickets. Nicole and I had made plans to attend the homecoming dance together. Interestingly enough, I was convinced that I was still in high school… The receptionist recognized me from the last time I bought homecoming tickets.

“How many do you need?” she asked.

“Two – one for me, and one for my girlfriend. Oh, she’s not a student here.”

“That’ll cost a little extra, you know,” she reminded me. I understood. “I’m impressed you found someone who could possibly like you enough to go on a date with you.” Gee, thanks.

“She and I have been dating over five years,” I replied. “Of course she would.” Anyway, I got the tickets for a total of $16 even though they were supposed to cost me $20. Outside the office, the line leading into the cafeteria was insanely long. I was in my middle school from North Carolina this time. I had no choice but to stand in the line… If I didn’t eat immediately, I wouldn’t get to due to scheduling constraints. As the line moved past the foyer, I saw Matt Parkman (Heroes). His last name in the dream was Schuester, though. He was standing with Ken Tanaka and Sue Sylvester (Glee). Sue was accusing him of sleeping with middle school girls. He gave his best impression of a pedophile.

“Oh, these little, little girls are so delicious… Like wet peaches…” he said while rubbing his hands together. He started babbling nonsense. Nicole and I cracked up; I didn’t notice her standing next to me until then. I tried to talk to Matt Schuester, but I couldn’t remember his name.

Intermediate Company

This dream has been omitted.

Shopping, Hiking, and Scaring the Living Daylights Out of Siblings

I was at the store with my mom, Chelsea, Austin, and Nicole. I walked around the store by myself for a while, inspecting various things… It heavily resembled the Toys R Us near our old house in North Carolina. There was a big box set in the gaming section labeled “So you’ve never played Crono Trigger?” It was $1000. I found my family gathered by the board games. My mom was going to give me $300, but when I asked why, she decided against it… She bought Chelsea an easy bake oven. After that, she told me she was going to wait in the car, expecting that I would usher everyone else outside. Austin wanted to look through games longer, however… A few minutes turned into ten, and I finally had to insist on leaving. He decided not to get anything after all. My mom came back into the store. She was pretty angry since we were still in the video game section… We followed her outside.

The dream jumped, and we were walking down a winding trail on the side of a mountain. There was only enough space for two people to walk side by side, and even that was dangerous. The trail brought us down into a forest. Nicole’s brother Eric appeared… Chelsea and Austin started kicking dirt at him. Rather than getting mad, he threw his arms up and covered his eyes with his sleeves. I yelled at them for it, so they stopped… Apparently they thought it was okay to throw dirt clods at him instead. At that point, I bent over and put my hands on the ground. I transformed into a black wolf and ran toward Chelsea. She laughed when she saw me approaching, but that laughter faded when I tackled her to the ground. I bared my fangs at her before chasing after Austin, too. He was surprisingly fast… I couldn’t catch him, but at least he stopped throwing dirt at Eric.

Adam Sandler as Himself and the Watery Ether (Lucid)

This dream has been omitted.

Revival of the Purple Gigas

I was in a high-tech facility with my mom, Chelsea, Nicole, and a floating, black ball of sentient energy. This ball was our strongest party member – capable of dishing out a whopping 300,000 damage per hit. Our stat system was loosely based off of Ragnarok’s, so that was quite a bit of damage! I found out we were aboard an airship… We upgraded the ship and went on the deck for an upcoming boss battle. Clouds rolled by at about fifty miles per hour. We were fighting Rhaknam, the Purple Gigas from Skies of Arcadia. I was the only one who could actually fight him, though. I held a short sword in each hand. These had the power to shoot tiny, green balls of energy at the arcwhale. I aimed for a series of large, purple sores on the whale’s body. When it opened its mouth to cry out in pain, I shot its teeth out with charged blasts of green energy.

