Thread: SD-1: Nephanim

February 15, 2011

I don't know what to say about my sleep last night. It was nice, but I kept waking up feeling like I was about to fall off the bed, and I had a lot of trouble getting up in the morning. XD

Frightening Demons and Rain Man

I was in my dorm room, but it had been converted into a computer lab. I understood that it was my introduction to music appreciation classroom. I was trying to download a song on my cell phone, but my connection was really slow. The file transfer never made it past 40%. The page I was downloading the song from had images of Neluna in various poses over a red background. The girl on my right asked about it, and I said it was probably the connection. I didn’t realize she was probably asking about the website. I sent Nicole a text message. We were talking about demons in the astral plane. I remembered projecting to find six terrified incubi all around me. They fled when they saw me.

“It’s cute when a succubus is in the middle of trying to rape you and realizes you’re lucid,” my text message said. I saw a flash of Neluna making that very realization. It was interrupted by Aamer Haque’s voice. He was my new music instructor. He started talking about “period instruments” and asked if anyone knew what the phrase meant. He called on me even though I didn’t raise my hand.

“Some music groups prefer to play songs in traditional instruments… The way they were originally played.”

“So they use the instruments the song was composed for,” Haque summarized. “That’s right.” A huge wall of text appeared on all of our screens. We were supposed to read all of that, then spend three hours working on an original song before leaving class. We only had about 45 minutes of class time left… I was determined to leave on time. Haque passed out sheets with comics printed on both sides. He accidentally gave me ten copies, but I returned the extras. I understood that reading the comic would satisfy the requirements of the three hour assignment somehow. It was based on Rain Man. In the comic, Charlie and “Randy” (Raymond) were children. Randy started growing ovaries at age eight, had his first period, and spewed out ten liters of vomit before it was through. I was amazed at how little sense the story made… Charlie brought Randy up to a tree house full of treasure to cheer him up. They had nowhere else to put their treasure chests, but even Charlie admitted it was ridiculous to keep lugging heavy boxes full of gold up into the tree. When I finished reading the comic, I prepared to leave.

Dark Forest of Building T

I was in the car with my mom. She gave me printed directions for us to follow in the form of a highlighted map, but the roads we were going to use overlapped so much that I couldn’t tell which way we were going. I tried my best to guide her. She kept asking which way to turn after we passed the Wal-Mart. I told her to turn left every time she asked, but she didn’t believe me until I pointed it out directly on the map. I knew it was a horrible idea – she was liable to rear-end someone while looking at the map – but I didn’t know how else to convince her.

We pulled into a parking lot. It was mostly empty except for a couple of freight trucks and a dumpster. The T-shaped building in front of us was our destination. I didn’t feel like sitting around while everyone prepared to go inside, so I started walking toward the building. We parked near the base of the enormous letter T, but the entrance was in the upper right. I had to walk past the trucks. They were dumping trash into the dumpster and stinking up the parking lot. The drivers watched me suspiciously as I passed. My mom, Chelsea, and Austin caught up with me at the entrance of the building.

The interior was a dark forest divided into cubic segments. It was also a maze; not every room had doors in all four directions, and some allowed you to go up to the second floor or down into the basement. My mom got mad at me for running ahead. Austin asked me something about manifestations of power in dreams. I told him that awareness was the ultimate source of power.

Smoking on Video

I was filming a video. I wanted to interview Rob, but when I got to his bedroom door, I could see (and smell) smoke on the other side. He wouldn’t like me barging in. Anyway, the smell made me sick to my stomach, so I went back to my laptop. Steven Jones had just posted a video of himself smoking marijuana. He was wearing black sunglasses. I realized it might be legal where he lives.

Let There Be Dodgeball!

I was in the ticket booth of a movie theater. A skinny kid walked up and asked the heavyset woman running the booth (also my gym coach) if dodgeball was an option. The sport, not the movie. She said she would prefer to do it on Wednesday so she could prepare for it. The kid also asked to eliminate the other sports. He didn’t feel like playing sports like tennis anymore. The coach agreed. She turned to me and laughed evilly.

“To get credit for gym, you’re going to have to play dodgeball!” The kid went back to his limousine, and the old woman scurried off laughing.

The dream jumped. I was in a dodgeball match against a pitiful team. I’m in horrid physical shape, and even I was doing well against them. When the brutal massacre came to an end, I walked out of the gym and into a kitchen. It looked like something from a TV show. Chelsea sat down with me at the dinner table. She said her boyfriend was picking her up on his motorcycle. What’s more, she was going to drive it!

“Have you ever been on a motorcycle?” I asked. “You can’t possibly drive one.” Still, she insisted. Her boyfriend came in to pick a fight. He had short, brown hair and huge muscles. I challenged him to a game of dodgeball!

The dream jumped. The two teams were separated by a red curtain. Since it was difficult to see the other team’s players, a lot of people were just lobbing the balls into the air and hoping they would drop into someone’s blind spot. The honor system was falling apart. Since no one could see when they hit people, there was no reason to take yourself out of the game when you got hit. My teammates just kept throwing. Some of the opposing team’s members even came through the curtain to our side of the gym with balls in hand. They tagged people’s backs as they walked along the outer edge of the gym. Of course, they knew they had tagged these people, so there was no excuse for staying in the game. I walked off the court when someone tagged me.

After the game, I wandered my old high school. I saw my university’s mascot (a hawk) picking up women in costume. He opened a trophy case near the music department and stole a giant, orange stuffed chicken.

“Stealing women from the school?” I laughed. He shook his head at me in disapproval. He was offended that we had stuffed the chicken.

Chelsea Falls into a Pit

I was playing Minecraft on Kelsey’s server. Chelsea wanted to walk around the area, so I let her use my character. I warned her about the places she shouldn’t go (those with lava and huge pitfalls). Nevertheless, she wanted to explore our entire civilization, so she ignored my warnings. I saw her going down a set of stairs which would inevitably bring her to a pool of lava. I warned her again about the lava. She didn’t even make it that far; she fell in a pit because she wasn’t paying attention. I took the laptop from her and managed to move myself into position above a block so I would hit that and die instead of falling into the pool of lava below. I only had half my health before the fall, so there was no way I would survive, but I hoped some of my items would land on the platform. I was pretty sure it had all gone in the lava, though… I respawned in our tower.

“Wow, that sucks…” I said. “I just got that armor.”

“Sorry…” Chelsea murmured.

“It’s okay. It’s probably all gone, though…” Surprisingly, I found all of my items scattered on the staircase leading down to our skeleton trap. As I collected them, I saw Nicole and someone else walking in the mines below me. Their names were faintly visible. Nicole figured out I had died somehow. I told her I had gotten all of my stuff back. I was particularly happy to recover the armor; it had magical properties. I went up to a bathroom on the third floor of the tower and washed my hands.

"Real" Food and Nicole as Marceline

I was at my grandma’s house for my cousin Alicia’s birthday. Apparently, I got her chocolates. She put them on the floor and broke them into pieces with a vacuum cleaner (instead of just using her hands like a normal person) for her little dog to eat. The dog was a black Yorkshire terrier. The candy came on a stick with gummy rings separating bits of chocolate.

“Do you know why this is the best present ever?” she asked me.

“Why? Because there’s not much chocolate, so you can feed it to your dog?”

“Well, that’s true. I just needed to teach this puppy to eat real food. Now I can!” Why would you want to do that? I frowned as I watched the dog eating the lumps of melting chocolate whole. I hoped it wouldn’t die from all the chocolate. I began to wonder where Nicole and my family had gone. They came to the front door in Halloween costumes.

“Trick or treat!” my dad said when Alicia answered the door. He and my mom had huge bags shaped like jack o’lanterns. Nicole was dressed up as Marceline. I saw a bunch of black and white pictures of her wearing the new costume. She stared directly at the camera in one of them, and her eyes seemed to suck my soul from my body.

February 16, 2011

Can't Get Along with Glee

I was at my parents’ old house in Louisiana. I watched a bus waiting in front of our house. It had been there for an hour.

The dream jumped. I was Rachel Berry (Glee), and I was standing in line to get on the school bus. When it was my turn to board, the bus driver told me I couldn’t because the dress I was wearing was too ugly. I ran away crying. My awareness returned to the bus in Kurt Hummel’s body this time. The bus driver told me that David Karofsky had been appointed as my official wedding planner. I wanted to vomit, but I decided to forgive Karofsky. I walked over and hugged him. Everyone around me was touched. My awareness passed into Finn Hudson. The bus driver started telling me about classes I would need to take to graduate. She showed me a geography textbook.

“Take this,” she said. “You’ll need it.”

The dream jumped. I was back in Rachel’s body. My (Rachel’s) biological mother drove me home so I could change clothes. After I changed into another outfit, I stood in front of the mirror with my mom. I turned left and right to get better angles. My hair was jet black instead of brown.

“See?” my mom said. “You’re beautiful.”

“Oh yeah, I’m smokin’!” I exclaimed. I hurried out the bedroom door.

The dream jumped. I was at a bowling alley – and this time, I was myself again. I watched the members of Glee walking across some kind of stage while holding hands. They started singing Seasons of Love. They stopped in the middle of the song because Puck forgot his lines. I bored of watching them argue, so I tried to figure out what classes I was going to take. The bus driver told Finn he would have to take geography, but I took that already… My mind was really muddled and confused; I felt like something about me going back to high school didn’t make sense. Rachel walked over and sat with me.

“Hey… I’m trying to figure out what classes to take… What do they require for people who already have a diploma?” She gave me a puzzled look. “I’m already done with high school… I’m just taking classes there so I don’t have to pay for them.”

“Oh! Well, you should already have all of your required classes, then. I don’t think they’ll make you take anything specific.” She pulled out a couple of music textbooks. She proceeded to encourage me to take so-and-so’s music classes immediately. I said I’d think about it. I began to wonder if I was still breaking the law by being at the bowling alley instead of school… I wasn’t required to be there, right? After all, I graduated three years ago… Rachel sighed. “They’re making me choose between geography, life studies, and sewing. I already know how to sew, life studies sounds horrible, and geography…”

“Don’t take geography…” I muttered. It really isn’t such a terrible subject, but it’s a ton of memorization. I hoped my school would accept all of the classes I took to get my diploma. If they didn’t, they might make me take some classes before letting me choose my own. My awareness left my body and wandered over to Sue Sylvester. She was trying to read a newspaper on the edge of the stage, but since the Glee Club kept singing, she was having trouble focusing. She walked over to the middle of the stage and began dispassionately shouting the lyrics with them. Brittany, Santana, and Quinn stood up to her.

“You know what you three are? Dumb-dumbs. Big, bloated dumb-dumbs.” She took a deep breath to start shouting lyrics again, but Brittany began crying. She took the insult to heart, apparently. Santana thrust her face into Sue’s and less than politely told her that she was the real “dumb-dumb.” Sue and the girls shouted back and forth until they were thrown out of the bowling alley.

Training Squirrels and Dad's Unhealthy Lifestyle

I was at my dad’s house. My mom was nowhere to be found. I washed dishes in the kitchen until my senses were overtaken by a vision of the past. I was standing beside a tree. A squirrel climbed down, and I started communicating with it… Then I grabbed it and made it kiss my nose. The squirrel flailed uncontrollably out of my hands. Nicole was disgusted by this behavior and refused to speak to me. I let the squirrel get away, but I grabbed it again the next time it climbed down the tree. Another squirrel watched all of this from the ground. It was afraid to run up the tree. I managed to train my squirrel to sit on my shoulder like a parrot.

“How do you like my new pet?” I asked Nicole. She groaned. My parents walked out of a small building nearby, and my mom was impressed that I had befriended the squirrel. They were both pleased that I was making friends.

I found myself back in the kitchen. I realized I was flying back to Chicago that afternoon. According to the clock, it was 1 PM. My flight would leave in four hours… I still hadn’t printed out my boarding pass! I thought it was strange that my dad hadn’t been nagging me about it all day, but when I walked by his room, I saw that he was still asleep. I printed the boarding pass in my bedroom. When I came out with it, my dad was drinking a glass of milk in the kitchen. He looked ill…

Holding a Shirt Order

I ordered a couple of nerdy T-shirts from my school. The shirts were free because the manufacturer was sponsored by the electrical engineering department. One shirt was for Nicole; I ordered that as a large. Because there was something wrong with the sizes, I knew a large would be too big for me, so I ordered a medium for myself. The shirts were available for immediate pick-up with a valid school ID.

When I went to the MTCC to pick up my order, I saw my power engineering lab TA handing out shirts. There wasn’t really a line… Everyone just sort of circled around the booth where all the orders were held. He gave me the medium shirt I ordered when I showed him my ID, but not the large one.

“I ordered two shirts…” I said. He walked away.

“And I’ll give you the other one,” he replied, “but not until this other person shows up with their ID.” I furrowed my brow. The order was in my name. What difference did it make who the shirt was for?

“She’s not coming here just for a T-shirt. She’s not even a student here…” I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just give me my entire order. He had nothing to lose… I hadn’t paid anything for the shirts, but the school had – and they weren’t going to see that money again even if they kept their shirts.

White-Eyed Horse in the Well

A horse had fallen into a large well in the woods. I somehow managed to hoist it out using a strong tree branch as a pulley. When the horse came out, it charged straight at me, snarling. Its eyes were glowing white. I woke up with a racing heart.

Getting to Know the Glowing Killer

This dream has been omitted.

February 17, 2011

A bunch of nonlucids and one lucid. I really should've focused on stabilizing it more, though.

Animal Magnetism

I was at some kind of party. People were able to fuse together if their personalities were different enough. The people who behaved similarly to each other could hardly move. It was as though the only way to move one’s body was to be attracted to the idea of fusing with someone else. I watched two groups of people sitting in a tight circle, moaning; one group was incredibly happy, and the other group was depressed. Gradually, people on the edges of each group would break off and wander toward the middle ground. There, one of them would be consumed by another person. Almost invariably, the happy person consumed the depressed person. There was no evidence to indicate that the person who was consumed continued to exist after that. I watched this as a neutral observer. Since I wasn’t “charged” with happiness or sadness, there was no magnetism between me and the other people.

Ridiculous Entry Fee

Nicole was driving her mom’s convertible. We were waiting in a line of cars for permission to enter some kind of closed facility. My dad was driving another car, but he was in a different line. Nicole and I went to the facility’s website to try to find a way to get in for free. We found that we could steal money from the company to pay for our entrance fee. The fee was some ridiculous number in thousands of dollars. I saw text come up on the website indicating Nicole’s “bounty.” It was $2.5 million. I started worrying that the guy at the gate would catch us and alert the police. If we ever owed that much money, our lives would be ruined. Fortunately, the person manning the gate somehow identified us as having paid for entrance but didn’t realize Nicole was a wanted criminal. After we got inside, I talked to someone who regularly visited the facility. He said that most people just cheated the system like that, and I had nothing to worry about. My parents drove up beside us. They had paid the exorbitant entrance fee.

Late Dinner on a Road Trip

My mom was driving on an interstate highway. I understood that my family (minus my dad) was taking a trip across the country. She agreed that we would have Chick-fil-A for dinner, but she was worried we wouldn’t eat if she took us there too soon, so we drove past the only Chick-fil-A we had located on our route. I checked the rest of the route and found out the closest one after that was a few hours away. We didn’t make it there until 8 PM. Austin and Chelsea slept for most of the drive, but they conveniently woke up just in time for dinner. As we approached the restaurant, my mom pointed out that it was probably a bad idea for her to eat and drive at the same time, but she didn’t want to stop. We couldn’t afford to waste any time. I figured she would have me drive while she ate… Surprisingly, she didn’t mention it. I didn’t want to drive, so I didn’t either. Somehow, I ended up with a nasty looking burger in my lap before we even made it to the drive-through. I ate a couple of flimsy French fries.

Magnetic Statuettes and Induced Current

I was in Nicole’s living room by the piano. I had a bunch of tiny, magnetic statuettes. They were mostly nuns, pixies, and cowboys. I didn’t examine them very closely… I tried to stand them all up on a small table by the window, but they kept falling over. I could feel a magnetic force gently pulling them away. As it turned out, there were tiny magnets under the tablecloth in the shape of X’s and O’s. I gathered these and stuck them together in a container. Then, I isolated the container from everything else so it wouldn’t pull my statuettes onto their sides. I set them up again. They were still drawn by the magnets, but not as powerfully. I noticed something strange happening to an insulated wire on the table… The ends of the copper wire were exposed, and they gradually started to fray. It was like watching someone split the ends of their hair. I couldn’t imagine why metal would do that on its own just because of a magnetic field. The thin, frayed portions connected to each other in the middle of the air gap, and suddenly, the wire started buzzing with electricity. When it zapped me, I got an impression of the current and voltage. The current was around 0.6 amperes, but the voltage was fairly low – something like three volts. I held the wire at a distance and watched the frayed metal dance with electricity. I wanted to take a picture, but I was afraid I would fry my camera… I touched the wooden table the little statues were standing on first to make sure I didn’t have an appreciable current in my body; I know, that wasn’t a smart way to test it. Satisfied that I wouldn’t break the camera, I took a picture of the amazing wire.

Sickly Rainbow Soda

This dream has been omitted. Summary: someone vomits a glowing, rainbow-colored liquid all over my driveway, then all over me; I brutally murder him.

Projections of the Cosmos

I was observing projections of the cosmos into the future. I could see several discrete-time versions of the Milky Way superimposed in my vision. I focused my attention on a continuous-time projection of the Andromeda galaxy as it swung around and cut straight through our galaxy, creating beautiful trails of red-white dust along the borders. It passed through, then swung back around and melded with our galaxy to form a new one. I could feel the conscious force emanating from the heart of Andromeda; it was self-aware. I knew that the time of this projection was the year 2012. I tuned into projections of Earth. I heard terrified military personnel arguing over a radio transmission. They had just received a radio signal from a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. Everything began to compress in time and glow white.

(Woke up to right dreams down here - went back to sleep at 8:00 AM exactly)

Blizzard Revisited and a Dog's Thigh Flaps

I found myself roaming the streets outside Nicole’s house. It was snowing very hard, and a number of people around me were trying to shovel it away. I don’t know why Galvin Library was in Nicole’s town, but I saw some people trapped in the library because they couldn’t get to the stairs leading out. A couple of people led the way to a low wall on one side of the library, and they managed to climb over it to get out. They had to walk all over a landscaping area, but it was understandable. I found a pile of snow by the street that was as tall as me. I sank into it when I crossed over. I watched the cars in the street, waiting for a chance to cross… Then I realized they were all stuck in the snow except a plow driving through. I carefully crossed the street. At some point after reaching the other side, I realized I had the head of a snow shovel in my hand. I took it to the sidewalk on the far side of Nicole’s street to help people clear it off. I saw an apartment complex up ahead, and a bunch of the residents had taken up the responsibility of cleaning the sidewalk. I wanted to help shovel the path, but it seemed like they had already done most of the work. I set the end of the shovel head on the ground and walked down the sidewalk, picking up stray flakes that had fallen since the apartment residents cleared off the path. I realized it didn’t make sense to hold the shovel this way and started looking for the handle… I found it right away. The shovel became longer to accommodate the handle’s appearance. I ran down the sidewalk with my shovel, and… Strangely enough, I entered a dry region without any snow. It wasn’t even snowing in this area. I continued through a forest and ended up in a more modern suburban environment. Nicole approached me with Scamper on a leash.

