Thread: SD-1: Nephanim

cool! Whyd you have to go an kill me though.

It felt like the right thing to do.

Messed around on MadMonkey's temporary server for personal amusement.

Spoiler for Pictures!:

Did you do a reality check?

Ya rofl. I really like your music machine with dancing doors and pigs! I think I will actualy save the map. We should mess around again some time.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

Ya rofl. I really like your music machine with dancing doors and pigs! I think I will actualy save the map. We should mess around again some time.

Definitely.

No time to type up dreams this morning - I've got an experiment to run, and then I'm heading out to the suburbs. I'll probably post them sometime tonight.

March 4, 2011

The Cat's in the Toilet

My roommate was replaced with a guy named Alex. He had a black cat named Sylvester. We didn’t talk to each other much at first. One night, as I was trying to fall asleep, I heard Alex murmuring in his bed. He had a stuffed lion in his arms. I knew it was named Simba because he frequently talked to it during the day… The next day, he accidentally spilled a whole container of bleach on my bed, so I helped him clean it. I joked about him doing it on purpose. He also accidentally dropped a bag of chips behind the bed. I refused to pick them up. The residents of the connecting room, Sandy and Tyler, knew Alex from high school. They were dating. They hardly ever came over to our side of the suite, but Alex frequently went downtown with them to parties. Alex had to go somewhere, so I decided to take the initiative to clean up our messy room. I finally disposed of the bag of chips. It was empty… I wondered where the chips had gone. I also washed a bunch of dishes by hand in the bathroom. They weren’t my dishes, but I was still worried someone would be mad that I didn’t dry them off and put them away.

Standing in the doorway between our bathroom and the other room, I gave Tyler a creepy stare. He was watching the History Channel. Confused and a little concerned by my weird smile, he explained that he never goes to class on Mondays. He always just watched the History Channel to learn things. I wondered if I should be doing that… Apparently, I was in the same history class. Tyler had to use Alex’s computer for something, so he came over to our room. Shortly after, we heard pained whispers behind the door.

“Help me…” a voice wailed.

“Just a second,” called Tyler. The whine repeated. I realized the door was already cracked open. Alex poked his head in. “Wow, it’s just Alex… Prick.”

“You know you love me!” he laughed. Alex was amazed by how clean the room was. He started looking for his chips.

“I threw them away,” I explained. He reached into the trash, pouting.

“But floor chips are the best kind of chips…”

“Well, no one’s been eating said floor chips, so…” Alex looked up at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Dude, Sylvester’s been snacking on those for like a day!”

“Really?!” I was surprised I didn’t notice…

“Dude! You ate my donut?” Alex asked Tyler.

“Yeah… What of it?” replied Tyler.

“Nothing, just saying…” He stared sadly at the half-eaten donut in the trash can. I sensed that he was considering eating it. I decided to go to the bathroom, and Sylvester followed me in. The cat started unrolling the toilet paper while I was urinating, so I sent him away. Then he hopped in the toilet itself – before I could flush down my waste. “This cat is psycho…” I flushed it with Sylvester inside the bowl, hoping he was too big to get stuck. The cat ended up with his head and front paws sticking out of the bottom of the bowl. He was soaking wet and could hardly pull himself out… He managed, though. After shaking off his back feet, he trotted back into the room. Alex cracked up when he saw what had happened to Sylvester. I secretly wondered if the cat could talk… Tyler and I discovered a stuffed warthog that played recorded sounds. Although it takes us a minute, we realized they were all recordings made by Alex when he was a kid. He had kept this since he was a child.

Strange Positions in Bed

I have several brief moments of waking up in strange positions in bed, often with Till and his friends in the room. Sometimes it was my alarm that woke me up, but it was usually them. One time, I had my foot propped up on the bedpost and lay in a ball at the foot of the bed. It was surprisingly comfortable. I called Till by Tyler’s name at one point, recalling my dream about new roommates.

Flooding Waste

I witnessed a news report live downtown about sewer flooding. A man’s office windows were gradually (but completely) obscured by overflowing waste from the sewer. Something caused the windows to leak, and before long, his office was flooded with human waste. Most of the files stored in the room were damaged beyond repair, and he had to throw away hundreds of books and an expensive desktop computer. He was pursuing damages in a trial with the city. I spoke to the man about offices in the basement. His room was on the first floor, but it was about two feet above the street level. There were a number of offices in the basement with windows positioned right at street level. According to him, none of them suffered any damage from the flooding.

Hypnosis Tapes

I was designing self-hypnosis tapes for personal use while someone drove me around Germany. We were in Bavaria somewhere. I recognized the lay of the land, but I couldn’t tell exactly where we were.

Guy with a Foam Head

While recording a dream in my journal, I saw a guy outside with a huge, foam head. It had short, red hair and a prominent jaw. My blinds were missing. I nodded my approval when I saw it. The guy looked up and saw this, so I gave him a thumbs up, too. He gave me two thumbs up in return before heading into the lobby of the building. I didn’t think it was strange at all that he didn’t have to scan his ID to enter. I realized this was a dream a split second after I felt it end. It felt incredibly dreamlike.