I had to dodge a bunch of attack patterns copied from De Rol Le (Phantasy Star Online, Episode I). It overused the attack pattern with all the bubbles of energy. The fight took a long time, but I eventually brought him down all by myself. There was an option to fight “Rhaknam II” after my victory. I decided to accept the challenge. A cutscene played, but I accidentally hit the start button and skipped it. I hoped I would be able to go back and watch it later… In this fight, I also had to dodge a bunch of illusionary arrows. They were fired by ghostly clones of Furude Rika (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) in her shrine maiden outfit. The ghost clones surrounded the ship. One of them was always actually Rhaknam, but it was hard to tell which… I thought it was the one that flashed white every few seconds, but that turned out to be a red herring. The Rika attack pattern stopped, and the whale appeared behind the ship. It opened its mouth wide and tried to suck me in. Fortunately, I was able to avoid getting sucked in. Austin laughed at me for nearly sliding off the deck. This happened again on the side of the ship, and the whale swallowed me whole. It spat me back out with critical damage, forcing me to heal my injuries.

The Rika attack pattern resumed… This time, she was appearing on the ship and in the air above it, too. I rolled and jumped to avoid the arrows whizzing past. Rather than terminating this by hitting Rika-Rhaknam successfully, I really just survived it… After the attack pattern stopped again, I turned into a giant, grabbed the whale, and pinned it down on the deck of the ship. I sat on it triumphantly. At this point, Nicole took control of the giant whale. She warned me that it was going to throw me off the airship if I didn’t get off. I didn’t believe her until it almost flipped me into the air.

Adura on the Existence of the Dream Plane

I read a short article online about the existence of the dream plane. It was written by a woman with a name like Adura… The article wasn’t particularly compelling – just a rehash of a bunch of theories I already knew about – but I was impressed by the extensive list of sources. She had cited over one hundred academic sources.

Detale Slays Symphony and Zanderu

I was on Agharta… Apparently, Symphony and Zanderu were interacting. We were in a Veins field. Nicole messaged me on MSN about something. While I was typing a response, a bow master had spawned next to me. Zanderu was fighting it to save Symphony. Detale spawned behind her, and the result was obvious – we were both killed. My health had already been critically low thanks to tanking the bow master. I didn’t attempt to help Zanderu at any point.

Meow! You've Got an Appointment

My phone kept making meowing noises every six seconds to remind me of my appointment with my advisor. Annoyed, I went to my calendar and opened the event settings. It was configured to remind me every six minutes throughout the day. I couldn’t figure out why it was doing it every six seconds instead… At any rate, I knew I wouldn’t forget the time, so I erased the event altogether.

Let there be dreams!!

November 5, 2010

Noodle Screensaver in My Brain

I had a dream about a pair of long noodles wrapped around one another. They each looked like they might have been made of even thinner noodles… Sort of like Twizzlers. I watched them wrap around several times.

Understanding Why Nicole's Always Depressed

This dream has been omitted.

Demon Lord Onizel, the Key to Hell, and Robot Gangster Rappers

Nicole was playing a single-player game on the PS2. It had Sonic characters, but it wasn’t really a Sonic game. She had to run through a heavily forested area with a lot of explosive barrels. There were also walking versions of Nicole’s green-and-white alarm clock. I thought the hour on the clock had changed, so I told Nicole she’d been playing for an hour. Rob didn’t believe me, and Nicole was rightfully doubtful. The individual LEDs on the alarm clocks were being blown up – probably by the explosive barrels all around them. Nicole pointed at her real alarm clock as proof. It said 11:26.

I got to play as Knuckles from then on… The game was only single-player up to a point. In order to defeat all the bosses in “the Final Order,” the last dungeon, you needed at least two players. Failure to defeat these would prevent the player from obtaining the “true” ending. I ran ahead of Rob and Nicole. With caution, I calculated an approaching mu’s acceleration (Agharta’s blurring into my dreams again) and threw him into an explosive barrel. Treasure chests rolled down the hill on small platforms with wheels. I stacked ten in a row and gave them all to Nicole. She was amazed.

The dream jumped. I went to a public pool with Nicole. I spotted Chelsea in the water, and she waved me over. Apparently, my family (as well as Oma and Opa) had been in Louisiana for the past two weeks. For some bizarre reason, I understood that I lived in Louisiana instead of Illinois… This statement confused me. I was fairly certain they had gone to school in Texas that same week. Anyway, Austin dragged me somewhere outside the pool. He wanted to show me something.

