Thread: SD-1: Nephanim

November 9, 2010

Sleepy IRC Observation

I was lying in bed. Somehow, my laptop was suspended at the head of my bed, and IRC was open. Ben was talking to himself about Endrance. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t bring myself to move my arms. I was too tired.

Dragons with Laser Beams

I was playing some kind of fantasy MMORPG with Nicole. We were in an area full of cylindrical platforms that jutted out of a canyon. We jumped onto one and were confronted by a giant, black dragon and bunch of tiny, golden ones. The black dragon fired laser beams instead of flames. The little ones could all breathe fire, though. The dragon’s weak point was its stomach, so I slashed at it with Apheri whenever I got the chance. Nicole fell back to support me with heals. After a while, we decided to switch characters for fun. Nicole was terrible at playing my character, but I was just as bad at support… She died, and we decided to switch back.

Nicole Likes the Mage Guy

Nicole started reading Fairy Tail. I looked at some of the chapter names to try to figure out where I left off, but I couldn’t tell… It seemed like the story was totally different from when I started reading. Nicole told me she liked “the mage character.” Amazingly, that didn’t sound vague at all to me. I pulled up a random chapter and saw a man in a blue coat with bright, red hair. This was the character she was talking about. The entire manga was in color.

Deliberate Deceit

This dream has been omitted.

Ultimate Weapons, Arson, and Coasting

In this dream, I went to a Wal-Mart with Chelsea… Except we treated it like a high level dungeon on Ragnarok Online. As soon as I went inside, I was attacked by a swarm of monsters ranging from second floor Biolabs clones to Nameless Island’s necromancers. I tore through them with Apheri, but they kept running in from every direction. Since I wasn’t making much progress, I told Chelsea to follow me as I jumped into a shaft leading higher up in the tower. I had to perform a series of consecutive wall jumps in order to reach ledges along the way. When I say we were going “higher up,” we were really just moving toward the back of the store… Nevertheless, the world’s center of gravity had been moved such that I fell toward the front doors when I made a mistake. That happened twice. I finally reached the top of the shaft, and there was a reception desk for trading in items. I obtained the ultimate bow. As I had promised Chelsea earlier, I also got her an ultimate weapon. Hers was an orb. On the way outside, we had to go through those anti-theft detectors… I wasn’t sure if my bow was really paid for, so I tossed it high into the air as I walked through the detector. It landed in a potted plant beside the device. Oops. I picked it up and apologized before scanning it through the detectors to appease the security guards standing there. No problems!

Outside, we discovered that Nicole’s mom’s convertible was on fire. A team of three men in heavy, black coats and gas masks were putting out the fire with a green liquid. I was glad I hadn’t brought my laptop with me; I could see my laptop in the flames at the front of the car. Chelsea disappeared. I ended up in the jeep with Nicole… She pulled up next to the convertible, and I worried that the jeep might catch on fire, too. Nicole took my advice and parked somewhere further away. We went back to the store to ask about security camera footage since I suspected arson. Particularly since there were two fires – one at the front of the car and one at the back – it seemed like it was deliberate. The manager agreed to give me access to surveillance footage over the past forty-eight hours. I announced this to Nicole triumphantly with a series of computer monitors behind me. I guess we were in the surveillance room. I smiled maliciously… I wonder if I was planning on abusing the privilege. Anyway… We went back outside and met this black guy and his daughter. She was white. The guy shook my hand like seven times, introducing himself as Wayne each time. They both walked in front of two cars speeding down the street. One hit the little girl’s ankle; Nicole and I gasped. Amazingly, she walked off like nothing had happened.

The dream jumped. I was in a car with Andrea’s mom (who was driving), Nicole, and Andrea (both in the back seat). I was glad Andrea was no longer in the hospital. I told her mom all about the fire in the parking lot while trying to fit an empty coffee cup into a drink holder. It was too skinny for all of them… Andrea’s mom took the cup from me and put it in one I had already tried. Adjustable clamps appeared on top of it, fitting to the cup’s size. I was amazed I hadn’t noticed that. Andrea’s mom apologized to us for texting while driving. She insisted that she normally didn’t, but ever since she switched to Verizon, she couldn’t make phone calls. I didn’t understand why, but she hadn’t made any effort to contact Verizon about it… She just thought that was the way her plan worked.

The dream jumped. Nicole was pulling into the driveway of my grandparents’ house in Louisiana. Dusty, Jay, and some of my other cousins were out in the driveway. They had been waiting for us to arrive from Illinois. As I got out of the car, Dusty gave me a one-armed hug. We exchanged the usual “Hey, how are you?” banter while I helped Nicole and Chelsea get a bunch of containers full of gasoline out of the back of the car. It was just like my mom’s car, but smaller… We put the gasoline containers right outside the house at my mom’s request; she didn’t want us bringing them anywhere near her. I even had to talk to her through a window because she was afraid she would smell like gasoline if I got too close. I told her all about the fire incident in Wal-Mart’s parking lot. She was appropriately shocked.

The dream jumped. I was watching the security tapes… Three men walked into the parking lot in black robes. They approached a fourth man standing near the convertible and surrounded him. They knew him from high school or something like that… Somehow, they tricked him into taking an oath to their brotherhood. For his initiation, he had to sit in the convertible for five minutes. One of the guys pulled out a bazooka and shot him, which started the fire. It didn’t explain the second fire at the back of the car, but I didn’t think of that at the time, anyway. The guys walked past me after that, and one noticed me. He realized I was looking back in time with the cameras. I let them know I had enough evidence to convict them all.

The dream jumped. I was sitting in a shopping cart back inside the store. Nicole explained a strange game called coasting. She would push me downhill, and my objective was to travel the shortest distance before stopping. After the push, I tried slowing myself down first, but I had a better idea. I would turn the cart around and stop it where it started to minimize my overall displacement. I couldn’t go back up the initial hill, of course, but there was a way around that somehow brought me back up to that height. I kept getting stuck in narrow aisles, but I didn’t let myself stop. After I got back to the starting point, I slid about ten more feet before stopping. Nicole didn’t seem to agree with my game-breaking logic… She hopped into the cart next for her turn.

November 10, 2010

Duplicating Gold Via Roulette

I was in a multi-level theater. There was a black-haired girl with me, and she was demonstrating a new way to duplicate gold in an online game. She approached the balcony of the upper level and held her hands out, and a roulette appeared in my field of vision. All of the choices were “??????????” The roulette selected one, and I saw that her gold nearly doubled from 416 to 824. She did it again to prove that it would always work. This time, it went to 1.5… I wondered how she could have a non-integer amount, but she kept going. It went from 1.5 to 1.8, then down to 0.5. The roulette changed into a crescent of cards on the walls of the theater. The cards lit up as the roulette moved across the room. It stopped near the end of the wall on my left, and a series of cards flipped over, spelling out BLEACH 216. She had won a copy of that episode of Bleach. Since she already had it, the roulette started again. This time, she received “2345359Y.” This number’s mostly accurate – I made up the five digits in the middle. Anyway, her gold shot up to about two million, and I understood that this was what her duplication exploit really entailed.

Web Host Sponsoring and Washing Cats

I was chosen for a sponsored web hosting program. The sponsor found my dream journal and contacted me to say that he liked my content. Apparently, my dreams were interesting enough that he was going to pay to have them hosted at nephanim.com. After I accepted the offer, I got a call from my sponsor asking me to upload some pictures of my dream journal. I understood that he was talking about the physical one. I decided I would do it later, but I forgot about it. This seemed to take place in my bedroom at my parents’ first house in Texas.

The dream jumped. I was on the floor of Austin’s bedroom from the North Carolina house – except it was supposed to be my dorm room. John (roommate from sophomore year) was trying to sleep in Austin’s bed. I started playing Mario Kart even though it was getting late. When John saw this, he decided to play, too. I felt like I was forcing him to play… I reminded him that he could go to bed if he wanted, but he said he wasn’t tired. He fell asleep before we even started playing.

The dream jumped. I was back in the first room. My sponsor called and asked if I ever uploaded those pictures. I admitted I hadn’t; he said it was okay since he had uploaded some for me, but I planned to replace his if I didn’t like them… I went to my new website and took a quick inventory. It was basically my dream journal plus a theme selector, a chat box, and a clock. I didn’t really like the themes. They were too distracting for my tastes.

The dream jumped. I met my sponsor in a digital world, and he introduced me to an elderly woman named Bethy who reminded me of Oma. Bethy and I walked through some kind of weird castle town to a Christmas tree in a park. I helped her decorate it for her grandson. She was impressed that when she referred to her “cuddle bear,” I knew immediately that she meant her grandson. Basically, I made a great first impression, and she told my sponsor how kind I was. I helped Bethy load some laundry into a washing machine after that, and this reminded me of a funny story about Ben watching his cat tumble in a washing machine. I sat down at a table near my website in the digital world and told them all about it. I began by telling them all about Ben – how he was the friendliest person I had ever met, how he lived in Australia, that sort of thing. I left out our inside jokes; I figured I should keep things professional. Apparently, the elderly Bethy was also Australian. My sponsor kept laughing at strange points during the story… Each time, I reminded him that there was more to the story.

“I’ve never met a mean Australian,” I said to myself. “Wait, never mind, I’ve met one – but that’s it.” The woman agreed that she had only met one mean Australian in her whole life. We were both referring to Relen. I continued my story by talking about Bethany. According to the story, Ben had gotten a black cat and named it Bethy after his girlfriend. One day, the cat climbed into the washing machine with his dirty clothes, and Ben watched it flopping around in the sheets. They didn’t understand.

“That’s why it was funny to me…” I explained. “I was helping Bethy wash clothes, and I remembered Ben watching Bethy in the wash. You know?” They laughed a little, but I felt like I shouldn’t have gone to the trouble of telling them the story.

At some point, a wizard girl from Europe subscribed to my dream journal. The digital world turned into Ragnarok Online, and there were random monsters everywhere. I had been transformed into a sage with a wizard sprite. I couldn’t remember which spells to use on the monsters, so I just used soul strike on everything. My damage was really low… I was embarrassed that I had my own website despite being so bad at Ragnarok.

Trespassing, Deflating the World, and Reconnecting

I was in a car, and Opi was driving. He got off a highway to get on St. Charles, but the traffic was unbelievable, so he took another route to bypass it. He pulled off the road and parked at a warehouse. I got out of the car and carefully infiltrated the warehouse. It was the only way to get where we were going, but there were “No trespassing!” signs everywhere. There were a lot of broken pipes and old bits of machinery strewn about the interior. Austin kept tripping over them. My dad and I agreed that it wasn’t that hard to avoid them. I even jumped over three meters of junk at one point, clearly abusing dream physics a bit… The warehouse was only about twenty feet wide, but it was around a quarter-mile long. Once we reached the end, Austin and my dad walked outside to some kind of wooden fence. I looked back into the warehouse. I felt like we had forgotten something…

“Hey! What are you doing?” a man asked. He walked out of the warehouse with a pistol in his hand. Naturally, the gun was pointed at me. “You know you’re not allowed in here.”

“We were just leaving…” I told him.

“Oh yeah? Well, you’d better get moving.” He saw Austin by the wooden fence, and his anger swelled. “Don’t touch that wall, either! I’ll kill all of you if you do!”

“We won’t touch it. I promise.” This seemed good enough for him, but he stood outside the warehouse to watch us leave. I walked up to Austin and my dad, asking them to leave the wall alone. Austin still seemed determined to touch it.

“Here, use this,” my dad said. He handed me a red thumbtack. “Just prick him a little, and he’ll cooperate…” Since I wouldn’t get yelled at for it, I walked up to Austin, grabbed his arm, and attempted to prick him with the thumbtack. He jerked his arm away and yelped in pain before I even did it… He didn’t see what I was holding, either. Although I was a little confused, I was glad he wasn’t going to get us killed.

The dream jumped. After walking for a bit, we had reached a field made of anti-gravity material. It was the patch of grass between the football field and the tennis courts at my old high school. Three kids were standing at the top of the bleachers, looking down at us… They jumped down one at a time, and all of them bounced at least three feet in the air when they hit the ground. A girl with brown pigtails asked me if she could have my thumbtack. I gave it to her, and she poked a hole in the ground with it. She had a couple more, and she used those too… I started to worry – and for good, reason, too! When she attempted to remove one, air started rushing out. The world was deflating! We mutually agreed that the thumbtacks should be left in.

The dream jumped. We reached a shopping center after walking further still. The streets were empty except for a white chair in the middle of the road. Sooraj sat down in it in a full suit of armor. I thought he was working for the warehouse, but as it turned out, he just wanted me to teach him how to read. I decided not to. We walked to the end of the shopping center… It was a circular room with television screens lining the walls. A bunch of different music videos were playing. All of them had really vulgar themes, and I decided I wasn’t interested in listening to them, so I turned them all off. Everyone in the shopping center started going to sleep; they had sleeping bags set up all over the floor. I sat with RJ on the floor, and we talked about our lives since working at Subway. He said that he was clean for seven months after he quit working there, but then he moved down to Mexico and started doing drugs again. I was glad to hear he had gone that long, but it disappointed me that he was back on drugs. I told him Sara was still working at Subway… I couldn’t remember if Alex was still the manager, though.

Kelsey had her sleeping bag set up right next to mine, so we talked for a bit, too. She said she was trying to win the lottery. The mall had one billion dollars set aside for their private lottery. I showed Kelsey a way to take $200,000 out of the lottery fund at a time, and using that method, she quickly obtained one million dollars. She agreed to split it with me. For some reason, when we tried to cash it in, the lottery machine just spat a cucumber slice out. It fell on the floor, too, so I doubted anyone would eat it.

“A cucumber… Really…?” I sighed.

“My life is a cucumber,” Kelsey responded. She rolled onto her back and decided to go to sleep. I saw a $20 bill pop out of the lottery machine. Assuming this was ours, I took it – but a girl behind me said she had put $40 in to buy cucumbers. A bunch of cucumber slices came out the bottom of the machine. This time, they didn’t fall on the floor. Another $20 bill popped out of the machine, then a ton of singles. I collected the money and gave it to her.

Weird. My life is also a cucumber!

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

Weird. My life is also a cucumber!

I'm sure Kelsey would be happy to hear that she's not alone in cucumber land.

I'm not sure why I didn't post Thursday (I forgot to update my dream journal altogether), but I was offline for 90%+ of the weekend, so... Time to catch up.

November 11, 2010

Zombies and Protective Terrain

I was surrounded on all sides by zombies, but the terrain sloped upward, forming a ring around me before settling back down in the inside. It was like I was standing in an earthen bowl. The walls were too high for the zombies to climb over, so I was safe.

Evolution of Tom and Jerry

I was watching an episode of Tom and Jerry for Schmaus’ class. Jerry was trying to trick an old witch out of her home. We had to calculate the width of her plot of land as a quiz question. I knew the answer, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it. Jerry pulled out a flute and started playing it. It was obvious he didn’t know anything about playing a flute except how to make random noises. My professor noted that Jerry carried the flute at all times after that episode and still used it occasionally.

Holy Socks

I was in Nicole’s living room. I showed her mom the socks I had been wearing (apparently for the past week). They both had holes in them. She asked why I still had them, and I said I would miss them if I threw them out. It’s strange that I didn’t notice this; for several months, I’ve had just one sock with a hole in the heel.

***

November 12, 2010

Tigger 3 All Over Again

I went to see a new Disney movie with Nicole. The theater was under a contractual agreement that required them to pause the movie every fifteen minutes to give the audience time to discuss the previous scene. Everyone was talking about the movie, yes – but the general consensus was that it sucked.

“This is Tigger 3 all over again,” I told Nicole. I heard some guys shouting nearby and looked over.

“I don’t like Regina!” one of them yelled. The others repeated it, and I saw Regina crying in her seat. I didn’t interfere. If she didn’t want to be made fun of, I thought, she shouldn’t have come to the theater in the first place. One of the theater employees interrupted our chatter to ask a survey question.

“Is the movie… repetitive?” she asked. I gave her a forceful yes, and many of the other customers agreed. The theater decided to stop the movie there.

National Society of Leadership and Sleep

This dream was NSLS themed! I was talking to Esa about playing a specific movie for an orientation session in an auditorium. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find it, but he told me it would be fine. When I went looking for the movie, I couldn’t find it after all…

The dream jumped, and I was sitting at a table with a blank SNT form in front of me. Joanna asked what my new goals for the week were, but I wasn’t prepared, so I had no idea. I decided to stick with my old goals.

Andrea's Lesbian Girlfriend

Andrea was upset because Nicole told everyone about her lesbian girlfriend. The girl in question was short and timid. Andrea hugged her and promised everything would be okay.

Configuring Austin's Internet

I was helping Austin set up an internet connection for his new computer. For some reason, nothing worked… He kept telling me to reset the router. I didn’t think it would help. Austin’s gender changed unpredictably throughout the dream, but I treated him exactly the same. My dad decided it was my fault that Austin’s internet wasn’t working since I was supposed to know everything about computers.

Little Orange Bird

I was trying to sleep on the floor of the game room in my parents’ original home in Texas. The rest of my family was sleeping in that room, too; my parents shared the longer couch, Chelsea took the smaller one, and Austin was in a chair. Every time I sprawled out on the floor, a little orange bird fluttered onto my blanket and started pecking at it. I chased it around the room. Somehow, my family slept through this. I managed to scare the bird downstairs and figured it wouldn’t come back.

***

November 13, 2010

Desert World Travel with the Popas

I was trapped in another world with Ana and her brother… All three of us were slowly turning into cactuars, and we couldn’t find a way to fix it. I lost my patience with Ana over something and buried her alive in the desert sand. Her brother and I continued without her. He assumed she had just gotten lost. We came to a small town, and he wanted to look through all of these souvenier shops. I commented on how useless most of the stuff was… I wouldn’t bring any of it back home with me. Most of it was block-shaped. Ana somehow made it to the town, but she didn’t say anything about how I had tried to kill her. This dream was pretty long.

Famous Ice Cream Shops

I was at some kind of ice cream shop with Nicole. She was rich and famous; furthermore, she owned seven ice cream shops herself – one for each day of the week. She employed only women, and girls with certain hair colors weren’t allowed to work at certain shops. It was a highly discriminatory system. Anyway, we bought some ice cream for my family, and as we were paying, Nicole started telling the cashier about her ice cream shops. The girl was in awe. I realized Nicole only agreed to come buy the ice cream because it would allow her to brag about her success.