Over Voltage Overload: Travels of a Robot Spider

I was slowly transforming into a robotic spider. My tongue was extremely sticky and removable. For some reason, I gained the ability to scale vertical walls with ease after licking them once. I used this ability to sneak into Nicole’s house through a window. This seemed to take place about five years in the past… Nicole and Jess were much younger, and they were still friends. They were sitting together in Nicole’s room. I crawled in and hissed awkwardly. That was my form of speech. Jess wanted to kill me and flush me down the toilet, but Nicole stopped her. I probably had it coming to me for letting that cat get flushed halfway down the toilet…

“He’s kinda cute…” Nicole argued. “I wanna keep him.”

“You want to keep that?” Jess scowled. Nicole knelt in front of me and gently stroked my head.

“Let’s teach him some tricks. Come with us, okay?” She and Jess went into another room. I followed obediently. They helped me correct my robot spider speech impediment, and I regained the ability to speak normally. I informed them that I needed to be at school at 8 AM, but I wanted to see Nicole before leaving. Nicole insisted that I could ride the bus with her. We started waling around outside. When I asked her about it, she admitted her bus driver probably wouldn’t let me ride to school with her… I was sorely disappointed; before I realized I wouldn’t be able to, I was enjoying a flashback to that giddy feeling of interacting with a crush. I tried to cling to that simple happiness.

“Well, at this point, I won’t make it back home to catch my bus… I need a ride one way or another,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me, “my mom will take us.” A bunch of people came out of the garage together. Everything smelled like smoke. Nicole smiled widely at them. “Oh, you were doing that thing!” she laughed.

“What thing?” asked her dad.

“That thing!” Nicole repeated. They still pretended not to understand (if they did understand in the first place). Mike and Eric were walking together. Eric mentioned something about being good at video games.

“You know what that means…” Mike said.

“Uh… No,” Eric said, shaking his head.

“You can reach into the fabric of the universe and bend it to your will! Space and time are your playthings! And rainbows? Don’t even get me started on rainbows. Wow. Just kidding, Eric – you can’t do that stuff.” Eric seemed confused. We continued looking for Nicole’s mom. I couldn’t remember what she looked like, so every time we saw a woman, I wondered if it was her. We decided to go in the garage, but Nicole went off on her own by the time we got to the backyard. Jess started laughing at me. She challenged me to destroy a glowing, black pillar in the yard. I punched it with all of my might several times, but I couldn’t break it. I continued into the garage. It was shaped like a barn. Once I was inside, I saw that they were on a platform near the ceiling. It took me a few tries because I was starting to lose my robot spider powers (it seemed to be caused by getting my tongue dirty), but I climbed up onto the ceiling and dropped down onto the platform. Something inside my body shattered. A console attached to my robot spider body sent out an error message.

“OV/OL,” Nicole read. She and Jess puzzled over what the error message could mean until a woman came up onto the ledge. She picked me up and sighed.

“Over voltage overload,” she said, explaining the console output to the girls.

“Oh no!” Jess cried. She seemed genuinely upset. I couldn’t figure out why. “We broke him!”

“Not to worry…” the woman said. “I’ll take care of it. You two should get ready for school.”

The dream jumped. I was my normal self again. Nicole and I lay on the floor in the living room (except it was my Oma and Opa’s living room). There was trash everywhere… Spilled drinks (grape soda on white carpet, jeez), half-eaten candy… I tried picking it up while Nicole and Jess played a fighting game. Justin was at Nicole’s house, so he played, too. He explained all of the unique headgears available in the game when I started watching. Nicole was playing as an incredibly powerful wizard with refined command of electricity. Scamper walked into the room and started eating food and toys left in his reach. I didn’t want Nicole’s family to get mad at me for things my dog did, so I made him drop the toys. One looked like Eric’s Guile figurine. A bunch of people had to leave again. I saw Beckman walk by. He complimented my talent for programming, and I took it to heart. Justin joked that Beckman seemed to be into me. I told Justin that I had a history of guys falling for me.

“Like Justin,” I said. I didn’t realize I was talking to Justin…

“Justin?” he asked, bewildered.

“Tynne. Serenity.” He fell onto his back in shock. Then, he started to cry.

“Serenity never gave me a chance…” he wailed. I hugged him to calm him down. After that was settled, I went into the kitchen to organize the refrigerator. I sorted the fruits with care. Nicole’s mom finally showed up. She asked if we were ready to go. I replied in the affirmative – just as soon as I was sure the refrigerator was in order.

Bored of That Game

This dream has been omitted.

March 5, 2011

Gift Card

I found a receipt for the last purchase I made with a gift card. It said I still had $38 on the card. Pleased that I wouldn’t have to bother checking the card’s balance online, I folded up the receipt and threw it away.