“So that’s where you were,” she said. “I woke up and looked all over for you!” Scamper bent over and took a dump on the sidewalk. Nicole picked it up with her bare hands. Gross.

The dream jumped. We were in a living room with Omi and a guy I didn’t recognize. He had a weird breed of dog I’d never seen before, too. It was like a cross between a terrier and a dachshund. We were sitting opposite one another in black sofas. I pet Scamper while Nicole and this guy talked. She asked him for help with her math homework. Naturally, I was offended! I could explain it better than he could any day. She didn’t even ask me… I patted my leg, inviting Nicole to sit in my lap. She did.

“So were you hanging out with him while I was gone?” I asked suspiciously. Nicole held Cleo between us. She didn’t seem to hear my question. I gave up on it. Cleo kept trying to escape whenever Nicole held her close to me. Nicole eventually just put her down. Scamper, Maggie, and the other dog all started jumping on the furniture. Nicole and Omi complained that the one guy’s dog needed to have his “thigh flaps” removed. I studied the dog, trying to figure out what they meant by that… Nicole mentioned something about the dog having a piercing on his body, too. The guy thought this was awesome. He transformed into Melissa. She was sitting with my laptop. Japanese music was playing, but she opened her own music player to choose something she liked more. My computer seemed to be running a new operating system. It looked simple, but it was painfully slow. I took my laptop from her and played the start of some of my music. It didn’t sound familiar at all except “Bittersweet Symphony,” but I don’t have that song.

Unknown Beach House (Lucid)

I heard my voice externally. I told myself I would have a lucid dream. I made other voices say it, too. A whole group of people was encouraging me to have a lucid dream by the time I was done, and my body began to feel numb as I drifted toward sleep.

I lost some time here. I felt myself beginning to rock back and forth. I knew this meant I was close to entering a dream. I let myself roll gently off the bed so I was hanging upside-down. My vision gradually brightened, and I could see a room in my left eye. Naturally, I wondered if I was seeing this with a dream eye or my waking eye, but the ceiling was painted white, so it couldn’t have been my dorm room. I closed and opened both eyes. The ceiling fan above me was spinning silently. Where was this? I sat up in bed. The world was hazy, and my movements were difficult to control. I rubbed my rubbery, tingling hands together until I stopped the world from rocking left and right. I tried snapping my fingers to make the overhead light turn on, but my fingers felt obnoxiously slippery, so that didn’t work out. I floated off the bed. Walking made more sense, but when I tried it, I felt like I was on ice. I stuck with floating. I noticed there was no furniture in the bedroom except the bed itself. I went over to the wall by one of the doors (there were two), closed my eyes, and licked it to see what it would taste like. Yuck, it tasted like a wall. Oh well.

I opened my eyes again. Everything was clear. I wondered if I could improve my baseline clarity by changing my diet… That was a question for waking life, though. I opened the bedroom door and walked out. I was basically just exploring. I briefly wondered if I might see Rayn in an adjacent room. I figured there had to be someone else in the house. I decided to head outside and see the sights rather than focusing on interacting with my dream characters. There were stairs to my left, but I could see the first floor beyond a railing to my right. I hopped over it and landed effortlessly on the first floor. There was some furniture down there: a bookcase, some sofas arranged in front of a fireplace, and a painting of a sailing boat on the wall. I saw the front door and calmly approached it. Through the windows, I could see a beach and the ocean. There was a palm tree on a small island off the coast. I had a thought about stabilizing the dream… I didn’t want to lose it prematurely. My current goal for extending lucid dream time was ten minutes. If I wanted to achieve that, I figured I would have to stop to ground myself in the dream again. I decided to do this outside; that way, I could take in the salty sea breeze, too. The area just outside the front door was made entirely of red bricks. I walked under an arch, and… My vision faded.

I waited patiently. I figured I could reenter the dream if I remained still. After a while, I saw brief flashes of a Minecraft landscape. I was able to walk around and turn my head, but everything was choppy. For that matter, although the area was similar in appearance (aside from being in blocks), I felt that this wasn’t the same beach. After this continued for a few more minutes, I lost all visuals. I waited, but they didn’t return.

I did a reality check after I woke up to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming.

(Woke up at 8:14 AM - what do you think of that? xD)

Nasty!

Oops. I forgot to post these!

February 18, 2011

Power Engineering Exam

I was presented with a blue, green, and black circuit board. It seemed as though the different colors were removable layers of the circuit. They each corresponded to a particular region of a power system, and I was supposed to identify them for my power engineering exam. The first question was simple: which of the two loads is connected in the wye configuration, and which is in delta? Just looking at the colors was pointless, so I tried to tell based on the shapes of the colored layers. That wasn’t very helpful, either… There was one portion of the blue layer that seemed to be roughly in the shape of a delta connection, but I couldn’t find anything that looked like a wye connection, so I figured I was doing it wrong. I stopped for a moment to think about the spatial arrangement of these physical connections in the laboratory. For a wye connection, all of the adjacent terminals would be connected with an additional connection going from terminal A to terminal C. The delta configuration was a little more complex – not much, but I decided to look for the wye connection first. I looked up and saw some plugs I hadn’t noticed before. They were connected to the terminals of a load in exactly the wye configuration! I looked to the right and saw a mess of wires. I figured that was the delta configuration. I wrote that down and prepared to answer the rest of the questions. I assumed these would have more to do with the colored layers.

If I Became Lucid

I was walking down the street by the Dollar Tree parking lot. There were no other people, but the parking lot was full of cars. I “summoned” Symphony, but I actually just took on her appearance. I was eager to see what I looked like. I treated this as something I would do if I became lucid, but I didn’t realize I was really dreaming.

Left at Daycare and Balmung's Dungeon

Despite the fact that we’re both adults, Chelsea and I were at a daycare center located where my old high school should have been. My mom came by to pick us up. Because Chelsea complained about something, my mom refused to let her in the car. She said she would come back for Chelsea later. I didn’t see the point in wasting gas driving back there. When I asked about it, my mom said she would send Austin to do it. I forgot Austin can’t drive… We made it home (Nicole’s house), and the car stalled in the driveway. Apparently, this was because there was too much ice. My mom desperately fiddled with the gear shift in an attempt to make the engine run. She looked at me.

“On second thought, I need you to come with me,” she said.

“Yeah, great,” I grumbled. It felt like a huge waste of time, but I couldn’t really say no. I didn’t want her to get stranded miles away from home. We drove back to the daycare center, picked up Chelsea, and drove back home. On the way home, I saw a white car parked by a metal railing separating highway 290 from the feeder road. A woman was pacing back and forth beside it. I asked her telepathically if she needed help. She said she was just doing this for fun. In fact, she did it once every week!

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were running toward the entrance of a dungeon on Minecraft. On the way, we encountered two creepers. I managed to kill them both with a fist full of wool. Nicole had to eat some food to recover her health. We were within sight of a huge, green building I used as a landmark to find the dungeon. We headed east from there to the dungeon’s entrance. As we walked in, a voice warned me not to give my winnings to Balmung if I conquered the dungeon. I saw Balmung of the Azure Sky standing in a small, circular room. I understood that he was running this dungeon and needed money to keep it afloat. We would have to fight him at the end. I really hoped Nicole had enough food with her… A portal to the Nether appeared, but it was shaped like a stargate. It was also about ten times its normal size. A ton of skeletons poured out of the portal and began shooting us. I killed a few of them with my bow, but the rest went into hiding behind pillars and in the depths of the dungeon. They were going to ambush us later.

Auditioning and Getting Lost at a Convention

I went to a convention with Kevin Liu. We parked in garage S on the top floor – the thirteenth. We walked past a football field on our way into the campus hosting the convention. I knew I could use that as a landmark to find the car later. When we made it inside, Andrea called me.

The dream jumped. Andrea and I were sitting in an auditorium. There were a few hundred chairs in front of the flat stage at the front. It was something like an audition for the masquerade. Nicole, Andrea, and I were going to sing Still Alive. I really wasn’t interested… They had just put my name on the signup sheet because they needed at least three people. I didn’t want to sing, I didn’t want to dance, and I didn’t want to go on stage. I wanted Nicole to come back from the bathroom so I could talk to her about it. Andrea would just get irritated if I brought it up in front of her. I pictured the strange set of dance moves I would perform if they still forced me into it… I would make a fool of myself for sure, I thought. Nicole finally came back from the bathroom. Someone came onto the stage to announce that the remaining people would audition Friday, starting at 10:45 AM. Nicole got upset over this because she knew I might not make it to her house until 3 PM on Friday. I was relieved, actually; I knew I wasn’t going to be in the skit! We were among the next five or six people in line to audition, so we would definitely do ours early. I told Nicole that we might not have to go on stage until 2 PM, in which case I might still make it, but she didn’t seem reassured at all.

The dream jumped. I was walking back to Kevin’s car alone. I wasn’t sure where to find the parking garage… I walked toward the football field and followed a sign that said the parking garage was on the other side of a pitch black forest. I was worried that I might get mugged in the woods. Before I reached the trees, however, I realized the signs were pointing me to garage SS, not garage S. I asked Kevin telepathically where to find the garage. He seemed to think I was going in the right direction. Suddenly, I was in the middle of a water park. I described the rafts full of people sliding down gushing chutes of water to Kevin, and he was completely dumbfounded. There wasn’t a water park anywhere nearby. Somehow, I didn’t realize I was walking through a pool of water two feet deep. I looked straight ahead and saw that I was standing at the bottom of one of the slides. A yellow raft whizzed past the slide to my left, and then I saw one approaching from right in front of me! The people in the raft screamed. I flattened myself against the wall of the slide and managed to avoid a collision. I quickly climbed over the edge of the slide. My hands were the only part of my body that got wet. I dried them and started wandering around the area.

I found Chelsea walking with a couple of her friends. She was cosplaying as Ushiromiya Maria (Umineko). I also saw a couple of guys I recognized from ACen 2010. They were dressed as Ushiromiya George and Maria. Yeah, the guy was wearing Maria’s skirt. I didn’t want to know why. When they saw me, their jaws dropped. I remembered I was wearing Battler’s suit. I gave them the trademark Battler point.

Ogres and Time Travel at Mr. Z

I went to Nicole’s house for the weekend. We had to go grocery shopping for her parents. For some reason, we decided to shop at Mr. Z. A lot of the food was scattered on the floor. We walked to the back of the store with our shopping cart and ended up in a series of wire frame tunnels. Ben joined us, and the shopping cart turned into a car. It was too big for Nicole to turn it around. She had me get out of the car to direct her so she wouldn’t hit the walls of the tunnel. After we got around a problematic bend in the tunnel, I thought all of that had been settled, so I got back in the car. We got stuck again, however, and I didn’t have room to open the door. We had to slowly squeeze through the narrow turn to give me enough room to get out and assist her. Following that, I helped Nicole navigate past the produce section. We came to an aisle full of pizza. A lot of the pizza boxes were open on the floor, and I didn’t want Nicole to ruin them by driving over the pizza, so I helped a Mr. Z employee pick up the boxes. I sensed that the store was going to close at 9 PM, and it was already 8:55 PM. Nicole grew impatient and eventually ran a couple of pizzas over anyway. She and Ben got out of the car after we left that area, and it turned back into a shopping cart. We encountered Donny the Grass Ogre on our way to the checkout area. He was terrorizing people indiscriminately. I figured it was okay as long as he didn’t discriminate.

We walked past the registers and into a side room with a flat-screen TV and a bunch of chairs. The room was host to a special checkout desk where customers could watch TV while they waited for service. The line was pretty long… There were eight or nine people in front of us. We watched old episodes of Family Feud while we waited. A couple of the people were actually just there to watch TV, so we didn’t have to wait for all of them to leave. Even so, we were waiting in line well after the store officially closed. Nicole got up before me and tried to pay for the groceries, but she needed to show the cashier some form of identification to verify her signature on the receipt. She didn’t have her ID with her. I got up and said I would pay with my credit card. For some reason, the cashier thought I was 29 years old, so she was a bit suspicious when I showed her my driver’s license. I couldn’t find my credit card… I did find another card, but I didn’t understand what it was for or how I got it. It looked like a small tablet PC, but then I discovered that I could punch out the middle portion – that was the actual card. The cashier reached over the desk and stamped the part of the card I removed with a label. I was confused by this because I figured that was just trash… While I waited for the old computer at the desk to process the transaction, we discussed how Nicole had school in the morning. The cashier asked Nicole why she didn’t just walk home and wait for me. I laughed.

“That’s like half an hour away from here by car… Not in this weather.” I gave Nicole her sweater and told her to go wait in the car.

The dream jumped. I was walking down a street at my school, presumably on my way to my power engineering lab. I saw a bunch of people singing an unusual song in the street. As they danced, I perceived a vision of a woman with long, brown hair in a pink bikini. She sang while lying on the beach, then while surfing. I saw an actor I recognized surfing with her, but I don’t remember who it was. As the woman rode a wave to the coastline, she cupped her hands over her chest and adjusted her top. It slipped off. Oops!

“Celebrity nudity is so predictable,” I muttered. I was back on the street for the end of the song. A black man with huge muscles bellowed out a series of low notes as though singing in the opera. I laughed at the group of singers as they walked in front of oncoming traffic. Horns blared at them. Suddenly, I realized I was going the wrong way, so I turned around. I remember seeing the Dairy Queen on Main Street…

The dream jumped. I was on my laptop. Nicole saw that I was available on AIM and messaged me.

“So you’re awake!” she said. “Can you help me with something?”

“What’s that?”

“Snow shovelingz!”

“Oh… But I’m not at your house,” I reminded her. I became really confused. I was just at the grocery store with her. How did I get here? “Wow… Nicole, I think I time traveled. My computer says it’s 9 AM. It says it’s Friday. It also says my laptop is at zero degrees Celsius.” She didn’t respond. I got an email telling me to pick up my groceries. I wondered why it took so long to validate my card… I found myself at the checkout desk at Mr. Z again. The cashier gave me a strange look.

“Didn’t you pick up your groceries already?” she asked.

Witch's Isle in Minecraft

I was playing Minecraft alone. I found a cave full of tools of witchcraft on a small island. There were a bunch of alchemical devices on a desk on one side of the room. A table on the other side had a pentagram drawn on it and a bunch of runes used for summoning demons. I could hear footsteps approaching from the basement. I decided to leave; I was unarmed, after all. I didn’t know where to go… If I left the island, I might not be able to find it later. I decided I would just find a safe place near the coast and log off. Suddenly, a black and purple zombie jumped at me. I tried running to the beach, but it was much faster than me. I attempted killing it instead, but since I was unarmed, that consisted of punching it in the face and hoping it died. That didn’t work out very well. I was down to two hearts, and it didn’t seem to be terribly injured. I ran as fast as I could and jumped onto a pier jutting out into the ocean. I found that I was able to recover health by taking deep breaths. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed that before… When my health was full again, I decided to make a run for it. I couldn’t log off in such a dangerous place. I jumped into the water and swam north along the coast. The zombie splashed its way out from under the pier. It was using powerful breaststrokes to catch up with me. There was no way to escape it. The zombie pulled me underwater and killed me.

Old Water Bottle

I found an empty water bottle in my backpack.

“Oh, look what I found!” I said to Nicole, showing her. I was going to use it to take juice out of the cafeteria. I wasn’t sure how long it had been in my backpack.

February 19, 2011

Dealing with the Cat

I was awoken from sleep by Cleo’s incessant meowing. I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep, but she just got louder. I sat up and saw her staring at me by Nicole’s door. She continued meowing.

“What do you want?” I asked the cat. She meowed. “Do you need food?” She meowed. “Do you need to go outside?” She meowed. Sighing, I rolled out of bed and walked into the kitchen to check her food and water. She had plenty of food, but her water was really nasty… It was full of soggy cat food. I took the bowl over to the trash can and dumped it out. I refilled it with clean water and showed it to Cleo. She meowed again. “Well? I got you water…” I looked over on the counter and saw a full water bowl clearly set out for Cleo. I sighed. “You already had water. What’s this about?” I set the water bowl down and went back to bed.

Dad Thinks Ben is Real

I saw a post by my brother on Facebook. This should’ve been a red flag; Austin doesn’t use his Facebook account. In fact, my mom set it up for him… The post linked to a YouTube video from Jadusable’s haunted Majora’s Mask creepypasta. It was this video. He said that he had been trying to explain to my dad that it wasn’t real for an hour, but my dad didn’t believe him.

Kelsey's Quarry and a Cottage

I was on Facebook. Kelsey posted something about how she just couldn’t stop playing Minecraft. She posted a picture with a huge quarry in the background. I entered the picture and found myself in Minecraft. As soon as I appeared, I fell down into the quarry. A half-finished mine cart track led down into the quarry below. I started placing blocks of cobblestone and mine cart tracks to help finish it, but when I looked up at the gray-blue sky, I saw the moon directly above my head. It was late at night. I wondered briefly why the sky wasn’t black like it usually is, but I was more concerned with finding a way out of the quarry. There weren’t any torches in the pit, so I figured monsters were going to spawn there soon. I jumped between floating platforms, working my way higher and higher into the air… It quickly became a problem of getting down to the surface instead of getting out of the quarry. I remembered that when I logged off before, I was about to open a chest in a dungeon. I figured Kelsey must have built the quarry right under the dungeon. I looked around for the floating dungeon… It didn’t take long to find it; it was the only floating lump of cobblestone in sight. I hopped from building to building on the rooftops. I hid in bushes on the roof so the skeletons below wouldn’t see me. Unfortunately, one skeleton did see me. He shot a couple of arrows up at me. I knew I wasn’t going to shake it off, so I had to keep moving. I was out of buildings to jump onto, so I hopped down and ran for my life. Several more skeletons joined the chase. I came across a band of six or seven skeletons moving together on the ground. They were all wearing black bandanas. I got shot in the back twice as I ran past them. I knew I wouldn’t make it to the floating dungeon with the huge group of monsters trailing behind me, so I tried to hide out in a tiny cottage I found. I opened the only door leading inside and found a furnace on the other side. Ugh. I circled around to the back, broke down a wall, and filled it back up with dirt just in time to avoid a spider jumping in after me. The monsters stared at me patiently through the broken door and windows. I had half a heart left… I couldn’t believe I had survived that.