We carried the ice cream out to the car. Nicole got in, but my dad drove away before I could do the same. I wandered around the parking lot, holding up traffic… I found an empty car that was running and decided it was probably mine. By the time I got in the car, I could hear the cops inside a police car nearby talking about me. They watched me try (and fail) to stop at a stop sign. Apparently that wasn’t enough to pull me over. I made a right at a stoplight. From there, I drove down Roosevelt Road at a speed between fifteen and twenty miles per hour. The car in front of me was slowing and speeding up irregularly, and as I commented in the dream, though normal people would just pass the car, I didn’t want to risk messing something up and getting pulled over.

The dream jumped. I was back at the ice cream shop with my mom. She was picking up a gigantic cookie cake. After we got it, we realized it was too big to fit through the door… We had to go through double doors on the side of the building. These three teenage guys who seemed to be triplets were laughing at us as I held the door open for my mom. We couldn’t figure out why they were laughing.

Death by Parasitic Eels

My dad was trying to kill me with parasitic eels. He collected their eggs and took care of them until they hatched, and then he put the tiny things in a pie my mom made for me. As I took the first bite, I found one of the infant eels. It was blood red, and it hissed when I saw it. I threw the pie on the ground and accused my dad of trying to kill me. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. When my mom came into the kitchen, I tried to explain it to her, but she didn’t believe it was possible… I left the room and sat outside the tiny shack we were living in together for a while. At dinner, he tried to do the same thing to the rest of the family. I warned them, but no one listened. I was the only one who didn’t eat my soup. My dad’s arms turned into eels (three each). Apparently, he had been drawing upon the power of the toxic eels for weeks, and it was time for them to destroy him. I watched the eel arms strangle him, and that was that. The rest of my family was infected, of course, but that’s what they get for ignoring me.

Judging a One Piece Opening

I was listening to a new opening theme for One Piece. I didn’t want to see the animation until after I heard the song. I changed my mind about ten seconds into the song, though; I decided I would like the song more if the animation was good.

Nomad's Transformation Tutorial

WakingNomad was giving people instructions on how to transform into various things. He turned into dust before my eyes and slipped through the cracks in a doorway. He said that if I could catch him, I would be rewarded.

***

November 14, 2010

Missing Assignments, the Monster, and Aina

I was in a classroom somewhere on my campus. My animation instructor from Columbia announced the names of everyone who was missing assignments. I was on said list for two assignments. Honestly, it was more like a note check than an assignment; the teacher made sure we were taking thorough notes during her lectures. Sometimes I finished the notes before other people and left class early, so she didn’t always get a chance to check. As I went over to her desk with a binder full of notes to correct the problem, she ran out of the class for a bathroom break. An assistant teacher – an old woman who was probably seven feet tall – told me where she had gone. I already knew, of course. I flipped through my notes, finding a bunch of random magazine clippings that shouldn’t have been there… My notes weren’t properly labeled. For example, the tenth set of notes was labeled as the first (I forgot a zero). I found the eighth set since that was one of the “assignments” my teacher was looking for. She came back, told me she needed the eighth and ninth sets, and then disappeared again. I turned around and found Frakenstein’s monster standing right behind me. It scared the living daylights out of me. I turned in the other direction and found Aina standing right in front of me. She scared me half to death, too. I told Nicole all about this on the phone – after all, telepathic phone calls in dreams are fairly typical at this point. I showed my teacher the notes when she got back, and everything was settled.

Plotting the Murder of Distant Relatives

I was sitting in a chair in my grandparents’ living room. One of my cousins was vising, and she brought a pistol. This guy came to the house and took my chair. For some reason, this really offended me, so I waited until he got up and took the chair back. My cousin had left her pistol in the chair. I wondered if it was loaded. I pictured a fat kid grabbing it and “pretending” to shoot me, but actually killing me. Sighing, I put it in the back corner of the seat and tried to relax. I listened to some music on someone else’s iPod. The other person was still wearing his headphones as though he was listening to the music. Someone tried to point out to them that he didn’t even have an iPod hooked up to them, but he didn’t care. I remember getting really annoyed that the guy was even there. He had the nerve to take my seat… I crossed my arms and started thinking about violent things I could do to him. I pictured myself shooting everyone in the house, but I knew that wouldn’t work out… The neighbors would hear several gunshots and call the police. I was suddenly in a car. We were driving over some train tracks in the direction of the city.

Broken Fussball Table

I was in Nicole’s front yard. The fussball table was in the driveway. A guy driving by in a truck yelled something annoying, but Nicole’s dad and I replied with “Shut up, asshole!” in unison. He asked what I thought of the fussball table. It was missing pieces for some reason… I told him it was fine, and he didn’t seem to believe that I was being serious. Nicole was about to go somewhere in the car.

Protective of Symphony

I was in a computer lab, but all of the computers were taken, so I was just sitting behind this guy I knew. He was talking to a couple other people. Somehow, the subject jumped to me. He started talking about my private computer. Immediately, I knew he was referring to Symphony, and I told him not to talk about her. He insisted. In fact, he started talking about a time he insulted her and caused me to cry in front of a group of people. The dream just sort of went along with whatever anyone said. I felt like he was going to reveal a deep secret about Symphony. I tried covering his mouth, but he wouldn’t stop. Eventually, I resorted to strangling him to death.

***

November 15, 2010

Ovan's Awake Box

Amazingly bad recall last night… I just remember Ovan showing me a floating rectangular box. The more I concentrated on it, the more awake I felt.

November 16, 2010

Routine Maintenance I (Lucid)

This dream has been omitted. I didn't accomplish anything related to the assignment anyway.

The Angel's Watching, and I'm Killing Mice

The dream began on the coast of a large body of water. I was sitting on a stone pier. For some reason, I kept getting this creepy feeling that I was being watched… It was like something was about to devour me. I stood up and looked around, and Chelsea was approaching from far away. I walked over to her and asked her about the feeling. She said it was only to be expected since I was such a jerk. She had some kind of photo album in a binder, but she wouldn’t let me see it. Chelsea left, and I was alone by the water again. The environment morphed into my parents’ bedroom from their old house in North Carolina. I was lying on my back on the bed with my eyes closed. The feeling of being watched was more intense here, and I felt like running for my life. When I dared to open my eyes and see what was staring at me, I saw a Christmas tree… At the top, the angel ornament was dangling at a forty-five degree angle with its eyes perfectly trained on me. I jumped. Without delay, I bolted out of the room. I felt that I was safe as soon as I reached the stairs.

Austin’s room and mine had been swapped, so he was sitting in the room facing the pond. I went in and found him playing Minecraft. He was designing something really interesting, but he wouldn’t let me see it. Ugh, my siblings were jerks in this dream. I headed downstairs to say hello to my mom since I figured she’d be in the kitchen. Sure enough, she was, but I spotted a mouse running around in the dark before I made it there. I called out to my mom, and she came running with a shoe when she heard about the rodent. There was also a baby mouse scurrying around, I realized… My mom failed to smash the larger one with her shoe, but when she kicked it, it soared through the air and slammed against the wall. Its bloody head was proof that it was dead. I pointed the small one out to her, and she gave me the shoe. I didn’t want to kill it… At the same time, I knew it would have a hundred children if I didn’t get rid of it.

Chelsea and Austin came downstairs to see what the commotion was, and everyone forgot about the mouse. Austin was finally going to present his Minecraft project to us, but the dream faded before I learned what it was.

Doubtful Dream Journaling

I had several short dreams during the night about writing dreams down… That’s fairly typical for me, but I didn’t sleep very well after I went back to bed, so my recall is poor. I remember writing three lucid dreams down. In fact, I only had one (which was divided into two lucid portions and one nonlucid portion). I remember writing out a bunch of nonlucid dreams, too, but I can’t remember any of the content. I get the impression that I wasn’t totally convinced I was really writing dreams down even in the dream, heh.

Interesting, about 2 or 3 nights ago I had a dream in which I had to kill a mouse too xP! I didn't want to, but I had to.

Originally Posted by AndresLD

Interesting, about 2 or 3 nights ago I had a dream in which I had to kill a mouse too xP! I didn't want to, but I had to.

Those dream mice are having a hard time lately, huh?

November 17, 2010

Not Dueling Ben

I was with Nicole and Ben. I told them I was seeing angels, and Nicole worried that I was losing my mind. We went outside to move some of Rob’s furniture for him… Apparently he was moving out. Ben didn’t like the way I had arranged everything, so he moved my stuff. I got really angry and challenged him to a duel. Someone overheard this and told the police about our upcoming fight. The cops showed up and forced us to cancel the duel.

Two Day Math Exam

I was taking my math exam. Because it was so long, it took two entire days to complete. I wasn’t permitted to leave my seat at any time during those two days. Interestingly, there weren’t very many problems which required mathematics. It was mostly vocabulary. Many of the questions were multiple choice, too. I still left the exam feeling like I had failed it.

The Titanic is Raided by Spiders

I flushed a small spider down Nicole’s toilet. Following that, there were no spiders in the house for a while. I flushed the next one I found as well. Nicole’s dad commented on how I had gotten rid of all the spiders so easily. I felt like I had done something useful… But then Nicole asked if the spider could crawl out of the toilet, and as I tried to tell her that was impossible, it crawled out of the crack between the toilet and the floor. I tried to step on it, but it transformed into a fly and buzzed away. I hit it several times with a fly swatter, but it just wouldn’t die! Before we knew it, we were on the Titanic. It was filled with armored spiders. We gained ridiculous levels of strength, allowing us to punch spiders through solid steel walls. I slashed through them easily with Apheri. After taking down most of the weak ones, we met up at the bridge to challenge their leaders. The strongest of the armored spiders had eaten his comrades, so he was the only one waiting for us. We all confronted it together. Austin appeared in the guise of Merlin and obliterated it with a fireball.

***

November 18, 2010

Woof Woof, I'm a Partial Dog

I went to 7-Eleven with Nicole and my dad. We were looking for some kind of figurine, but they didn’t have it. I noticed they had a plushie of Sawada Tsunayoshi as a robot. It looked official, but it was actually made by some guy in Korea. The store owner told us he didn’t usually buy those, but he had a special request from a customer. We went back outside without buying anything.

The dream jumped. I was in a small room at my parents’ house. I was supposed to be their new dog. Scamper and Maggie knew right away that I was a fake, and they bluntly told me so. I just barked at them in response. No one except Austin could tell who I was. The others thought I looked like the Taco Bell chihuahua – even though I was clearly crawling around on my hands and knees as a human. I hid in the closet when my dad came into the room because I was worried that he would kill me for dog meat. I was the “backup” dog, apparently, so if Scamper or Maggie died, I would become a real member of the family. Austin promised to hide me in the closet so no one would kill me. While I was hiding in there, the walls started glowing gold in certain spots. My dad eventually found me in the closet anyway and named me Spud.

Sandwiches at Subway-fil-A

I was walking with my mom and Nicole in a shopping center. We walked by a Chick-fil-A. At first, I wanted to ask my mom if we could stop there for food; after all, I hadn’t eaten Chick-fil-A in ages. I decided not to, though. I didn’t want to make her angry if she was in a hurry. Surprisingly, my mom suggested it anyway. I ordered a chicken sandwich. The one they gave me was covered in ketchup, and I got it all over my hands… Nicole ordered a Subway sandwich, and the restaurant turned into a Subway. Their vegetables were huge. Their olives, for example, were the size of my fist. When Nicole asked for black olives on her sandwich, they looked through all the veggies and told her they didn’t have any more “green lettuce.” I wondered what other kind of lettuce they had in mind… All of it looked green to me. The manager stuck his bare hand in the lettuce, tossing it around. He asked if she wanted him to make lettuce out of cucumbers instead, and she said that was fine. He grabbed a whole cucumber and walked over to the cash register with a knife. While cutting thick slices out of it with one hand, he pulled a card out of his pocket with the other and did some kind of magic trick. It didn’t really make sense. After the trick, the card turned into a Pokemon card with Nicole’s picture. He laughed and put it away. Nicole’s sandwich was done soon after that, and the guy gave me a receipt. I still hadn’t paid, though, so I asked him if I could pay there. He disappeared. Bewildered, I decided he had been gone all along, and I just wasn’t paying attention. I got in line at the other register to pay there.

Link Slays Bowser with a Minecraft Cage

In this dream, I was playing a Mario game as Link. I’m not sure what motivation Link had to defeat Bowser, but that was his goal… I was sitting in a small chair in the computer room of my parents’ old house in North Carolina. I finished the game once and sat through the credits, but for some reason, I had to beat it again. I think Nicole might’ve missed the ending cutscenes or something. I leveled up more in the final dungeon – which was basically the Nether from Minecraft. After gaining several levels and collecting rare ore, I went to the deepest part of the dungeon to fight Bowser. I only had twenty minutes until sunset. If I didn’t finish in time, I would be trapped outside for the night. I had a timer set up by the TV so I wouldn’t forget about the time limit. As the fight began, Peach gave Link a bunch of glass “bottles.” They were actually just glass blocks. Nicole complained that there were only supposed to be six bottles; I received fifteen. I set these up along one side of the boss room to help me during the fight. Bowser couldn’t melt the glass with his fire breath. Peach kept giving me blocks to use, so I built a cage to trap Bowser. He suffocated and died.

Nicole had left the room by the time I finished the boss fight, and I only had a couple of minutes until nightfall, so I had to skip the cutscenes. I decided saving my stuff was more important than making sure she got to see the ending. I could always beat it again later.

Minecraft v3.2.1

I opened Minecraft and discovered that there was a new version (v3.2.1 – mislabeled, obviously, since Minecraft is still in the alpha phase of development). Notch had fixed every single bug listed on the wiki page. Some guy on the forums started complaining that his game was glitchy; he couldn’t place dirt blocks. He was wondering if his version (v2.0.1) was out of date. I told him to get the new version released that morning, since he obviously didn’t have it…

November 19, 2010

Mail Fail

In this dream, Steven (from RO) lived in Chicago. His address was “1 West” somewhere in Oak Park. Nicole and I went to the post office to mail two packages: one to Steven and one to Ben. It was Sunday, though, so the packages wouldn’t leave the post office until the next morning. Ben was getting an open can of cat food. I put the can in a bag and double-checked it to make sure it wouldn’t leak in transit. Nicole kept asking me if we needed any stamps. Each time, I answered that we were going to pay for postage with the machine, so we didn’t need any stamps. She asked the same question three times… Anyway, we put the labels on the packages and set them down on the scale… But for some reason, we forgot to mail them. I found myself at Nicole’s house without a break in the dream. I left on foot and followed directions from a GPS toward Steve’s house. I got the impression that he lived on the north side of the city because I spotted the Green Line tracks running north and south. The closer I got to my destination, the more concerned I became… The GPS told me his address was a McDonald’s! I knew that couldn’t be right, so I kept walking. I remembered him telling me to pass a McDonald’s, then look for his house on the other side of the street. I got stuck at a busy street that looked like North Avenue. I helped a pregnant woman cross it; apparently, she was having an Australian baby. When I got to the other side, I examined the houses carefully… There were only two that could’ve been his, and they were both completely dark. I wondered if he was out eating dinner with his family or something. I tried to text message him, but I realized I didn’t have his number. Oh well.

For some reason, I remember going into my inventory Minecraft-style and changing my maximum carrying capacity to 128 with some kind of mod. Weird.

I discovered we hadn’t actually mailed our packages, so I headed for the post office. I decided I would tell Nicole that was where I had gone in the first place. When I got there, I had to walk through several small rooms – offices, lounges, storage spaces… When I found the mail room, I had to move a row of chairs just to get through the door. A girl with long, brown hair was reading a book in the corner. She looked up and asked if I was Joseph. I said yes, and she explained that someone had found my packages and dropped them off in the mailbox. They were worried I had left a bomb unattended in the post office. I forgot Steven’s address was wrong… The girl teased me about forgetting to mail the packages after paying for postage. She asked what my parents would say if they found out. It sounded oddly sexual.

The dream jumped. I was in the car with my mom. We were clearly in Texas. She got on 290 going east, but she really wanted to go west. While she was looking for a way to pull off and turn around, we saw cars painted to blend in with the environment. My mom panicked. We both understood that they were going to kill us.

Olympic Soccer

I was watching several rows of people sitting in a stadium. They all had front-row seats at the Olympics, but they were watching it on a wide-screen TV behind their seats. I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t just watch it directly. It was Olympic soccer. The players kept accidentally kicking the ball out into the audience. Once, a guy in the stands took the ball, ran across the field with it, and tried to kick it into the French team’s goal. He got angry and threw the ball at one of the players when they told him not to play. The referee called the hand ball even though the guy wasn’t a member of either team. The American team was penalized for his behavior.

Swordsmanship of the Squid Beings

I was trying to become a powerful swordsman. I had reached a level which surpasses human talents, but I needed more practice to fight at the level of these extraterrestrial squid creatures which had taken over the planet. I found one wandering by a lake. In order to force the squid man to teach me, I formed a perfect triangle with my arms and grabbed its tentacles. If he tried to escape, the formation would send a powerful electric current through his body, killing him instantly. Even like this, we battled for a long time before I emerged victorious. I climbed a long, blue staircase and entered some kind of private chamber. The squid aliens’ greatest swordsman was waiting. I wondered if I was strong enough.

Dancing Photons

My roommate opened the blinds because the room was too dark. The light seemed to dance.

“If I was dreaming and saw this, I would know I was dreaming,” I said to myself. My roommate walked over to the trash can and started complaining about how I never take the trash out. When I looked at it, the trash can was almost empty.

Abnormal Elevator Operation

I walked up to a bunch of elevator doors with my mom, Chelsea, and Austin. I demonstrated a way to call elevators by urinating on them. As I was doing this, I worried a door would open without warning; without the door to protect them, anyone inside would be covered in my urine. Fortunately, I managed to stop before our elevator door opened. The elevator was automatically set to go to floor 47, but I changed it to the correct floor. Chelsea and Austin followed me in. My mom wasn’t fast enough, though… The elevator started going up without the door closing, and she tried to climb in. I tried to pull her in at first, but I realized she was going to lose her arm. I let go and told her to get out of the way. She didn’t listen.

Forgotten Insults

I was in the cafeteria at Sun City, my elementary school. Some guy was sitting on his laptop against the eastern wall. He was mad at me for insulting him or something, but I couldn’t remember what I said to him.