Ben's Amorisms and Stealing Souls

I was planning my schedule for the next week downtown. I wanted to increase the amount of time my professor spent reviewing material before an upcoming exam. I found that if I sucked out a few people’s souls, I could have them beg my professor for a review session. The souls didn’t have to be human, but my professor wouldn’t understand the voice of a dog’s soul… Language barriers, phooey. While I considered ways to collect souls, I talked to Nicole and Ben on Skype. Ben had to go somewhere, so Nicole and I were left alone in the chat. We talked about how we missed Ben’s amorisms. I copied and pasted the conversation into a chat with Ben once he returned. At some point, Nicole showed up naked in my room.

Hyden's Grove

Nicole and her dad were talking about recent murders and rapes in the “bad” part of town. They referred to it as “Hyden’s Grove.” Nicole’s parents were going on a trip for a few days, so they planned to leave the jeep for us to use, but her dad specifically warned us not to go near Hyden’s Grove. I’d never heard of such a place, but Nicole knew where it was. Since she usually drives, I figured we wouldn’t have any trouble.

The dream jumped. We were driving the jeep through a dark forest. It was early in the afternoon, but it was very dark in this place… The jeep broke down on the side of the road. Stunned, I asked Nicole where we were.

“Hyden’s Grove…” she replied. Of course.

“Are you serious? You’re going to get raped!” I hopped out of the car to have a look around. The dream branched into multiple layers here. On one layer, we were stranded in Hyden’s Grove; on the other, we were in Dunst, the desert of devils. I focused my efforts on the desert layer. I knew the two realities had to correspond, and it seemed it would be easier to protect Nicole in Dunst. I escorted her through the desert to some sort of bunker. There was some kind of hologram device inside, and Neluna spoke to us through it as we entered. She warned us of an approaching sandstorm. We were stuck in the bunker for a while.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were lost in the desert. I had no idea which way was home in this reality… We kept ending up back at the bunker! Each time, Neluna giggled and asked if I needed help. I was worried that Nicole and Neluna would get into a fight, so I declined her offer. I didn’t want her to show up in person.

The dream jumped. We made it out of the desert somehow, and I found Nicole’s house in the base layer. We met her parents outside the garage; they were back from their trip. I kept them distracted with stupid jokes about cheese while Nicole brainstormed a plan to get the jeep out of Hyden’s Grove… The jokes didn’t make any sense, but her dad laughed at them anyway.

Quelling the Rebellion at Fort Ne'er-do-well

I watched four rebels plotting the destruction of the kingdom of Knives. They each had the power to transform into a tool. They referred to each other by their individual tool forms. The hammer was a slow learner, but he know how to pack a punch. The wrench was extremely cunning and devised most of the plans. He could also turn into a black, ghostly worm with red eyes… I saw a fork and a spatula, too, but they didn’t have much to say. As the wrench called his comrades to their objectives, I decided to help Knives out. I hovered in the air behind the hammer and the fork as they headed toward the south end of Knives. A voice spoke to me.

“Oh yeah,” it said, “and the fork can turn into a rocket launcher.” That was serious news. I contacted the captain of the guard telepathically to alert him of the upcoming rebel attack.

“We already know, sir,” the captain explained. “Meet us at Fort Ne’er-do-well if you want to help out.” I brought up a digital map of Knives and the surrounding countryside. I saw a white dot labeled Fort Knox to the west, but I didn’t see any other forts labeled on my map…

“Uh… Which direction is that from Knives?” I asked.

“Minus 120 degrees, sir.” I saw a white dot on the map in that direction. This had to be it.

Mathematics Can't Explain

I was learning amazing things about mathematics in a small classroom. I didn’t recognize the professor teaching us, but he had taught me more about math and the universe in an hour than I had learned in several years. I stared in awe at the equations on the white board. Everything made such perfect, logical sense, even dreams! I eagerly told the guy sitting on my right how amazing this stuff was. He said it was actually putting him to sleep because it was so boring. Disheartened, I studied the equations again. What was so boring about it? Why was it that I could understand the entirety of the universe, but I couldn’t understand this man’s lack of interest?

Free Android Testing (Some Circuit Analysis Required)

Google released a new Android phone. I saw an advertisement for it that said Google would mail a free testing model to anyone who provided them with an address. The commercial made it seem as though there was no application process. Service on the phone was also completely free. I told Austin about this, and we agreed we were both skeptical. I rewound the advertisement and paused on the “free” animation. In the fine print at the bottom of the video, it said that we had to fill out a brief question and answer packet. For some reason, Austin already had one! I saw a bunch of questions about bipolar junction transistors, transconductance, output resistance, the hybrid-pi model, base current, and other common transistor parameters. I told Austin I could explain these to him if he was interested.

“The math isn’t hard,” I said. “It’s just setting up the problems that poses a challenge.” He declined. I pointed out something in red text on the front of the packet that warned testers the new phone didn’t have application moderation. As it explained, this meant that applications didn’t have to go through the market – one could develop any sort of application and distribute it freely. It reminded testers that this was dangerous for security reasons, but that didn’t deter me. I tried to convince Austin again, using this as leverage. He folded up the packet and handed it to me.