I ate some pork to recover a little health. When day arrived, I planned to watch the monsters all burn… Then I could get to my treasure! While I waited for morning, Nicole and Andrea logged on. They were both inside the cottage. Andrea started threatening to kill me just because my health was low. I remembered that I had died on the beach recently and left all of my items. This must have been the Witch’s Isle in Minecraft dream I had the previous night. I didn’t even bother to get my clock and compass back. I knew they were gone by this point… Since I didn’t have those, I doubted I had anything terribly valuable to lose in the cottage. For some reason, Nicole and Andrea kept holding hands. They were wearing matching purple T-shirts.

On the Highway and Then on the Highway Again

I was in the car with Nicole, Omi, and Opi (who was driving). Opi asked if I knew which exit to take to get to a certain road. Incredibly, I did! Nicole thought it was the exit we had just passed, but the signs clearly indicated that it was three exits down the road. All of the exits were on the left side of the highway. We were also driving on the left side for some reason… As we approached our exit, I advised Opi to switch into the left lane. He didn’t listen. Train tracks appeared in the air over the road, and support pillars formed underneath them. The pillars barred us from getting over when Opi finally saw the exit. He swore.

“It’s alright,” I reassured him. “I think the next exit goes to the same place.” Nicole agreed. We drove to the next exit, and this time, we ended up on the edge of a snowy landscape. Omi started walking on an icy ledge leading to a castle made of ice. I followed her barefoot. I also thought it was strange that I wasn’t wearing gloves… Like it was inappropriate or something.

“It’s like the North Pole up here!” Omi remarked.

“This is nothin’…” Opi mumbled behind us.

“You have to admit it’s pretty cold!” she insisted. I don’t know about Opi, but my bare toes were freezing.

The dream jumped. I was back in the car with Andrea, Nicole, and Eric Gronkiewicz (who was driving). We were on the same highway. I felt like I had been on this highway before, but I couldn’t remember… Andrea started talking about things that didn’t interest me. She got mad at Nicole for criticizing Eric.

“You know what I really hate?” Andrea asked. “Those brain-body types.” Nicole agreed. When neither of them explained, I asked Nicole to clarify. I didn’t want to misinterpret what they were talking about…

“It means exactly what she said. Those jerks who think they can solve everything with their muscles.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, they’re jerks.”

Matt Draws Girls That Look Like Ichigo

I was in the kitchen at my parents’ old house in North Carolina. Nicole was about the size of a fly. Matt came into the kitchen to get food, and somehow we started talking about Bleach. I tried to draw Ichigo with his new swastika Fullbring, but the swastika part came out lopsided. I gave him really long hair (reminiscent of his Hollow form), but there was no sign of his mask. Matt complained that every girl he draws ends up having Ichigo’s face. As proof, he showed us an example drawing. He was right; the face was identical to the one I gave my drawing of Ichigo! Nicole decided to stop being tiny, so she grew to normal size. She also erased our drawings…

Winning Prizes at Best Buy

I was on a train. Nicole’s dad and Kyle were arguing about when to go to Best Buy. Phil said it’s best to go after midnight, but Kyle reminded him that Best Buy closes at 9 PM. He told us a story about going to Best Buy at 8:57 PM and finding it closed. I thought of Phil’s ordeal with Funky Java. My vision was overtaken by a visual interpretation of Kyle’s story. The manager at Best Buy was annoyed when Kyle demanded to be let in; he said he couldn’t handle working another three minutes.

“That’s a great way to get fired…” I said. “Maybe he will get fired. Then I can apply for his job.” I was only partially serious. Phil and I walked into the store. The manager was gone. I saw a piece of paper with the man’s hours marked on it. He had worked around eighty hours that week.

“Quad jobs are hard in this economy,” Phil warned me. I understood that he meant the manager was working four jobs. That didn’t make sense, though. Any way I considered it, the guy was only working the equivalent of two jobs. Whatever. We were walking around the Best Buy when Phil saw a bunch of key chains that played strange sound effects. They were sold in sets of ten. There didn’t seem to be any reason behind which ten were put into each package… You had to buy several packages to get them all. One of the key chains was labeled “On the Reality of Darkness – The Elder Scrolls.” It played a peculiar spacecraft noise. I walked over to an arcade game setup nearby. Some of the prizes in the game were really cool, considering the game only cost fifty cents to play. I saw a black Megaman figurine among the prizes. I decided I would try to win one for Nicole’s brother Eric.

I pushed the coin return button first and got ninety cents in change out of the machine. I put two of the quarters back into the machine and started playing. There was a joystick in the middle of the machine, a jump button on the left, and a punch button on the right. It was a really annoying control setup. My character was some kind of martial artist. I had to jump up to the game’s height limit to kick football-shaped bells. There were also gold coins floating on balloon strings. I quickly beat the first level. Then a world map appeared… My character appeared on an island in a black car. He drove across the ocean to get to the mainland. In the second level, I had to fight a few enemies while kicking the bells. It wasn’t difficult.

The third level, however, was ridiculous. As I spawned, a massive tank – about thirty feet tall – rolled in from the right side of the screen. It tried to run me over. At the same time, five gangsters spawned on the left side of the screen. They pulled out a huge bow that required three people to operate and started shooting arrows at me. I got shot in the chest, but I survived by jumping on the tank. A guy with a knife climbed out of the top of the tank and cut out my intestines. As the game over screen appeared, I asked Phil if he knew how the prizes worked. He gave me a confusing explanation that I couldn’t follow at all… I saw a bunch of colorful sticky notes on the bottom of the machine explaining the prize system. They didn’t really make sense either. An awkward girl with black hair came up to the machine behind me. The machine directed me to the left side to pick up my prize. It said I had earned a “Rank 2″ prize. I understood that this was the rank required to get the Megaman figurine. A crane appeared and picked my prize for me. It picked a stuffed dolphin!

“Hey! Why don’t I get to pick?” I frowned. The dolphin dropped into the prize claim box at the bottom. “Well, I wanted to get something for Eric, but I guess I’ll just give it to Nicole.”

False Awakening: Hazy Memory

I woke up in the middle of the night, but my vision was hazy. I couldn’t remember any of my dreams. I looked over at my dream journal which lay open on the chair next to Nicole’s bed. There were two dreams written down there.

I only realized this was a false awakening several hours after I woke up this morning… When I woke up, I hadn’t written anything down, and I didn’t go back to sleep after.

Hidden Belt in the Ceiling

I was in Nicole’s room. She and I noticed that one of her ceiling tiles in the corner of the room was loose. I stood on her desk to fix it. In the process, I accidentally pushed the ceiling tile to the side. I saw my missing belt, an empty water bottle, and an open bag of Doritos. I accused Nicole of hiding my belt from me. I suspected she probably had rodents in her ceiling…

February 20, 2011

Internet and Fuzzy Apples

I was at my grandparents’ house in Louisiana. The hallway between their living room and the den was much smaller than it is in waking life, so I could sit on the couch in the living room and talk comfortably with my grandpa as he sat in the other room. He told me a story about how he forgot something important when he and my grandma moved into this house. I told him about how my dad forgot to bring the router when my family moved to Las Vegas. My grandpa thought that was hilarious. He didn’t really understand, though.

“Can’t they all get the internet without a router?” he asked.

“Well, it depends on how many lines they have. If you want a bunch of computers on one line, you need a router.”

“But I’ve seen them use the internet without a router.”

“If you plug your computer directly into the network port, you can get internet, but no one else can use that port.” He nodded slowly, seeming to understand. After a pause, he asked again.

“…But can’t you get the internet without those cords?”

“A lot of people have wireless routers. You can connect without wires, yeah.”

“But not with the routers! I’ve seen people use the internet without a router.” I gave him a blank stare for a moment, thinking… Then I realized what he was talking about.

“You mean those network cards they plug into their computers,” I replied.

“Yeah! That’s the thing!” he said, grinning. “How do they do that?” I pulled out my phone.

“It’s just like with my phone. There are satellites in outer space which pick up the signal, process it, and…”

“And send signals back,” he finished. I nodded. I felt like a good person for trying to have a technology-related discussion with my grandparents. I wondered if my grandpa would remember this in the morning. I went into the kitchen and grabbed a green apple. There were around fifty apples and fifty oranges in a bin hanging on the wall. A bunch of my extended family members showed up, including cousins Jay and Dusty. They were both really tall – around eight feet or so. Jay insisted on hugging me while I was eating the apple. For some reason, he forced me to use both arms in the hug, so I got fuzz from his sweater on the inside of my apple… I stared at it after we stopped hugging. My dad put his hand on my shoulder.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. I didn’t know if I could go on without my apple.

Winning More Chances to Win

I was walking around downtown with Nicole and Andrea. Nicole’s mom came up to us and gave us half-finished scratch-off tickets. She scurried off to a bar after that. I pulled out a quarter and scratched off the rest of mine. I didn’t win anything. Nicole had an extra one, so she gave it to me. This time, I won – but it didn’t say what the prize was. A homeless man came up to me, snatched the winning ticket out of my hand, and gave me $1 in change along with a huge stack of new tickets. I started scratching those off. With so many tickets, I had a much better chance of winning something, though probably not much. I followed Nicole to a staircase leading up to a train platform. It was in the middle of the street for some reason.

“Which way are you trying to go? North or south?” I asked her. We were getting on the Green Line.

“South,” she said. I shook my head with raised eyebrows.

“I don’t really want to go to the south side this late at night… Whatever…” Andrea and I followed her in. We didn’t have to pay to enter. I didn’t realize we were actually on the west-bound side (north to Lake Street). I was only concerned with where the tracks should have been.

Symphony's Violin

I was in the game room at my parents’ old house in North Carolina. I was playing a game that was like a cross between .hack and Ragnarok Online. I showed Matthew the game, and he thought it was the coolest thing ever. He snatched the controller from me. I looked down and saw Symphony’s violin on the floor. It had ice cream all over it. For that matter, the controller cord was sitting in a puddle of melted ice cream. I pulled it out and wiped the cord off.

“How long has this been sitting here…?” I moved the violin out of the puddle, too. I tried to clean it, but I knew it was still going to be sticky afterward… I hoped Symphony would forgive me for ruining it. I saw her and Chelsea sitting on the couch. They were talking about playing the violin.

Reasons Why I'm Not Interested in Neluna

I was standing in a small room with a man and Neluna. The guy asked me if I wanted to be with Neluna. When I said no, he asked why I didn’t.

“Well, she’s almost forty…” I said. Neluna crossed her arms and gave me that empty stare… Of course, it wasn’t true at all. “That’s the least important reason, though. She’s really not my type, and I already have a girlfriend.” Neluna turned her back to me.

A Park in Missouri

I was in the car with Nicole (who was driving) and Austin. We were taking him somewhere, but we needed to stop at a park on the east coast first. He asked which state the park was in, but I couldn’t remember. I said I would look it up. A map of the United States filled my field of vision. The northern portion of California was highlighted and labeled Missouri. I told him that was where we were going, and he groaned.

Lost Without a King

I was playing a real-time strategy game like Age of Empires, but it was set in our Minecraft world. I kept trying to get my soldiers from our snow house in the north to our main tower using the bridge Nicole and I built, but my king kept dying along the way… The first time, we were ambushed by a bunch of skeletons at the end of the bridge, and most of my army was slain. The king fell toward the end of the battle. The second time, I gathered a huge army, but a skeleton on the ground managed to shoot the king three times, killing him. None of the other soldiers were harmed. This posed a bit of a problem… There were around two hundred soldiers, and all of them remained on the bridge. All of my attempts after that were doomed to failure; the soldiers on the bridge attacked everything that came their way, and I couldn’t build another army of that size with my remaining resources. I decided I would play as a “guest civilization,” which allowed me to start at a random spot on the map. If I could strengthen that civilization enough to clear out the bridge, I could return to my old kingdom.

Late-Night Tunnel Construction

I was digging a tunnel with Nicole on Minecraft. I really wanted to go to sleep… It was 3 AM, and I knew my sleep pattern would be disrupted because we stayed up so late. Nicole agreed to put the construction of our tunnel on hold until morning. I jabbed my iron shovel into the dirt wall and left it there for when we returned.

The Timeline in Which the Slug's Heart is Destroyed

After going on a weekend vacation with Nicole’s family, I was on my way back into town with them. For some reason, Nicole wasn’t in the car with us. We drove past a giant cyclops with a spear in a wheat field. It looked more like it was an ordinary giant in a cyclops costume, but I couldn’t tell the difference. The giant and I stared at each other as the distance between us increased. Long after we passed by him, he walked into the street with his spear and launched it toward our car. The spear hit the ground a couple of meters behind us, bounced into the air, and landed on the roof. The spear hand sank through the ceiling and nearly jabbed me. I couldn’t believe what an excellent shot the giant was. I looked back at the little speck in the distance. It was a good thing he had decided to leave us alone… Or so I thought.

The giant threw his arms into the air and roared. He started running after us, causing light earthquakes with each powerful step. He jumped onto the top of the car and retrieved his spear. Amazingly, Nicole’s parents didn’t seem to notice any of this. I waited until the giant stabbed his spear into the ceiling again before moving. It got stuck. I reached into the back of the car and retrieved a spear of my own, which I used to stab his foot from below. The giant rolled off the car and groaned in the street as we sped away.

Sometime later, a massive, white wolf started running alongside the car. Battle music began to play. I didn’t know what to expect from this boss… It disappeared as we pulled into a gas station. I understood that my game had been saved. I checked the time… It was almost 1 AM. I knew I had an exam in the morning… Why wasn’t I asleep yet?! We drove to someone’s house after leaving the gas station. It was in a forest of redwoods. I didn’t understand why Nicole’s parents hadn’t gone straight back to their house. They knew I had school in the morning. What was I supposed to do, walk back to town? As I walked into the house, I was challenged by a bunch of small animals to something called a “taco game.” A metal cube in the middle of the house poured meaty taco fillings into taco shells for everyone playing. The winner was the person with the most delicious taco. It was supposedly an extremely fair game. I won, and all of the little creatures had to swear allegiance to me. I found Nicole outside the house. After talking to her for a while, I realized had a duty to fulfill to the world by committing suicide. I had the power to turn matter into bombs by first splitting it into atoms and then breaking those to trigger an explosion. I created a bunch of powerful land mines out of pancakes. Nicole didn’t want me to leave because she knew I would die.

At this point, the dream began to branch off into multiple timelines. These continued simultaneously, and I was aware of all four of them. In the first, I realized it was 9:34 AM, so I had less than two hours until my exam. I teleported back to school and blew myself up. In the second timeline, after seeing what time it was, I decided that blowing myself up at school was no different from blowing myself up with Nicole. At least if we died together, we wouldn’t be separated. I chose to miss my exam and fail the class. Nicole and I went into the forest of redwoods and relaxed. She convinced me not to kill myself, and the world was doomed.

In the third and fourth timelines, we didn’t go into the forest. I decided to battle my fate directly. Nicole and I fought the enormous white wolf from before. It fired red laser beams at us. I kicked her in the face, and she agreed to help us. I realized this was actually Lyra. We climbed the redwoods to reach a floating platform in the clouds. We fought a giant slug creature up there… It had the power to rapidly consume matter and effectively destroy it by sending it into another dimension. Physical attacks were hardly effective because it was covered in Aperture Science’s repulsion jelly. I set down a pancake mine and timed its detonation so the blast would go off as the slug closed its mouth. Unfortunately, in the third timeline, the blast also killed Nicole and Lyra since they were standing right next to the mine as the snail swallowed everything. I screamed when I realized what I had done. I blew myself up with the remaining mines. In the fourth timeline, they survived the first mine. After that, I was more careful with my explosives. I wished I had made more than four of them… I didn’t know if I had enough to kill the slug. I was able to increase the force of the blast by splitting more atoms. I cranked the power up to full – meaning I would split every atom inside the pancake – when I saw the slug’s stone heart float up its throat. The explosion destroyed the heart, and the world was saved.

Chibi Bleach Rehash

I didn’t remember this for several hours after waking. It may have been from a previous night.

Bleach was going into filler after the completion of the current story arc (Battle in Karakura Town). The filler was basically a rehash of the first arc with new art. The characters were drawn in chibi style, and the environments looked like something out of Ed, Edd, and Eddy.

February 21, 2011

Under a Warm Blanket

I was in my dorm room under a pile of blankets. I heard Till talking to someone. He didn’t know where I was. I didn’t want to be invited to any sort of social gathering, so I just kept quiet. For some reason, I changed my mind after he left the room. On my way to the door, I saw a white envelope addressed to my mom on Till’s desk. I thought it was from my mom, but that’s not how the envelope was labeled. Anyway, I rushed out the door in my pajamas and turned left toward the stairwell. The door was still open.

“Till!” I yelled. He was already out of earshot on his way down the stairs, but one of the girls with him heard me and got his attention. Till came back upstairs.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

“I heard you asking where I was.” He chuckled.

“Don’t worry about it, man.” He turned and left. I was excited to have the room to myself. I decided to take a quick shower. I gathered a set of clothes, but as I prepared to head into the bathroom, one of the guys from the adjacent room came into mine. He didn’t say anything.

The dream jumped. I crawled under the same blanket on my bed after showering and let my thoughts wander. I wanted to lie naked in bed all day.

Fighting a Dragon - Twice

I was playing a cooperative RPG online with Austin. My character was based on Symphony. Austin and I had to break out of an underground prison, but on the way, we encountered a number of small dragons. I didn’t really understand the game’s controls… I could only seem to punch and use items. The healing items were tinderboxes (from Amnesia: The Dark Descent). There were also yellow power orbs for restoring magic energy, but I never used these since I didn’t know how to use magic. Austin had a red, screaming mask assigned to one of his item hotkeys, but I never found out what it was used for. In any case, we came to a waterfall guarded by a huge dragon. The final path to our escape lay beyond the waterfall. Austin drew a sword and initiated the battle. The dragon was able to fuse with the earth in order to attack us from below. Its fire was hot enough to kill us in seconds. I kept back for most of the fight, pitching in with a punch or two when necessary. When the dragon finally fell, we walked through the waterfall into a cave. The winding cavern brought us to the exit, but we had to go back to the prison for something.

We came to a bunch of urns full of tinderboxes. Austin was low on healing items, but he insisted that I take as many as I could carry before he picked any up. I was a little concerned about this… I figured he would need more than two of them for himself. We went back through the waterfall, and the dragon roared at us. We had to fight it a second time. It was faster this time, and its flames were even hotter. I learned how to jump, but it didn’t help much; I wasn’t able to jump high enough to get over the dragon’s sweeping flames. I went through a few healing items trying to survive the fire consuming my body. I also learned how to kick – which I expertly combined with my newfound jumping abilities – but that didn’t do me any good since I couldn’t get close to the dragon without suffering serious injury. I ran out of healing items halfway through the fight. The dragon started chanting in its native language, causing fireballs to rain down from the sky. My camera stopped following my character for some reason, so I had trouble dodging the fireballs, but I managed to survive. After the fight, Axis and three men in power suits appeared. They quickly restrained and captured us. I was glad that the game’s storyline prevented us from fighting the dragon a third time on the way out of the prison.