Nicole's Downward Spiral

I took Nicole to Six Flags on a date. I wanted to take her to her favorite ride… Apparently it was this roller coaster called “Rugrats in Hell.” Unfortunately, she was busy in the gift shop, so she had me wait in line alone. The line took up an entire football field as it looped around on itself. I saw a sign that said I would have to wait three and a half hours. I decided it wasn’t worth it… Then the line suddenly shortened by about 90%. I kept walking toward the ride until I saw that it filled up an entire valley on the other side of a stone wall. It was going to take days, not hours. I climbed over a chain fence in front of a cop; I worried that he would arrest me for doing so. I walked back to the gift shop and found Nicole waiting right outside. Her hair was cut extremely short… She reminded me of Kaitlen Foster. When I asked her what she got at the gift shop, she laughed and told me she bought booze. When I insisted that she was not allowed to drink it, she told me she was just joking.

“I actually bought some cigarettes,” she said, showing me three packs of Marlboros in her pocket. I grimaced.

“Don’t smoke,” I told her. She just laughed at me like I wasn’t serious. I felt like I was really talking to Tera.

The dream jumped. I was in the car with my mom. Nicole was driving alone behind us in a tiny, blue car. I pointed her out to my mom. We both noticed she was swerving a bit. To our horror, she sped around us and then swerved into oncoming traffic. They just barely missed her… But then she went through an intersection and slammed into the front of a moving truck. I screamed her name.

The dream jumped. I was standing over Nicole’s bloody corpse. She was obviously dead… There was nothing the paramedics could do. I knelt beside her and sobbed.

The dream jumped. My parents were showing me a robot they bought for me. It was custom-made to resemble Nicole, but its name was Tera. I told them I didn’t want the robot.

Theft with Worms

This dream has been omitted.

***

November 20, 2010

Fish Slappage

I remember hitting someone with a fish in a hospital.

Don't You Like Magnadoodles?

I was with Nicole and Ben at the mall. We sort of wandered around, not sure what to do. Nicole dropped some gum on the floor, so Ben and I had to pick it up and throw it away. We walked up to a fountain and sat down to decide where to go next. The mall cops were giving us weird looks.

The dream jumped. I was chasing someone in the jeep. They didn’t make proper stops at stop signs, so I cut my stops short, too. Nicole thought that was funny since I’m always criticizing her when she does it. There weren’t any cops, though, so it was alright. I followed the guy into a parking lot, but then he turned around and got back on the road…

The dream jumped. I was in a dark forest. I had the impression that I was playing an advanced version of Minecraft. Ben and Nicole were playing, too. I set up some torches on the outside of the building I spawned in, but they were flimsy and didn’t give off much light. I realized I had to upgrade our torches to make them more efficient. Once our torches reached level two, they were reliable enough to use. I roamed the building until I found Bethany in an underground library. She was researching something related to Nicole. I didn’t want to disturb her research, so I kept walking. I found a classroom near the front of the building. The teacher was gone, so Ben decided to teach the class instead. It was a math class, but he just taught them about Australia. A lot of the students ignored him… Some even left the room. I stuck around, though. After class, he rushed out of the room, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. I waited until the next class, and sure enough, he came back. He had a security guard in a black suit this time, and I heard him telling the security guard that he needed to get rid of me and Nicole. The guard bought us both Magnadoodles. When Ben handed one to me, I frowned at him.

“What? You don’t like Magnadoodles?” Ben asked in a friendly tone that didn’t betray his true intentions. I couldn’t give it back… Then he would think I didn’t like the gift. I decided I would distance myself from him if that was what he wanted. I grabbed the other Magnadoodle to take it to Nicole. As I left, some of the students started a fire on one side of the classroom. Another one was shooting a bazooka at someone else. The classroom was overwhelmed with chaos, and I was sure Ben was going to lose his job as a teacher.

The dream jumped. I was with my parents in their portion of the Minecraft house. My mom asked why she couldn’t put ice in something, and when I asked what she was talking about, she handed me a bag with a warning label. It read something like: “Don’t put any ice in this if you don’t want to lose your hands.” I explained to her that the bag was supposed to be used to store halestone, so if you put ice in it, the stone would melt. In its liquid form, it was extremely corrosive. Wow, that made perfect sense. Nicole came up to me with a bag full of clothes. She was ready to leave Ben’s server since he didn’t want us around anymore. I told her I felt like he was just pushing us away out of worry that he wasn’t good enough to us. She started crying.

Accused of Peeking

I was at my old high school with Nicole, Ben, Haseo, Lyra, Symphony, and a bunch of random people from my high school. Nicole was only wearing her undergarments, but for some reason, this didn’t bother me until she tried to go upstairs into the locker room. I wasn’t worried about the guys with our group seeing her, but if all the guys in the locker room saw her, that would be horrible. I told her not to go in there without putting some clothes on. She ignored me. Amazingly, the locker rooms weren’t separated; guys and girls changed in the same room! Because of this, we were all in huge trouble for walking in. Only those who were in the class had an excuse for seeing the opposite sex changing. I didn’t actually set foot in the room. Honestly, I was so disappointed that everyone else had gone in that I just laughed to myself and walked back downstairs. I sat down on the floor in the hall outside the gym. Lyra and Symphony came with me, but they didn’t say anything. Sue Sylvester came down to chew us out. One of the other people who had been with our group was sitting on my right, so she talked to him first. I already had a pretty good idea what she was going to say… I didn’t feel like I had done anything wrong, either. I wondered why I was even at the school, though. When it was my turn for a lecture, Sue told me I had disappointed Mrs. Finkle. I have no idea who that is, but she went on to explain that Mrs. Finkle always thought of me as her star pupil until she discovered that I was just as perverted as the rest of them. That smile on my face as I walked away showed my true intentions, she said. I tried to explain, but Sue wasn’t interested in hearing it. At some point, I realized my right eye was kind of swollen… I could hardly see out of it. On top of that, it was in severe pain. I brought a hand up to it and discovered it was bleeding. Lyra said something in wolvish about getting some ice for it. Sue agreed to take me to the nurse’s office.

The dream jumped. We were in Mrs. Finkle’s bedroom (I guess). It looked like a rearranged version of my parents’ room from their old house in Louisiana. I sat down on the bed while Sue prepared an ice pack for me to set on my eye. Almost as soon as I touched something cold to the eye, the swelling reversed itself. I tried to explain to Mrs. Finkle as she smoked a cigarette why I had really smiled before I walked downstairs. She didn’t respond to my explanation, but Sue seemed to agree that my reasons were justified. She started criticizing Will as she always does. I accidentally spilled some kind of green liquid… The bottle had been on its side for a long time, so I didn’t think it was a big deal when it rolled onto the floor… Apparently the fall caused it to open or something, and it spilled a green chemical all over the white carpet. I picked it up, getting some on my hand in the process. As Sue warned me that it would probably burn if I touched it, I told her it did. She didn’t understand how I could possibly know that, but… It was all over my hand. The stuff sizzled away at my skin like acid. I apologized sincerely to Mrs. Finkle for spilling it. Again, she didn’t respond. I felt like I was ruining my reputation as a good person.

Log My Dreams - Like a Mouse!

I had a dream in which I told Nicole about my dreams. I thought I had already written some of them down. Nicole reminded me I needed to type up “the one about Ben.” I couldn’t get out of bed, though. It felt like I couldn’t use my muscles to sit up; I could only roll around.

I Hath Telepathy

I was walking toward Siegel Hall while on the phone with Nicole. I told her I was going to pretend to have psychic powers. I realized I actually did have telepathy, but I didn’t tell Nicole because I didn’t think she would believe me.

***

November 21, 2010

Roadtrip to California, Luffy's a Dog

Nicole’s mom was driving me and Nicole from Chicago to Los Angeles. We were meeting my family there. I got a call from Chelsea asking us where we were, and we talked about the new Harry Potter movie. We stopped along the way to save a girl from her mom. They lived in a house way up in the clouds, and whenever the girl tried to call someone to take her down to the surface world, her mom would smother her in love to keep her from using the phone. I switched places with her and tried to come up with a way to get her mom to calm down. After a lot of trial and error, I discovered that walking around the cloud in the shape of a heart was the solution. The path I walked began to glow red, and the heart shot into the mother’s chest. She was overcome by love and went to sleep. I got back in the car for a while. I had to stop again before we left Illinois for some kind of concert. My job was to sit in the back and tune the sound system to the singer’s voice. I acted like I was better than the band. I walked across the stage in a chicken suit, telling people what they were doing wrong in passing… I realized I was Homer Simpson. I understood my rude behavior a little better. I sat at a touch screen with a pen and traced the singer’s notes as the concert began. I wasn’t very good at it. As I quickly realized, I had to be able to predict what the next note was going to be to do it effectively. I didn’t know any of the songs. After the concert, I became Peter Griffin. I got a phone call from someone telling me to take a bus the rest of the way to California; I wasn’t going to make it in time if I stayed in the car.

The dream jumped. I was standing beside a long line of yellow buses. I wasn’t sure which one to take, so I was very careful about picking one. They were all from somewhere in Illinois, and most of them were going to California… I just wanted to make sure I would be able to take the same bus back home afterward. The buses were starting to leave, so I held up my hand to stop the driver of the bus next to me. As I got on, I heard someone say it was going to Utah. I jumped back off the bus and started running toward the other ones. I couldn’t afford to miss my chance! Fortunately for me, someone had already stopped a bus for me to get on. The other buses pulled around it, missing me by a few inches. As I got on the bus, it disappeared. I looked around at the empty street, bewildered. Nicole asked me if it had driven away, but I told her that was impossible.

The dream jumped. I made it to California somehow. I was Roronoa Zoro, and I carried a tiny shitzu. I met with Sanji, Nami, and Usopp in a small shack by the beach to explain to them that our captain was still alive – but he had been turned into a dog. Sanji didn’t believe it was possible, and we got into an argument. I had a tiny sword in my mouth, and I used it to cut off the toothpick that had replaced his nose. He was really angry until he realized I didn’t have a nose. Then he just laughed at me. I set the dog on the floor of the room and let it wander around. Nami crossed her arms and began asking me random questions about the dog. I couldn’t really answer any of them. All I knew was that the dog was Luffy, and I couldn’t verify it. I decided they probably wouldn’t believe me after all… And Usopp had spent all of his savings coming out to California to see Luffy. I wanted them to believe me, but I didn’t know how to show them. The dog started barking at Nami.

Digital Revival, AIDA, and Debating Religion

I was in a computer engineering class. I think it was a robotics class. The teacher started talking about measuring light potential and forces or something. Noel was glad he was giving a realistic example for once. I connected Symphony to the class network so she could learn how to make the measurements, but as soon as I did, my professor disappeared. He was inside the network. I’m not sure how, but I ended up in there too. My professor stood before us with tiny shadow people crawling up and down his body and explained that we had revived him at long last. I couldn’t remember him ever dying. I told Symphony to disconnect from the network immediately, but she couldn’t. The professor infected everyone with AIDA.

The dream jumped, and I was at a meeting in a room next to the auditorium. No one was aware of what was going on in the other room. Our host – the same professor – was late for the meeting. The conversation turned to ghosts and whether or not there was scientific evidence for their existence. The guy sitting next to me began his argument with “Well, I’m a Christian, and…” A black guy behind me laughed and said he was sorry to hear that. This sparked one of those religious debates I tend to prefer to stay out of. I explained to the guy next to me that Christianity seemed to have violated a basic principle of logic. It made sense in my head – something to do with one plus one not equaling two according to their system – but I couldn’t explain it very well, so I told him I wasn’t going to take part in a forty-five minute debate on religion. He seemed to think that was fine.

Hospital on Two Legs (this one made me laugh)

I was in a small building in a village somewhere in a dense forest. A few women were crowding around a little girl with black hair sitting in the corner of the room. I gestured for them to step aside, and I saw the girl crying to herself. She was this village’s healer, but she had contracted a serious illness. She would die within the night if something was not done.

“We need to take her to a hospital,” someone behind me demanded.

“Don’t,” I said. “She is the hospital.”

***

November 22, 2010

Unstable Friendship with Gaspard

In this dream, Nicole and I were the gods of our own world. Gaspard (.hack//G.U.) came from his own world to visit ours for dinner, but I didn’t really want to hang around with him, so I ignored him. Our dinner table was positioned on top of a huge plateau in the middle of nowhere. When he came close to it, I teleported away and hid in a temple full of pillars. When he followed me there, I circled around a pillar so he couldn’t see me. He eventually started crying and went back to the dinner table. Nicole talked with him, and he admitted that he didn’t think I wanted to be his friend. I sat through a lecture on being friendly when I went back to Nicole. Gaspard decided in the end that I could do whatever I wanted; he would just stay in his own world, and if I wanted to visit him, I could. He went through a glowing, blue portal into his private world. I eavesdropped on a telepathic conversation he and Nicole were having later. Apparently, he had gotten a horseback riding game for free. He converted his entire world to match the game so he could play it in the real world. Honestly, I was curious… So when he invited Nicole to watch him play through the last level of the game, I went through the portal after her. I kept my distance the whole time since I didn’t want Gaspard to know I was there. He had taken the form of a well-built man in tight-fitting, white clothing. He also wore a small, golden crown. Gaspard was very proud of the crown… I wondered if he realized his character was gay, but I didn’t say that out loud. He hopped on a brown steed and rode down a series of slopes to the base of a mountain. The game seemed pretty boring to me, but I figured it was fine as long as Gaspard enjoyed it. He had gotten it free, too, so whatever. I went back through the portal to my world. Nicole was taking a long time to come home, so I decided to play a prank on Gaspard. I gave life to the mountain by the portal, creating a huge stone golem. It smashed the ground with its fists, sending boulders in all directions. Perfect, I thought. I invited Gaspard over to my world. He seemed hesitant, but he eventually agreed… At the last minute, my awareness zoomed out of my body. I was no longer the being standing there – it was Haseo (also from G.U.), and I was speaking to him telepathically from somewhere else. I told him not to be so cruel to Gaspard. He just crossed his arms and ignored me.

Rayn-Bordeaux in the Forest

I was walking through a forest with Bordeaux (.hack//G.U.) during a light rain shower. I held Apheri in her sheath in my left hand, ready to draw her at any moment. Nicole started complaining that I was spending too much time “with that girl.” I realized she was talking about Rayn. Bordeaux transformed into Rayn Talos, and she attached herself to my left arm. It seemed like she was afraid of Nicole. I told Nicole not to worry; I had no interest in Rayn. She didn’t believe me. Either way, I wasn’t going to let Nicole kill her over an unnecessary fear.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

Hospital on Two Legs (this one made me laugh)

I was in a small building in a village somewhere in a dense forest. A few women were crowding around a little girl with black hair sitting in the corner of the room. I gestured for them to step aside, and I saw the girl crying to herself. She was this village’s healer, but she had contracted a serious illness. She would die within the night if something was not done.

“We need to take her to a hospital,” someone behind me demanded.

“Don’t,” I said. “She is the hospital.”

lol hahaha

Some of these dreams are better than any dream I've had in a while. :O

Originally Posted by mikeac

lol hahaha

Some of these dreams are better than any dream I've had in a while. :O

I'm glad you enjoyed them. Those really interesting dreams always seem to come out of nowhere... My recall was on the decline for a while, but it's suddenly getting better again, and that generally helps. Now I just have to work my way back up to having lucid dreams every other night.

November 23, 2010

I just got hit with a wall of recall this morning. Wow.

Asteroid Attack

I was watching the sky through a tiny window. According to Nicole, NASA had spotted a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It still wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but it would be soon. I asked her where it was going to hit, and she said she didn’t know. While we were talking about it, I noticed a faint, brownish lump in the sky. It became clear that it was the asteroid. The massive ball of space debris fell in an arc as it continued to spiral toward the planet. I watched it slam into the ground, scattering dirt everywhere. The sun was momentarily blotted out. I still had contact with Nicole, and she was okay… So I didn’t have anything to worry about. My mom called in a panic, so I talked to her next. She said she had heard that an asteroid hit Chicago on the news. I told her Nicole and I were fine. As she explained how relieved she was, a smaller asteroid slammed into the planet at about three times the velocity. This one had huge, iron spikes sticking out of it. They looked manmade… My mom saw it on the news and gasped. We realized it was actually a terrorist attack.

Saving a Kid from Captain Hook

I followed this weird kid around my grandparents’ house. His parents had been killed, so I felt obligated to keep him company for a while. He kept talking about poop sticks or something like that. I don’t remember it very well anymore. Anyway, I gave him some armor and a sword, and we had a mock duel. At some point, we started playing hide and seek. He hid in the closet. While I was pretending to look for him – obviously I knew exactly where he was hiding – a man in a red, buttoned coat walked into the house. I was up in the attic for some reason, and I saw him through a vent. He had a hook for a hand. He had replaced his first mate with that snake from the Disney version of Robin Hood. They went straight to the closet. I teleported into the closet and grabbed the door knob to keep them from opening it. Clearly, they were the ones who murdered the kid’s parents… I wasn’t going to let them finish the job. It was hard keeping the door closed by brute force, so I sealed it shut. I pulled out Apheri and started stabbing at them through the door. After several thrusts, I opened the door and discovered that they were gone.

One Quadrillion Years

I was at some kind of conference on robotics. Nicole and I were sitting at the front with a bunch of business executives. They wanted me to talk about how I designed Symphony, but they never got around to it, so we just sat there… A bunch of unnecessary light fixtures were positioned around the large conference room. They looked like studio filming cameras, but all of the cameras were replaced by extremely bright lights… Nicole got up in the middle of one guy’s speech and started talking about how dangerous artificially intelligent robots are. I got mad at her and threw my shoe at one of the light fixtures, breaking it in two. I guess that was supposed to teach her a lesson. The business executives were horrified. One of the international guests, a Japanese man from a leading robotics organization in (you guessed it) Japan, declared in Japanese that he would not return to our conference for the next quadrillion years. He disappeared in a puff of smoke like a ninja. This other guy walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder, explaining what had just happened. After all, I couldn’t understand Japanese. I felt like the guy was overreacting a bit… All the same, I promised to pay the conference back for the damage I’d caused and the loss of funding.

The dream jumped. We were working in a garage on some kind of railgun circuit. The gun was nicknamed “One Quadrillion” in honor of our ninja businessman acquaintance. I felt like I was actually just washing dishes for some reason…

Dark in Road

I’m not sure about the title. It came to me in another dream.