Murder in a Church

Nicole was living in an orphanage run by a church-based organization. All of the orphans had to wear Catholic schoolgirl uniforms. Nicole was part of the church’s choir, but she hated singing religious songs all the time… It was the only way they would permit her to sing, though. I found out that the priest was responsible for keeping her at the orphanage; he wouldn’t allow her to leave until she pledged herself to God. To stop him, I broke into his private office and killed him. Unfortunately, Nicole skipped a church service the night I did this, so the other members of the church were highly suspicious of her… The choir director confronted Nicole at the front of the church the next morning. I transformed into Luffy (One Piece) and sent a punch his way. Nicole transformed into gum, spreading over my knuckles like sticky armor. Somehow, this caused my fists to multiply, and I punched the choir director through the church doors. I returned to normal, but Luffy was still there. He started muttering gibberish about gum and Native Americans. Nicole and I laughed at him.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were observing a choir rehearsal from a balcony inside the cathedral. She wanted to say bye to her only friend at the orphanage before leaving, but since this friend was part of the choir, we had to wait for the rehearsal to end. Her friend had long, purple hair and wore black-rimmed emo glasses. She noticed Nicole was missing and looked around. Eventually, she spotted Nicole leaning over the railing of the balcony.

“Hey!” she called. “Nicole! What are you doing?” I pulled Nicole out of view. The girl kept calling her name. I knew this meant trouble… They would send people after us. After all, they thought Nicole was responsible for killing both the priest and the original choir director.

Super Hero at a Daycare

I was a super hero with a cape on a visit to Ben’s daycare. The kids all wanted to help me fight crime, but I laughed at them. They couldn’t possibly be super heroes!

Tanks, Explosions, and Middle-Aged Men

I was wandering around in a snowy field. I found a cabin with all of its doors and windows boarded up. I checked a strategy guide (evidently this was inside a video game) and learned that I was supposed to blow one of the doors up with bombs. I tried this, producing bombs reminiscent of a Zelda game, and a black, transparent version of one of Perona’s ghosts appeared (One Piece). The ghost stared at me from within the darkness of the building. It just hovered there… I tried shooting it with my slingshot, but I didn’t have any ammunition. I used my bow instead; the arrows passed right through. Nothing seemed to work except throwing bombs into the house. The ghost flew out of the house and started chucking bombs at me from the air. I picked them up and threw them into the house before they could explode. As the fight progressed, the ghost flew up into the air and started using a boomerang to attack. I thought I’d be clever and catch the boomerang, but when I did, the ghost just threw a second one. I realized I had to be doing something wrong… The guide said there was a tank positioned south of the cabin. I was supposed to shoot the bombs out of that for increased firepower.

I ran away from the ghost and found two successive ramps. The second had the tank. Instead of firing unlit bombs to the first ramp, riding over there in the tank, reloading said tank, and shooting the cabin as the guide recommended, I drove the tank straight to the first ramp and fired from there. The bombs bombarded the house until it collapsed. The music that plays in Ocarina of Time when Link defeats a boss filled the area. I checked the guide to see what else I was supposed to do here before proceeding. Apparently, I was supposed to drive the tank to the nearest town and attack the item shop. I drove over there and tried it. Anju (the innkeeper from Majora’s Mask) walked out the front door after the bomb exploded on the wall. It didn’t seem to cause any structural damage. She escorted a little girl to a small building off to the side (possibly an outhouse). Inside, Anju made her take off her panties. They walked back into the item shop together. The item I was supposed to collect was in that small building, so I ran over there while ducking under windows so the people inside the shop wouldn’t see me. I wondered what the item was – a heart piece, maybe? I looked inside the tiny building and found nothing unusual except the pair of pink panties on the floor… I decided this was what I was supposed to find. I figured it was better for me to pick them up than a middle-aged NPC.

The dream jumped. I was on a forum run by a middle-aged man. His username was TheGuyWithTheBulldozer. He whined in his forum-based journal about how every time he tried to steal panties, someone else beat him to it. I thought it was best not to reply… The man was also an independent game developer. He made an interesting motorcycle platform game which required the player to escape monsters while performing tricks on their bikes. I watched someone play through the first level as part of a review. They had surprisingly good control of the bike. The developer said he didn’t really like how the game turned out even though the review was positive.

Originally Posted by nephanim

i was planning my schedule for the next week downtown. I wanted to increase the amount of time my professor spent reviewing material before an upcoming exam. I found that if i sucked out a few people’s souls, i could have them beg my professor for a review session.

LOL

I just figured out...If you make a post in all caps, it automatically uncaps it. >

March 6, 2011

Preparing for a Cheap Scare (Lucid)

I was chasing Austin around our parents’ old house in North Carolina. I lost sight of him upstairs, so I started checking hiding places – our bedrooms, closets, under beds and desks… I saw that it was oppressively dark in the hallway bathroom. Where else could he be but in there? I approached the shower curtain to draw it back. I knew what would probably happen, though… I would find some kind of shadow creature instead of Austin because this was a dream. My mind enjoys those kinds of cheap thrills, I thought to myself. I braced myself for the shock and pulled aside the curtain. I heard Austin’s laugh echo all around me. I couldn’t see anything in the shower except a twirling puff of smoke. Right… I walked out of the room.