Skiing without Skis (Lucid)

I was standing on a raised platform with Chelsea. Each of us held a video camera. Jon was walking around on the dirty floor below with a baby and a bunch of well-trained dogs. They seemed to understand everything he said. He came up onto the platform with a couple of dogs to feed them first, and then he fed the rest. One dog started eating directly from the main dish; Jon sentenced th dog to one week in the “tired house.” The dog grabbed a Kong toy in its mouth and dove headfirst into a pet carrier.

“Make that two weeks,” John said. He turned into a woman at this point. The baby wandered around, manipulating the world freely as though controlling a lucid dream… She held her head in her hands.

“What’s she doing?” I asked Chelsea. I thought the baby had hit her head when I wasn’t looking. Jon asked us the same thing when he walked over.

“I think she’s dreaming…” said Chelsea. At this point, I felt I was writing down a dream that had already taken place. I explained Jon’s uneasy laugh in writing. Given his talent, this baby was likely to stir up all sorts of trouble in her lucid dreams! He worried she wasn’t ready for it. The platform became the second floor of Yorktown Mall. Jon and the baby were gone. I told Chelsea I would take our stuff to Jon’s room. She was going to put the video footage on Jon’s computer and make a movie out of it. I reminded her that it was the same room as before. She had to go to the bathroom first, so I took her camera, too. It looked like a CD… I felt that I was supposed to take the CD from her because I had done it before, not because it was a kind gesture. Anyway, I looked across the mall and saw the store I recognized as Jon’s room. As I walked toward it, I appeared on the first floor. I realized I wasn’t writing the dream – I was in it! The environment warped at my will, and I began to slide across the floor. Building on this, I turned the world into a snowy mountain. I slid effortlessly down the mountain. My feet were my skis. I felt like people were watching me and commenting on what I was doing. They knew it was a dream. I had trouble making the mountain taller to lengthen my journey down to the ground, though… Each time I came close to the bottom, I teleported myself back to the top. I kept my momentum. I decided to play around with temperature a bit, so I had the snow-covered slope lead into a volcanic cavern. When I approached the mouth of the cave, the snow melted and turned into a flowing stream. It was freezing cold on my feet. The water quickly warmed up to a comfortable temperature. Unfortunately, the cavern was dark, and it melded into a view of the back of my eyelids. I saw flashes of brown and gray plus signs before I opened my eyes.

Chelsea Updates Her Journal

Chelsea finally posted something on her dream journal, but it had nothing to do with dreams. I don’t remember the post’s content.

February 22, 2011

In Love with Motherly Instinct and Drowning

Nicole and I met a peculiar woman who reminded me of Asuzu. She said she fell in love with the unconscious motherly instinct and had been preparing to give birth since she was a little girl. She gave us a few video games she didn’t want anymore (Diddy Kong Racing 3, Dead Space 2, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent even though we said we’d already played through it). We met with her in a sewer to discuss this motherly instinct and her visions of the future. The water was surprisingly clean… Clean enough to drink. After a while, Nicole said she was getting sick of listening to the woman. I hadn’t listened to most of what she said, so I didn’t know what to say… I was worried Nicole would yell at her for all of the annoying things she had done, though, so I suggested saying goodbye and leaving. I wanted an excuse to play Dead Space 2… Anyway, before we even mentioned it to her, the woman’s true colors emerged. A bunch of men came down into the sewer on the other side of the water. She got down on her knees and begged them for money. They laughed and threw small stones at her. She began offering her body to them in exchange for money, and I decided it was time to leave.

When we got back to Nicole’s house, I turned on the washing machine. Her mom asked me if I took the clothes out. I didn’t remember there being clothes in it, but I hadn’t really checked… I wondered if it was actually empty. Regardless, I said yes. I went upstairs and sat with Nicole in the dining room of my parents’ old house in Texas. She said she needed to wash a VHS tape she got from the “motherly instinct” girl in the sink. When I asked why, she explained that she had accidentally labeled it incorrectly, and she didn’t want anyone to find out. I didn’t understand why she had to wash it to get the label off, but I didn’t want to argue about it… We started playing Diddy Kong Racing 3. As usual, the game included three vehicles: cars, boats, and planes. Nicole insisted that I had to drive a car. She would fly in a plane, and the computer opponent would take the boat. I was going to play as Diddy Kong, but Nicole got angry. She said she was always Diddy. Giving in, I decided to play the sickly, lime green turtle. For some reason, all of us were in cars when the first course loaded. The voice acting for the start of the race was strange.

“Ready?” asked the announcer. “Like, yeah!” I heard several engines sputtering – even though there were only three of us. “Get going!” The race began. All of the items were contained in item boxes rather than balloons. The items were taken directly from Mario Kart. It’s just as well since I can’t remember many of the items from Diddy Kong Racing… I stayed in second place for most of the race. Nicole and the computer switched every now and then. I wasn’t sure why, but they seemed much faster than me. Nicole was actually Yoshi… The computer was actually Luigi. We neared the end of the final lap, and I was in first place! I slipped on a giant banana peel and ended up in third place (although the display said thirteenth place). I tried to zoom past the computer at the end, but I stumbled and couldn’t make it to the finish line.

We went to a course that was essentially a bowl of crumbles with milk added. Instead of actually racing, you just brought your spoon around the bowl in a circle. We kept taking our spoons out to sample it. It tasted like Frosted Flakes with a raspberry flavor. When I was on my fourth lap (of five since it was a short course), Nicole warned me about an upcoming boss. I saw a purple octopus in the milk and prepared to fight it. The course became a bowl of warm water, and I was floating in it. The octopus released a hollow steel sphere into the water. I caught it, and the octopus drifted away. So much for the boss, I thought.

“Hah! I tricked you!” Nicole announced. I wasn’t worried; I was way ahead of her. Nicole accused me of cheating for going around the bowl too fast. After I finished in first place, Nicole began taunting me. “I bet you’re afraid of going underwater in the middle of the pool.” Chelsea appeared and agreed with her. I went to the middle, checked my distance from the edge in all directions (they told me this was another indication of my fear), and sank under. I was careful not to get any water in my nose. It was fine until I tried to come up… Hands held me underwater. I could hear Nicole and Chelsea laughing. I fought to get to the surface, but before I knew it, I was out of oxygen – awake in bed. I saw a flash of the function u(-t).

Cereal Advertising in Dreams

I saw the same cereal commercial several times in a row. A man and a woman sat in a bathroom while they talked about how much they liked the cereal. The guy never said anything substantial about the cereal. He just nodded every now and then and said “I like it!” really fast. I told Nicole it was an annoying commercial. We saw another commercial, but then the same cereal commercial played again. Argh! Get out of my head!

Mom and Dad at a Cake Park

I was looking through an old photo album I found at my parents’ house. All of the pictures were of my mom and dad together. I saw several photographs at what I understood was a “cake park” – a cross between a water park and a bakery. Their bodies were splashed with rainbow colored frosting. They were very young, too; the pictures were taken before I was born. I thought it was weird how my dad looked so much like me and my mom looked “so much like the kinds of girls I’m interested in.” After waking, I can’t imagine that’s true… She looked a lot like Sara Koch, though!

Fireworks and Rockvision

Fred Flintstone was talking to his boss, Mr. Slate, in front of his house. They discussed an upcoming company event at a commercial firework show. Fred wouldn’t have to pay a dime for his seat at the show. He said he would book the tickets to the event if his boss wanted, but he admitted that he would probably buy seats in the back row. According to Fred, he felt the view was better from the back (he wouldn’t have to crane his neck to watch the fireworks go off), but I knew he was just worried about spending too much of his boss’ money. Fred went into the house. I saw him in a room that resembled my parents’ bedroom at their old house in North Carolina. All of the furniture was made of stone. The TV was spewing pink hearts and chocolate bars. I understood that Fred had left the TV on the romance channel to learn how to make Wilma happy, but he meant to turn it off. Embarrassed that someone might’ve found out, he punched the stone TV until it turned off.

“Stupid rockvision…” he said.

Exam in 23 Minutes

I was at Nicole’s house on a Sunday night. This seemed to take place before yesterday’s signals and systems exam. Nicole and I played Animal Crossing with the Gamecube connected to the PS2 somehow. We saved all of our data on a PS2 memory card. We didn’t play for very long, though; it was getting late.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said afterward.

“Didn’t know you could do what?” she asked.

“Save Gamecube stuff on a PS2 memory card. That’s really weird.”

“We used to do that all the time, remember?” I didn’t, but the fact that I couldn’t remember didn’t bother me much. I rolled up a blanket and held it in my lap. Nicole buried her face in it and started making strange sounds. She asked me how many eyes I wanted her to draw on my forehead… Eric heard her from all the way in his room and yelled that she should stop being annoying. Their dad heard Eric yelling and shouted up the stairs for all of us to shut up. I told Nicole she couldn’t draw eyes on me, anyway… I needed to look like a normal person for school the following morning.

The dream jumped. While I was in the bathroom, I overheard Nicole and her dad talking about how Matt needed a haircut. Apparently, he kept asking Phil to cut his hair.

“When I cut hair,” Phil explained, “it always comes out looking like my hair. I really don’t think Matt wants dad hair.” Nicole laughed.

The dream jumped. I sat up in Nicole’s bed and checked the clock. 9:37 AM. How long until the next bus, I wondered? Panic set in – I had class at 10 AM! For that matter, I had an exam to take… I couldn’t afford to be late. I ran outside and found Nicole and her dad on the driveway. It looked like Phil had been digging in the trash before I arrived. He started walking toward the garage.

“I don’t suppose I could get a ride downtown…?” I asked hesitantly. Phil didn’t even stop walking.

“Not right now,” he said as though I should’ve known his answer already. Nicole gave me a weird look, and I explained the situation. I would never make it to class on time unless Phil drove me. Even if I took a train, I wouldn’t get to school until half an hour into the test. I suspected I could manage anyway, but the thought was unsettling.

Bicycle in the Sky (Lucid)

I was riding a bike down Nicole’s street as I whistled Disney songs. By the time I passed the church, I started wondering what I was doing in Nicole’s neighborhood. I was supposed to be at my dorm. There was only one explanation: I was dreaming! I instantly remembered that I had just gone back to sleep. Having gone a long time now without flying, I decided to make the bike fly off the sidewalk. It rose off the ground slowly, then faster as I realized I could pedal, too. I tilted it back until I was riding straight into the sky. I passed through the branches of a huge tree that seemed to exist solely to get in my way. Once I made it above the tree, I made my wheels level with the ground and steadily rode across the sky hundreds of feet above Lombard. Although I had to laugh when I saw chunks of land loading in the distance (Minecraft style), the view was impressive, and I wished Nicole could have seen it with me. There were patches of water here and there that didn’t belong. They reminded me of the town’s layout in another dream (Pace Route 123 and Selling Dreams). As I passed St. Charles, I felt the dream destabilizing abnormally. Before long, I was awake in bed. My alarm was going off.

Actually, it was just a false awakening, but I forgot to do a reality check… I started writing down the lucid dream I just “awakened” from. There were two beds on the other side of my dorm room. Till lay in one, but the other was empty. I assumed he had stolen it from someone else’s room for his girlfriend to use.

“Get a gun… and shoot Josh…” he murmured in his sleep. I burst out laughing. He pointed his hand at me like a gun and waved it. I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Till started laughing, too, and then he opened his eyes. I stopped laughing; had he been awake all that time? Till stumbled out of bed and walked over. I tried to avoid talking to him – at least until I could finish writing down my dream. He started rearranging the experimental data printouts on my desk.

“Hey, stop it,” I said. He didn’t listen. I asked him to stop again – politely, this time. Eventually, I lost my patience… “Screw off!!” I shouted (except I wasn’t as polite this time). He gave me a puzzled look and went back to bed.

“What did I do?” he asked after a few minutes of writing. I noticed a place where my lines were jumbled on the page. I couldn’t figure out what I had written there. I spoke to Till in Ben’s accent.

“You think this is such a big deal? Your friends drink whatever I buy for myself because I’m not here on the weekends. They eat my food and leave the trash on my desk. They sleep in my bed and leave it smelling weird, like pistachios and B.O.” I threw my arms in the air. “I’ve been patient with all of that, but this is too much! So yeah, screw off!” For some reason, he got up and started looking for my differential amplifier lab report on the desk. I got up to help him look (so I could keep it away from him). We couldn’t find it until Nicole showed up… Apparently, I was supposed to put milk in the transistors to “sweeten” them, and that’s why our data was off. Right…

Writing a Dream about Writing a Dream about a Dream

I was writing a dream about writing a dream about the lucid dream I had this morning. I had a lot of difficulty putting my thoughts into words because of how confusing this was.

On minecraft there was a new update today and one of the new things is that you can designate the "seed" for the random map generator. That way if two people type in the same numbers or letters they can have the same map. One really epic one you should try is 404. Dig in the gravel and have fun. (at coordinates 26, 67, 13)

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

On minecraft there was a new update today and one of the new things is that you can designate the "seed" for the random map generator. That way if two people type in the same numbers or letters they can have the same map. One really epic one you should try is 404. Dig in the gravel and have fun. (at coordinates 26, 67, 13)

Wow, that's interesting!

February 23, 2011

Two of these weren't in my paper-and-pencil dream journal, so there may be more dreams I haven't recalled yet... I'll update this if I remember anything else today.

Ace's Reincarnation

After Ace’s death, he reincarnated and become an infant who looked exactly like Ace. He even wore the same clothes. Reborn appeared and gave Ace a devil fruit. The fruit gave him the power to create sinusoidal signals in his body. Because the domain of the sine function is infinite, this included expanding his body infinitely in two opposing directions. I was surprised by how similar this ability was to Luffy’s in appearance (especially for a sine wave with a small amplitude). Reborn dragged Ace to a Vongola training camp so he could get in touch with his former self. I noticed something bizarre about their heights: while Reborn was only about a foot tall, Ace was less than half his size. I guessed it was just the way the manga artist likes to draw babies.

Scamper's Development and the White Gar

I was on the floor of the living room at my parents’ house in Texas. Scamper lay beside me. He rolled over to get me to rub his belly. I checked a website intended to track a dog’s intelligence and cognitive abilities. Some of them were just silly (for example: “Able to Recognize There are Other Homeless Dogs”), but others were interesting – like learning to search on Google! I was proud of Scamper until he started rubbing his butt on my leg… I didn’t know what he was up to, but I didn’t like it. My vision was taken over by a library of monsters from various video games and books. I noticed a creature that looked like my perception of a gar. I understood that it was a level ten monster. As I studied it, I decided to find and raise a white gar.

1970's Festival and Fatal Allergies

Within the first two hours of sleep, I had a surprisingly lengthy dream.

I was driving around in Nicole’s mom’s convertible. I kept crossing train tracks. None of the warning arms were working, so at first, I thought they were safe to cross. I almost got hit by a small train on the passenger side because of this. After that, I was extremely cautious about stopping before each set of tracks to check for trains. I usually had to wait for the same two obnoxiously long trains to pass every time. It was like the tracks were snaking their way back and forth across the road… One of the trains had a giant, yellow sign that said “1970′s.” Arnold Schwarzenegger stood next to the sign with a big grin on his face. The other long train wasn’t particularly interesting except for the short-haired reporter woman sitting on top of it. In this dream, she was my mom. Over time, I figured out that I was going to have to beat the trains to the next set of tracks unless I wanted to wait every time. Obviously, I didn’t want to waste time by waiting. At the next railroad crossing, I was happy to see that I had beaten the trains, but there was a car on the tracks (as though it was a train). I gave him a moment to cross, but he didn’t. He waved his hand, indicating that it was safe for me to go; he didn’t need to cross the road yet. I drove about a foot onto the railroad tracks before I saw a train zoom by in the other direction. So much for it being safe to cross! I switched into reverse and backed up to safety. I had to wait for the long trains to pass again… After this crossing, I was no longer in a car. I walked to an area where the two trains were supposed to meet so they could be combined. Arnold Schwarzenegger hopped off his train with the 1970′s sign as it neared the end of a winding mess of tracks. He pushed it down a sloped set of tracks into a holding area.

“Hey, kid!” he said. “That sign’s not going to be lit for anotha houa!”

“Oh, really…?” I frowned. “Guess I’ll just have to find a way to entertain myself.”

The dream jumped. I decided to join the team of engineers organizing the upcoming event – the lighting of the 1970′s sign! We were quite literally train engineers. Our job was to connect tracks and drop portions of a train into a holding area such that they could quickly be combined and used for the lighting of the sign. Our base of operations was a white tower contained within an even larger building. Imagine NERV’s headquarters – it’s similar to that. The reporter woman from before was my boss as well as my mother. She complained that none of us had the flair of an artist. To show us true art, she hired a robot bird to help with the assembly process. I pushed it out a window and never saw it again. We all went to another room. A snaking path leading from the surface descended to the level of the room’s floor, which resembled an infinite white void. A domed, white temple stood nearby. This was the entrance to the boarding area. Pipes and train parts lay scattered across the white floor. Austin was also working for this company, but he had a Darth Vader suit. Using commands to the suit, he could perform feats of telekinesis. He let me borrow the suit, and I gained the same powers. I typed the command force(t, y) into the suit’s console, and an “invisible” light blue arm reached out of my body to grab a section of the train. It was invisible to everyone but me. I pushed the train section down a slope into the same holding area as before. Next, Austin and I got in a single train car and rode it down a track spiraling down the length of a long vertical shaft. The spiral was meant to build up the train’s speed for the lighting ceremony. We referred to this speed as current. We came to several intermediate platforms and had to carefully lower our section of tracks to connect with the next set. Mistakes at this point would send us plummeting to our deaths. After a couple of track adjustments, some random guy almost drove an old van onto one of the platforms before it was ready. I stood on the tracks to stop him from proceeding. Once the spiral track was complete, we returned to the area with the temple.

Hundreds of people flooded into the room, most of them children. My mom announced that it was time to light the sign. We all boarded the completed train, which had somehow been brought back up to the top of the spiral. As we rode it down, Austin and I realized that the “current” was getting out of control. We warned everyone to brace themselves for impact. We crashed into the back of another train at eighty miles per hour. Amazingly, no one was hurt, and we didn’t damage the trains! I drew Apheri instinctively and cut my way through the broken door at the end of our train. I had to do the same to get into the train we crashed into. Using this train to descend the rest of the way to level ground, I was able to get a better view of the situation. I kicked the smaller train at the bottom onto another set of tracks, and the long train came rolling down beside me. My mom came outside and scolded us for messing up the ceremony. It had been a pathetic failure.