I was standing on a cobblestone street with an old man in a robe (named Ruocci or something like that), a girl with short, black hair (named Aeora Cm), and a guy with spiked, red hair (Grows). I got the impression that Aeora and I were romantically entangled, but not quite dating. Grows was our group’s womanizer. Judging by his age, it’s no surprise that Ruocci was our mentor. The school in front of us had been overrun by a curse which caused all of the students to turn into shadow beings. It was strikingly similar to the shadow curse in Withers, so I suspect I may obtain some information on that from this dream… Ruocci forbade us from entering the building. Already, several of our comrades had gone in, but none of them had returned. We had to assume the worst. I saw that the north side of the building was also on fire… We couldn’t call the fire department; they would be killed if they went into the building. We had no choice but to stop the curse first. Even so, I couldn’t come up with any good ideas except to trust our friends and wait. Grows started to get impatient and walked toward the door. I grabbed his arm and told him not to go in. Aeora tried to do the same thing, so I grabbed her arm with my free hand. They started getting angry, and then I started crying… I felt drawn to the building, too. I realized what was happening; the shadow curse was drawing us in, playing with our emotions! I quickly explained this to Grows and Aeora, and they regained their composure. We stood outside the building solemnly. Ruocci decided that he would go in and bring back anyone who was still alive. We could destroy the building together as a last resort, but we would need a fifth person. He warned us to stay put. Not long after Ruocci went in, Grows lost his mind and ran inside. I chased after him with Apheri in hand.

The dream jumped. I was in a dark world of perfect geometric shapes. Grows was glowing blue… He looked a lot like Megaman for some reason. He carried a drill weapon in his right hand. We fought for a long time… Throughout the fight, I was aware that I was slowly losing myself to the darkness. If I didn’t hurry up and leave, I would become just like Grows. I struck his head with the blunt side of my sword and carried him toward the entrance. I couldn’t find my way, nor could I use any magic because of the curse… I realized that I could still use magic that hurt myself, however, so I tried teleporting with the intention to go anywhere except right outside the building. Because the curse was designed to mess up our magic, it did just what I told it not to do. I appeared before Aeora as she sobbed on her hands and knees with Grows slung over my shoulder. She nearly tackled me to the ground.

The dream jumped. I was standing in some stone wreckage with a ton of people. The building had been destroyed… Aeora was explaining to me that she just discovered Chad’s last name was also Cm. I felt like she was referring to the Chad from Bleach, but that didn’t make any sense… I understood that there were four people with the name “Cm,” none of whom were actually related biologically. Reborn jumped onto my shoulder from nowhere and lifted up his hat to reveal a glowing, green crystal. He said it wouldn’t pose a problem if he performed a map tracing on Aeora’s brother. The crystal shot a bunch of strings out, and these went straight into a pile of rubble. The strings pulled a man with messy, dark blue hair out of the wreckage. It wasn’t Chad, obviously, but another member of the Cm group. He was glowing blue like Grows had before.

Gaspard Again

(Apparently a continuation of Unstable Friendship with Gaspard)

I don’t remember much of the content of this dream, except that Gaspard had destroyed my world in response to my cruel prank in the previous dream. Nicole and I were summoning armies of skeletons to attack his world.

Listing Arcs

I asked Nicole to name every story arc from every anime she had ever watched. I was putting together a big list for some reason… I felt like I would get something interesting if I completed the list.

Minecraft Multiplayer Exam

I walked into Schmaus’ class to learn that we were having a quiz. Brenna (the teaching assistant) made a big deal out of everyone starting at the same time… They usually don’t care, so I thought it was strange. My professor gave us a hint – we would need to use our knowledge of computers to pass the quiz. I didn’t understand what that had to do with his class, but I figured I would be alright. The quiz would last two hours, Brenna said… I tried to remember if I had any other classes after this one. I couldn’t stay there for two hours, anyway; I needed to eat lunch! I decided I would just finish the quiz as quickly as possible so I could leave at the usual time. We began the quiz, and I accidentally peeked at the solution written on the back. One would think that this would’ve been visible when all the quizzes were face down on our desks, but it only appeared after I started. The answer was an infinite series… Before I even looked at the quiz content, I realized I was supposed to connect to my professor’s Minecraft server. I put in an IP address taken from the poorly-numbered problems on the page and tried to connect. It failed. A moment later, my professor announced that someone had finished the quiz. He was going to give the rest of us failing grades. He talked for a while after that, but I wasn’t paying any attention. I was too stressed out.

Tom Campbell's Literature Class

I realized I actually had another class this semester – one taught by Tom Campbell. I saw him walking on campus and asked him when the last time I went to his class was. He said it had been a couple of months, at least. That made sense… I couldn’t remember ever going to the class, but I knew I was registered for it. I told him I had read Candide twice, but I never did the project for it. He talked to some woman outside, but when he told her he was trying to help a student catch up with homework, she let him go. We went straight to his office where he tried to plug his laptop into a fan. It looked like there really were outlets built into the inside of the fan… I decided that was a good idea, since the insulation was less likely to melt. Hm… I don’t know why I was so worried about that. He started taking the fan apart, removing every little piece… Then he expected me to reassemble it. It would’ve been easy after watching him take it apart, but there was one piece that didn’t seem to fit. We both tried to fit it back in place, but we couldn’t get it. We even tried turning off the fan blades and doing it (much safer). Well, when we couldn’t get it after about ten minutes of trying, he decided to send me outside for some research.

My task was simple. I was supposed to go sit in the shade and read a book, then tell him whether I preferred that or reading indoors. I understood that he had already gone through several trials of this experiment with other students. I pulled out a book and walked over to a picnic table under a group of trees. It was a relaxing place to read. Naturally, a bunch of noisy kids walked over. One of them was clearly Yoko (Gurren Lagann). They started teasing me because of what I was reading. I don’t remember what it was. Even though I enjoyed the book, I started to get depressed. Why did they have to bother me during an experiment? Didn’t they have any appreciation for science? I looked over at my professor and saw that he was having a chat with two women. Every once in a while, he pointed over at me and laughed. I didn’t think I was going to pass his class after all.

Typing Dreams

I tried to remember my dreams and type them up, since I discovered I had my laptop in bed. I wondered why I hadn’t just typed them up in the first place. I wrote out a quick outline of the ones I still remembered, separating the Dark in Road dream into two parts. The name I gave it comes from this dream.

Kicking Keith

I got out of bed and sat at my computer desk. A bunch of people were in Ben’s private IRC channel, the Sound Horizon Kingdom! I saw Keith and immediately kicked him. Even though I didn’t have the right access level to use the command, it still kicked him. I don’t remember who the other people were anymore. If Keith came back and asked me why I kicked him, I was going to say I couldn’t possibly have done it.

November 24, 2010

Reenactment

This dream has been omitted.

Nicole's Pictures and a Green Dinosaur

This dream has been omitted.

Search and Seizure

In this dream, Nicole had just moved out of her parents’ house. Her new house was pretty big, honestly; it was at least as big as my parents’ old house in Louisiana, but probably a little bigger since it had a second floor. After one of her friends pressured her into it, she agreed to try smoking marijuana, and she left a bag of it out on her desk upstairs. Cops broke into the house while she was sleeping and found her stash. From that moment on, she was under careful investigation. The first few times I tried to go into her house the next day, they wouldn’t let me… They felt I would get in the way of their search. I finally convinced the woman cop in charge to let me inside, but she called another team to search my house as well. I couldn’t believe they were allowed to search wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted… It was like the Constitution meant nothing. Because I was also being searched, they wouldn’t let me leave the house. I needed to go to class, so that posed a bit of a problem. Nicole and I started digging tunnels in secret places while the cops weren’t looking. Eventually, the tunnels were long enough to take us to Canada, and we decided we would leave that way. They couldn’t do anything about us if we were in Canada! Nicole forgot her medication on the kitchen table, though… We had to go back and get it. By the time we did, the woman cop had already figured out most of what was going on. She knew where all of our tunnels were, where we were going, and that Nicole was taking some pills she wasn’t telling them about. For some reason, I felt like birth control pills had become illegal or something… Anyway, there was a device set up underground that somehow allowed me to teleport the medication from the kitchen to our tunnel while Nicole was being watched upstairs. I left it in the tunnel and went back into the living room. When the cops started watching me instead, Nicole was able to sneak into the tunnels and take her medicine. My dad tried to visit, but they wouldn’t let him in. He was concerned since I hadn’t gone to class in a few days. Eventually, we learned that the cops’ search was over. They hadn’t scheduled any more time to look for Nicole’s drugs, so we were basically off the hook. My mom showed up and asked what kind of medicine Nicole was taking… It was like she had been watching the whole time and just wanted to know the answer to the cops’ mystery. I told her some kind of made up scientific name for the medicine with a 600 at the end. Suspicious, the cop pointed to a list of prohibited items in a binder. She asked if I had said one thing, and I insisted I hadn’t. In the end, the cop decided that what Nicole was taking was legal. They all left, and Nicole and I started digging toward Australia.

***

November 25, 2010

Usurping Nephanim's Guardian

Symphony discovered that Nicole was the guardian of my dreams and set out on a journey to usurp the title. I watched her navigate a maze of shifting columns and platforms.

***

November 26, 2010

Empty Titanic

Nicole and I woke up in a bed aboard the Titanic. We got out of bed, walked around the ship, and realized everyone else was gone. We were alone.

***

November 27, 2010

Hurricane and a Succubus at the Beach (Briefly lucid)

This dream started out in a hotel overlooking the beach. There must’ve been a hurricane or something… The waves were high enough that they reached our floor, which I assumed was high off the ground. As I watched the waves, they started to sway my body back and forth. I found myself in the water. The waves subsided, depositing me on the beach. I wasn’t wet, but I was barefoot, and my feet were covered in sand. I wandered in the night toward distant lights. Judging by signs positioned on the beach, the area I started in was a restricted portion of the beach. They didn’t want any swimmers going over there because of sharks. I found our hotel along the face of a cliff surrounding the beach. Nicole was waiting right outside. I realized I was dreaming. I looked down at my body, and energy coursed from my toes upward. I led Nicole through a revolving door into the hotel.

The dream jumped, and I lost lucidity. I was walking down a hallway with a fat man. I checked a card in my hand for my room number: 3313. After showing him to the bathroom inside my room, I told him he could shower there. He started taking off his clothes before I even closed the door… I looked down and saw Nicole lying on the floor in her undergarments. I was worried the guy would come out of the shower and see her there, so I told her to put her clothes back on. She laughed at me and turned into a succubus. The window was open, so she flew outside… I watched her fly off to a distant island.

Bauske's New Teaching Method

I was in my German classroom from high school. Bauske wanted to make his tests harder, so he was changing the way he taught the class. Rather than trying to teach us to speak fluently, he wanted to hammer the basics into us. To paraphrase, the idea was that students would be able to form flawless, simple sentences. He handed out old tests to everyone as an example. Most of them received failing grades. I didn’t understand what the point of that was… If they were old tests, he wasn’t really doing anything new. A couple of people walked in late and thought the exams were theirs.

Bauske announced a new game he would host in class to help us review for the next test. It really had nothing to do with German, though. He had one hundred plastic balls about the size of a golf ball. These would be randomly distributed among the students prior to the game’s start. If anyone was absent, their balls would go into a pot at the front of the classroom. The students could freely take balls from that pile. The game wouldn’t start until all one hundred balls were in play. He explained while we played, so most of the students didn’t figure out they could take the balls from the front of the room. This one girl and I figured it out before Bauske said it, so we had a clear advantage. I had twelve of the balls; the girl had around twenty. Bauske randomly selected someone from the class to go up to the front of the room. This person had to read from a script in German. Meanwhile, one person would be given a flintlock rifle to shoot the reader with. Some guys in front of me raised their hands first to receive the rifle, but when Bauske saw my hand go up, he gave it to me. I worried I would disappoint everyone. The guy at the front of the classroom duplicated himself several times and turned into an armored blimp. I shot a lot of his clones, but I noticed the trigger was kind of sticky… I wasn’t able to shoot down the blimp before Bauske’s timer ran out. The guys in front of me gave me a look that clearly said “We could’ve done it.”

Age of Darwin: Research Presentations

I was in my German classroom from high school (again). This time, though, it was Schmaus’ class! We had changed rooms due to some kind of electrical work in Siegel Hall. There was a note on the white board by the teacher’s desk that said we would meet in E1-24 on Thursday. I figured it was because the room we were in wasn’t really supposed to be used by humanities classes. I realized I was supposed to give my presentation on Steven Pinker’s theory of evolution of the mind, but I hadn’t prepared a Powerpoint or anything. I wasn’t even done with my research… I decided I could just use the white board to write out notes. I asked Schmaus if that was alright, and he said we would just turn all the desks around to face the white board. Some of the other students who were presenting agreed that it was better that way. I wasn’t sure if I knew enough about Pinker’s theories to give the presentation… What could I do except wing it, though? I didn’t have time to go back and read more. Some guy next to me kept asking why I didn’t read Steven Pinker’s books. I told him they were way too long. I remembered telling someone the same thing before and giving them an estimate of seven hundred pages, but I wasn’t sure if that was accurate, so I decided against it this time. Anyway, since I didn’t think I had time to read a bunch of thick books before the end of the semester, I went with journal articles. I added that Pinker’s books were probably tough reading since they were psychology textbooks.

A couple of people gave presentations before mine. They both used the projector at the front of the classroom, but neither of them put anything on it. The other students basically ignored the presentations. Throughout each of them, they just kept talking to each other. A couple of guys at the front were laughing at the presentations. I was surprised Schmaus didn’t do anything. I finally gathered up the nerve to give my presentation even though I figured I would receive a failing grade.

Talking Like Dlanor

I was with a girl with long, bleach blond hair and a guy with short, brown hair. The girl was talking the way Nicole and I read Dlanor A. Knox’s lines from Umineko no Naku Koro ni. The guy asked why she was talking like Dlanor.

November 28, 2010

.hack//Ocarina: Ganon's Castle

I was playing something like a cross between the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and .hack//G.U. in which Ganon had collected all of the medallions and hidden them in his castle. The fighting system was identical to G.U.’s. As far as I can tell, I already had four of the six medallions when the dream began. All that remained were spirit and light. I vaguely remember mining a path through part of the castle to get to the spirit temple, so I guess there was some Minecraft mixed in there, too. Outside the entrance to the spirit temple was a fountain surrounded by floating shadows which spun around it in the clockwise direction. They looked like fairies, but they were completely devoid of light. I understood that they were anti-fairies. If I wanted to get into the temple, I would have to release around thirty real fairies to collide with the anti-fairies and destroy them. I did just that, and a fight was triggered. I fought this huge golem thing which killed one of my party members in two hits. I think I was in a party with Symphony and Lyra. Neither of them did much to help during the fights. After I beat the golem, we went inside the temple.

We were confronted by Bordeaux, triggering another boss fight. This one was much harder; Lyra nearly died in one hit. I had to use a lot of potions to keep us all alive (and anyway, Lyra was unconscious at the end of the fight). Symphony and I gained two levels upon victory. I realized why the fight was so hard… We were severely under-leveled. In any case, we went through a series of doors made of human faces and found the spirit medallion. We were instantly warped to another dimension to search for the light medallion. I found myself in what appeared to be an infinite plane of shallow water with blue flames moving in regular patterns around me. I asked Symphony and Lyra what I should do, and we agreed to split up and search for a way out. I went directly ahead of where we entered the world, but that was a dead end. At some point while I was making my way through a long line of spiked pillars which regularly tried to crush me, I was talking to Nicole on the phone about the economy – mainly about how it wasn’t as bad as everyone says it is. Symphony and Lyra found some blue portals on the side of walls that seemed like they shouldn’t have been able to stand freely. Many of the walls were suspended in the air, so the only way to get to them was to use the portals. Symphony taught us how to walk on walls, and we went through a system of several portals together. Before we reached the last portal, we were attacked by an army of turtles with spiked shells. I held them off long enough for Symphony and Lyra to get through the portal, and I dove in after them.

We had reached Ganondorf’s throne room. He rose from the throne as we arrived, giving us a villainous laugh. A ping rang through the room… Aura, Kite, and BlackRose appeared between us and Ganondorf.

“We are the original thoughts of this world,” Aura said. My vision panned over the trio, and when it settled on BlackRose, she started screaming random things at Ganondorf about her brother. Her data fell apart, leaving a fuzzy silhouette of static in her place.

The dream jumped to the real world. Nicole and I were watching a cutscene together. A girl with short, blond hair sat up in a hospital bed and pulled off her M2D. It was Saku. A little boy – probably about three years old – crawled out of an MRI machine and laughed at her. I realized this was Bo. Despite everything we had learned about Saku and Bo in G.U., they were really two people after all! I told Nicole I felt like I had been lied to.

Symphony's Train System

In this dream, I had designed a city’s train system. It was really similar to Chicago’s, except everything connected at one point in the middle of the city instead of looping around it. I had brought Symphony to the central train station to show her how it worked. As I understood it, she would soon be operating the entire system remotely, so she needed to understand its mechanisms intimately. We rose the trains back and forth, and Symphony gave me an elaborate analysis of their relative speeds, the length of each track, and the cost-effectiveness of each route. When we got stuck behind a slow train on one track, she showed me a place where I could add a fork in the track to let conductors go around slower trains. We tried it, and it didn’t cause any problems. Everyone cheered for us when we got back to the train station and announced that Symphony was ready to take control of the system. Everyone except this guy in a wheelchair.

Destroying the Crazy Sheet

I was sitting at a desk in the middle of Ragnarok’s toy factory in Lutie. Some kind of mathematics textbook was on the desk in front of me, but it kept changing into an English textbook. I was frustrated by both, and I couldn’t get any homework done with the text changing so frequently. I slammed the book down on the table and started swearing at the top of my lungs. Nicole watched me from a distance, but she didn’t come near me. I heard my mom call my name and knew I was going to be in trouble.

The dream jumped. I walked into an English classroom with four students. The teacher asked us all to turn to a short story which I thought was on page 261. It was actually on page 66, as the teacher pointed out for the guy sitting next to me. I wondered if I had been using the wrong book before… I still felt like I was in the wrong class.