The dream jumped. I was on Agharta, but the graphics resembled Minecraft. It seemed like I was in a forest divided into square blocks. I saw a catgirl standing in a cube of water. She was blocking a door to the next block. Her name, I noticed, was Onizel. She said something about being laid to rest. I understood that since we had defeated the Demon Lord Onizel, his four sacred elemental aspects had lost their power, too. That’s quite a bit to just randomly “understand.” Oh well. The water and the catgirl disappeared. In her final moments, she whispered a warning to me.

“Don’t walk too fast in Meird’s presence…” I took her advice to heart, but I didn’t really know who Meird was. I kept walking and came to an area separated from the rest of the forest by rows of metal bars. A phantom similar to the poes from Zelda games was standing beyond the metal bars. He agreed to give me the key to hell if I could beat him. I had to walk across a path divided into perfectly square tiles. Some of them were white, others were black, and everything else was red. I figured the black ones were actually missing tiles; if I fell into these, I would probably end up in Prontera or something. The ones that were totally red would kill me instantly. Some of the normal tiles also had little bits of red running through them. They reminded me of Minecraft’s redstone. It hurt to walk on these. My objective was to step on as few red tiles as possible on my way to the other side of the prison area. I had to use a tablet pen to walk… Basically, I had a touch screen, so I could just poke the tiles with the pen. The end of the pen flashed red sometimes for no apparent reason. I thought this was related to the course, but it seems like it really wasn’t. I noticed that when I walked faster, the phantom started making these shuddering noises. I realized he was Meird… So I walked slowly the rest of the way. I cheated a little near the end by jumping down a ledge instead of walking around on the path, but whatever. I received a black card key from Meird.

The dream jumped. I was eating pizza and spaghetti with meatballs on Nicole’s couch. My mom was there, too. Since Scamper was sitting right by the couch, I asked her to watch my food while I went to the bathroom. She misunderstood and thought I was full (even though I’d barely touched my food) until I corrected her. I went into the kitchen and urinated in the sink. Aah, refreshing.

“That’s weird,” I thought aloud. “It doesn’t hurt.” I guess urinating was supposed to be painful… I tried to stop myself, fearing that the pain would surge through my body all at once, but the attempt just caused urine to spray onto the ceiling. I went back to my food in the living room. I thanked my mom for watching my food when I returned.

The dream jumped. I was in a factory environment full of robot gangsters. They all liked to rap, but they were mute, so they just mouthed the lyrics. I dubbed one’s voice.

“What?! What?! What?!” I shouted as he swung his arms across one another defiantly. His face looked part canine. “I’m a dawg!! I’m a dawg!!” I shouted. Nicole didn’t believe that he was really saying this, nor did she accept that he looked anything like a dog. She pointed out another robot gangster on the other side of the room with pale white skin. This one looked like a normal person. I wasn’t willing to dismiss the first robot’s floppy, black ears so easily.

Chelsea's New Gumphone

I was walking to the car with my dad. We were driving to a university I had decided to attend. It was still a few more hours away. My dad got back on the interstate highway going south instead of north. In fact, I quickly realized that he hadn’t even gotten on the right one. There were two right beside each other. This one went from Mexico to Arkansas. I was about to bring this to my dad’s attention, but he swore under his breath.

“Which one did I get on?” he asked me.

“53,” I replied. “We were on another one before we stopped. This one’s closer to the Burger King.” I pointed out the restaurant where we had just eaten.

“This is the wrong direction, too,” he muttered. I brought a street connecting the two highways to his attention, but he seemed to have something else in mind. We came to a stoplight (some highway that was, hmph), and my dad tried to make a right turn… He didn’t slow down nearly enough, so he skidded into the middle of the intersection and had to swerve to the right to correct the mistake. The right side of the car hit the curb, but at least we didn’t hit the car in the left turn lane. My dad pulled into a small parking lot in front of a convenience store. Austin was suddenly in the car as well… My dad explained that Chelsea wanted a phone that would play “the girlfriend song.” We went inside and asked the woman working there about it. She brought us over to the candy…

We found these gigantic Bubble Tape containers equipped with their own speakers and microphones. They basically functioned as phones. One in particular played Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend.” I wondered if that was the right song… My dad hadn’t been very specific, after all. The employee didn’t seem to think it would serve our needs, but it was the best thing she could recommend. I asked my dad what he thought. Just then, the gumphone began playing “Girlfriend” and vibrating. Someone was calling it! I realized it was Chelsea and told my dad to pick up the phone. He stared at it for a moment, pondering how exactly to answer… When he pushed the label in the middle, the call was connected. He told Chelsea immediately that he had gotten her a new phone. The woman working there and I shared a grimace. It wasn’t really a “phone”… Besides, it would only last as long as the gum inside it. Once Chelsea realized that, she would probably throw a tantrum.