The dream jumped. I was helping clean up after the ceremony. I gathered all the food I found in open containers in the large room with the temple. We could save some of it for the next event, I reasoned. I got dirt in the guacamole and spilled the salad all over the floor. Whoops. I picked up some scrap metal on my way up to the surface. I emerged in the backyard at my parents’ old house in Texas. I climbed over the fence with all of these things in my hands somehow. The only place to get rid of trash was in the front yard. My mom just opened the gate… We had to open the gate to the neighbors’ yard, too, for some reason. My mom complained about everything that had gone wrong with the 1970′s festival. She said she wanted to do the event in China originally, but she figured Americans were more organized. I agreed. I dropped some of the scrap metal in the neighbors’ yard by accident, and I huge, black dog came running over. The scrap metal turned into a wasp. The dog walked over to my mom and started sniffing around. The wasp started building a nest on the side of the air conditioning unit beside the house. The dog aggravated it, so the wasp flew over and stung my neck. At first, I was fine… Then intense pain seemed to stab me in the neck, and I started screaming. I realized I was fatally allergic to wasp venom. I woke up.

Searching Underwater Caverns for an Inheritance

I was in a huge field with a small house situated nearby. I understood that there was a secret fortune stored somewhere in the area, and I wanted a share. I communicated telepathically with the deceased spirits of those who owned the gold. They told me to go into an underwater cave to find it.

The dream jumped. Austin and I floated around in the underwater cavern with flashlights. Nicole accompanied us, but we did most of the searching. Austin asked where he could get a copy of a certain software package. I told him to check Usenet. He said he didn’t think they would have it. Nicole started making scratching noises inside her scuba suit. Somehow, the vibrations from these scratching sounds injured me and Austin. Our health appeared as it would on Minecraft. Nicole kept doing it until Austin died. I said not to worry since I would get his stuff, but when he respawned, he appeared on the same tile. I realized his spawn point was following him around… He was basically immortal. Of course, if he fell in a pit of lava, he would be trapped. I reminded him we would have to walk out of the cave the long way instead of killing ourselves since we would all spawn right in the cave if we tried. Of course, that’s irrelevant anyway, because I wanted to take the gold out of the cave.

Healthcare in Strange Places

I was at a Japanese mall. A bunch of the store owners were giving presentations on their businesses. I listened to one presentation from a woman named Dr. Kim. She started a hospital at the mall and had surprising success. She said she couldn’t believe how many of her patients told her how hot she was. I moved around some tall people to get a better look. She wasn’t particularly attractive, so I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. She put on a Beatrice costume over her lab coat. It made her look enormously overweight. I found myself in Nicole’s kitchen. Rob talked to me about how most high schools have their own dental office now. He said it was funny how equipment in a dentist’s office could mess with cell phone signals.

Delicious Chicken Fingers

I went to a small restaurant while carrying a bag of fabric Nicole had just bought at Hobby Lobby. She had to use the bathroom, so I waited there for her. I saw a bunch of individually wrapped chicken fingers on a heated display tray at the front of the store. They looked like free samples, but I knew they really weren’t. They were $1 each. I stole one anyway… It was incredibly delicious.

Starting Abnormal Psychology Again

In this dream, it was the start of the semester I was already mentally drained on my way to psychology (meaning I had only been to signals and systems). I just wanted to go home. Chinonso offered me leftovers from Subway. I gladly accepted his offer and finished the six-inch sandwich inside the bag he handed me before I made it to Ben-Zeev’s abnormal psychology class. We went through a list of thirty terms I’ve never heard before… Among them: “paralisia” (apparently Portuguese or paralysis, which sounds right) and “parasignon” (which is nonsense). He drew pictures next to the words to help us remember which was which. Unfortunately, he drew the same pigeon for three of the terms! I definitely got better at drawing pigeons – my third one was incredibly realistic – but it didn’t help me remember the definitions. Someone spoke over the professor during his lecture, and he immediately called the student out.

“Go to the principal’s office. You had your warning.” Whose office is that, exactly? Another student went with the accused, explaining that he was an architecture student. I suppose they’re all working as campus guides on the side. Otherwise, I didn’t understand how that was relevant. We moved on to a new topic. Ben-Zeev asked me if I knew what he was going to talk about. He picked my dream journal off my desk and started reading it without my permission. I wished he had just asked… He only wanted to see if they were notes on the assigned reading; they weren’t. He asked someone else when he realized my dreams had nothing to do with his class (now they do). After psychology ended, I went into a small room with a couple of picnic tables. I had a bowl of suspicious-looking pasta. There seemed to be cooked worms in it… The guy who gave it to me asked if I liked it. He looked like he might be Chinonso’s brother. I wanted to say it was disgusting, but I had to try it first to pass judgment. I reached three fingers into the bowl, scooped some out, and ate it out of my hand. It was actually pretty good. It turned into lasagna when it touched my tongue. I had a fork, but I preferred to use my hand to eat. The guy asked what I thought of Alice’s singing lately. I had a vague idea of who he was talking about, but she was someone in Nicole’s high school choir… Did he think I was in choir with her? I tried to play along anyway. Basically, this Alice girl was getting suspended for inappropriate behavior in the girls’ bathroom. I wished I knew if we were thinking of the same Alice. The guy mentioned being hungry, so I passed him the bowl and made one more handful out of wormy scraps on the table using the fork. Since I hadn’t put it in my mouth, I gave him the fork. Warm cheese dripped off the lasagna into my hand.

The dream jumped. I was viewing my grades on my phone. My average in one of my classes was 1%. It seemed I was also taking physical education… I checked the syllabus for gym. There were one hundred tasks for me to complete in the semester to earn a perfect score. As an example, my grade would go up by a point for “Becoming Heavier than Really Necessary.” I wasn’t sure how to interpret many of them. I could get up to five points for scoring goals in team sports. The grades screen disappeared. Sue Sylvester was helping an elderly woman use a printer wirelessly. Sue made crude gestures to Will Schuester from across the hall. He didn’t really understand what she was saying, so he repeated the gestures back. The old woman said that one of the pages wouldn’t print, so Sue went over to the printer to print it directly.

Cursed Pendant on a Cruise Ship

I was on a cruise ship with Nicole, Andrea, Lyra, Rayn, Neluna, Axis, and Symphony. We all went below decks for a candlelit dinner. The food took ages to arrive, and our waitress kept giving me strange looks. I told Nicole I didn’t like how this restaurant felt and suggested going to another one. She insisted it would be fine. After a while, the lights went out. Our waitress came back to assure us that everything was fine and power would be restored momentarily. When the lights did come back on, Axis and Lyra were missing. It seemed like every time I turned my back on someone, they disappeared. I was left with Nicole and Rayn. Our food finally arrived, but none of us felt like eating… We wanted to know where our friends had gone. The waitress refused to get her supervisor when we asked. She said the management had nothing to do with the restaurant proper. Nicole was infuriated by this, but I seemed to understand; this was common in high class restaurants. I told the girls I was going to sneak into the manager’s office and see if I could find an explanation. I hoped they would still be there when I got back.

I released my awareness from my body and drifted past the kitchen to a small room at the back of the boat. Our waitress was pacing back and forth in the room. I slipped in and looked around. There was a magical pendant in a glass case on one side of the office. I sensed that it was cursed. This was the source of our troubles. I reached through the glass and grabbed it. As soon as I touched it, the waitress sensed my presence. She shouted at me, and a couple of security guards in black suits hurried into the room. They didn’t believe her when she said someone was in the room. They certainly noticed that the pendant was floating in the air, though, so they realized it for themselves. I teleported away.

For a moment, I became a strange waitress who wore two wigs – a long, white one to cover her naturally brown hair, and a short, orange one that somehow covered everything underneath. She brought Nicole and Rayn complimentary drinks. When Nicole wasn’t looking, she crept up behind Rayn. I could feel the pendant resonating. This woman was possessed by the force of the pendant. She took off her orange wig, and the white wig fused with her head. Her eyes became a silverly purple. She grabbed Rayn gently around the shoulders, and the blue-haired girl disappeared with her. My awareness returned to my body.

“This place is cursed,” I said. “We have to get out of here immediately.”

“What about the others…?”

“I’ll get them back. I don’t want to lose you too.” The lights went off. I heard Nicole scream, and then I fell into an abyss of darkness.

February 24, 2011

I forgot to post these this morning, but it all worked out since I took a nap and had two more just now!

Faulty Wiring in the Monitor

I was talking to Nicole and Ben on Skype. My laptop had an extra button to turn the monitor display on or off. When I pressed it, however, it turned the entire computer off instead of just the monitor. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew I couldn’t afford to have it fixed… I would just have to let it turn off automatically. I called Nicole after the computer turned off to explain what had happened. I told her this had happened once before already.

Visit from Dad and Careless Nudity

I was at Nicole’s house. My dad showed up without telling anyone. He came into the room just before Nicole was going to change out of her pajamas. I tried to escort my dad out of the room, but then Nicole’s parents both came into the room, too. All three parents wanted to hug me. When we were done with that, they went into the kitchen to have some coffee. Nicole started taking her clothes off before I closed the door… I just reminded her that someone could’ve seen her and closed the door behind me.

When I went into the kitchen, no one was there. I sensed that there was something seriously wrong in the room, but I couldn’t figure out what. It might have been something with the layout of the furniture.

Dominion over Direct Current

I was acutely aware of fine-tuned ratios in the natural world. I didn’t experience the world through my senses. Rather, I interacted with it through a number of discrete circuits. My domain was that pertaining to direct current. Another entity guided the mechanisms of alternating current, but we were unable to interact because our consciousness was orthogonal. Everything was smooth and made sense… I know I’m not describing that properly, but “smooth” is the best word I can come up with! It was a beautiful reality for all its simplicity.

Embodiment of the Letter Gamma

I was in a world in which only I existed. I went to a restaurant and approached myself at a small table. The world around me rippled as I moved. I asked myself for psychotherapy. The other me said to sit down and relax, so I did. My body became like a metal and formed into a square hook shape. I became the Greek letter “gamma.” I understood that mankind had recorded my symbol incorrectly; it was backwards. At the same time, my metallic body floated from one table to another, trying to find a place in the universe in which its psychotic agony could be relieved. Nothing changed. I began crying when the fourth table still showed no change.

Hyper Dreamer and a Leone Tribute

While visiting at my parents’ old house in Texas, I found an amazing website called Hyper Dreamer. In addition to allowing its members to keep dream journals on their server, the site had an unknown mechanism for determining all of one’s dreams in a given night. I only remembered three dreams when I accidentally discovered the site, but it knew of seven dreams of mine from the previous night. I checked the three I recalled for accuracy. They were correct. As I later described it to my mom, the dreams were described almost exactly the way I wrote them down, even using the same words in many cases. I checked another dream – one of the four I didn’t remember. In this one, I was driving a car near my old high school, but Nicole and Andrea couldn’t decide where they wanted to go, so I didn’t know which way to turn. I remembered this in great detail as soon as I pictured it. Not only did the website keep track of the dream content, it also indicated the source region in the brain. Apparently, this meant that different dream content came from different regions of the brain… I wondered just how advanced the psychology behind this project could be. I started copying my forgotten dreams over to my dream journal, but my computer was overrun by pop-up advertisements! They all depicted the same tanned woman with black hair sucking on a lollipop seductively. I tried closing them, but ten appeared for every window I managed to close. My computer’s processing speed quickly dropped to a crawl. I had to close my browser altogether to solve the problem. It also changed my desktop background to an image of the woman with the lollipop. I had to go help Chelsea, Nicole, and my mom clean up the kitchen downstairs, so I put the laptop away. It was an ancient machine with sharp, metal edges. It was also difficult to open and close because of rust in the hinges.

The dream jumped. I was downstairs with Nicole and Chelsea in the kitchen. Nicole was vacuuming dirt, Chelsea was wiping down the surfaces, and I just seemed to be observing… I found my mom in the laundry room. She was sweeping out dirt that had collected behind the laundry machines. I retrieved the vacuum cleaner from Nicole as soon as she was done and brought it to my mom.

The dream jumped. In my room, I attempted to show Chelsea the dream website. I couldn’t find it anymore, though… She took the laptop from me and tried it herself. I warned her about the advertisements in case she was successful. I still hadn’t changed my desktop background, so I showed that to her. She found some pictures I had apparently taken nude for Nicole… Whoops. I don’t know why they were on my desktop in plain sight. I took the laptop back and deleted all of the picture files on my desktop, including some that weren’t even related. Chelsea left the room. I kept trying to get to the site. I remembered finding it on a simple-looking white page with a bunch of links. When I found that page again, I knew I was in business. Unfortunately, I kept getting disconnected from Hyper Dreamer’s server when I tried to connect. After several attempts, I received a notification that there was a limit on the number of times a guest could visit their dream record. I signed up as a member to get rid of this limitation. I still couldn’t connect, though. I decided I just needed to reset my IP address… I restarted my computer and the router, then tried again – same problem.

The dream jumped. I found myself on a train. As we made a stop, I checked the signs on the platform. I was on the Green Line, but I didn’t recognize the name of the stop, so I figured I had gone too far south. I hopped off the train. Shortly after it left me behind, I learned that there weren’t going to be any more trains for the night due to weather conditions. Crap… Although I didn’t like the idea, I left the train station and walked down a poorly lit street to a small motel. I would have to stay there for the night. The inside of the motel looked like Roberto’s, that Mexican restaurant we went to in Las Vegas – except it had a fireplace on the left side of the room and about half as many seats. The guy running it told me to sign my name in his guestbook and write how many days I was staying. Right above where I signed, I saw two signatures from Nicole for zero days (whatever that means), each with a nude photograph attached. I felt nausea stirring up in my stomach.

“Hey, don’t masturbate to that!” the guy scolded. I wasn’t… “She’s a nice girl!”

“She’s my wife,” I said.

“Oh… I’m terribly sorry…” He meant he was sorry that my wife was giving people pictures of herself.

“I don’t think she did it,” I said, rationalizing the situation. “I’ve had other girlfriends. One of them must have done it. Kaitlen, maybe.” Sorry, Kaitlen. I sighed. “The pictures are real, though. I took those about a year ago. I have no idea how anyone got them.” I went over by the fireplace and sat down. “Could you please take those out?” I asked, referring to the pictures.

“Of course,” he said.

The dream jumped. It was sometime later in the night. Police showed up at the door to announce that another train would be running shortly. It would really be the last train for the night, though. Weather predictions said that another blizzard was coming into town. I walked back to the train platform in darkness. Even the platform lights were off. A light turned on when I waited in one of those heated waiting areas, but it wasn’t particularly bright. I worried it would just lure people to me… I wouldn’t see them until it was too late. I saw a guy sitting on a bench in another circle of light. Should I go sit by him, I wondered? The platform soon became crowded, and all the lights went on. Someone on the intercom warned us that the train would be unable to make a complete stop due to excess ice on the tracks. We would have to be careful boarding and leaving the train. They also wished a woman happy birthday; she was 150 years old. The train finally crept by with its doors wide open. Some people couldn’t hear the announcement, so they didn’t know they had to board while the train was moving. Sam Sullivan tried to chase the train down the tracks and board it further down. I watched him chasing the train all the way to a grassy cliff. He kept shouting at the train conductor to stop for him because the doors were on the other side. He tried to jump onto one of the platforms connecting the train cars, but he missed and ended up under the train. I heard his horrified scream as the train crushed his bones. His ghost stood on the cliff, staring directly at me… Then we sped down a hill, descending from the cliff. We crossed a deep chasm and finally stopped (read: slowed down significantly) at Roosevelt. So much for going back to my dorm. Well, I decided I would buy some food and things at Target, then come back to the train platform and catch the last outbound train going back south. Somehow, I ended up at Six Flags with my mom.

“What are we doing here?” I asked her. “I need to hurry back to the train platform. I’ll get stuck here.” My mom was fine with letting me go back, but the guy standing at the exit asked for my ticket. I didn’t understand why he was checking tickets at the exit. Obviously, I had a ticket if I was inside the park! “Oh, I have a lifetime pass,” I said. “It’s okay.” I tried to walk past him, but he stopped me again.

“Let’s see it,” he said. I checked the pockets of my swimming trunks – no idea where my pants went… No pants, no tickets.

“I don’t seem to have it on me…”

“Tickets are $120 for non-members.”

“I guess I’ll just put it on my card…” I sighed. I couldn’t really afford it. Helplessly, I looked over at my mom. “Dad’s gonna kill me.”

“No, he won’t. I’ll talk to him,” she reassured me. “It’ll be alright.”

“Maybe we should just stay here… We’re already stuck, so why not enjoy it?” I put my wallet away and turned my back to the ticket salesman. He didn’t seem bothered by the fact that I was planning on running around Six Flags without paying. I wondered what my mom would want to do at an amusement park… Roller coasters were out of the question, but I considered that a good thing. I’m not fond of roller coasters, either. We ended up going to some kind of comedy routine hosted by Jay Leno. It took place in Perlstein Hall, room 108. Evidently, that had become part of Six Flags. At first, it sounded like Leno was continuing Morrison’s review of Fourier series. He quickly started talking about something else, though – the “circumstantial properties” of a pair of parabolas. He asked me to tell him what those were. Obviously, I had no idea, so I said I wasn’t sure how to define it. The class unanimously erupted into laughter. I rolled my eyes. Ordinarily, I would be extremely anxious about dealing with the situation, but I knew for a fact that none of them had heard of parabolas having “circumstantial properties” before. What did that even mean? I heard the guy sitting behind me call me a name, but I couldn’t hear it clearly over all the noise. All this laughter triggered Jay Leno’s horrible migraines, so he had to wear a Styrofoam hat after that to ease the pain. As the migraines worsened, he even had to lie down on a couch.

“David Leone has always been an important role model to me,” Leno said. “He used to give shows lying down. I can make this like a tribute to him!” When the show was over, my mom and I went back to the entrance. There was no one there because it was so late at night, but the gate was locked. I had to climb over it. I didn’t wait for my mom because I thought she would be mad at me for sneaking out. I had to climb over several locked gates on my way back to the train station… My mom talked to a friend who worked at Six Flags and convinced her to unlock the gates, so they quickly caught up with me. The woman asked my mom how I managed to get through all of these locked gates without her help.

Unisex Bathrooms

I was in a public bathroom. In this dream, no distinction was made between male and female bathrooms; everyone just used the same one. W0men knew how to use urinals effectively, too. Three of the urinals on one wall were connected with tiny walls separating people to prevent discomfort. Nicole, Chelsea, and I occupied the triple urinal. I worried they were going to think I was peeking and wished someone would propose segregated bathrooms.