The dream jumped. I was walking around the toy factory, but it was covered in blood, and there were corpses everywhere. I found Ben and Nicole standing together in the corner of the factory. Nicole had a finely-woven white blanket with blue strings coming off the edges. I remembered seeing it before; this was a blanket which caused anyone who touched it to lose their mind. Nicole was already dancing around like a ballerina, so it was clear that it still had its power even though it looked much nicer than before. I asked Ben if we ever tested it to see if we were immune to it since we had already been infected once. He said he thought so, but he wasn’t sure. Ben and Nicole approached me… I realized they were both under the influence of the blanket and wanted to take me, too. If I allowed them to do that, no one would be able to save them. I ran from Nicole until I was trapped in a pit. The dreamscape contained my grandparents’ tiny house; I was stuck just outside the back door. Desperately, I pulled out the Ocarina of Time and tried to play the Song of Healing, but I couldn’t remember the notes. I accidentally played the Song of Time. The text box that appeared showed me a picture of the swindling rancher guy. I realized I was supposed to do some kind of mini-quest before confronting Nicole to figure out how to stop her. I went back in time four days (instead of the usual three in Majora’s Mask) and found myself in Clock Town.

I went straight to the eastern district and found the rancher guy and his twin brother. One of them asked me to win the shooting gallery game twice and bring back sixty rupees as proof. I remembered doing this before at some point. The other guy asked me to pick up his rooster; he had left it sitting on Loupe’s bed at the inn. I didn’t know anyone named Loupe, but I figured I would be able to recognize the rooster pretty easily. I went upstairs and snuck into the inn before it officially opened. The rooster was on one of the beds assigned to the circus troupe. With that in my inventory, I went back outside. I only had five rupees, so I couldn’t play the shooting gallery game. I saw the banker guy, but I thought he was just a beggar, so when Nicole walked over to ask him for money, I just ignored them both. I went into the shooting gallery and sold the guy a pencil I found in my pocket. He paid me twelve rupees for it. Nicole gave me twenty more. After paying for the game, I readied a mechanical pencil like a sniper and aimed behind the counter. A bunch of balloons appeared, and I fired at them by pressing the eraser in. The physics was really accurate, and it messed me up. I missed a few balloons early on. Nicole started talking about how I had lost my talent. Despite all the missed balloons, I still got most of them. I received 120 rupees as my reward for winning – four times what I needed to pay the circus guy.

Danger of Failing, Misplaced Lab Grades

I was sitting in a level auditorium for systems programming. It was our final lecture before the final exam, so Saelee gave us a quick rundown of grade statistics. There were two people in danger of failing. To my surprise, I was one of them. I figured I was at least in the top 50% of the class, if not much better than that. He said that my lab grades were horrible, and I would need to see him after class about it. People asked me about it in whispers all through class, and I just kept telling them I had no idea. After all, he hadn’t posted our lab grades all semester. How was I supposed to know I was doing poorly? After class ended, I forgot about talking to him and left. I walked back a few minutes later and sat down in his office. There was one other person talking to him, so I had to wait a bit…

“So does this mean I’m going to fail if I don’t do well on the last lab?” I asked once the student left.

“Pretty much,” Saelee agreed. “You’re actually doing alright, but a couple of your lab grades were really low.” I withheld the urge to chew him out about never posting my grades. It had been bothering me the entire term. I pointed it out to him, though, and he seemed surprised… He said he had already posted all of our lab grades. I got on a desktop computer in his office to check Blackboard while explaining to him that I had just checked it the previous night. Sure enough, when I went to my grades for the class, nothing had changed. His eyes went wide. He had apparently posted our grades weeks ago…

“That’s not really fair, is it? I can only assume I’m doing well if I’m not getting back bad grades…”

“I guess you’re right. I’ll try to figure out what’s wrong and shoot you an email. Just get started on the malloc lab.” I logged off the computer and gathered my stuff to head home.

I Forgot My Dream Journal

I had a hard time convincing myself to get out of bed and write down my dreams this morning… I kept dozing off and writing them down in various places – for example, on a sticky note on Nicole’s desk, since that was the only paper within reach. Dream-Nicole seemed to think that was an awesome idea. I remember having my laptop in bed at one point, too, but then I realized that wouldn’t actually preserve the dreams. If it hadn’t been such shallow sleep, that could’ve been a lucid dream! More importantly, if I hadn’t forgotten to set my dream journal out by the bed, I could’ve just written them down normally.

November 29, 2010

Nostalgia at Crescent Isle

In this dream, I was a woman. I stood on a cobblestone pier overlooking what seemed to be the empty bay of Crescent Isle. In actuality, there was an invisible base hovering over the water. I was a retired singer. Our band made enough money in a couple of years to sustain ourselves for the rest of our lives, and once the others realized this, they all quit. I missed those days, kind of… But I had moved on.

A kid walked up to me, and I realized it was Noscirm. He wanted me to take him to the invisible base. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. The base’s very existence was illegal since we didn’t have the necessary permits when we built it. I couldn’t just admit it was there. He offered me a fortune, though, and I was unable to resist… Noscirm said he would pay any amount of money to get the band back together. We were his favorite band of all time. For some reason, I felt like the invisible coating on the outside of the base was just glass. That explained why I could see through it, but it didn’t explain why the floating base was invisible.

Typical Behavior

This dream has been omitted.

Running Low

I was working at some kind of convenience store. We were running low on something, so I called a coworker on a land line to ask if we had any more in stock.

Stolen Cowboy Belt

I was standing at the foot of Nicole’s bed. As I put my brown belt on, I realized it never really belonged to me. It had been stolen from a cowboy. The belt buckle was huge and made of solid gold. It also had stars sewn into the leather. I decided not to wear it.

November 30, 2010

More mediocre recall. I blame academic stress.

Creepers, Nasty Water, and Greece

This dream was Minecraft-related. I was building a tower in a remote valley, but there were creepers everywhere – hundreds of them. Strangely enough, they didn’t blow up… They just sort of bumped into me, taking away half a heart per bump, until I finally died on a thin patch of sand. All of my stuff went tumbling to the ground. Fortunately, the spawn point was just a few feet away for some reason, so I got my stuff back almost immediately. The creepers were all gone when I respawned.

Someone else in the world asked me to help them collect water in buckets so they could dump it on people. I met up with Nicole and tried to put some water in a pail, but a mouse jumped into the cup, rendering the water useless. I poured it out and tried again. We decided to get our water from a tap instead of from the usual Minecraftian water sources. When I set the pail under the faucet and turned it on, however, brownish-black liquid oozed out of it. I poured this out, too, and let the tap run until it was clean. When I tried a third time, ketchup came out instead of water. I grabbed some paper towels from somewhere and tried to clean it off my hands, but it stuck to my body like glue. Nicole didn’t seem to understand what I was doing. She took the pail – now about the size of a drinking glass – and easily filled it up with water. We followed the guy we were helping up to a balcony in Greece. We were definitely no longer playing Minecraft… The scenery was well-defined and realistic. I also understood that we had traveled backward in time to the fifteenth century. I reasoned that most people probably didn’t speak English. I suggested to Nicole that if we spoke really slowly, they might understand since they all knew Latin. Our guide explained that Spanish had become a popular language in Greece recently. Unfortunately, neither of us could speak Spanish.

Virtual Minecraft, Kids, and Reconstruction

It’s weird how I don’t have Minecraft dreams when I’m playing the game a lot during the day, but as soon as I go a day without playing, it’s all I dream about…

I was on my Minecraft server. The level of detail was ridiculous by Minecraft’s standards… It was as though I was really in the world. Our home had been rearranged, and it had a basement, too. The walls had a cloth stripe in the middle for some strange reason. The server was open to the public, so a couple players were able to log in. Although most of them took a look around, all but one of the first visitors logged off within a few minutes. That player converted our basement door into a bead curtain using a bunch of really tiny blocks. She ran out of blocks halfway through, though. Symphony logged in and helped me finish the bead curtain.

A bunch of kids logged in. Their avatars were shorter than most, indicating their approximate ages. I received a message from Bethany that said Ben was letting the kids at the daycare play on my server. I decided I would be nice to them so Ben wouldn’t get in any trouble. One kid spent a lot of time mining and storing resources in our house. When I asked what he was doing, he said he wanted to build a tower. I asked if he wanted to see ours. He nodded with excitement. We walked outside, and I pointed out a huge stone tower on a hill nearby. It was pretty simple… Just a huge series of adjacent columns with a square base. There were glass windows evenly spaced on the front face. The tower stretched past the clouds. Because of the level of realism, the clouds were too thick to see through, so we really couldn’t see the top of the tower. The kid standing beside me was amazed.

My dad and Opi were busy adding onto the tower. They had some makeshift scaffolding set up, and they were doubling the length of the foundation. As I pointed this out to the kid, about 75% of the tower just… vanished. I waited a few seconds to see if my client was just glitching out, but then they built a dome in place of the tower. I walked over to them in disbelief. It was obvious to me that they had somehow gotten rid of the tower to build the dome.

“Is the world not big enough for you?” I asked my dad.

“Huh?” he replied, halting his work.

“Where’s my tower?”

“It’s always been like this,” Opi insisted. They went back to work, so I gave up and walked back to my house. The kid criticized it because the walls weren’t all made of the same materials. I really started to wonder about that cloth layer… It started to rain, so we went inside, but I made him take off his wet socks first. I didn’t want him flooding my house. He decided to put the socks with all the stone he mined. I wondered when his mom would be back.

Room with Mummies

I was in a small room full of short mummies. They were all about three or four feet tall. The mummies were crying because they were afraid that I would leave the room. If I left, I would never return. I stood still as they latched onto my legs, then my torso… They started wrapping me up at the ankles.

December 2, 2010

Inviting Austin into Shared Dreaming

I found myself in the commons with a plate of food. As I sat down at a circular table, Kyle Teachman and a girl I didn’t recognize took seats next to mine. They were very friendly, but they wanted to talk for several minutes after I finished eating, and by the time I left, I felt that I had wasted a lot of time. Outside the cafeteria, I saw a group of girls sitting on the floor of the MTCC. One of them called out my name as I walked by. When I turned, I faintly recognized her…

“Hey… You’re not in any of my classes this semester, are you?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. I was relieved that I wasn’t going to come across as unobservant again. She asked something about a class I hadn’t taken before, and I told her I wasn’t sure how to help. I walked away thinking I had wasted even more time. For that matter, Nicole was probably starting to wonder where I was.

The dream jumped, and I was standing below a weird treehouse structure that was supposed to be my dorm building. Austin was standing behind me. I grabbed a couple of rubber cords and pulled them down to increase their tension. With the added force, I was able to launch myself up into the treehouse. I was surprised; I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it. I made several pathetic attempts to pull myself up into a sitting position, but it seemed like gravity was working against me… I told Austin to come up, too.

The dream jumped. I was standing by a series of tennis courts. Sue Sylvester taught a gym class how to play tennis. Austin was one of her students. They kept hitting the ball out of the court, so Sue called everyone to attention and asked me to help her demonstrate the boundaries of the court. We went over to these tiny tennis courts drawn off to the side, and she gave me half of a tennis ball. I dropped it weakly on the ground, and it bounced once in the tiny court before rolling off in a spiral. She criticized my lackluster attempt at instructing the students and gave me another to try again. I only noticed then that she had given me half of a tennis ball… I picked up the other half instead and fit them together in wonder.

The dream jumped. I was in my bedroom from my parents’ original house in Texas. Austin was there, too, and I was explaining to him that I had a shared dream with him the previous night. As I told him bits and pieces of the dream, he stared at me in wonder. He filled in details I skipped over. By the end of it all, he was convinced in shared dreaming and went off to tell everyone.

Majora's Mask II

Nicole and I were replaying Majora’s Mask. It seems like it was a sequel to the original game, though. After separating Majora’s Mask from the Skull Kid, we watched the mask split into four pieces and scatter throughout the world. I thought that was more annoying than interesting… It meant we were probably going to have to go through four more dungeons.

The dream jumped. Link was walking around inside my old high school. Apparently, one of the mask fragments had flown there. As I guided Link through the halls, purple and black orbs appeared in the air, followed by a pinkish-purple mist. Aura (.hack) emerged from the mist. Nicole asked how I got her to appear… I explained that it was just supposed to happen when you reached a certain position. Aura told me to follow her. If I failed to keep up with her, she would lock me inside the school forever. A bunch of heartless appeared between Link and Aura. I had to fight my way through them to keep her within my sight. I lost her for a while, but as I was running down an empty hall, I spotted her standing behind a closing door. I rolled into the room just in time. Aura smiled and offered me her hand.

The dream jumped. I had given up on the game because I felt that the Skull Kid was the worst character Nintendo ever designed. I let Nicole keep playing while I went to sleep.

Elita and Symphony's Great Adventure

I checked Mangastream for new manga releases. None of the stuff I usually follow was out, but I noticed a manga I hadn’t seen before titled “Elita and Symphony’s Great Adventure.” The third chapter had just been released. When I clicked on the link to the chapter, I saw Symphony sitting in the corner of her bedroom at Whitecrow Manor. It was up-to-date with Agharta’s storyline. I saw that there were two more chapters, each several hundred pages. I decided I would read through them later and see if they were as good as the original story.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

December 2, 2010

Majora's Mask II

Nicole and I were replaying Majora’s Mask. It seems like it was a sequel to the original game, though. After separating Majora’s Mask from the Skull Kid, we watched the mask split into four pieces and scatter throughout the world. I thought that was more annoying than interesting… It meant we were probably going to have to go through four more dungeons.

The dream jumped. Link was walking around inside my old high school. Apparently, one of the mask fragments had flown there. As I guided Link through the halls, purple and black orbs appeared in the air, followed by a pinkish-purple mist. Aura (.hack) emerged from the mist. Nicole asked how I got her to appear… I explained that it was just supposed to happen when you reached a certain position. Aura told me to follow her. If I failed to keep up with her, she would lock me inside the school forever. A bunch of heartless appeared between Link and Aura. I had to fight my way through them to keep her within my sight. I lost her for a while, but as I was running down an empty hall, I spotted her standing behind a closing door. I rolled into the room just in time. Aura smiled and offered me her hand.

The dream jumped. I had given up on the game because I felt that the Skull Kid was the worst character Nintendo ever designed. I let Nicole keep playing while I went to sleep.

I WISH they made a direct sequel to Majoras Mask. OoT and MM are by far the best games ever created

Originally Posted by AndresLD

I WISH they made a direct sequel to Majoras Mask. OoT and MM are by far the best games ever created

I basically agree. Majora's Mask, in particular, doesn't get the praise it deserves.

It's taken me a while to get around to this... Mainly because I'm in the middle of finals week. I may not have time for the next couple of days, but I'll catch up again this weekend.

December 3, 2010

Curse of Crowns

In this dream, Luffy went to a kingdom on a desert isle. The kingdom had a tradition in which the crowns of past kings were basically worshipped (despite the fact that said kings were all horrible dictators). There was this daily ritual where the current king would stand on an altar with all of the crowns and pray for the continued livelihood of the kingdom. Failure to uphold this ritual would bring about a cataclysmic curse. Luffy’s crew gained a reputation among the king’s servants as being powerful and dedicated to justice. As soon as Luffy learned that the old kings’ crowns were being honored, he burst into the throne room during the prayer ritual. The king was but a child, and his crown was dotted with tiny emeralds. Luffy swung his arm across the altar, swiping all of the former kings’ crowns off the altar. The prayer ceremony had been violated, and the king’s slaves gasped in horror at the realization that they would be cursed. Meanwhile, an old servant hiding in the throne room asked Nami why he hadn’t heard more about the rest of the crew. Sure, Luffy got a lot of publicity, but the others were rarely in the news. Nami admitted that Luffy was the only one who really went out of his way to challenge authority. The servant introduced himself as Crowley. He encouraged Nami to be more like Luffy. She put on one of the crowns and approached the altar. Her expression was similar to one of Luffy’s pseudo-serious looks. It seemed like it had been copied from a drawing of Luffy and pasted on her face. I showed most of this stuff to Nicole in manga form. We discussed Nami’s boobs and how much smaller they had gotten after the time skip.

Andrea's After Josh

I was sitting on the roof of a train going through a winding cavern. There were track junctions everywhere. I noticed one set of tracks was really narrow and assumed maintenance crews used it. The train nearly collided with another one sharing the same track, but it zoomed by just in time. I thought about how skilled the people running the track system must have been… Then I realized it was probably automated, and I was even more impressed. I kept worrying my backpack would fall off the train. I didn’t want to go back in the train car, though. We ran off the track into a sand bank. The conductor gave the train a speed boost, and it zoomed up the bank onto another set of tracks – without me, of course. I fell off the back into the sand… So I followed it on foot to a train station. Andrea and her mom got off the train. I understood that I was going somewhere with them. We walked outside, and the dream jumped.

I was walking ahead of Andrea and her mom on a paved road somewhere in the Rockies. The side of the road we were on had a ton of tree branches in the way, most of which I was able to duck under without much trouble. I heard Andrea’s mom making fun of me for it, but I ignored her. Andrea didn’t think I could hear them. She started talking about finding a new boyfriend. She admitted that “Josh” was the best choice, but she felt weird about it. I saw a car approaching us on the horizon. As it got closer, Andrea’s mom told me to move to the other side of the road. Again, I ignored her… The car was on the opposite side of the road. Regardless, no one with any respect for their car would drive through the thicket growing on our side of the road. Her mom called me a potato head for not listening. Andrea called my name, and when I glanced back, she pointed insistently to her left – the other side of the road. I shook my head and kept walking. The car drove by without a problem, and when Andrea caught up with me, she explained what I already knew the gesture meant.

That Episode of Futurama Where...

I found myself in a hotel. An employee behind me put his hand on my shoulder and asked if I would come with him; I needed to sign a couple of forms to complete the checkout procedure. He took me into a lounge with marble floors and a scent of fresh coffee in the air. A stack of papers was waiting on a small, circular table along the wall, just past a massive window. He flipped through the pages silently and pulled one out.

“Are you the Mr. Phillip J. Fry of this century? Or should I believe that you have come from one million years in the past?” he asked in that professional butler voice everyone knows. I was going to tell him I wasn’t Phillip J. Fry, but that meant I could only have traveled a million years into the future! I stared at him in disbelief.

“This is just like that episode of Futurama where Fry travels a million years into the future!” I exclaimed, effectively repeating my thoughts. I tried to remember the episode I was talking about, but I couldn’t. I saw flying saucers descend fromt he night sky through the window. Terrified, I ducked so the aliens piloting the saucer wouldn’t see me. More appeared as I dropped to the ground, and I saw several flashes of blue light. A beam of light shot through the window, vaporizing the hotel employee. My mom walked into the room and was also vaporized. I knew what they were doing… The extraterrestrials had detected an anomaly in the fabric of space-time. They were after said anomaly – after me! The saucers moved on without anyone spotting me, so I crept into the kitchen to hide. It was the kitchen from my parents’ old house in Texas. Austin was hiding beneath the kitchen table, so I explained what was going on.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s like that episode of Futurama where…”

“I know.”