After the woman went into a storage room at the back of the store, my dad handed me an empty cereal box and told me to hurry. He wanted me to steal it. I followed him and Austin out of the store as I closed the box. I didn’t go through the anti-theft detector, so I didn’t set it off. I got in the car as the employee walked back into the main room of the store and found us missing.

“She’s probably thinking, ‘Those jerks stole my cereal! I bet that whole story was fake!’” I said. My dad pulled back onto the road and drove away.

***

November 6, 2010

The Witch Sare and Her Shadow Clones

I was walking around the neighborhood I lived in with my parents in Texas. I was alone, and I was Symphony. My system was becoming somewhat sluggish; sometimes, my body would lurch forward without warning. I knew this meant I needed a fresh supply of batteries, but I couldn’t find any… I couldn’t find any people, either. I walked out of the neighborhood, through an underpass, and turned onto a long, winding street leading to a witch’s palace. The witch controlled most of the world… She would almost certainly have charged batteries. Along the way, I came across a junkyard. It had been placed in the middle of the road, almost like someone had taken a junkyard from some other town and accidentally dropped it there. I sifted through the junk in search of batteries. No luck. I started finding these gnarly pieces of firewood nailed together in crazy geometries. They were just like the few pieces we didn’t saw apart when we were preparing firewood last weekend. On top of that, they were covered in little, white spiders. I leaned close and examined the spiders as they crawled over the wood. It was precious data. At the very least, I would become inoperative with new and useful information stored somewhere within my memory. A homeless woman pushing a shopping cart came up next to me and asked if I was going to eat the spiders. I told her no, and so she grabbed the pieces of wood and put them in her shopping cart. She got spiders all over her hand, but she just sucked them down her throat. I continued walking down the road. When I reached the palace, I went in through a personnel door. I realized I didn’t have valid identification. I had my master’s wallet (note: MY wallet; stupid robot, stealing my money), however. I went through one of three scanners built into the wall separating the entryway from the inner palace. It beeped to inform me that I had been authorized to enter. As I walked into the next room, I saw the witch Sare standing before a group of three misshapen, shadow-dominated beings. They loosely resembled Elita, Onizel, and Nephanim. Elita had pink hair as she originally did. Onizel’s hair was green, of course. I’m pretty sure Nephanim had black hair because it blended in with the smoke-like shadows swirling over his body. Their limbs were measured poorly… Most of them had mismatched arms and legs. Nephanim’s neck had been made too long, so his head sort of drooped forward. Although they were obviously characters from Agharta, I recognized them as Nicole, Ben, and Josh respectively. Sare spotted me, and she sent these monstrosities to capture me. I knew exactly what they were: clones. Having destroyed the originals, Sare had no choice but to make clones of the trio to use as her personal bodyguards. I ran for the main exit. I realized I was barefoot somewhere along the way, but there was nothing I could do about it. My battery power was running critically low. I had to lose them and get to safety before it ran out… If I was fortunate, someone would find me and replace my batteries – someday. All of that was impossible if I was dismantled by Sare, however. I went through another one of those security doors. This time, sirens went off. I found myself in an auditorium. I’ve had a dream about this auditorium before, but I don’t remember what that dream was about, so I’m having trouble finding it. I’ll link to it when I do. Anyway, I ran around the perimeter instead of cutting through the middle because there were more shadow-possessed clones mulling about down there. Sare appeared on the stage as I passed by and announced that unlike the “recent fiasco” that took place in that room, they would soon capture Nephanim’s robot and truly seize the world. My movements were becoming more erratic and difficult to control. I stumbled through a door…

I was outside on a narrow bridge stretching what seemed like miles into the distance. For some reason, though, it only took me a matter of seconds to get to the end. I knew the clones were close behind. I went into a building – my master’s underground mansion. The stairs circled around as I walked further underground. The clones caught up with me… Nephanim’s clone pinned one of my arms against the wall, and I flailed at him with the other. Ben and Nicole approached on one side… Nicole put a hand on my chest, shoving me back. Ben covered my face with a hand, too. The other clones limped toward me, some groaning and others laughing. I kept struggling, but I knew it was futile. I had less than thirty seconds of battery life left. I sent out a message to Nephanim as my final act and performed a manual shutdown.