The Demonization of Vongola Tsuna

I was driving a car into a snowy parking lot when the dream began. I had to change gears to keep the car going over thick layers of ice. We found a parking spot near a huge building. It feels like we were geographically close to Curtis Elementary School in Bossier City. Right behind our parking space, there was a stream called the Cool River. Appropriately named, it was the coldest flowing river in the world. On the other side was the Steam River, the hottest river capable of retaining its fluidity. Where they flowed together, they created the Warm River, which flowed into the basement of the building. All three of these were known for their powerful currents and deadly rapids, so my mom refused to go near them. I brought $10 with me to pay for my ticket; I thought we were going to Six Flags (not that again). We stopped right outside the entrance. My mom was nowhere in sight, and Nicole had transformed into Kozato Enma. I was Sawada Tsunayoshi. We vowed to protect our friendship inside the building, regardless of the cost. After we entered, Enma realized he didn’t have enough money to enter. I barely had enough for myself, so I couldn’t pay for both of us… I encouraged him to try selling artwork to raise the money. He drew four pictures of a bed in different colors. To my dismay, he explained that he planned to sell it to me… I told him to give it to the guy guarding the secret entrance inside the building. This person was standing in front of prison bars. He wore a black executioner’s mask over his face and thick, black leather armor. When Enma gave him the drawing, he got a job working at the prison just inside. The executioner called him “the good jail guy.” In contrast, the executioner locked himself in a jail cell and took the title of “the bad jail guy.” They argued vehemently as Enma let me into the secret depths of the building. I laughed nervously at all of this.

There was an enormous room beyond the prison with a ton of white, ant-like creatures. They were about the size of my hand. I was terrified of going near them… They reproduced incredibly fast. When I first saw the pile, it was about a foot high. I went through a golden portal in the wall and found myself in an old cavern full of black and red velociraptors! So dinosaurs had survived the tests of time by hiding in these underground caverns, I realized… When they noticed me, I ran for my life through the cavern. I jumped on successive platforms made of stone and dove through a second golden portal. This one took me to a nest of angry dragons. I fled again… The third portal brought me back to the jail and the rapidly growing ant hill. It was already twice my height. I sat and watched the ants expanding their civilization for a while. Although I didn’t voice my opinion for fear of Enma locking me up with “the bad jail guy,” I theorized that there might be a whole new world above the ceiling of this room… A world we never discovered because we didn’t look past all the dirt in the way. A voice in the back of my head told me that was stupid.

I revisited the dinosaurs and slaughtered them with my bare hands. I learned that I was gradually becoming a gnome demon – despite the fact that I wasn’t even a gnome. I noticed devil horns and a tail growing out of my body. When I returned to the ant hill, it was almost touching the ceiling. I prepared to invade the new world.

Wedding and Wandering the Jungle Archipelago

I hovered over a lush landscape divided up into numerous small islands. It looked like a rainforest had been consumed by the ocean. Far from the rest of civilization, Rayn and Axis woke up on the edge of one of these islands together. They exchanged dreams and started planning their wedding. Rayn knew exactly which island she wanted to get married on. It was a tiny one in roughly the same shape as Nocturn Isle. Axis asked her about the decorations, and she said she had hired some people to paint the island white as a symbol of purity. They got on a boat and rowed there, but when they were within sight, Axis was horrified. It was pink, and the paint was oozing into the ocean.

“No way, we can’t invite them there… That’s dangerous! We… We have to cancel the wedding… Just for now…” he panicked. Rayn held him close to calm him down.

“It’s alright,” she said. “We can delay it if you’re worried. I’m sorry.” They continued to travel the beautiful, overgrown landscape together.

Elsewhere, I saw Symphony wandering alone. She showed no sign of delay in her movements or her usual curiosity. I wondered how long she had been in this jungle archipelago.

“Symphony?” I descended behind her and allowed my body to take form. She turned around.

“There’s no time. I must be going.”

“Well, then…” I sighed. I watched her march off.

Operation Rescue Elita

Symphony and I were part of a team trying to rescue Elita (or Cass, whichever name she used in this dream). We were deep in the heart of an ancient civilization well-versed in golem technology, booby traps, and poison arts. As such, we had to be extremely careful as we progressed toward Elita. I divided our mission into several smaller objectives we could work on one at a time. Symphony seemed to appreciate this consideration for order. Phil, Nicole, and Axis were also on the team. There was an extra member: a foreigner who hardly understood our language. I thought he might be from this civilization, but I didn’t ask him. He had no experience with robotics, so he had difficulty understanding Symphony’s behavior. When he congratulated her on a job well done after the first couple of cleared objectives (flawlessly completed, of course), she said nothing. She just continued walking directly behind me as I returned to our cooler to get a drink of water. The third objective required us to run past a series of timed release systems in the walls which would shoot out poison arrows. It was a typical Indiana Jones sort of thing. Symphony and I cleared this quite easily, leaving no arrows behind to bother the others. Symphony could have cleared it herself, but she insisted on staying close to me.

As we neared Elita’s location, we came to a chasm. Because of her weight, Symphony was unable to make the jump. I told her to wait while the rest of us jumped across. We took a slab of metal, extended it over the edge of the platform, and weighed it down with bricks on our side so it would stay in place. Then, with each of us holding the metal slab to add support, we had Symphony jump down. She gave me that dumb smile of hers we’re all so fond of and hopped onto it. Then she looked up at me and asked if she had done it properly. We underestimated her weight; any moment, we were going to drop the slab. I urged her to get off it, and she jumped to safety. We let the slab slide into the abyss.

“Unbelievable,” Phil muttered. “What do you teach this thing?” I didn’t respond to his question.

Hey could you do me a favor and test my minecraft server I made for me and a friend please. He can't test it right now and I just want to make sure I set everything up right. The ip is 192.168.1.3:25565.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

Hey could you do me a favor and test my minecraft server I made for me and a friend please. He can't test it right now and I just want to make sure I set everything up right. The ip is 192.168.1.3:25565.

No luck.

February 25, 2011

Dirty Towels

I had a dream that I left one of my dirty towels on the floor of my dorm room by my bed. I was disgusted by my behavior. When I picked it up, there were scraps of food and bits of paper stuck to it… Not to mention hair. I was definitely going to have to wash this.

Lost Tomes in Nicole's Desk

I was asleep with Nicole in her living room until a voice woke me up. I went into her room and started searching her desk for something. I knew she had just organized her desk – or, rather, stuffed a bunch of small things in her desk drawers to make it look more organized. I was never going to find the tomes if I had to search through all that junk! Of course, they had been on the desk earlier. If they moved, I was certain Nicole was responsible. I decided to change clothes before worrying about that. My new clothes were too small for me to put n, but I eventually managed. I found full versions of my magic tomes available for download online. I decided that was an acceptable alternative.

“Where did you get all of these?” asked the voice that woke me up earlier.

“I don’t know. I draw them in – all sorts of books come to me, especially the ones I want.” I was worried Nicole would wake up without me and freak out, so I went back to her.

Poorly Directed Interrogation

I was sitting at a school desk with a small piece of paper. A man in a black suit stood over me at the side of the desk. He was administering some kind of test. He just kept asking me “Why?” I didn’t understand…

Signals Exam and Regret

I was in Morrison’s class for an exam. He passed out tiny bits of construction paper for some reason. He let us look through the exam with out notes out, but we had to put them away before we began. One of the problems was really stupid… The impulse response was a really complicated expression that ended up being constant. This made calculation of the convolution extremely simple. I found myself in some kind of bridal shop with my mom. I was Symphony, and she was Elita. She asked me about a particular dress that was $600. I said I would wear it, so she bought it. The cashier saw her with Morrison (who was still watching to make sure I didn’t cheat on the exam) and asked about my dad. My mom was visibly disgusted.

“You’ve been together… What, thirteen years now? What’s wrong with him?” the cashier asked.

“Fourteen,” my mom hissed. That still didn’t make sense… My mom’s debit card was declined, so she had no way to pay for the dress. She turned back into Elita and apologized for not being able to afford the dress. I calmly told her it wasn’t necessary in the first place.

The dream jumped. My mom was on a road trip with two elderly women. She was complaining about my dad and things she wanted to do with her life.

“Did you think this trip was all about you?” the driver asked. “Well, it’s not, so shut up already!”

Originally Posted by Nephanim

No luck.

D: thanks anyways. What did it say when it failed?

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

D: thanks anyways. What did it say when it failed?

Connection timeout. It sounds like the port's not open.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

Connection timeout. It sounds like the port's not open.

Ya it tursn out my ip adress kept changing so I couldnt forward it so I had to make it a static ip. Everythings all fixed now. oh and the ip is actualy 66.75.206.194:25565.

February 26, 2011

It's late, I know. I'm off to bed. P: MadMonkey, I tried connecting to your server this morning, but then I realized minecraft.net was down, so the fact that I couldn't connect doesn't say much... I'll try again sometime tomorrow.

Catnapped and Nagging

I was in Nicole’s living room. She and Andrea’s mom walked in. I understood that Nicole had kidnapped a little kitten she found in her backyard even though she knew it belonged to a woman down the street. Andrea’s mom had come to order Nicole to give the kitten back. Nicole said she would give it back if her parents wouldn’t let her keep it. She secretly told me that she was going to keep it anyway. Andrea’s mom yelled at us for a bunch of other things, too, but I just tuned her out… I couldn’t believe she was barging into Nicole’s house to boss us around.

Manga and Visitation by the Darkness

I was in a haunted house. The room I spent the night in was fully illuminated by a number of red candles and secure. I walked over to a computer built into the side wall and saw that a new chapter of One Piece was out. Austin asked a question about it, but the question didn’t make any sense. He asked about the manga, but the question only pertained to the anime… Suddenly, the door creaked open, and all of the candles went out. I was in total darkness.

Squatting while a Chinese Man Watches

I was in a field. I followed a path to a portable toilet since I had to relieve myself. No one had been able to point me in the right direction because they were too busy watching golf. The toilet inside was just a hole in the floor, so I didn’t have a seat to use. I had to squat. A Chinese man walked up to the door and tried to open it. Since I had locked it, of course, he couldn’t get in. He pressed his chubby cheeks against the door, and it molded to his face. He could see inside… I yelled at him, and he ran off. He came back, but I kicked his face the second time.

Getting to School and Meeting the Valkyrie of Wisdom

I was bathing at my parents’ old house in Texas. I saw a boy’s reflection in a window outside. I thought it was Austin, but I wasn’t sure… He gave me a sad, lonely look. I smiled.

“‘I’m going to kill you,” I mouthed. Then, realizing I was stirring up legal trouble for myself if it wasn’t Austin, I added, “Not really.” He moved away from the window. I finished washing myself and went up to a room with four beds. Nicole and I shared a bed; the other three were for Chelsea, Austin, and this other guy who never told me his name. We’ll just call him Gary. Anyway, when I walked in, Austin wouldn’t make eye contact with me. Gary announced that he did something cool. He had burnt out his headphone jack on his laptop a while ago, but he figured out how to connect any kind of speaker system to his computer, provided he connected them to an appropriate external power supply. To achieve this, he said he had to “jack” his PC. He said he had to be careful about contacting Microsoft in the future. They would arrest him if they knew. I congratulated him on a job well done. Nicole and I started looking through a blue bin full of books and junk. There were strategy guides, figurines, that sort of stuff… I also found a wad of cash at the bottom. I remembered a story Nicole’s dad told us about finding his money in his copy of Lord of the Rings. I had put this money here to keep it safe and forgot about it… I would still keep it somewhere safe, but hopefully somewhere easier to remember.

“I hope that wasn’t your bus, Austin,” I said as I saw a vehicle that resembled a school bus zoom by. For some reason, I felt that Nicole and I went to the same school, but everyone else went to different schools. Austin’s bus was supposed to come second, but I sensed that mine was already gone. I urged Nicole to hurry outside in case ours came late. I saw it enter the subdivision. We quickly gathered our belongings. I ran out first to stop the bus while Nicole finished collecting her school stuff. As I stepped outside, the bus went by our house. I waved my arms frantically.

“Hey! What a jerk!” Nicole yelled on her way out. The bus stopped, turned around, and pulled up to our yard. We were happy to board, although I noticed some weird details: the bus driver’s ability to turn that huge vehicle around on a small street in one try; the fact that the bus had four doors which all opened (two on each side); and Nicole’s decision to walk around to the passenger side of the bus to get in. The inside looked more like a Pace bus than a school bus. I hoped this was the high school bus… I was worried it would take us to the local middle school. In fact, the first stop was an elementary school… We found Gary and asked him to take us to our school. He drove us to McDonald’s first to get breakfast. On our way out of the McDonald’s parking lot, we saw five kids in a circle with pot standing by the drive-through lane. Nicole and I saw someone with her pants down. Nicole thought this was Lauren Vargo, but it wasn’t. For some reason, the back half of the person’s body was female, but they were male in the front… She had the face of a neanderthal. We drove around for a bit until Gary noticed his gas tank was half empty. Since his car could hold fifteen gallons of gasoline, that left him with a little more than seven gallons.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna make it, guys…” he said as he turned right onto a busy street. Someone cut him off from the middle lane, but he didn’t honk.

“Man, you’ve got more than enough,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it.” I shook my head at him. Before long, we were at our school – sort of. It looked like a shopping mall… As we parked and went inside, I discovered why: the school was inside the mall. We went through a couple of stores first. We were already forty minutes late for class, so there wasn’t any hurry… I had a conversation with Nicole about the names of our electronic devices. She accidentally called her laptop “Clacifer” instead of “Calcifer.” I made it very clear that my laptop – Symphony – was very different from my phone, Symphony XI. I recalled that my Wii was also named Symphony… I would have to change that. Nano could work as the Wii’s new name, I decided, judging by its size. I wondered what to use the name AIOS for… We went through random aisles of sporting goods, toys, and power tools. I kept reminding Nicole not to spend her money. For some reason, Gary warned us that we had to crawl through the exit. We couldn’t just walk out. Other people could walk through, but not us. I tried crawling under the carpet until Nicole stopped me. She explained that I didn’t really have to crawl.

Once we made it back to the parking lot, we chased each other around. I ran a bit slower than I’m able to allow Nicole to actually get away from me. I turned a fistful of snow into numerous chunks of ice. I flung these across the parking lot with ease. They bounced off walls at weird angles without losing any momentum. If they hit Nicole, she pretended not to notice. I observed that I could control their movements with my breath, too. Nicole started flinging my ice back at me, but my breath sent it to her again. This repeated several times before I missed her. I don’t know where the chunk of ice went after that. Anyway, we were about to head to school, but Gary’s little brother showed up. Gary wanted to let him ride on a small life we found near a row of dumpsters. I had a feeling we would get in trouble for this, but I got on it with them anyway. There was a trash can and a dolly at the top. I noticed the dolly was about to fall over, so I warned them about it, but they still knocked it off the platform… Somehow, I caught the handle with my foot. We started going back down. I managed to restore the dolly to its original position before we started moving back down with the lift, but the heavy dumpster decided to come with us. The lid swung open when we reached the bottom. The stench inside was horrible… Gary said there were marimos in there. There were also human limbs! I saw two men in black suits watching us with their hands behind their backs. They approached and restrained us. We learned that we had stumbled upon a secret government project. We tried to deny it, but they had seen us. We talked about the marimos. Gary and I ran for it without warning, catching the men off guard. One of them chased us. We went into the school building.

“If anyone asks, I’m Professor Wong’s research assistant, Mister Chao,” I told Gary.

“What will you do when they call and find out you’re not?”

“By then, we’ll be long gone.” I ran through several white doors, down a long hallway, and into a restaurant. I heard people talking in hushed, frightened tones.

“I don’t wanna die here!” one girl said. I saw that most of the doors and windows were barred up. I exited the restaurant through an open door and found myself in the parking lot. The government agent wasn’t far behind me. I planned to sneak up on the other agent and rescue Nicole and Gary’s brother. I saw a woman with long, white hair down to her ankles floating in the air. She had four breasts, four arms, and four legs. She also had enormous, artificial-looking wings. They didn’t move.

“You’re too late!” she laughed. “The project is already complete!” She pulled out a tennis ball gun. I grabbed a huge, metal bowl and held it in front of me to deflect the balls. When I got close enough, I fused the bowl with the woman’s gun. Another woman – on foot this time – pulled out a tennis ball shotgun. I got hit by this several times, and it hurt me, but still not enough to slow me down. I took it from her and shot her in the head. Blood splattered everywhere. The four-breasted woman descended in front of me. She introduced herself as the Valkyrie of Wisdom. She bestowed her blessing upon me.

Dont wory I know it works fine now. After minecraft.net got up and running again me and my nephue had a lot of fun starting a world together.

Also lol tennis ball guns.

February 27, 2011

Silent Films for Children

I was helping Amar with homework. We had to answer questions about a silent film for children. It was about the suicide of a kid wearing a trench coat and briefs. Neither of us really understood why he killed himself… His life was pretty typical. We wrote down stupid answers just so we would have all of them completed. Our professor announced that the director of the film would be speaking in class for three days. He expected a lot of questions. In addition tot hat, our research project presentations were going to start Friday (the third day of the director’s visit).

The dream jumped. Amar and I were eating lunch. I criticized our professor’s decision to have the film director speak for three days. He didn’t have that much to talk about. Amar left the table when I started talking about Mexicans and tacos. He came back, and I realized I hadn’t started on my project yet…

Forman Family Confinement

Red and Eric Forman were sitting at a table behind a glass wall. They were in confinement until they could be nice to each other. Red pretended to punch Eric, and Eric cried out in fake pain. Kitty ran up to the glass with wrath in her eyes.

“Be nice!” she shouted.

“Mommy, I need you…” Eric whined. Heartbroken, Kitty opened the door. She unbuttoned her shirt, took Eric’s hand, and put it over her chest. He was fittingly disturbed. “I don’t need you that way, Mom.”

“It’s okay, dear… I’m just doing this for her father.” Tense piano chords played as the camera zoomed in on Red’s face.

Shared Dreaming Class and Tracing Threads of Consciousness

I was in a shared dreaming class. All living expenses had been paid for, and on top of that, I was living pretty well. The bathroom had carpeting, for crying out loud. I quickly realized that a few of my dream characters had waking life counterparts who were also enrolled in the class. In particular, I was almost positive I had identified Rayn, Neluna, and Axis. Our class took place in the living room of our new living space. Everyone sat in comfortable wicker chairs and exchanged stories of the previous night’s dreams. This time, however, our instructor announced that we would all be meeting in the same dreamscape for a lesson.

The dream jumped. I found myself in my old neighborhood in North Carolina. We started out about halfway tot he community pool from the front entrance. I examined our instructor closely as he summoned everyone else. For some reason, I could never make out his face. Who was this guy? More importantly, why were we reconstructing places from my memories for his lessons? This isn’t Inception, I thought to myself.

“Welcome, all,” the instructor said. “Come with me, please.” I noticed that in their dreams, the counterparts of Rayn, Neluna, and Axis looked exactly like the characters I knew. I was surprised in Rayn’s case; I thought I knew who her waking self was before enrolling in the class, but this meant I had been wrong before. We walked toward the front of the neighborhood, turned onto my street, and then went down the driveway to my house. I watched the others throw rotten eggs at my house by request of the instructor.

“What gives?” I grumbled. I took Rayn by the hand and teleported with her onto the trail behind my house.