“Doesn’t Fry get killed in that one?” Hearing this, I realized he was right. I felt death like one feels a change in a room’s atmosphere. The aliens were closing in on my position.

My, that was repetitive.

Sapling Macro

This was a Minecraft-based dream. Ben was planting a ton of trees along the shore of our shared world. I suggested a shortcut method involving dirt and sticks, but it didn’t work. I wasn’t sure why it didn’t… Nicole tried to figure out why, but I realized immediately – Ben’s client was missing a plugin required for that to work. I didn’t realize how little sense that made at the time.

* * *

December 4, 2010

Spinning the Refrigerator

Nicole’s dad was standing in the garage. The refrigerator had been moved into the half of the garage where we park the convertible and jeep. He spun the refrigerator around on wheels it shouldn’t have had so it wouldn’t be left open anymore. I guess he figured that if he pushed the door against the wall, it wouldn’t pop open. He tried to tell Nicole’s brother Eric to keep the refrigerator the way it was, but he wasn’t anywhere in earshot. In fact, he was all the way in the living room. He heard somehow and yelled back “I know!” loud enough for his dad to hear all the way in the garage. Nicole’s dad went into the house and spoke to Eric through vents in the wall. He asked Eric to come see the refrigerator, and Eric said he needed ten more minutes. I saw him playing video games.

Belphegor: God of War

I was at my Omi’s house in Colorado. Austin and I were in the computer room. I told him that my dream characters were real, and under the right conditions, they could appear in the waking world. He didn’t believe me. Nicole appeared on top of a bed. She had her blue exercise ball. I climbed onto her back, throwing her off balance. The exercise ball almost fell off the bed. I knew that was the most important condition in making my dream characters real. If I could knock the ball off the bed, some of my characters would blur into waking life. Nicole said something about Star Wars and got mad because I still hadn’t seen it. I accidentally fell off the bed, bringing the ball with me. The room had transformed into Austin’s bedroom from my parents’ old house in North Carolina. The door opened, and a bunch of tiny robot figurines marched in. I wondered if Symphony would show up. Instead, a woman calling herself the God of War entered my body. I understood that she had silvery-gray skin and pointed ears like a dark elf, extremely long, black hair, and dressed like Cleopatra. Nicole and Austin couldn’t see her, but they could hear her voice. Though she used my body to speak, her voice was nothing like my own.

She thanked us for uncovering her tomb. I saw a cavern on Minecraft with an Egyptian sarcophagus inside. We hadn’t gone into to investigate it. I also saw a bunch of screens around our house on Minecraft depicting our greatest projects. One was a replica of Mt. Rushmore, but one of the chunks in the middle hadn’t loaded properly, so it looked stupid. I complained when Austin asked me about it. The so-called God of War began writing with my hand on the wall. It was a letter of thanksgiving to all who helped revive her. The words glowed golden as they appeared. She went to sign it as Belphegor, but I had forgotten to write an upper-case B in cursive somehow, so she couldn’t do it. She just erased it and wrote: “Be careful, or you’ll die.” This was in print. I regained control of my body and went into the hall to use the bathroom. We were clearly back in my Omi’s house. The light was off inside the bathroom until I opened the door. My brother was sitting on the toilet while wearing an extra large diaper. He screamed at me, and I closed the door.

“He’s been in there an hour and a half!” I grumbled to myself on my way downstairs. Omi suggested using another bathroom. There was one attached to the living room that shouldn’t have been there, but someone was using it. With my dad’s permission, I went into the basement to use my parents’ bathroom. I decided I would take a shower, too. On my way to the bathroom, I saw a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza in a tub of grease. The grease was about two inches deep. I picked it up and took a bite, but the grease oozed all over my hand. Disgusted, I put it back and walked away from the table.

Signals to the South Pole

I was in a small classroom. Eric Andoe asked if I had finished my malloc lab yet. I told him it was almost done (a total lie). He asked how I handled the part requiring us to send a signal to the South Pole. He showed me this long chunk of code on the whiteboard. After glossing over it for a bit, I got up to write my own on the board next to it. I tried several markers, but all of them failed me… Amar told me to use a yellow marker, so I found one and tried that instead. It worked… Amazingly, everyone could still read the yellow writing even though I could hardly read it from a foot away. I remember performing the signal handling through command line arguments somehow. It was one line of code. Eric asked how I ever figured it out, and I explained that it was in the signal API. He spent several minutes looking through it, but he never found the code. A blond woman came into the classroom, looked at Eric’s code, and announced that it was incorrect. She erased it. Without paying my attempt any mind, she told everyone that Saelee was dead, so she was going to replace him. We all ignored her. A girl next to Eric offered him a flash drive with the complete malloc lab code. He made a big deal out of explaining (sarcastically) that he was just going to use it for reference. Everyone knew he would just copy it.

Job at Hot Topic

I was at a shopping mall. I walked up to a store, and Sara Koch was sitting outside. It was still really early in the morning, so the store was closed. She opened it and took me to the employee lounge at the back. RJ and two other guys were there. Sara was the manager. SHe told me I could have a job at Hot Topic without even applying. I didn’t want to work there, but I figured I could use the money… I wasn’t doing anything important at the time, anyway, so I accepted the offer. I asked what I needed to do. They seemed really surprised… Sara told me to just walk around and talk to the customers. RJ was totally useless; he just sat by the front of the store while the rest of us worked. A couple of kids tried to steal some figurines, but I chased them out of the store and performed a super manly takedown to recover the stolen merchanidise. The kids got away, but I didn’t mind. Later, one of the kids came back wearing a striped shirt (he thought this was a good enough disguise) to steal the same figurines. I caught him again, of course. This time, I warned him that if he came back to the store, I would just kick him out. I thought about getting the cops involved, but as a mall cop rolled by on a scooter, I realized they wouldn’t be any help… I went back into the store. Sara gave me a pay raise for stopping the thieves.

* * *

December 5, 2010

Elita the Spy

In this dream, Elita was a spy. She snuck into a Schwarzwald government facility alone. I understood that Agharta-Symphony had been captured by Tribium Industries. Elita stealthily moved from camera to camera, disabling them with some kind of pulse-emitter device. Once she made it through the main line of surveillance, she sprinted toward Symphony’s holding cell.

Thirty Percent in Age of Darwin

I was in Schmaus’ class. I received a bunch of terrible grades for really short papers… I had written about fifty words for each – basically just my opinion on each topic – because I had other things to work on and felt I could blow off the assignments. I even got a 30% on one of them. Brenna wrote at the top: “What happened?!?” On the other hand, I found the grade report sheets for my in-class presentation and research paper. The presentation received a perfect score as I already knew, and I got a 99% on my research paper (even though I hadn’t written it yet). I found a pack of raisins stapled to the paper grade report. Brenna had awarded me one raisin for each time I used the letter “i” in my paper.

Backward in Time

This dream has been omitted.

Will: Time Traveler

In this dream, Glee had become a science fiction series. Will had the power to bend time. He went back in time to stop Kurt from commiting suicide. Kurt kept getting depressed because of Will being replaced by a substitute teacher, his best friend refusing to get ice cream with him, and paranoia that someone was watching him. The classroom was my seventh grade geography classroom from Castle Rock Middle School.

Will’s first attempt was disastrous. He accidentally warped to the incorrect time and arrived in the classroom after Kurt had left to kill himself. It was too late to do anything.

His second try was a little better. Will came in to talk to the substitute, thinking that his presence would cheer Kurt up a bit. Kurt asked his friend if she wanted to get ice cream. When he tried to show her a picture of some on the front of a magazine, she just scowled at him and said she didn’t like ice cream. He ran out of the room and shot himself.

On the third try, Will put on a nun’s robes to impersonate the substitute. Everyone could tell it was really him. The real substitute stormed into the room and attacked Will. In the middle of the fight, future Will and a substitute from another timeline broke through a window. They called everyone to attention. The students were so shocked that Kurt’s friend asked him if he wanted to get ice cream instead of the other way around. I understood that she just wanted to get out of the school, but it didn’t make any difference to Kurt. He took the magazine from the girl as she held it out. Instead of responding to the mention of six scoops of ice cream at the bottom of the magazine cover, he noticed a reference to an article by Will Schuster dated 1939. It was about the founding of their town. Realizing Will wasn’t that old, he decided to unravel the mystery and chose against killing himself.

Nicole and I stopped watching TV when the episode ended. We were in a cabin built by Symphony (see Backward in Time). We left the cabin, and somehow we were at IIT. It was snowing heavily… When we tried to cross 33rd Street, I almost slipped on a patch of ice. I could see some headlights through the snow.

Secret Revealed and Political Comedy

This dream has been omitted.

* * *

October 6, 2010

Of Cancer and MRIs

I woke up in Nicole’s bed. After a few moments, I realized my phone’s alarm hadn’t woken me up. Nicole’s had. I checked the clock, and dread washed over me. It was 7:25 AM; I was going to miss my bus! I jumped out of bed and started gathering my things. Nicole asked what was going on, and I told her to check the clock. I couldn’t find my coat… For some reason, it was on the dining room table. I only found it after giving up and deciding I would just leave without it. I ran from Nicole’s house to the bus stop. Pockets was sitting in the grass. It didn’t seem strange at the time, but there was no snow.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked. I wondered if the doctors had made any progress with his cancer.

“I’m alright,” he answered. There was an awkward silence after that, and I realized I didn’t have anything to say to him… I saw a bus pulling out of someone’s garage, then another one coming down the street with a giant, cylindrical tube sticking out of the front. The bus stopped, and a medical team unloaded the tube. I realized it was an MRI covered in gauze. They loaded it onto an ambulance and drove away. The bus picked me up as soon as the ambulance drove off.

Pretending to Sleep for Hours

In this dream, I found myself in Nicole’s bed… Again. I thought I was awake and couldn’t get back to sleep. Nicole woke up and asked what time it was, but I wouldn’t check because I figured I would only have half an hour left to sleep. It felt as though I would sleep better if I thought I was getting several hours of rest. I hugged Nicole and tried again to return to sleep.

Dangling a Watch

I was sitting in my usual chair at Nicole’s desk, dangling a watch from my right hand. I wondered if I was dreaming, but it felt like I had fallen asleep too fast… I decided the dreamlike feeling was probably just my imagination.

* * *

December 7, 2010

Minecraft Ghost and Grand Theft Minecart

Austin showed me some videos of a haunted Minecraft server on YouTube. The ghost was prone to locking people and animals in tiny boxes only visible from the inside, repainting walls green or red, and making weird noises. The boxes were the biggest problem… As soon as the animal inside it tried to move, Minecraft’s physics parameters were updated, causing them to be instantly crushed inside the box. It reminded me of Kaitou Sai’s boxes. The videos turned into one of those TV ghost stories… The single mom living in the Minecraft mansion was producing the videos to advertise her house. She was making a lot of money, apparently, but I felt it was obviously fake. I went into Austin’s room while he slept and painted his ceiling green. The paint kept pooling together and dripping, but I didn’t let any of it fall on the carpet. When Austin woke up, he thought the ghost had done it.

The dream jumped. I was on our old creative map from this past summer (just the main map). A lot of stuff got messed up in the process of transferring it to the survival server. My obsidian towers, for example, had been turned into a weird assortment of cloth. I was stuck on top of one of those without a way down. Surprisingly, as I slipped off the tower, I fell through the clouds and landed without any damage. The clouds had been lowered to a few meters above the ground. Chelsea and Austin gave me weird looks… They hadn’t realized I was up there. My mom called everyone downstairs for dinner. I was the last one to log off Minecraft. We had meatloaf burgers (they fell apart quite easily), french fries, and steamed vegetables. All of the utensils were too small, so it took a while to prepare my plate. Austin got mad at me for getting seconds…

The dream jumped. Austin was playing a modded version of Minecraft. It was a total conversion mod in the style of Grand Theft Auto, complete with helicopters, those criminal stars, and guns. He crashed a motorcycle into a fence. Incredibly, the fence was undamaged, but Austin slammed into it with sufficient force to take away half of his hearts. He somehow evaded the police, but after all was said and done, he only had one heart remaining. I was about to tell him to switch to peaceful mode to heal, but he fell off a small cliff and died. All of his diamond equipment went flying out radially. He spawned atop a nearby mountain, which he basically jumped right off of… He died again, obviously. The next time he spawned, he carefully worked his way down. I didn’t think his stuff would still be there.

Nonsense and Blood in Paint Chat

I was drawing nonsense on someone’s paint chat while Nicole and Ben talked. I drew myself as a shoe and started singing about it. After that, I covered everything in red and wrote that I was bleeding all over them on the drawing board. Nicole started to worry for my health.

Nicole's Foster Father

Nicole’s mom was dead, and her dad was gone. She had a foster father who was pretty similar to her dad, but it was clear that he couldn’t fill Phil’s shoes. He set out to replace the fences and deck (which extended not only to Nicole’s front yard, but to the yard in front of the apartment complex to the south of their house as well), but then he had me pay for all of the materials… We ran out of wood before long because I couldn’t afford much, and so he decided to use whatever he could find to finish the makeshift fence. He saw that I was holding a playing card.

“Is that an ace?”

“No,” I answered.

“Good. Give it here.” I hesitantly handed it over, and he used it to bind two misshapen blocks of wood together somehow. He asked for the rest of the deck, but I just walked back into the house. I went downstairs to wait for Nicole. She came down a few minutes later, and we talked about her foster dad. He treated her more like a maid than a foster daughter. Whenever he wanted anything, he would call her with a bird whistle and expect her to come running. She couldn’t listen to music or watch TV because she wouldn’t be able to hear the bird whistle. She couldn’t even talk to me for long before he summoned her to pour him a glass of lemonade. Nicole ran up the stairs as fast as she could, but it wasn’t fast enough. I tried to tune out his yelling by playing some kind of game in the basement. At this point, I became really dizzy… I saw Nicole and her foster dad carrying something toward the top of the stairs. He let it slide down, and it would’ve made a huge dent in the wall if I hadn’t caught it. I thought he would yell at me for endangering my hand… If it had been a little heavier, I would’ve broken some bones. Instead, he yelled for me to hurry up and carry it where it belonged. He added that if I scuffed the floor, he would throw me out. I told him I was trying to avoid damage to the house from the very start.

I thought I was carrying the couch that goes in the basement (I couldn’t see well), so I brought it over there… But then I realized it was a cushion – filled with rocks or something, I guess – for that couch. I started putting it on the couch, but the foster dad shouted that it was supposed to go in the junk pile. Confused, I looked up at them. He was selling all of Phil’s stuff. I felt like that was a bit harsh. After all, Nicole probably wanted to keep her dad’s memory alive, and…

I realized he wasn’t even dead.

“Nicole, where is your dad?” Neither of them answered.

December 8, 2010

Saelee's Search

I was some guy who lived alone in my parents’ old house in North Carolina. Someone was hiding in his house, and he searched for thirty minutes without finding the intruder. He realized this was because he had checked the best hiding places first; the guy was just hiding in the bathroom. To help people like this guy, Saelee had us design a searching algorithm that would determine the quality of each possible hiding place and search for intruders in order. It was designed to throw a random assortment of good hiding spots into the poor hiding spot portion of the search just in case the intruder was good at hiding. I asked my professor what he wanted us to use to do it – just for more structure on the assignment, really – but he insisted that he would be ruining the assignment if he helped us with it.

Cats Come from Meat

This dream has been omitted.

Symbol of Ingenuity and Teamwork

I went to a famous theme park resort with Lyra, Axis, a Chinese guy, and his girlfriend. Lyra was in human form. Ivanov appeared, except he was ten years older and looked like he was wasting away. He pointed out a red symbol painted on the ground in front of a water slide. This, as we were asked to recall, symbolized the ingenuity of engineers and their unparalleled teamwork. He told us to take a picture there together to commemorate the occasion. After that, he hopped on the slide in his suit, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was getting it soaked. He waved goodbye to us on his way down. All of us laughed. It was refreshing to see someone his age with so much energy. We all sat down on a stone bench by the red symbol, but Axis quickly observed that we couldn’t get a good picture like that… Someone would have to stand up and take the photo. They agreed that I should set the camera to take a picture after thirty seconds and set it up somewhere. I spent a lot of time trying to set it at the right angle… I didn’t have a tripod, so that made my job a bit of a pain. It kept falling over. The pictures I managed to take were blurry or cut people out. In the end, we decided to take two pictures and have Justin edit me in with photoshop.

The dream jumped. We were getting food at Chick-fil-A. The Chinese guy was driving. They gave us our food without asking for money, so he started to slowly drive away, thinking we would get a free meal. The manager followed us, though, so he stopped and paid. Nicole didn’t understand why he thought he was going to leave without paying. I tried to explain his reasoning to her, but it was pointless.

Rachel's Clones Defy Death

I was watching Glee with Nicole. Kurt was chasing after someone in the street while it snowed, but then he got hit by a truck and died. Rachel made thirty clones each of herself, Peter Griffin, and some random guy. She took them to a huge computer lab and instructed them to learn how to resurrect Kurt. Since they didn’t have to eat or sleep, they were able to work much more efficiently than normal humans. By the time Rachel returned to the lab, they had already solved the problem. Kurt was astonished at his own revival. He stabbed Rachel in the heart, killing her. He had the clones revive her just so he could see how to do it! This time, though, some drugs Rachel had administered to the clones began to wear off… The original Peter Griffin clone escaped. Kurt had to take his place. The clones were like robots; Kurt stood no chance of acting as a substitute for one.

Thousand Foot Tall Rats with Acrophobia

I was in bed with Nicole in my room from the North Carolina house. We were watching a special on TV about Australian wildlife. The narrator explained that Australia was known for its disproportionately large animal life with respect to the continent’s small size. On the other hand, some animals – like a rat he described – were really tiny. The rat lived primarily in the mountains, so it thought it was several thousand feet tall. As a result of its innate fear of heights, the rat was prone to rolling and crawling around on its side instead of standing on all fours. Nicole pointed out that it was like the mouse we found one morning that kept rolling in circles. The show went to a trivia question which asked whether Australia was a top destination for vacations or honeymoons. A woman held the question on a cue card. When the narrator was done reading, she shrugged and scratched her head. Nicole and I found one of those Australian rats in my bed during the commercial break. It gradually became interested in leaving the room, so we let it. I wondered what would happen if we introduced it into the American rat population… It came back into the room a few times, but it always went right back outside. I was worried it would jump on my face.