Responding Poorly to Criticism

I was teaching Chelsea how to write code. We sat in the living room of our old house in Louisiana, and I made her go through a tutorial online. My dad grew impatient with her slow progress and said something about how I was supposed to teach it to her. I told him I was doing it the fastest possible way. When he made a weird look, I leaned back on the couch, crossed my arms, and asked him why he didn’t just teach her instead.

“Oh, that’s right, you can’t. Guess we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.” He was unable to respond. My mom looked over at us, clearly disturbed by my tone of voice, but she didn’t say anything.

Applying at the Ultimate General Store

Nicole and Chelsea were filling out job applications in the tiny hallway between the living room and the garage in my parents’ first house in Texas. The hallway had been converted into a carpeted room, but it was still the same size. Once they finished filling out their applications, I agreed to drive them around town to drop them off.

The dream jumped. We were at a general store. When I say general, I mean it. They sold everything from buttons to firearms. Part of the application for this store included learning how to perform tricks with a gun. Despite obvious safety concerns, the gun would be loaded… Nicole and Chelsea were talking to the manager – who looked just like Alex Cervantes, but that wasn’t his name. For some reason, he considered me one of the applicants, too. I didn’t have an application, but if he wanted to give me a job with flexible hours, that was fine by me! I told him I didn’t know how to use any weapons other than a sword, but I could learn to handle others quickly. There were some really weird moves in his desired list… For example, one question asked the following: “Can you slap your chest with a pistol?” I acted as though this was a difficult task. I was worried I would shoot myself in the attempt… Regardless, I assured him that I could adapt to anything required of the position. Alex was pleased. He seemed to like Chelsea and Nicole’s applications, too. He gave me a job as a cashier. The girls were offered a position called “back girl,” whatever that means. They were basically stockers; they would carry boxes from the back room and put items on the shelves. Chelsea was way too excited about her first job.

Thought-Commanded Computing

I was in Nicole’s dining room. She and her dad were there, too, and we all sat on the floor by the table. I’m not sure why we didn’t just use the table. My laptop was much more advanced than it is in waking life; it could easily render animated desktops without any affect on performance (massive caches), my storage space was in the range of hundreds of terabytes, and most importantly, it responded to my thoughts. I considered changing my desktop, and the computer brought up my desktop settings automatically. I thanked it, and an image of a pink-haired girl smiling showed up – apparently, this was supposed to be the computer showing its gratitude. The image showed quite a bit of cleavage, though… I felt awkward looking at it right next to Nicole’s dad. He was watching everything I did, too. I scrolled through a folder of pictures, and they were all similar: explicit hentai images with various things stuffed through girls’ cleavage. There was some variation in the pictures – for example, sometimes the girls were clothed – but these were rare. Since I couldn’t find any “normal” pictures, I selected a few of these as my desktop backgrounds and set it up to rotate every five minutes. I went to my desktop and scrolled through the images quickly, testing them. Nicole’s dad sighed.

“How about you pick something with less cleavage?” he asked me. Nicole looked over at us and asked what was wrong. “He’s got nothing but porn on his computer.” I didn’t say anything… I was pretty sure Nicole had put most of this on there, but I didn’t want her dad to know that. I wished I hadn’t gone into the pictures at all. The desktop settings closed automatically, and my computer brought up a blank browser window to block its questionable wallpaper content.