Minecraft, Piracy, and a Mental Hospital (Lucid)

Nicole and I were playing on a Minecraft server together. We ventured into an unexplored area and found some strange, circular platforms floating in the ocean. They looked like targets. Assuming the administrator had plans for these, I decided building on them was pointless; the buildings would just get destroyed. We walked back in the other direction, and I found an old cabin I had built previously to survive a night. I decided I would stay there until morning. I was glad I found it when I did since skeletons were already patrolling behind it. I looked around the cabin and quickly discovered the basement. I couldn’t remember why I abandoned the cabin… Until I saw the creepers hiding in the basement, that is. There were at least seven of them, and they all noticed me. Only one jumped up to the ground level, though. I backed into a corner to try to force it to blow up where the damage would be minimal. I knew I couldn’t fight a creeper in this small space. Unfortunately, the creeper knocked out nine blocks on the south wall, exposing me to roaming zombies! The open space was three blocks high, so I quickly placed a line of wood across the middle to keep the zombies and creepers at bay. This didn’t protect me from skeletons or spiders, though. I tried to find materials to use without going into the basement. I tried typing “/give Nephanim diamonds” to see if I had operator rights on the server for whatever reason. The dream didn’t seem to care that I typed the command incorrectly. As I worried that someone would see the request for items and complain that I was cheating, I got a red error message back from the server. It said that I had received a warning from the staff, and the item request had been denied. Boo… I decided to brave the basement for some dirt. To my surprise, it was now empty. Dirt was better than nothing… I don’t know why I had thought to put diamond blocks up instead of something less valuable. Anyway, while I was down there, I found these long, skinny lego blocks and put them together to form a red and yellow striped wall. It still wasn’t wide enough. The corners of the hole were still open, and skeletons were shooting me. I saw that my health was empty. I was alive, but not for long. Another arrow hit, and my items burst from my body. Apparently, my spawn point was close tot he cabin even though I expected to have to run across the island. I carefully returned to the building, collected my belongings, and went on my way.

I met up with Nicole again, and we found a water purification plant beside a street. We filled buckets with water from the clean end and sampled it. The water was horrible… On top of that, we were stealing it. We laughed about all of this as we roamed some more. We found a car, I guess… Some people called Nicole and told her to pick things up from Chick-fil-A. We went there, but we didn’t buy anything for these people. Nicole spent $14 on something applicable to her diet. I saw that $5 of it went toward adding extra bacon. That plus my food and two drinks came out to $21.45. I misheard the amount, so I only pulled out a $20 bill. The drive-through was reversed as if we were in Europe, so I had to pay. To my immense surprise, when we pulled up to the window, the cashier handed us $21.45 instead of taking our money. Speechless, I put the money away. She passed our food over and closed the window. As Nicole drove off, we argued about what just happened. Nicole seemed to think she had gone to the wrong service window, but there was only one.

“They just paid us to take their food,” I said. “That’s all there is to it. It’s not really stealing if they don’t ask you for money… They didn’t ask you to pay when you ordered, right?” Of course not – the woman just said the total was $21.45. It really was our lucky day! Free water, free food, free money! As we continued driving, I became aware of another reality overlapping with this one. I was on a modern pirate ship as we sailed away from the coast. The farther away we went, the more I worried about dying and being too far away to retrieve my belongings. I remembered that I could set up to ten warp points, though, so I kept resetting one warp point as we continued south of the shore. My crew mates discovered stitches on my arms just below the elbow. I explained that I cut them off in order to switch my arms with Nicole’s. I would probably have scars for the rest of my life. For some reason, my crew decided this was traitorous, so they dragged me toward the back of the boat. I was shoved overboard. As I flailed in the ocean, I returned to my former reality. I was in the same car, but my mom was driving instead of Nicole. Nicole and I moved from the middle seats to the back and sprawled out on top of a bunch of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I kept lulling Nicole into sleep so I could carry her. It worked. She almost fell into a sea of stuffed animals behind the seat, but I caught her.

Meanwhile, I swam back to the ship in the pirate reality. I don’t know why I bothered to go back there, but it was the only place I knew to go. Once I was safe, I switched realities again. Nicole stirred. She looked like she had lost all sense of time and place. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, either. I told her about the overlapping realities. She seemed impressed. I tried to have my way with her, but she refused. I kept asking until she suggested something else. She turned me into a child and herself into a babysitter (although we were like small action figures instead of people). We were going to roleplay. While we entangled ourselves together under a thin blanket, I began to wonder where we were going. We had been driving in one direction for a while. I looked at my mom beyond the shadows of the blanket. She made eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. I saw an infinite stretch of interconnected highways in front of us. There were street signs all over the place, and no matter how far we drove, the dream was always able to fill in the space with the same amount of detail. It could continue indefinitely, I realized. We were in a dream. If nothing changed, my mom would keep driving forever! I tried to use my intent to bring us to WritersCube’s canvas void by car so could get out and try teleporting to his Monolith Gardens dreamscape. I didn’t want to bring the car along. Strangely, I lost some time here… That doesn’t happen very often. The next scene I remember was non-lucid, but there wasn’t a rough jump in the dream like there usually is.