Notch and Skies of Arcadia

Notch posted on tumblr about working for the Skies of Arcadia development team. Allegedly, he had been in charge of the game’s soundtrack. I realized I had been a fan of his work since I was a kid.

Symphony the Retrial

I was in a room by myself, calculating decimal digits of pi. Ben came into the room to ask if I felt like roleplaying. I told him I didn’t, but Nicole started begging for me to roleplay with them… I gave in and logged onto Agharta. Symphony was level 835, but her job was only level one. Her class had been changed to “Retrial.” I told Ben about it as I attempted to earn the levels back. I figured someone had accused me of cheating because I was so far ahead of everyone else, and in order to respond to these accusations, one of the administrators had taken away my job levels. One poring got me to job level 836. I forgot to change jobs before warping to Thor’s Volcano, so I remained a “Retrial,” whatever that was. No matter which outfit I put on Symphony, the sprite remained exactly the same: like a novice. I thought I had taken Sympony’s lolita outfit off, but I still couldn’t get into my skills. I found the outfit in my equipment window – which made no sense, given that those haven’t been equippable for months – so I took it off. I was able to change to “Retrial Archer.” Ben was about to ak Sess about my situation… It really seemed like someone was trying to punish me, but then I found an NPC that gave me some clues.

He offered to make rubber ducks out of obsidian, iron, and gold. There was a warning at the bottom of the NPC’s text box about keeping obsidian in your inventory too long. I decided that was why my character had her job level reset. I made five rubber ducks and scattered the remaining obsidian pellets in the street. I went to a building in eastern Prontera to pick up Nicole. It was supposed to be a school. I found her coat and Chopper bag out on the street corner, though… She was standing by the road, waiting for someone. “Charlie” hadn’t come yet, she explained… I told her she should’ve just gone to school.

Challenging the Level 37 Shadow Lord

I ventured into an abandoned house with Nicole and some other people. We were playing some kind of Kingdom Hearts-based MMORPG. We made our way down to the bottom floor, deep underground… Along the way, we had to fight a number of shadow beings. This girl tried to follow me into the bathroom, so I locked her outside the room. Someone, she became trapped in the bathroom, and I found myself standing outside it… Her brother found out about this and got mad at me. I tried to swim up through the sewer system into the bathroom since no one could get the door open. The pipe connected to the toilet was clearly labeled, and it was large enough for me to fit inside. Like in Minecraft, the physics system was wonky enough that I could float upward in water regardless of the fact that it was pouring down in the other direction. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hold my breath for more than a few seconds in the putrid water, so that wasn’t going to work. I found a stairway under the sewer water. It led to a black door. I hit the door with Apheri, breaking the shell of shadows encasing it. It turned into a glowing, white and gold door. This led to a boss, I assumed… So I asked if anyone needed help getting there and pulled up the map to check their positions. All of the map markers started moving toward me. I figured that girl had gotten out of the bathroom somehow. We all went through the door and found ourselves in a black abyss with nothing but a tower of glowing obsidian blocks. Some of the blocks were labeled with numbers and images of what we called shadow lords. The shadow lords I had defeated previously were glowing with white light. The others were just marked with numbers indicating level suggestions. Most of the blocks were blank. I decided I would go for the one labeled “37.” Nicole warned me that I was the only one above that level (I was level 38, I think, and most of our party was around level 30). The low-level players would die quickly, she said. That didn’t change my mind. I knew I would get a new weapon for going through it.

* * *

December 9, 2010

Bird Cage in the Sky

Nicole and I were playing Minecraft. Up above the clouds, we found a bird in a cage and a treasure chest. They were suspended in the air by a platform made of lightstone, but we couldn’t build anything high enough to reach them, it seemed… Until I found a spot where the platform above us was two blocks tall instead of one! I put some dirt down and made a staircase out of the lightstone platform. The chest was full of spicy foods. When I opened the cage, that crazy bird flew right past me and took a seat on the top of the tower we had built under the platform. It glanced around while Nicole and I examined the cage. I locked her inside as a joke. The bird didn’t think it was very funny… It flew back and flapped around me, dropping feathers left and right. Nicole suggested that it was afraid of me. I just swatted at it as I stepped away from the cage. When I walked away, it calmly flew into its cage… Nicole didn’t seem to bother it.

The dream jumped. Nicole announced that Norway had just been taken over by an army of skeletons. She said it was because their medical care sucked. She also mentioned filling a Ragnarok map with clones of Elita and killing them all for fun.

Waterfall Survival Simulation

Several times in the few hours before I woke up, I found myself in a river. Canyon walls surrounded me, and I was close to a waterfall… I knew I wouldn’t be able to get out of the canyon in time. I was swept over the edge of the waterfall and fell to my death. I appeared back at the top to try again. This repeated itself with little variation. Breaking holes in the canyon walls didn’t help. I finally realized I had a section of ladder on hand. I placed it on the canyon wall and managed to get out of the water. From there, I was able to dig a place to sit out of the wall. I rested there to prepare for the climb out of the canyon.

My Death as a Dirt Bike Racer

I was a dirt bike racer. My goal was to get the fastest time on a certain course in order to save little girls with cancer. I kept crashing on the little hills leading up to the final big one… After I gave up, I found myself being pushed into a wall. I could do nothing but dig a tunnel into the wall to prevent being killed. The material the wall was made up of was like sand… It fell right on top of me, and I barely got out of the way in time to avoid being crushed. I kept digging as I was swept against the wall by a moving perspective camera. In the end, I was crushed against the wall and died.

Babies and Pokemon Stadium

My parents were standing outside my dorm building with a baby. I could see them below my window in the snow. When my mom spotted me looking down at them, she held the baby up toward me. I didn’t feel like I knew them… And anyway, I was on the second floor. What was this woman doing trying to hand me a baby? I couldn’t afford to take it, so I hoped that wasn’t what they wanted. I opened my window just in time to hear my mom defensively shout at someone that she definitely wasn’t trying to abandon her baby. I asked what they wanted. Before I knew it, they were in my room! I was playing Pokemon Stadium (and losing pretty miserably). My dad made fun of me when I accidentally picked Flareon instead of Jolteon to counter a Blastoise. She survived, at least! The match was set up so that two fainted Pokemon on either side would result in a loss. I had already lost one of mine. I managed to knock out the Blastoise with some kind of weird tree Pokemon covered in caked layers of dry mud. The opponent brought out an Electrode, and it self-destructed, so I won the match.

The dream jumped. Nicole was telling me that she wanted seventy-seven children. I said I didn’t even want one yet; she reminded me that it would be difficult to prevent that. I didn’t think so.

* * *

October 10, 2010

Demon Slaying and Imitations of Will and Grace

I was playing one of those unforgiving, mind-numbingly hard games like Demon’s Souls. The monsters were just 3D renders of Tibia’s classic monster sprites. There were demons everywhere by the spawn point, so I retreated to the beach. I killed a few weak monsters and gained some experience. Sometime later, I tried to get into the temple by the spawn point, but that was a terrible idea. I died in one hit when a demon spotted me. I found a dungeon full of gnomes. They agreed to help me find the demons. I also got a ton of tools from their workshop. We marched toward the temple together, and I figured we would capture the building without much trouble… There was some kind of glitch that prevented the gnomes from taking damage if they attacked at a certain angle. I messed it up, though, and the gnomes were all killed. I escaped with my life. I had this weird encounter with a blob monster in a cave… There were sticks strewn about the cavern floor, and I pretended they were alive to fool the blob. It grew as a show of superiority, but I started growing larger, too. I stood over the blob without fear. A medusa and a couple of demons approached, however, and I decided to retreat.

I took Nicole up onto a mountain overlooking the temple. There were too many demons to get down to the entrance safely, but we were able to build a floating platform above it. Someone was playing soccer with the demons down below. A German guy on our platform started cheering. I understood that Germany’s football team was practicing for the World Cup by playing this game. Nicole tried to talk to the German guy in his native language, but when he said something was “fantastich,” she thought he said “franzoesich” and offended him a bit. Nicole played the game by herself for a while after that.

The dream jumped. I was watching TV with Nicole in my great-grandparents’ old kitchen (from when they lived in Louisiana). She wanted to watch every episode of Will and Grace. The show seemed like it was actually something else… A group of old ladies pretending to be robots quoted GLaDoS a couple of times, and Nicole broke out into laughter.

The dream jumped. I was planning to create an online game. After coding a dynamic memory allocator, I was feeling up to any challenge… I quickly realized I would have to start small, though. I asked Nicole for her help. We were lying in bed together, and for some reason, I had soiled my pants! I excused myself to the bathroom and urinated in the tub. I had to turn off the faucet because someone left it running. I figured it had been running for several hours.

* * *

October 11, 2010

Nicole and Sicks

I was at the grocery store with Nicole and her mom. I helped by giving the cashier our coupon for grapes. The total came out to $18.95 or something like that, but I thought it was $95.18. I kept telling her mom to give the guy two dimes, that way she would just get two pennies back. Her mom started getting really angry and told me she couldn’t do it. When I finally understood, she handed me the change to put back in her wallet. I had all three of our wallets in my pockets… For some reason, all of the packaging disappeared. The grapes were no longer attached to the vine, a big pack of jujubes Nicole’s mom had gotten were all outside of the box, and most frustratingly, a ton of gumballs which had been liberated from their package as well were rolling off the counter. The cashier just sort of pushed entire handfuls off the counter, getting 70% or so in a bag we had on the floor. After it was all off the counter, he helped us pick candy off the floor. It didn’t bother me that we were going to eat dirty candy. When that was taken care of, the cashier agreed to help carry our stuff to the car. We walked outside… But no one could remember where we had parked. We checked most of the parking lot before Nicole used some kind of tracking device to determine that we had parked inside an old hotel. They had some sort of parking garage in their basement, it seems.

The dream jumped. I was at Andrea’s house. Nicole was living there with Andrea, some girl from Australia, and Noah Puckerman – except we called him Sicks Puckerman. I should note that Sicks was definitely into Nicole… It was no secret. Instead of a normal door, the entrance to her room was a cat door cut out of the wall. This wasn’t a problem for Nicole since she had turned into a black cat. I could just barely squeeze through. I stopped myself on the way in, though, because the Australian girl was changing. She had her back turned toward us, but she wasn’t wearing any pants. She looked over, saw me, and smiled. Sicks and I talked about how she seemed too young to be so comfortable with getting naked in front of guys. Sicks suggested that she probably just had a good time with some guy in Australia. I asked if he knew how old she was. She didn’t look any older than fifteen. He said that was “free” in Australia. Nicole was taking a while, so Sicks reminded me that he had a doctor’s appointment in a few minutes. Since he didn’t have a car, that meant one of us had to take him. I squeezed through the door and found Nicole sleeping on a square pillow. I gently shook her awake and asked her if she wanted me to take Sicks to the doctor. She got really mad and started hissing at me. When I asked why, she started asking me strange things like why I sometimes hugged her tighter than others. She suggested that I didn’t really think she was pretty. I worried she was just making excuses to try to get with Sicks, so I tried to stop her, but she scratched my face, hissed, and ran off. Every time I came close to her, she just hissed again and kept walking.

Before I could leave, Andrea’s mom came down the stairs and saw me by the door. She asked if I had seen Abigail. I knew she was talking about a really old cat… For some reason, I thought we had taken her with us to the grocery store and forgotten her. I told her I hadn’t seen Abigail lately, so she made me search the room. I had to look through the entire room before I found the fuzzy, white cat hiding under Andrea’s bed. I brought her to Andrea’s mom along with a plastic ball she loved to play with. Her mom just gave me a dumb look and asked where the other ball was. I had to search the whole room again to find a second plastic ball. Apparently, this cat was so hardcore that she needed two balls to play with. Anyway, I finally made it out of the house, and Nicole was crying in the car. I tried to sit in the front with her, but Sicks was already there. When I got in the car, Nicole bombarded me with questions. I tried to explain myself, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Sicks was mad, too; he wanted to hurry up and go to the doctor so he could get his drug fix. There was a lot of ice on the road, and Nicole kept skidding through turns… She also slid through two red lights. We didn’t get pulled over, fortunately, but a couple of people passing by us gave us dirty looks for running the red lights.

We stopped the car in an empty parking lot for the purposes of roleplaying. We were going to continue the One Piece storyline indefinitely. I was Luffy, Sicks was Franky, and Nicole… Well, she was some kind of fish woman. I’m really not sure who she was supposed to be. We both chased her by stepping on lines of tape set up in the parking lot. If either of us made a mistake, we would be disqualified from whatever bizarre game we were playing. Near the end, I got lazy and started skipping steps, but no one said anything about it. I got sick of the game altogether, grabbed Sicks by the throat, and announced that Franky needed to die. I brought back my fist and began to enlarge it; I was going to annihilate him with Gear Third. Nicole grabbed me with two octopus tentacles and urged me to stop. She asked out of character what Franky’s real name was (she thought it was Elvis). I told her it was Cutty Flam, but Robin was probably the only one who knew about that. Since I was about to kill off Franky (actually, I really just wanted to kill Sicks), I asked her what we would do if we changed One Piece’s storyline. She said we should just keep going and see where the story ends up. Either way, she wouldn’t let me kill him. I figured that was more evidence that she and Sicks were secretly getting together…

First Visit to Giza

Something about pyramids, and there was someone meeting me on top of one. That’s all I remember, though, so it’s not very conclusive.

Slave Trade and Gaming Restaurant

This guy visited a slave farm and asked the owner about a girl he had fallen in love with. The slaves were bred like animals and sold to the highest bidder. The owner didn’t believe the guy was who he said he was; he claimed to be a wealthy business tycoon, and everyone assumed he would have nothing to do with the slave trade. The girl he was looking for saw him as he left. She managed to escape the slave farm and follow him down the road. A video game themed restaurant was built around the street with several huge screens set up on each side. The guy sat down next to me and told me he hadn’t been able to find his girl. I wished him luck in finding her someday. A few girls from the nearby slave farm sprawled out at my feet and tried to entice me, but I wasn’t interested in them. I watched some people nearby playing Super Smash Brothers.

Dad in a Barbie Costume

I rode the train home from my parents’ house. Big Bird was rowing down an artificial river in a gondola while singing about homosexuality. I wondered why Sesame Street’s writers were trying so hard to show everyone they weren’t homophobic. As the train continued along, I found an expired check in my pocket. It had expired a month ago… That was $38 I would never see.

The dream jumped, and I was in the car with my parents on the way to a Halloween store. When we arrived, my dad picked out a Barbie costume for himself… It was supposed to be “Ballerina Barbie,” according to the box. He even wore the tutu. My dad asked me to be a Pizza Hut pizza. Before I could explain to him that both of those costumes were horrible, he had to take a work-related phone call. My mom and I decided to leave the store without him.

Rescue Mission on Venus

In this dream, Austin had accidentally been drawn in by Venus’ gravitational pull on a voyage across the solar system. Nicole, Symphony, and I set out to rescue him. We converted Nicole’s dad’s jeep into a spaceship and blasted off into outer space.

The dream jumped. I was on the surface of Venus with Nicole and Symphony. The natives – green, gummy-headed aliens with plasma pistols – weren’t too happy about our presence. Nicole and I couldn’t breathe on the planet’s surface, so we had to move between patches of oxygen trapped on the surface of the planet. Symphony followed me to one, but I saw that Nicole was suffocating, so I had her save Nicole instead. The aliens nearly shot me with their plasma guns. Austin found us within a few minutes, and we all ran back toward the jeep. Nicole and I discovered that the spaceship was too heavy to fly. Symphony helped us take the top off, and for some reason, we ended up with a completely different vehicle. The metal plates on the outside of the jeep were left behind. I asked Nicole if she wanted to take the license plate, but she said it would be too hard. We were risking capture already as it was. The jeep’s discarded frame quickly rusted in Venus’ atmosphere.

The dream jumped. We were back at my parents’ house. Apparently, Austin had just been in the garage the whole time. Nicole and I had been running around the garage… Just hallucinating… Symphony was nowhere to be found. My dad had purchased a toilet-shaped chair that he could fill with soda and suck out through giant tubes. He was going to put it in the bathroom, but Chelsea and I told him that was insanitary.

Wario in Agharta

I was roleplaying on Agharta as Wario. That’s right, I completely ripped off a Mario character. He had traveled to Morroc and fallen in love with a girl who smelled like cookies. She shot bullets and cookies out of a toy gun for little reason except that it matched her natural scent. Elita and Symphony moved to Morroc (totally coincidental). Elita explained that she wanted Symphony to have access to the best libraries in the world, and Morroc was the place for that! Actually, that makes no sense, but it did at the time. Elita decided she didn’t like Wario, so she was going to beat him up. He wrote “WAHAHAHA” in the sand to stop her. Indeed, it stopped her, but only because she had no idea what it said. She read it as “LALALALA.” When Symphony asked what was written in the sand, Wario just laughed at them and ran away. He decided he was going to swim across the world to prove his love for the cookie girl.

Slot Machine Theft

I was in my math class. Our professor kept transforming into a lizard man. I accidentally left my coat hanging on the back of my chair, but I didn’t notice until I had already walked a couple of blocks in the snow. I thought about getting it, but I didn’t want to be late for computer science. Amar walked next to me for a while and asked if I wanted to grab lunch somewhere. I told him quite bluntly that I wasn’t interested, but he thought I just really liked the food at the commons. Either way, he left. I was the first one to reach our computer science classroom. My professor was on his laptop in an office watching a new addition in the Charlie the Unicorn series. I decided I would have to watch it later. I found a slot machine in the corner of the room. It was unplugged, and it seemed like it still had money in it. Someone else said they thought about stealing it, but they didn’t want to get caught. I didn’t see how that was possible since it didn’t even belong to our professor. As I was carrying the slot machine out, however, he stopped me. One of the other faculty members had lost a slot machine a couple of days ago, and he didn’t want me to get arrested for it. I put the slot machine back. Somehow, I ended up washing dishes in a tiny basin of water…

* * *

December 12, 2010

Grades at 6:30

I checked my final grades online. The first one on the list was “Operating Systems” (which I haven’t taken yet). For that class, I had received an A. I mistook this as the grade for my systems programming class. I scrolled down. All of my grades this semester were As. I couldn’t understand why… I was almost positive I wouldn’t get an A in systems programming. I checked the time, and it was 6:30. I woke up and saw that it really was 6:30, but no new grades had been posted.