Bacon, Eggs, and Deutsch at Subway

I was following Andrea’s mom’s car in Nicole’s mom’s convertible. Another car pulled up beside her, and the driver asked for directions. I already knew they were going to Subway, so I didn’t have to follow them anymore. I sped into the left turn lane at forty miles per hour. When I saw a cop in the lane beside me, I slammed on my brakes to slow down. Even this was insufficient; the car was going to skid over the line. I slammed a second set of brakes, and this slowed me down enough that I didn’t cross the line until my turn arrow lit up. I was glad the cop didn’t pull me over. As I drove down this new street, I passed one called Subway Drive. I knew that was a trick; the Subway was actually one street further down. I turned into a shopping center and made my way around to the Subway. There was plenty of parking available, but I messed up when I tried to pull into a space normally. I backed out of that space and realized I was perfectly aligned to one behind me. I didn’t pay much attention to the cars on either side of me… I just knew I wasn’t going to hit them. As I shifted into park, the back of the car hit something – presumably the curb. The car rolled forward the first time I put it in park, and I was barely able to get it back into reverse fast enough to avoid hitting the car in front of me. I backed into the space again, parked it, and tried to set the emergency break, but it wasn’t there… I kept wondering why anyone would pave a parking space on such a ridiculous slope. The car rolled forward a little and stopped.

I discovered that I couldn’t turn the lights off because the windows were rolled down. I worried that the car would roll forward again if I turned it back on. I could barely squeeze through the space between the convertible and the car on my left when I got out. As I walked inside, Andrea’s mom parked her car. When I walked into the building, I saw Nicole and Andrea’s mom carrying food over to a table. I wondered how it was possible that I beat them to the restaurant and still didn’t make it inside before them… The person asking for directions earlier was a Chinese girl who didn’t speak any English. Apparently, most of the people at the restaurant could only speak German, so she fit right in… Anyway, they had ordered a big box of bacon and eggs. I asked if we were bringing some back for Eric, but Nicole said she didn’t know. We started eating; I figured it was just for us. I went into a side room when we started to run out of food. There was a big bowl full of bacon and eggs. I started scooping stuff onto my plate, but I accidentally dropped a piece of bacon over a ledge into the kitchen. I pointed it out to a Hispanic worker, but he didn’t understand what I was saying. When he finally did realize it, he grabbed the slice of bacon with a trash picker and went back to frying eggs. I thanked him for it, and he thought I had dropped another piece of bacon… I tried to explain that I was just talking about the first piece and pointed at the empty spot on the ground, but he thought I was pointing out another piece… Ugh. He tried to speak to me in Spanish. I vaguely understood, but I had a better idea.

“Kennst du deutsch?” I asked. He nodded. “Toll! Ich kann deutsch verstehen… Ich kann dich auch verstehen, aber… Est ist so, um…” After pausing to think of an appropriate word, I heard him say “breathing.” He took a deep breath and then made an attempt to breathe more, but couldn’t. In that sense, I supposed it was kind of like breathing… “Ja, das stimmt.”

“I… prefer my… undaragin,” he said. That was supposed to mean “native language,” I guess. I understood what he meant and nodded. I walked over to a bed in the side room and found fourteen used plastic forks underneath the pillows. I grabbed them all.

“Siehst du? Eins, zwei, drei, vier…” I counted these up to fourteen and chucked them in the trash. Customers really were inconsiderate. The employee and I had a brief laugh over it together, and then I walked back into the main area. Nicole was waiting for me. We went outside and saw that both Andrea’s mom’s car and the convertible were gone. The Chinese girl came outside and asked us if we could give her a ride home. She didn’t know how to drive – apparently, she forgot how while she was at Subway. We called Andrea’s mom and asked her to pick us up since she stole Nicole’s mom’s convertible, too. She asked if any of us had taken driver’s education. The Chinese girl overheard and took my phone. She said she had taken the class, but she never finished. More importantly, I wanted to remind Andrea’s mom that the ability to drive was useless without a car, but I didn’t get that chance.

Bobsledder's Union

Nicole’s dad had decided to give us a taste of work in the union. He drove me and Nicole to work one day and left us with a wooden bobsled. He said we would understand what to do. Nicole’s mom showed up, too… Apparently she was working there just for fun. I asked her why she wanted such a dangerous job, and she said she was already putting herself at risk anyway. She pulled a cigarette out of her pocket, lit it, and hopped into the bobsled. We watched her go down a plastic slide, picking up pieces of cardboard along the way… I didn’t really understand the objective except to go down the slide. Nicole and I got in one together and followed her mom. We almost made it back to Nicole’s house without having to push the bobsled. It finally stopped on Roosevelt Road near Nicole’s street.