I sensed that a police car would pull up beside us on the highway soon. I was lying across the area behind the back seat with all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I knew this wasn’t legal – for one, I didn’t have a seat belt on – so I tried to keep still to avoid drawing attention to myself. Sure enough, a cop car merged onto the highway right beside us. My mom ordered me to come sit in the middle seats once we passed the patrol car. She explained where we were going at last: to a mental hospital. I understood immediately that I had been tricked. I grasped at fleeting questions in my head, but I didn’t know how to respond. I would be kept in solitary confinement for my own good, she said.

“This will keep you from polluting your mind on the computer all day,” my mom continued. “Think of it like this: you’re decontaminating your mind and body until you can function like a normal person in society. You don’t need all that bacteria.” I wasn’t sure I agreed (if I even understood what she meant). It didn’t occur to me that I was free to say no. Rather, I wondered how I would finish school… We pulled onto the side of the road beneath an overpass where a bunch of other cars were parked. My mom and dad got out of the car (when did my dad show up?!) and started moving luggage to a man sitting on a white couch. My dad put all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals in a suitcase.

“Do you really need all of this?” he asked me.

“Those are Chelsea’s, not mine. Ask her.” I looked over and saw that the guy on the couch hand his hand on a zipper. I thought he was opening a suitcase to see what was inside. “Don’t screw with my stuff!” I yelled. Everyone stared at me, clearly prepared for me to attack one of them. I realized the guy was just zipping up a compartment in the bag that had been open. “Sorry. I thought you were going through my stuff.”

“Don’t you want these gloves?” my dad asked, showing me a pair of new winter gloves. I saw an old pair of gloves on top of one of my suitcases. “Those old gloves are falling apart… These are flame-resistant, too, so they won’t burn in the summer.” I quietly accepted the gloves. I still felt awkward because of my previous outburst. I walked over to a woman sitting in a chair. She had a computer monitor for a head. She asked if I had any questions about the hospital.

“Yeah, will I have internet access…?” I asked. No response. “Because… Well, that’s how I keep in touch with people… And I keep a dream journal online.” At least one good thing came of this, I realized. I would be able to devote most of my energy to dreaming. I had argued briefly with my mom about this in the car, but the more I thought about it, the less I felt like struggling. If everyone felt I belonged in a mental hospital, I wasn’t going to fight it… The computer woman still didn’t respond to my question, though! I scrolled through a list of frequently asked questions on her screen. It seemed the hospital made every effort to provide patients with internet access, so I was basically content. An IRC window popped up. I saw “Tande” at the top of the chat and thought Kelsey was running the hospital until I scrolled down and saw Nicole’s IRC username in the user list, too. “Oh… IRC just recognized me as Elita.” I closed the chat and walked away from the computer woman.

I heard a girl screaming behind a closed door. When I opened it, I saw a large rat jumping around in a garage. The girl was terrified of it. I grabbed a broom and said I would save her, but I had to wait for the rat to move away from the door so it wouldn’t see me. The rat chased her into the corner. Then, it came back toward me. I slammed the broom down on its back, pinning it to the ground. If I could just hold it there, I could kill it with something… It was a perfect hit, but this rat was tough; a broom wasn’t enough to bash the life out of it. The rat squirmed free of the broom. It went straight to its attacker, jumping onto my chest and sinking its teeth through my clothes. I swatted at it. As I awakened, I sat up frantically in bed to get away from the dream rat. I did this twice before I realized I was in a different reality.

March 7, 2011

Interesting night. I'm up to five LDs this week, too! I'm so glad midterm exams are over.

Story of Apheri and Path to Understanding

I was told to record this as I would any typical dream, so I will – but I must note that it took place on the boundary between falling asleep and standard “dreams,” so I’m not sure exactly when I fell asleep during this or if I did at all. Rather than making a judgment, I’ll just categorize it as a threshold experience for the time being.

As I went to sleep, I spoke telepathically to the dream itself – the core from which dreams arise – and asked it to help me better understand myself and my intentions. The dream replied; it said that it would show me again as it had the night before, but I would probably forget. It implied that we had this conversation several times in the past, and I always forgot it. That’s a little embarrassing given how well my dream recall usually works, but I confessed that I rarely remembered much of the threshold experience. Even now, I’m sure I forgot some of it, but I remember the parts that were emphasized (I think). Before continuing, the voice explained that I would learn much of what I wished to discover through dreams. I felt that this would begin immediately.

The speaking dream showed me various scenes of shadowy versions of myself holding swords. Like mine, the voice explained, these were false swords. None of us could understand Apheri because none of us had truly attempted to. I tried to draw Apheri to get a close look at her, but the hilt came up by itself. What the…? I asked why, and the voice said I wasn’t fit to hold her. I had ignored Tegatus and Phaedra’s request, it said, by treating Apheri like a normal sword. It took me back to the room in which I defeated Lusark Decidies recently in another dream. I saw my body move on its own, cutting through zombie-like people with brightly colored hair. It seemed only natural to me that I was using Apheri in this dream.