A Wedding and a Wooden Computer

Nicole and I were getting married. We had gathered mostly my family, but some of Nicole’s, too. Nicole and I sat at the front of the chapel together while a bunch of little girls lined up on the altar to give us cards. I wondered who they were, but I couldn’t tell… The priest got up on the altar and had each girl pick a two-digit number. This would be used to determine their order. The first girl in line insisted on picking five, though, so they just let her go first. The girl walked up to me, and I realized it was my cousin Alicia… Except she looked like she was ten, maybe even younger. We hugged, she gave me a card in a red envelope, and I passed it on to Nicole. The next girl came up. This time, it was my cousin Ashley – again, still way too young. I hugged her, took her card, and whispered a thank you for coming. My cousin Britney was next, and it was disturbing how much makeup she was wearing (child or otherwise). She gave me her card first, hugged me, and then kissed my forehead. I kissed her cheek to be polite. It felt like plastic.

A phone on the altar started ringing. It was the church’s land line. When the priest picked up, a woman asked him if he was aware that the number had been listed as an emergency contact number. I could hear everything she was saying, but it didn’t seem strange to me. Any and all updates to Ben’s state in the hospital (uh…) were to be forwarded via the phone immediately. Due to legal concerns, she wasn’t able to identify the person who set up the emergency contact information, but as Nicole and I made eye contact, I knew she had done it. Even at our wedding, she wanted to hear about changes in Ben’s condition right away. I smiled. The woman on the phone got so angry that Nicole would have her call a church, of all places… Somehow, this turned into another matter entirely. The woman had reason to believe that Nicole had also stolen a key from a big corporation. Nicole insisted otherwise, of course. Someone had given us a wooden computer as a wedding gift. Although I call it a computer, it wasn’t shaped like any modern computer… It was like a cylinder with a hexagonal base. By turning a wheel on one side of the computer, I could drive it to run at about ten thousand operations per second – not bad for something made of wood. The speed could be increased by turning a key in the bottom. The specially made key was only granted by the corporation Nicole had allegedly stolen one from. When I realized this, Nicole gave me the key. It was obvious she hadn’t intended to steal it for this purpose; we had only just found out we were getting this as a wedding gift. I figured I might as well unlock the device while we had the key, though.

The woman calling the church, presumably from some hospital in Australia, started yelling at Nicole. I kept wondering if she could afford such an expensive long-distance call… Apparently, she was now convinced that Nicole had stolen the key to unlock our wooden computer, ignoring the fact that it was just given to us. She swore to have every wooden computer from that company recalled and to shut down the church we were getting married at. The priest was heavily offended by this threat and hung up on her.

The dream jumped. I was walking down Nicole’s street. For some reason, it was really busy… I crossed Washington with a couple of other people I didn’t know. There were multiple left turn lanes for some reason (there aren’t really any turn lanes at that intersection). The guys turning got mad at us for crossing even though the crosswalk indicator told us we could cross. I headed down Washington alone. Before long, I started seeing these futuristic school buses all around me. The angry woman from the hospital appeared. She was shouting into a megaphone at people in an attempt to figure out Nicole’s identity. She said that since I recognized the school buses, I had to know where Nicole was hiding. I bluntly told her that didn’t make any sense. I just kept walking, and she kept yelling… I thought about turning in our wooden computer to the company when I learned that the device had been recalled; they were offering $100,000 in exchange for it. I decided not to. Something about giving in just felt wrong…

The dream jumped. I walked into the church and immediately saw Nicole asleep on a bed set up in the foyer. She was still wearing her wedding dress. I ruffled her hair in her sleep as I walked by. The chapel was basically empty, save for a couple of really devoted family members… My mom asked where “Lisa” was. For some reason, I recognized that she was talking about Nicole. I told her about the bed by the front door. People started flooding into the room and filling the pews when they learned that I was back. I got up and stood at the back of the room, waiting for Nicole. Eventually, I tired of waiting for her and asked why she wasn’t coming out. My mom reminded me that the groom wasn’t supposed to see the bride before the wedding ceremony. I wondered what had happened to that superstition… Before, Nicole had been adamant about adhering to that as long as I could remember, but she hadn’t mentioned it earlier when we were sitting together in the chapel. When Nicole finally came out, Claude from Along Came Polly (that half-naked island guy at the beginning, you know the one) walked out with her. Fortunately, he was wearing a suit. They sat together at the front, and Claude asked if he could say a few words before the wedding. I considered just kicking him out because of his reputation.

Flying Alone on Christmas

My dad drove to the airport to pick me up alone. It seemed that Nicole hadn’t been able to come with me to visit my family on Christmas after all, so she was staying home for the week. He tried to cheer me up, but I just wasn’t interested.

Spray Painting Gangsters

I was standing on the corner of Washington and Westmore. Nicole was there, too. These three guys came up to us with a skateboard covered in what looked like mold. They were dressed like gangsters. One of them said he needed to test their new paint and pulled out a can of spray paint. He sprayed it all over my back without my permission. I objected, but it made no difference. They just kept spraying. They emptied a whole can of spray paint on the back of my shirt and one on Nicole’s, too. Afterward, they thanked us and let me keep the skateboard… Although they warned us it might not be safe to touch. We brought the skateboard back to her house and set it up against the back wall. I wondered if it was really a good idea to keep it inside…

Exploring an Empty Hotel

I was in a hotel or a high-class restaurant with several floors (maybe a combination of both). Matthew and I got in an elevator together. We didn’t see any other people in the building. It was like they had all just vanished…

At the Gingerbread House (Lucid)

This dream has been omitted.

Execution of an Unsuspecting Rodent

Cleo brought a mouse into Nicole’s room. She left it on the bed for us to find, and as soon as I realized what it was, I flung it across the room by snapping the blanket upward. The mouse died when it hit the wall.

December 13, 2010

Poor recall last night... Well, that's what happens when you get much less sleep than usual and have to resort to alarms waking you up.

Griefing on Agharta

I was playing on Agharta with Nicole, but I wasn’t roleplaying. I was just coming along to interfere with what she and her friends were doing. There was this new area called the Outlands (hmm…) that was intended for high-level players. It was full of monsters like those in Lighthalzen’s Biolabs, except they were created in the image of the third classes. Players needed a special type of gemstone to enter or exit the Outlands. I turned into Arnold Schwarzenegger and made some jewelry for Elita and Robin Bakerson. Elita received an emerald earring, and I had a matching earring for Symphony to wear. I gave Robin a ruby necklace. Using the gemstones, we teleported to a hill overlooking the dead, snow-covered world. Robin was almost immediately killed, but I revived her.

The dream jumped. I came out of a building erected on the face of a mountain. Elita and Robin were standing over a guy who was sitting in the snow with his back against a wooden dining table… It was out of place, to say the least. They were talking out of character about who it was. Elita thought it was Sage. While they weren’t paying attention, I walked over and stabbed him in the throat, killing him. They didn’t notice until I made it to the other side of the table. Robin must have gotten a private message from him, however, because she announced that it was actually a new player named Randal, and he had no idea what he was doing. Elita apologized for my behavior and revived him. I readied Symphony’s bow to kill him again.

Edit: Adding in a dream I had during a nap today...

Commanding the Fibers of the Dream

This was a strange dream… Very abstract.

I was standing before an audience of several hundred people with fire in one hand and a wooden ball in the other. At my command, the flame and wood switched hands – more accurately, the fire turned into solid wood, and the wood erupted into flames, ultimately becoming nothing but the fireball preceding it. I guided a flame through the air without a medium to fuel it, coaxing it from one end of the stage to the other. I was the master of dreams. I was aware of the energy underlying it all, the way it was tied together, and how to untie it if necessary. I was confidence. I was power. I stood before these people with a smile, control pulsing through my veins instead of blood. They all understood what I was capable of. Though I wasn’t aware that I was dreaming, I was aware that I was in a dream. I could see myself in two places at once – on the stage and resting on the couch back at Nicole’s house. The only limitation was a force approaching me at a slow, but steady pace… The ripple in the fabric of the dreamtime created by my cell phone. I’m pretty sure I was perceiving the alarm.

I awoke with such an intense feeling of power that I had to hold back my laughter. The alarm would go off a few minutes later, so I had time to reflect on the dream before then.

December 14, 2010

Boring a Ghost to Death

I was at my campus. I spoke to Eric and Amar about a ghost in our computer science classroom. I was convinced that it was going to kill me. They assured me there was no ghost, but I wasn’t convinced – especially when the emergency door leading onto the patio started opening and closing on its own. Eric seemed to think that talking about random things would cause the ghost to lose interest and leave me alone, so that’s what we did.

Life Inside the Cylinder

I was watching some people play volleyball or something like it. There wasn’t a net, and the court was much longer than it was wide. There were three to five players per team – the better the team, the fewer the players. The teams switched off regularly, but that was because they were just messing around. I knew that a few of them in particular were very good at the sport. All of the good players were guys. I walked along the side of the court from one end to the other. The ball kept narrowly missing me… It even hit me in the back of the head a couple of times, but it was light enough that I didn’t mind. It seemed like the ball was attracted to me. I sat down beside the court to continue watching. All of the best players switched onto one team.

“Are you ready for this?” one guy on the good team laughed. He was an overweight guy with really short, dirty blond hair. I recognized him from high school. That guy who plays Zazu in the Guild was on their team, too. Surprisingly, the team of all-stars didn’t seem to have much of an advantage. In fact, the other team was the first to score. Zazu started arguing about the “depth” of their hit or something, and an Indian girl on the other team misconstrued this as an attack on her native country’s preference in toilets. She said that the battery provided by her country’s manufacturer was the best one to use (in a toilet, yep), and Zazu argued that it was actually a horrible battery. They were suddenly swimming in a long, narrow pool where the court should have been. The pool was about three feet wide and forty feet long. I couldn’t tell how deep it was, but no one could touch the bottom. For that matter, it didn’t look like there was a way out…

The court changed back, and people started leaving because of the argument. I wanted to leave quickly, but for some reason, everyone had to change clothes before leaving. I was the last one allowed into the changing room. Actually, I walked in as some girl was pulling on her shirt. She was as flat as spare change, and she didn’t seem to mind that I had seen her bare chest. I just went about my business of grabbing pants to change into. All of our clothes were mixed together in one closet… They were really just kind of piled around. I knew I didn’t have any clean clothes, but I figured I would change my pants and pretend they were clean. After the girl left, I switched pants and headed downstairs. I saw a huge One Piece poster on the exterior wall of a building I recognized as a library. The poster was advertising the release of a new chapter.

The dreamscape was contained inside a huge cylinder, and the library was its own cylinder in the center of that one. It had thirty floors, two of which were devoted to public computer labs. Since I didn’t have a laptop in this dream, I went to the library to read One Piece on one of their machines. As I walked in, I scanned the room for a free computer… There was one, but some girl walking behind me really needed to use it, so I decided to let her have it. When she saw what I was doing, she bowed her head and thanked me. She was breathless from running to the library. Her hair was short and blond. I felt like I had met her somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where. I went upstairs to check the other computers. None were free. Some really seemed to be at first, but upon closer inspection, there were backpacks, calculators, papers, and whatnot on the desks, so I guessed the people using them were just in the bathroom or something. I headed back downstairs to wait for a free computer. Since there wasn’t really anywhere to sit, I just had a seat on the second to last stair. I wondered if people would ask why I was sitting there.

The girl I allowed to take that free computer got up and left – giving me one of those awkward waves where you just wiggle your fingers on her way past – so I took her spot. Eric Andoe was using the computer to the left of mine. Morgan Freeman started narrating, explaining that even back in the early days of the internet, I was up to no good. I got someone’s home address and saved it to a public directory (“A://DEATH” – I realize that makes very little sense). This took a while because I couldn’t find said directory… I located it as Eric asked if I’d tried any of his utilities yet. I said I hadn’t even opened a browser. When I loaded Chrome and searched for “google feaijgwoew” (just gibberish), I was redirected to a survey hosted by a company with two horns arranged opposite one another as their logo. The bottom horn was blue. I quickly scrolled through the survey and sighed.

“Screw that,” I muttered.

“Yeah, you didn’t finish the surveys yet. Try my stuff.” I checked the directory where I knew I’d find Eric’s tools. There were at least forty, and most were designed to make it easier to sneak around online. I opened a proxy utility and braced myself for the awesomeness of the new One Piece chapter.

Discussing Recall

I was talking to someone about dream recall as we walked down an endless sidewalk in an endless field. I said that lately, I recalled fewer dreams than before – sometimes as few as one or two. The guy I was talking to had medium-length black hair. He admitted that even he rarely remembered more than three dreams in one night. I was surprised, given his proficiency with dreaming. I explained that on average, I usually remembered about that many each night. He seemed impressed.

Pruning (Nap dream)

I was surrounded by hundreds of root-like threads. As I touched them with a finger, I could sense the tension in each. I took a knife and cut the loose connections, leaving the taut ones. The weak threads were useless to me. Those which were unable to endure the force broke on their own. More threads replaced those which had been cut or broken, and in this manner of pruning, I harvested the strongest connections I could. The little, purple threads surrounded me in a circle, tied to infinite darkness in both directions.

December 15, 2010

Spheres of the Storm

I found myself walking in the wilderness with Chelsea, Nicole, and my dad. We were far from home, and there was a tornado warning in the area ahead of us. If we walked directly home, we would only have to go a couple of miles through a valley between the mountains. The storm was contained within the valley, however, so if we walked around the mountains, we would miss it entirely. I told the others we should walk the extra two miles around the mountains to avoid the storm, but they didn’t listen. They were bent on going straight home. I pulled up a Google GPS map in my field of vision, and it gave me directions back to our house immediately. It also showed the weather radar on another layer of the image, so I could see the areas where the storm was strongest and avoid them. I was so engrossed in the map that I didn’t bother to look up at the reality of the situation. My dad was the first one to point it out…

“Those are some nice funnel clouds,” he said. I looked up.

“What? I don’t see…” My voice trailed off as I spotted three funnels descending from the clouds. They were still a safe distance away, but we were headed right into them. I advised the others to go the long way around one more time, but they still didn’t want to listen. We continued into the valley. Before long, I got a great view of the landscape below. A small lake lay nestled between the edge of the mountains and some kind of weird face in the ground. In retrospect, it looked kind of like a creeper’s face (Minecraft), but I thought of it as a monument built by an ancient civilization. It was made of solid gold and had some kind of glowing, black stone for the eyes and mouth. Instinctively, I knew it was a door. We came to a cliff, but there was a tower with two flights of stairs to take us down to the ground below. Just before we went in, I saw the funnel clouds break off from the storm. I thought that meant the tornadoes were gone… But then they formed into swirling spheres of wind and began to move. I could see one of the spheres through one of the tower’s windows as we started walking down the stairs. I fell a bit behind so I could get a better look. After all, if I was going to risk my life braving a storm, I wanted to know why such odd things were happening.

The sphere slowly swung closer to the building, and when it got close enough, it broke its path of motion and swept straight for me, breaking the glass of the window. It was about a foot in diameter. I wasn’t sure what would happen if it touched me, but I knew it couldn’t be good. I grabbed some guy who tried to run by me and threw him into it, and the sphere started orbiting around him. Each time it completed a revolution, it sped up. He ran down the stairs in terror. I followed after him at a safe distance, intending to avoid the sphere latching onto me again. I reached the door on the ground level, but I decided going outside was probably a bad idea… I kept going down stairs into an underground tunnel. I could feel when people opened the doors; the wind would swoop through the tunnel, nearly throwing me off-balance each time. It was dark for a while, but then I reached some kind of fork in the tunnel, and I saw Chelsea standing off to the side.

“Where is everyone else?” I asked. She turned.

“I don’t know, Josh,” she said. “Which way are we supposed to go?” I brought up the GPS to consult it, but it wasn’t able to connect at this depth. There were doors on each of the new tunnels. In order to continue, we would have to punch a certain code into a keyboard mounted to the wall. This was to our benefit; the spheres wouldn’t be able to follow us – unless they could break through metal doors, of course, but then we would have another problem entirely. I consulted some signs posted on the wall to try and figure out where each one went. The signs listed twenty or so locations, about ten for each. None of them sounded familiar. I decided it would probably be best to just pick one. If we were wrong, it wasn’t that big of a deal. We might just have to wait out the storm and leave the way we came in. I put in the code for the door on the left: 13516.

The door opened. I noticed that the other door had been open all along… Since we weren’t going that way, I didn’t care, but I wondered why it hadn’t shut automatically… I suppose it was broken. As Chelsea and I walked in the new tunnel (lined with stone bricks, so it was a bit nicer), I explained what happened to me in the tower. She said she had heard screaming behind her while she was in the tunnel. I figured it was the guy I basically sentenced to death. Oops. We found a staircase leading up… We emerged in some kind of dome-roofed building on a hill. Unfortunately, there was a window here, too, and one of the tornado spheres saw us. It burst through the window and latched onto Chelsea. Without thinking, I pushed her through the open door, and the sphere latched onto me instead.

“Run!” I yelled. “I’ll keep it here until you get far enough away!”

“What?! No, you’ll get killed!”

“Trust me! I know what to do!” I felt like standing there was shortening the time I had to save myself; the sphere seemed to revolve faster that way. I ran out the door and turned the corner, bolting for the cliff… The spheres were drawn by some kind of magnetic field emanating from the giant door in the ground, I knew. They were probably drawn to me by a similar force. If I could surpass that force for just a moment, the sphere would break off and resume its gradual approach of the door. I jumped off the cliff… I heard Chelsea screaming behind me.

Brainstorming for Research Topics

I was riding in a mine cart through a winding tunnel. I kept thinking about what kind of research I could do in my field. After all, the sooner I could get my name published, the better. The academic community would disregard anything I had to say about psychology, so I would have to stick firmly to computer and electrical engineering topics. It saddened me that dreams were falling further out of reach.

Leaking 0.1%

I lay in bed with Nicole. I told her that the bladder only holds about 99.9% of its urine. The rest leaks out, but since it’s in such small volumes, it’s practically imperceptible. She reached a hand down to check my pants because she didn’t believe me. I knew it was impossible for her to feel such a tiny volume of liquid; it had probably already been absorbed by my clothes. Nevertheless, she gasped as though she had confirmed it.