“Hey, what are you doing?” she asked, gently freeing her hand.

“I know this place.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah. I lived here once, before I…” I trailed off as I looked back at the house. “I just want to go for a walk with someone. Would that be okay?”

“Sure,” Rayn said with a smile. Her blue hair seemed to glow. We walked toward the woods together. The trail circles around a pond behind my house, which drains into a ditch when it overflows. The concrete drain in the path was so huge to me when I was little, but as I approached it, I realized I could probably just jump over it. Forget that… It wouldn’t be as fun. I held Rayn’s hand – not in a romantic way, just to feel that connection to her. After all, we had been friends for ages.

“Be careful up here,” I warned her. “Just watch my feet. Ready?” I guided her down into the drain, then back up. “Well done.” She laughed at my childish way of overplaying the drainage system.

“What’s this place called?” she asked. I knew why she wanted to know; she would find it in the waking world.

“XXXX,” I told her. I can’t remember what it’s called, but I knew I told her the right name.

The dream jumped. We were back in the classroom. Rayn refused to look me in the eyes. One of the other girls in the class was kind enough to explain why.

“She felt something toward you in that last shared dream, but she doesn’t feel comfortable with it yet… She’s trying to keep her distance so she doesn’t misinterpret anything.”

“I see…” I replied. Rayn just looked angry to me – particularly in the way she crossed her arms and pouted at the wall. Her brown hair was long enough to reach the middle of her back, and it was carefully maintained. It seemed strange that it wasn’t blue. I decided to take a shower while waiting for her to cool down. When I went in, someone had just come out. She had her hair up in a white towel and another towel loosely wrapped around her body.

“Hey, Nephanim,” she said. “Wanna hop in the jacuzzi?” She gave me that look Neluna gives me… I remembered this was Nel.

“I’m trying to think of a way to cheer XXXX up,” I said, using Rayn’s “real” name. I wish I could remember it.

“Just let me know if you change your mind…” Neluna said as she slid her hand across my cheek. “You’re so cute, you know…”

“Am I?” I laughed.

“I could just…” She threw herself against me for a kiss. I felt her tongue snake its way into my mouth. She pulled away before I had a chance to do so myself. “Yeah… I could do that forever.” She brushed shoulders with me on her way out. My suspicions about her identity were basically confirmed… But was that something I could tell Nicole about? I hadn’t kissed her – it was the other way around. Shrugging, I took off my clothes to get in the shower.

The dream jumped. I was flying high in the sky over a dark world. A knight with a black cape and futuristic blue and white armor opposed me. His helmet was a sphere. I stopped his blade when he slashed at me. When I confirmed that Rayn was watching from the ground, I shattered the knight’s existence with Apheri. He dissolved into nothing. I dropped down beside Rayn.

“That was one of my dream characters… An evil one,” she said. “He always tried to kill me. How did you beat him so easily?”

“I’ve fought him before. I saved you once,” I realized. Rayn gasped.

“Then… Oh my god! It’s you!” She dove into me and gripped me around the torso. “That’s how I know the name Nephanim! All this time, you…” She started coughing, but since we were dreaming, I remedied it through my touch.

“Yeah… I know you as Rayn.” We shared understanding smiles.

The dream jumped. I was talking to our instructor about my discoveries – Neluna and Rayn’s identities, mainly. I asked him to keep all of this secret from Nicole for the time being, especially the part with Nel. I didn’t want her to get angry over nothing. He congratulated me on what I’d learned.

February 28, 2011

Tuition, Library Jobs, and Dreaming

I was in the game room inside my parents’ old house in Texas. My dad told me he was about to leave and wouldn’t have his cell phone for a few days. He was getting dropped off at the airport. He gave me a series of specific instructions that I knew I would never be able to remember. I felt like I was watching a movie, and the main character (in this case, me) was fated to die because of his inability to follow through with someone’s advice. Anyway, my dad wanted me to go to this farm he visited once and see if anyone there was still alive. I was supposed to feed any survivors until he got back from his trip. He warned me that if an armored knight came for me while I was doing this, I was to call him immediately. Didn’t he just say he wouldn’t have his phone? I tried to point this out, but he left before I could. I talked to my mom and learned that Austin was upset about how expensive his college tuition was going to be. It was too late to apply for scholarships, so he would have to pay for all of it himself. I sat down with him to try and cheer him up. He was crying as he held an empty plastic bag in his hands.

“So I hear you’re overcome with financial problems,” I said. He didn’t respond. “I know it’s scary, but it’ll be alright. Have you tried getting a job?” Austin nodded. “How did that go?”

“No one will hire me…” he sobbed. I nodded, understanding his frustration. I almost told him not to worry since it would be easier to get a job once he had a high school diploma, but I withheld that; he would get mad if I told him he might have to wait.

“Just keep trying, okay? You’ll get one eventually, and if not, Dad will help you get through school… Or at least help you get started. They’re… cutting me off, you know…” He looked up with wide eyes. This was actually something my dad joked with me about on the phone last night. He wasn’t really planning to do it.

“Really?” Austin asked.

“Yeah, Chelsea got mad or something… She said it wasn’t fair that they were paying so much for my tuition. You know, I’m actually broke. I’ve got like $500 left to my name.” He buried his face in his arms. This didn’t cheer him up much – knowing that his older brother on the road to success was having difficulties, too. “We’ll get through it, both of us.” I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and went back to my mom.

“What do you think of working at a library?” she asked me.

“I would love that,” I said. “Plenty of downtime, low tension…”

“Wouldn’t it be boring?”

“Not at all! I could use that time to type up dream or do homework.” In the worst case scenario, I would just read a book.

“But you have to make sure everything’s where it’s supposed to go. What if a book gets moved?”

“I would just keep a list of misplaced books and go find them when the list was larger than five books. You don’t have to scan every book in the library looking for mistakes in the order.”

“That’s pretty smart!”

“That’s the programmer in me speaking.” What I didn’t realize at the time is that this wouldn’t really fly with customers… I would have to look for the misplaced books every time one was reported. I got up and went into my old bedroom. My desktop computer was still set up in there. I wondered if I should get a desktop computer when my laptop eventually breaks. I decided that was stupid. How would I bring my computer to the kitchen table at Nicole’s? Of course, I didn’t realize that I also wouldn’t be able to transport it to Nicole’s on the weekends. I turned the computer on. I wanted to see how effectively it could run Minecraft.

The dream jumped. I was sitting by my bed with some kind of test. There were one hundred questions, each true or false. I answered them as I knew Nicole would. If I wasn’t sure how she would respond to a question, I left it unanswered. When I finished, I carefully scored the test. It was 84% correct. I had skipped six questions, so assuming my representation of Nicole’s knowledge was correct, she had a maximum score of 90%. I took the scored exam into the game room to show Nicole. I explained exactly what I had done to her and my mom. They were really excited to know that 84% was the worst she could do. True, my method was suspect, but it seemed reliable at the time… I went back into my room and started hovering over my bed. I felt a pressure in my foot countering the effects of gravity. Austin walked in as I was floating around. I fell onto the bed.

“What were you just doing?” he asked.

“Dreaming.”

Katekyo Hitman Reborn 2: War of Italia

Nicole and I saw an opening animation playing for Katekyo Hitman Reborn 2: War of Italia. I was surprised by the title. How did they know there was going to be a war? Nothing of the sort had happened in the manga. Anyway, the opening was mostly done in grayscale. The song was performed by Chiba Yusuke, the guy who did Zombie Loan’s terrible opening theme. Nicole started groaning as soon as the vocals kicked in. The drawings of Enma and Tsuna were particularly amazing. They seemed to be fighting in some kind of city.

Aladdin and the White Sand

I was watching Aladdin walking through Agrabah. He spoke to the Genie telepathically. When he came to a sandstone statue of a tiger in the marketplace, he put his hands on its head and began to meditate. White sand poured out of the tiger’s mouth.

“With this,” the Genie said, “you could fly over the white moon without touching it!” Aladdin held out his hands, catching some of the white sand. Immense power filled his body.

A Cop with a Pipe, Barbed Wire, and a Loss of Control

I watched Roseanne Conner playing baseball. Everyone else on her team was wearing a uniform, but she was in her pajamas. She walked off the field after a play, and Dan Conner shook his head at her in horror.

“What are you doing? Get back on the field! You’re teasing the audience!” he said. Amused, Roseanne skipped back into left field. A police officer showed up and stopped the game to get to Roseanne. He thought she was a prostitute because of her husband’s comment. The cop took out a long, white pipe and prodded Roseanne’s arm. Dan ran onto the field and grabbed it from him. “Hold on just a second! Why are you doing that?”

“This woman is a prostitute. I’ll have to take her downtown.”

“Not if I can help it!” Dan threatened, rolling up his sleeves. The other baseball players surrounded the police officer. They all started yelling at him, and then the yelling turned into chanting.

“Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew!” they chanted. The police officer threw his arms up in the air.

“I’m not a Jew!” he insisted. They continued to chant.

Elsewhere, Nicole and I walked through a parking lot. We found a dusty van with a drawing of an anatomically correct female dragon in the dirt and dust on the side. I walked over and erased the drawing by wiping the doors clean. The police officer from earlier showed up and started prodding us with a pair of pipes. Nicole broke into the car and crawled under the back seats of the van to get away from him. I grabbed the pipes to hold the cop off.

“You’re obstructing justice,” the cop said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a strip of barbed wire, which he then stuck in my mouth. I couldn’t remove it. The more I tried, the worse I cut up my gums. Dan followed the cop to the van and confiscated his pipes.

“Leave those kids alone!” he said. “They haven’t done anything wrong.” Defeated, the cop promised not to cause any more trouble. Dan politely returned the pipes. I followed the cop back to the car while bleeding heavily out of my mouth. He dropped some kind of vacuum tube on the ground between the van and his patrol car. I picked it up and crushed it in my hands. Dan told me to stop, but I ignored him. I threw the broken tube at the cop car and stormed off.

The dream jumped. Later, as I was sitting on a curb outside a restaurant and messing with the barbed wire, I found a way to release it. I forced the long strip of wire out of my mouth, slicing up the rest of my gums. I groaned at the pain. After I did this, I realized the cop wasn’t trying to hurt me at all. He hadn’t caused me any injury by putting the barbed wire in… It was supposed to correct the alignment of my teeth! The more I struggled to remove it, however, the worse my situation became. The only pain I experienced was directly related to my inability to trust the officer’s judgment. I walked into the restaurant. Nicole and Tessa Renzard were waiting for me at a table. I ordered ice cream and water. Nicole ordered a regular coffee. She and the waitress had some kind of misunderstanding over what “regular” meant, but the waitress eventually figured it out. For her meal, Nicole ordered a turkey. Somehow, this translated to barbecue chicken. Nicole was furious.

“Don’t barbecue chicken,” she said. I gave Nicole an uneasy look. I could already tell where this was going.

“What? Oh, you don’t want it barbecued. Okay, regular chicken, then.”

“No,” Nicole hissed through her teeth. “Don’t. Barbecue. Chicken. Ever.”

“I’m sorry… It’s a menu item. We can’t just stop because one customer…”

“I want my chicken cold and raw!” she shouted. The waitress held her notepad to her heart and gaped at us with wide eyes. Tessa and I exchanged worried looks. After the waitress walked away, I turned to Nicole.

“You don’t really want it cold or raw, do you? That’s disgusting…”

“Shut up!” Nicole yelled. “I’m tired of all of you!”

The dream jumped forward. I was eating my ice cream… It came as a mix of strawberry, banana, chocolate, and vanilla ice cream with a cherry on top. Nicole got up and pulled her shirt off in the middle of the restaurant. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. I just kept eating my ice cream. Tessa didn’t seem fazed, either. I noticed Tessa was wearing a black turtleneck and wondered when she changed clothes… As I watched Nicole sit down next to Tessa, I sighed. People were probably wondering why I allowed Nicole to run around naked… It wasn’t that I permitted it, but rather that I knew she wouldn’t listen if I told her to stop.

March 1, 2011

Cinnamon Rolls and Orange Slices

I was sitting at a table in the commons with Noel Deis and Mike Palarz. My grandparents showed up without warning and sat next to me. Noel seemed annoyed by this; there wasn’t much room for anyone else to sit at the table. I went on a search for good food. I found some cinnamon rolls and orange slices.

Duel with Voldemort in the Dragon Ridge

I was walking along some train tracks. I was some sort of duck… Joining me in my travels were a chicken and a cat. We heard a train coming, but we didn’t know which way to look until it zoomed out of a nearby tunnel and nearly flattened us! We waited for it to go back through the tunnel in the other direction – the tracks were set in a loop behind us – before walking through it. On the other side of the tunnel was the Dragon Ridge. The mountains were jagged and unforgiving, and some of them looked as though recent rock slides had buried sections of vegetation. The other animals turned into Nicole (the cat that was not a cat) and Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander (the chicken that was not a chicken). Nicole pointed out a heart-shaped rock high above us. It lay on the summit of a smaller mountain. We had to be close to Naven, she said. We climbed over a hill of loose rocks; they were so finely grained that Zedd got his feet stuck in them like quicksand. On the other side of the hill, we found a lone cottage. When we entered the building, I knew immediately that evil had made this place its home. The interior was an exact replica of my grandparents’ house. I sat down in the dining room with a sign that read “Yeah!” in bold, red letters. Before long, Voldemort entered the house. I was fortunate this time… He went straight to the back door and exited onto the patio. He came back in through the front door almost immediately after, went to the back door again, and… This time, he turned around. Our eyes met. He glided across the dining room with his black cloak billowing as though a violent storm was stirring up inside the building. His hand clasped the wand sitting on the table. Immediately, he fired a volley of spells at me. I repeated his words, tossing the same spells back.

“Expelliarmus!” My wand popped out of my hand. Crap. “Crucio!” I fell to the ground, effectively paralyzed. I didn’t feel any pain, though. Voldemort put a foot on my leg and stood over me with his wand pointed at my heart. He smiled. Slowly, he pronounced the name of the killing curse. “Avada… kedavra…” A green bolt of energy shot out of his wand and bounced off my body. Voldemort’s face contorted. “What?! Why can’t I ever kill you?!”

“Because love is forever, stupid,” I said. I shot him with the same spell several times in succession before he finally died. I was glad I was able to protect Zedd and Nicole from harm.

Basketball Court Reservations and Jumping out of Buildings

I was in a car with two of my cousins. Using Chelsea’s directions, they drove to an exit leading out of our neighborhood that I didn’t know about. I tried to tell Jackie (who was driving the car) that such an exit didn’t exist, but she soon showed me the way. She hadn’t known about it, either. The whole way, Jackie’s driving was terrifyingly bad. She swerved away from the curb about every three seconds, and we frequently found ourselves on the opposing side of the road. Eventually, we stopped outside a fenced basketball court, and everyone got out. We started bouncing volleyballs to each other on the court. For some reason, the balls behaved exactly like basketballs when anyone but me bounced them. When I did it, they only went about half as high – as I expected a volleyball would. Nicole got mad at me because of my inability to bounce the balls properly. Before long, a basketball team showed up for practice. Their coach told us we had to leave. I didn’t feel like we really had to; this was a public court, and even if they had somehow arranged a reservation, they needed to show us some kind of verification… Jackie called the town hall and found out that the coach had in fact made a reservation, but it wasn’t for another hour! We started throwing our balls at the basketball players when the coach still tried to make us leave. He directed us to a bunch of rules posted on signs along one side of the fence. The signs indicated that only twenty-five people were allowed on the court at a time. We were pushing forty with all these basketball players around… I threw a tennis ball at a girl’s head on my way out. After leaving, we gathered on the third floor of an abandoned apartment building across the street. We were just going to wait until after the basketball team’s practice. I found stacks of wooden blocks and used them to build tiny houses just to kill time. The basketball team left early, so my cousins went back to the basketball court. I soon found myself alone in the apartment. I grabbed a black umbrella and climbed out a broken window. Somehow, I knew I could jump down to the ground without injury despite being on the third floor. Nicole saw me preparing to jump, though…

“You’re not Mary Poppins!” she shouted. I decided I would just climb down using pipes and railings on the side of the building.

Dissolving Dormitory and Glimpse of a Rainforest (Lucid)

I was reading something on my computer screen when I realized quite abruptly that I was dreaming. I moved my hands via thought alone. A moment later, everything became fuzzy. I reminded myself that it would come back if I focused and relaxed my thoughts. I got hazy visuals of the computer screen fading back in (I was no longer on the same website), then my dorm room. I was sitting at my computer desk again.

“Increase lucidity!” I shouted inside my head. Surprisingly, this didn’t work. My dream control’s usually pretty good… I tried morphing my bedroom into a lush rainforest full of sights and sounds to engage my senses. It worked! I got about halfway through the transformation before I lost the dream.

Catgirls, Doomsday, and Video Games

I was sitting in my bedroom at my parents’ house in Texas. Austin was there, too. My dad came in and announced that Austin had just discovered catgirls. As such, they needed to have a father-son talk. He said something about 4chan.

“Also,” he said, “your tumblr is down.”

“Austin uses tumblr?” I asked. Austin agreed to show me. While he went to that, my dad asked me what I thought about doomsday predictions. I pointed out that they usually come from people who are trying to validate the predictions of someone they respect by “correcting” his or her mathematics.

“Oh, right,” my dad agreed. “Like those guys who say, ‘Well, it wasn’t really supposed to happen three years ago because of this… The real date is blah, blah, blah.’”

“Exactly. That’s why these doomsday dates keep getting pushed back,” I said. “It’s all kind of ridiculous… The world’s not going to suddenly…” I trailed off, realizing that an end of the world scenario was extremely important to my parents’ religious faith. “Never mind.” Nicole and Matthew came into the room to try playing The Sims 2 on my TV – without any sort of game console… Naturally, it didn’t work. “Can you remember this working?” I asked, hinting that it was nonsense.

“Yes!” Nicole insisted as though I’d played video games this way with her a number of times. They wanted to try another game – as if the game disc was the problem – but they couldn’t find the other game. They came back with an empty case.

The dream jumped. We all spilled out of the car at Best Buy. Nicole pointed out a Google store, but it was going out of business. A phone company had purchased the lot. I felt as though this was an attack on my pride since I wanted to work for Google. Were they losing steam already? Austin started whining about how hard it was to get out of the car. I folded the seat down for him and told him to hurry up.

March 2, 2011

Chaotic Internal Sensations

As I was falling asleep, I saw the top of someone’s head. It looked like Nicole’s. Powerful vibrations filled my head, then swept my entire body. My eyes almost seemed to be sucked out of their sockets. In general, my body was sinking into the bed, but my head wasn’t moving significantly – just rising and falling sinusoidally with the vibrations. I felt my dream self rising up out of my body. All of this stopped suddenly, and I was left with dark, splotchy visuals of trees. Everything went dark again.