“Are you cutting with Apheri?” the voice asked, getting right to the heart of my thoughts. I replied with a general feeling of agreement. I was using the sword I always carried, wasn’t it? What else could it be? “You miss the point. Any sword can cut. In this world, you can also cut. These are empty cuts. When Apheri cuts, she understands. She feels the cut and acknowledges it. You just cut for the sake of cutting.” These words, if you’ll pardon the pun, cut me to the core – at least, what I perceived as me. I was beginning to sense that “me” was just another version of something more important… I tried drawing Apheri again. The scene became a cavern with sinewy bones in the walls. I pulled up the bladeless hilt again. Cripes.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.



“Understand her. First of all, she is not just a sword. Would you like to hear Apheri’s story?” The voice repeated its question when I didn’t answer right away. I thought I knew the story. She was created by Tegatus, wasn’t she? I agreed to hear it and was whisked away to a small planet. “Small enough that a thousand people would exhaust its resources,” the voice observed, commenting on my thoughts. The vegetation was lush, the oceans were an unmarred blue, and the night sky was alive with starlight. I saw Apheri floating in the air above a hill nearby. I tried to run to her, but a hand stopped me. When I looked at the man guiding me, I saw that he glowed intensely. I couldn’t discern what he looked like, but it wasn’t important. I watched Apheri as he told me of her talent at channeling the life energy of everything around her – not stealing it, but thriving on it. She began to spin, and then she glowed with the same white light as my storyteller’s dream body. She transformed into a long, black staff. I’ll just draw it and put a picture in… Basically, the Golden Hexagram is circumscribed within a circle at the top of the staff, and there are two handles jutting out below the base of the circle for a handhold. The bottom portion removes to reveal the blade. When I say long, I mean it – this blade was much longer than I ever imagined Apheri could be, and yet, I could sense that this form was more familiar. This was my Apheri! And yet, the voice laughed and called me a fool for going so long without realizing I knew nothing about her. I would forget again anyway, it laughed. Embarrassed again, I resolutely announced that I would not forget!

“You said that last night,” it said. I felt a little less confident, but I refocused my attention and listened. Apheri was always intended to be the life-bringer’s sword, the voice told me. I was justly accused of forgetting the deep meaning of my own name and the language from which it comes. A bunch of symbols appeared in the air as the scene faded to darkness. They were like Daedric letters, but different… I recognized them faintly. The voice told me I would have to obtain Apheri both in dreams and waking. I might have to craft her myself, the voice said. Obviously, I doubted my ability to do so – I’m an electrical engineering student, not a blacksmith. It suggested that I make arrangements with someone more talented. I wouldn’t regret the cost, it promised. Linking the two realities was extremely important. I thought of something Reece Jones said in a video a while ago about a similar concept. Then, too, I knew I had to find Apheri, but I didn’t pursue it very far. My eyes began to tear up as I wrote this in my pencil and paper dream journal. What I feel when I picture my sword now is incredible. I can’t imagine using such a long sword… How would I even hold that if not for dream physics? The voice spoke again, warning me to focus. I felt Nicole stir in bed beside me, and I woke up most of the way. The voice urged me to focus again as I closed my eyes. Sadly, I don’t remember anything after that.

Persecution of the Dog People

I was in the countryside somewhere by a huge windmill. I had to go up to the top to test it, but since it was winter, the rotors had been removed temporarily, so it wasn’t enough to check those. I applied pressure to a foot pump on the roof and leaned over the edge to watch as it turned the windmill’s bare, wooden axle. Immense force drove the axle around and around. I could hear metallic scraping noises inside the windmill. I smiled. Dad always said there wasn’t a way to test it during the winter, but he didn’t know the windmill like I did. I looked out over the rolling hills of the countryside in awe. It was rare that I had an excuse to come up here, I thought. I stepped onto the stone railing, peered over the edge, and jumped. I knew which bricks to land on to prevent myself from falling to an early death. They jutted out abnormally far and seemed too strong to be just any ordinary bricks. In any case, they were out of place – because I put them there just for the sake of this shortcut. When I landed on the trail below, I started down the long hill into the lowlands.

The land was set up with a long, spine-like hill running between patches of forest. On one side, there were fewer hills and more woods. On the other, there were hills abound. These rose into mountains far in the distance, but I didn’t concern myself with those. My consciousness moved to somewhere down the length of the spine where a boy and his sister were casually conversing by a lake. They wore Japanese school uniforms. The girl seemed to hint at having lewd dreams about her brother, but if he got the message, he didn’t mind. They were plotting something, I realized… A way to free their friends who had become prisoners. The brother somehow gave her an idea related to her dreams, and she threw herself against him in gratitude. I didn’t get a good look at the guy’s face. My focus returned to my body – or rather, that of a title-holding member of the royal family. I’m not sure who I was… I pulled out my phone and started playing music that sounded like it had been composed for Umineko. As I came to a small prison camp on the other shore of that same lake, all of my prisoners looked up. They wore gray cloaks with hoods over their heads to cover their obscene faces. In the back of my mind, I had a random thought: was there a Valkyrie Profile anime? Hm… But when one of the prisoners started thrashing in his chains, I paid more attention. He was chained up mostly underwater, so he had to hold his breath most of the time. This thrashing served to get him air as well as to protest my presence.