Audition or Spirit Hunting

Nicole and I were trying out for something together. I remember walking around my middle school in North Carolina on my way to audition. I get the sense that my dream control helped me in some way with the audition. This was all on the tip of my tongue when I woke up halfway through the night, but I couldn’t recall anything else.

I woke up later and sensed that I was actually there to kill a powerful spirit haunting the building. Since I was a dreamer, I could kill even those who had died already.

Practicing Focus and Specific Recall (Lucid)

I found myself in what I knew to be a fleeting dream in between states of wakefulness. I was about to get out of bed and write down my dreams, but then I saw what looked like a can of coffee grounds on my mattress. A picture of Santa Claus was in the middle. There was writing above and below the image, but I knew the dream wouldn’t last long enough to read all of it, so I focused on the bottom and committed it to memory. I would only have to remember it for about thirty seconds to record it in my journal.

“And so, only one thing is for certain. My angry colony will become bad if something were to happen.” I understood that this was a threat from Santa Claus to the United States. He was raising an army of ants to attack us. As predicted, I woke up right away.

Raspberry Milk, Animals in the Basement, and Disruptive Dreaming

I was at Nicole’s house. We played a lucid dreaming game on my computer. I knew of a cheat code that would unlock multiplayer mode, so we tried it. We had to go to the options menu, enter the language select menu, go back, and press a series of buttons. When we did it, nothing happened. I realized this was because we had to reach the fiftieth lucid dream in the game first. We were still early on in the game (the second lucid dream, if I remember correctly). Nicole lost interest then; it was too late in the evening to go through all of that. We would get to it eventually. We decided to go to bed early and try to share dreams. After we got in bed and relaxed for a bit, Nicole said she was hungry. I was thirsty, so I didn’t mind going into the kitchen with her. I figured I’d have a glass of water or something. We went into the kitchen together.

Nicole’s dad was sitting at the table. He told me that some of his friends wanted to make a video game, and they needed a programmer to help them with it. He passed me a black sheet of paper with his friends’ contact information in white text. It seemed like a pretty good way to get some pocket change. I wasn’t sure I was really up to the challenge, but when he mentioned that they were looking to make something in the style of Perfect World, I was a little more interested. Perfect World was a pretty game. Phil started criticizing it, though.

“I heard it was really jittery,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The characters jumped around a lot during gameplay.”

“Maybe on some servers…” I suggested. “Nicole and I played on one that didn’t have that problem.”

“They might’ve modified the game’s code, though,” Nicole observed. I tried to tell her that wasn’t the problem, but her dad chimed in.

“Then it wasn’t the same game.” I tried to explain again, but Nicole spoke.

“That’s illegal anyway…” she said. I sighed and gave up as her dad walked out of the house. I could understand Nicole’s dad misunderstanding the concept of latency, but Nicole had no excuse. Nicole’s refrigerator was a pitiful sight. They had diet A&W root beer, but I wasn’t in the mood for soda – besides, if I’m going to drink that sort of thing, it may as well have all the flavor. I saw that they didn’t have any bottled water. I thought I found some apple juice, but as I turned it around while taking it out of the refrigerator, I saw the label. It was actually something alcoholic. The word “BEER” was printed in bold, capital letters in the middle of the label. I put that away… I found another alcoholic beverage on the same shelf. Frustrated, I almost decided not to bother. I would just have to go shopping the next day to stock up on stuff to drink. I saw a gallon of milk in there, however, and I decided to pour myself a glass. For some reason, instead of getting one normal-sized glass out of the cabinet, I took out four shot glasses. I only filled them up halfway. I stopped after doing three of these because I realized I was being an idiot. I put the milk away after chugging the first “shot” of milk. It was warm and tasted peculiar… It left an aftertaste that reminded me of medicine. For a moment, I worried that Nicole’s mom had just used this shot glass to take medicine and hadn’t washed it. The concern was eliminated when I saw the label on the milk jug. Raspberry flavored milk? Gross. I drank another of the tiny glasses. I didn’t want to pour it out… My throat was thick with the stuff by this point, and I really needed to wash it out. I felt that I was better off before I drank anything… To remedy this, I put some cold water from the sink in the third glass to even out the temperature and water down the raspberry flavor. Nicole laughed at me, but at least it worked. It tasted much more like regular milk this way. I rinsed all of my glasses and put them in the sink. For some reason, I couldn’t make the hot water turn off! The handle turned in full revolutions without stopping. At no point did it fully cut off the flow of water, although it did increase and decrease flow. Nicole came over to the sink. At a loss for words, I jiggled the hot water handle to show her the problem.

“Help!” I pleaded. She took over the sink problems, and I wandered over to the back windows. A car had just left the house. Nicole thought it was her dad, but I pointed him out sitting on the deck. He was reading a book. He heard us talking through the closed windows somehow.

“No one left the driveway,” he insisted, pointing at a black car parked by the pool. “Katie’s about to go somewhere. You must’ve just seen her lights go on.” It didn’t occur to me to ask why he was reading outside in the dark… I looked down below us and saw a red car where portions of the deck should have been. Dawn and Steve were in the car, and both of them looked like they were about to pass out. Nicole went outside, so I followed her. We sat down at the table that used to be on the deck and talked with her dad for a bit. Some random kid came up to me and sat on my right knee. He said he wanted to join my pirate crew. I told him to eat his fruits every day so he could sustain his magic powers. He corrected me; you only have to eat a devil fruit once! I was impressed by the One Piece reference. I saw a pirate ship under construction where the apartment building north of Nicole’s house should’ve been. I understood that it was just imaginary. Spongebob Squarepants stood on the ship in a pirate costume.

“Send me on a mission, Captain!” the kid insisted.

“Alright, what kind of mission?” I asked.

“A mission with carpenters!” he said. I pointed at the imaginary boat.

“Why don’t you help Spongebob? He needs more carpenters for his ship! Find those carpenters and bring them to him!” Excited, the kid hopped off my knee and ran to find carpenters. Nicole and her dad chuckled. They started talking about what Phil claimed were the most delicious donuts in the world. Nicole hadn’t tried them yet, so he sent her into the basement to get one. Phil and I walked into the house a moment after she did. He said something about fixing the door on the way in, but I figured he was just talking to himself. When we got inside, he saw Nicole standing around in the kitchen and got irritated. He turned to me with a patient smile, but I could see the anger in his eyes. I thought he had meant for me to fix the door, and since I hadn’t understood him, he was about to chew me out… “Josh, remember when I calmly asked Nicole to go downstairs and get a donut?” I nodded. At least it wasn’t about the door. “Maybe you should do it instead.”

“Dad!” Nicole objected. “I was just thinking about something! I’m going, okay?! He doesn’t even know where they are.” He asked if I really didn’t; I confirmed that it was true.

“Well, I’ll show you.” I followed them into the basement. Everyone forgot about the donuts. The basement was set up a little differently. Nicole’s parents’ bedroom was connected to the small sitting room down there, and the support beam between the stairs and the bathroom was much bigger, so it looked like there was actually a room there. I walked in circles around the basement and saw a series of mirrors all over the walls. These allowed Nicole and I to watch each other. It occurred to me that these mirrors didn’t make sense – regardless of the direction they faced, I could see Nicole in them. Interestingly, I never saw myself in them. I decided the mirrors were set up so one mirror could redirect photons to the next. None of them were angled properly to facilitate this, however. Nicole and I started playing a silly game where she tried to hide from view in the mirrors. She quickly moved behind walls so I couldn’t watch her movements. There were four hallways leading out of her parents’ room… She ran toward me, choosing a new hallway each time. I knew exactly where she was, so it wasn’t difficult to catch her on her way past me. She begged me not to tickle her, but I didn’t understand what she was saying. She ran off again. I saw a sea gull flying around the basement.

“Is that… a seagull?” I murmured. “Nicole, there’s a bird in the house.” It flew into her parents’ bedroom and sat on Phil’s shoulder. He swatted at it, and it fell on the ground. Nicole and I stood over the seagull. It was covered in bloody wounds, but we didn’t recognize that it had been hurt. We thought it was sleeping. We found some dogs with mostly black coats, although there were some brown and golden ones, too. I turned and saw a blue and white falcon sitting on the stairs. It watched the bloody seagull.

“Oh, that falcon must be after the seagull. No wonder it came in here.” I pointed the large bird out to Nicole. I didn’t notice when this happened, but the falcon turned into a jackal. It started barking as Phil approached. It looked at me once before running off. The dogs followed us upstairs. When we went into the kitchen, the walls of the house were gone. The door, cabinets, and such were stacked on the deck. There were loose screws all around the perimeter of the room. Wow, I thought, did they just unscrew all the walls? I received a hot cup of coffee from Mike. In order to avoid dropping it, I had to hold the bottom because of the awkward way he handed it over. It actually wasn’t hot despite my expectations; the liquid inside was steaming. I fetched a plastic tray for my food when I saw Dawn with one. I grabbed a couple of these apple candy kebabs and some pineapple. My tray was full when I came back to it. Someone had put food on it for me. Most of the guests sat at the main kitchen table, but Nicole and I shared a small table near the bathroom. A TV had been set up on the wall, but Phil didn’t know how to use it yet. He gave me the remote and asked me to find a certain movie. The remote turned into a two page instruction manual. It wasn’t very helpful… All I could find were Disney and anime movies. We settled for watching a live concert. I saw that it was 1 AM and realized Nicole was already gone. I went to her bedroom and found her asleep. Quietly, I closed the door. I decided to set up the fan in case it was warm during the night, but when I turned it on, the blades of the fan knocked the cover off. It was incredibly noisy, too. I managed to fix it after turning the thing off, but Nicole was already stirring. I saw dog poop and bits of fluff on the floor. One of the dogs from earlier had chewed up a white blanket Nicole left on her floor. She sat up in bed while I was scolding the dog.

“Why haven’t you married me yet?” she asked sleepily. I stared at her.

“Well… It’s mostly a financial thing… I can’t really…” She interrupted me.

“I’ve put up with this for six years,” she sighed. “Lately, you’re different… Look.” My vision was filled by a month-by-month breakdown of things I did to seriously upset Nicole in the past six months. It listed things I did in predream meditations, dreams, and waking life. There was frequent mention of Neluna for some reason.

“I’m sorry…” I said, folding it up into a sheet of paper. “I’ll try to fix it. Do you want to go to bed?”

“Yes…” Heeding her will, I crawled into bed with her. Only after we got comfortable did I realize we left the lights on. Two bald black boys were playing video games on my parents’ TV in the same room. One offered candy to us. I sensed that the candy was drugged, so I refused. Nicole took two. I knew I would have to keep an eye on the boys in case they tried to do anything. I worried I would wake up during the night and find one on top of my girlfriend. “Could you turn off the lights?” she asked them. “They’re bothersome.” One of the boys got up, turned the lights off, and pulled out a guitar. He started playing it facing us.

“The music is also bothersome…” I said with a tired glare.

“Josh!” Nicole scolded me. I didn’t see what was unreasonable about it. Who plays guitar in front of people who are trying to sleep in their bed?

“They can play somewhere else.”

“This is the only TV in the house with the right plugs.”

“…They can still leave.” She rolled on her side with her back facing me and sighed.

Super Hero Theme Park and Psychoanalysis

Nicole’s dad was a dungeon tour guide at an indoor theme park for super heroes. The employees all called him Mr. Moguesby. He showed us how to avoid traps placed on staircases and the best way to navigate the on-site maze. He forgot where to send us after the dungeon tour, so we just started roaming around. We ended up at some kind of bubble-blowing competition. The guy running it wanted to see our tickets.

“No,” I said, “we’re not sure where we’re supposed to be. We don’t have tickets for this. We just finished the dungeon tour… Our guide must have forgotten what comes next.”

“Mr. Moguesby never forgets,” the man said. He pointed behind us. “Go to the ice rink.” As he said it, I became aware of an ice rink nearby. We went over and watched uncoordinated children swinging at air or ice instead of the hockey puck they were aiming for. It was some kind of youth hockey match. Three clever kids used a boot to carry the puck across the rink so they wouldn’t have to slide it. The referee was okay with this since they didn’t use their hands. The kid with the boot threw it into the opposing team’s goal for a point. The goalkeeper was nowhere in sight. He showed up moments later and asked the referee about the boot. The play was recalled because the goalie hadn’t been present. Nicole and I agreed that it should’ve counted. It was the goalie’s fault, after all. I read a pricing table I found on a brochure. Our program also included a visit to the Dream Chamber, a sensory deprivation room which would require us to take notes on our hallucinations. We had three choices for our notes: to write backwards, upside-down, or in “stone-faced print.” I figured I would write normally and just flip the paper over when I turned it in. This aimed to get at unconscious drives and repressed thoughts using the psychoanalytic model of the mind.

Sandy Shoes

I was sitting in the front passenger seat of Nicole’s mom’s convertible. We were at Mike and Melissa’s house in Indiana. For some reason, my shoes were filled with sand. I took them off and saw piles of sand beneath my seat. So that was where it was coming from! I shook as much of the sand out of my shoes as I could. The shoes were unusually flimsy…

Summoning and Banishment of Lusark Decidies

I went to the doctor’s office with my mom. Our doctor was an interesting woman with a voice and a personality like a man’s… Deep down, though, she still had that motherly instinct. She had a terrible habit of smoking in the hospital, which a blond nurse kept coming into the room to ask her to stop doing in front of us. It made no difference to her. The doctor explained that she only checked teeth on the first visit, so she had us each open our mouths and show her our teeth for three seconds. Once that was done, she took off her rubber gloves and shrugged.

“That’s it. See you next time.” Before we could leave, however, a white-haired man with glasses came into the room. He smiled faintly when he made eye contact with me.

“Excuse me, but I’d like to step in as this boy’s doctor starting next week,” he said. Our manly woman doctor put her hands on her hips.

“What? Why?”

“I think I understand why he’s here… Would that be alright?”

“Well, sure… As long as he’s fine with it, too.” Everyone looked at me.

“I don’t see why not…” I said. In truth, I just wanted to get away from this doctor’s smoke. Now that all of that was settled, we were able to leave the doctor’s office. I overheard my new doctor whispering something to the woman after we exited the room.

The dream jumped. We returned to the doctor’s office sometime later. My doctor was late, so the woman doctor took me into her room anyway. I noticed she wasn’t smoking… That was a good sign. She checked our teeth again, but she was a little more thorough this time. She paid particular attention to my teeth, and I thought that meant they weren’t doing so well, but she smiled after each of the three rounds of inspection. She only had one complaint.

“Try not to go so hard on your front teeth,” she said. “They’re in pain.”

“His teeth are in pain…?” my mom wondered in amazement. I understood what the doctor meant, but there was no way I could explain it to my mom. She lacked the experience to assimilate it. The doctor asked about my life and studies, so I explained my academic interests and lucid dreaming practice.

“I also work at an airport,” she said after I mentioned studying electrical engineering. “My job is to assess risks and input danger zones in the airport mapping system. We isolate areas with cones and what have you, then put the danger point in as a user under the protection platform with a timer for removal.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a pretty complicated job sometimes, but I enjoy it.”

“That’s so good of you!” my mom complimented. “You’re keeping people safe at the airport.”

“Yeah,” I added, “and most people at the airport probably don’t think about…” My mom interrupted me, but I let her finish. Neither of us really listened to what she had to say. It’s not that we didn’t care, but it literally could not be anything important – we both understood this as a fact.

“Go ahead,” the manly woman doctor urged me after my mom was done speaking.

“Well, as I was saying, most people at the airport probably don’t think of it as dangerous. The ones who are terrified of airports are either scared of the people or the planes, and the people who don’t have that fear see airports as a fairly safe place. Without people like you, that wouldn’t be possible.” The doctor smiled. I almost expected her to give me a fist pump. The door to the room opened, and in walked my new doctor. I noticed he wore a white sword on his hip, but I didn’t say anything about it. The woman doctor started smoking again, and I covered my mouth and nose so I wouldn’t get a headache. Smoke gives me serious headaches…

“Oh? Are you smoking again?” my doctor asked. “When we met last week, you said you were going to stop that dirty habit…”

“It’s not me, it’s…” She trailed off as a red portal appeared behind my doctor. He drew his sword.

“It’s her!” A fancy, red car appeared beneath the huge portal. It drove out of the building and down the street. I saw it long enough to notice a woman with pale skin and fried, blond hair in the driver’s seat. Her eyes were as black as the night. Both doctors rushed to the front of the building, and I hesitantly followed them. My mom came along to tell me not to wander around the doctor’s office.

“We’ve got to do something…” the woman doctor said in a hoarse, choking voice.

“Well, that’s what he’s for, isn’t it?”

The dream jumped. I was in the basement of a store in the Imperial City of Tamriel. A bunch of women with bizarre, neon hair colors lurched around the building naked like zombies. I cut through their bodies with Apheri, and they dissolved into black shadows. I felt that this was all part of Oblivion. I wondered why there were still NPCs here, thinking that I’d deleted the mod that implemented them. I supposed their zombie-like behavior was the result of null dialog and a lack of AI presets; they didn’t know how to behave, so they just wandered around aimlessly. Anyway, once I destroyed most of these, I saw a girl sitting with her legs crossed on a rounded ledge built into the corner of the room. She was wearing a shirt, frilled black skirt. Her hands rested at her sides until I approached. Then she looked up at me and screeched. It was the woman who came through the portal at the doctor’s office! I saw her name for a brief moment – Lusark Decidies or something like that. Her black eyes seemed to suck me in, but then she transformed into a bloody heart. Her membranes attached themselves to the floor and the ceiling, suspending this pulsating lump of organic material in the air. I slashed across it, and she howled again as her blood shot out into the room. She transformed into a web of needles next. The area around her became a fireplace. There was some kind of weird, razor-sharp curtain attached to the mantle. When I rotated a wheel on the base of the mantle, this curtain was moved in line with the woman’s needle web. The whole time, electricity was shooting out of the walls at her for some unexplained reason. I heard voices talking in the back of my head.

“That final boss was boring,” one guy said.

“No way! The lightning was really cool.” I continued cranking the curtain wheel. The woman groaned at the pain. She shot needles at me, but I didn’t care. I was pretty sure I could survive if I just killed her quickly.

“You know, a lot of people compare her to Lady Gaga, but I don’t see the similarity.”

“What? She’s Lady Gaga’s oversoul. Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t think so…” I kept cranking the wheel, and the curtain got stuck on the corner for a bit. When I got it through, it started going toward the wall. If I could get it all the way to the wall, I would rip out all of her energy – I just knew this instinctively.

“She doesn’t try to stop you from finishing?” I asked the voices. The curtain was almost to the end.

“Sure she does.” A hand reached out of the web of needles, grabbing the curtain and crushing it. She was much more powerful than me; even turning the wheel at full force, I couldn’t keep her from jerking the curtain back. I put some more effort into it, but it was no use. I was losing. I heard the door of my room open and felt my physical body roll over. What would my roommate think if he saw me turning an invisible wheel in bed? I woke up.