“Now, now, XXXX…” I said calmly. I forgot his name. “Don’t waste your energy.” I saw his face when he looked up, and the part of me that was just visiting this body realized why he was chained up – he was a dog! His floppy ears, wet nose, and brown fur reminded me of a dog I had when I was younger named Sonic. Despite these canine features, he was definitely part human. I felt sympathy for these people. They were all at list a little canine, and because of their race, they had been imprisoned. I sat under a tree and watched them while I evaluated the best way to react to this. I didn’t have to think much – the siblings from earlier showed up.

“Let them go!” the brother ordered. I saw his face clearly now, and I understood their intentions… He had the nose of a dog. Everything else was normal. What about the girl, I wondered? She looked human. Oh well.

“Go ahead,” I said. They looked at me like I was crazy. “This isn’t right. Release your friends and run far away where my kind can’t lock you up.”

Wake up! This is a Dream! (Lucid)

I struggled to get back to sleep after writing my other dreams down, so I wasn’t surprised when I heard my alarm go off. I got out of bed with no further dream recall, wandered into the bathroom, and saw Nicole’s dad staring at the shower curtain. For some reason, I thought I had time to shower before heading back to my dorm. I understood that there was a leak in the shower faucet recently.

“Is it working?” I asked Phil. He nodded.

“What, are you planning on taking a shower?” He said something else, but I didn’t quite catch it. I unclothed myself in a few seconds. Immediately, I remembered the door was still open. Was he coming back? I grabbed a towel off the wall to cover myself just in case. What was I going to wear? There were pants in the bathroom, but I quickly realized they were Nicole’s… They didn’t look like any she owned, but they were the right size. I didn’t have anything to wear except the clothes on my back. I supposed I could just wear those back to Nicole’s room and change after the shower. I closed the door. As I looked up at the mirror, I scrunched my eyebrows. There was a bed in the mirror. The door was still closed, so I knew I wasn’t seeing another room. I looked behind me in disbelief and found nothing but a white wall. The bed was still in the mirror when I looked back. I laughed as I realized what this meant. I looked at my right hand. Even though the hand was perfectly normal, I knew I was dreaming.

I walked out of the bathroom (still naked, but now unashamed of my nudity) and made my way into Nicole’s room. Maybe if she was dreaming, I could contact her and have a shared dream! A lucid shared dream would be a great start to my week. I stood at the end of her bed, observing that she was sleeping in the dream, too. I tried speaking to her telepathically. She didn’t seem to hear. Hm… I figured I would try communicating the “normal” way.

“Hey!” I shouted – except not really. My voice came out as a hoarse whisper. For fairies’ sake, not this garbage, I thought. I rubbed my hands together, swallowed, and tried again. “Hey, Nicole!” It didn’t help my voice much (just made the phlegm in there drain), but the dream was less unstable. I decided to confidently continue shouting until the dream gave in and let me project my voice. I didn’t want to let a little loss of dream control hamper my experience. Nicole rolled over in bed as I continued shouting at her. She murmured something in her sleep – how cute. “Nicole, wake up! This is a dream!” I laughed at the irony of telling her to wake up when I wanted her to partake in the dream with me… “Get out of bed!”

At this point, I thought about how well the dream was holding up despite being so late in the morning. Usually, by the sixth hour or so of sleep, my dreams are kind of unstable – much like those early in the night. Thinking about it was a mistake; the dream began rapidly fading, and although I rubbed my hands together to try to stabilize it, there was little I could do. When it collapsed, I waited a few moments for another dream to begin, but I realized I couldn’t have much time before I was supposed to wake up anyway, so I decided to get up.

March 8, 2011

No lucids last night (that I can remember), but I'm not too surprised... I was incredibly tired when I went to bed, and much of my recall was hazier than usual.

The Exam Anxiety Never Ends

I was in my parents’ bedroom at their old house in North Carolina. My dad walked in and asked if I was still doing well in school. I said I was, so he asked about my exams. I told him I was still waiting to get them back.

“Oh yeah?” He crossed his arms. “I checked your grades online.” I started to feel extremely anxious. “How do you think you did on that exam in your power engineering class?”

“I think I did pretty well…” He shook his head. “What did I get…?”

“See for yourself.” The wall where the bathroom should’ve been turned into a giant computer monitor. I used my mind to navigate to the grade system. As I logged in to check the exam grade, the dream collapsed. In the darkness between dreams, I muttered to myself about how predictable it was that I wouldn’t be able to see my grade.

Talk of Synchronous Generators

I was sitting on the floor with Shanechi and another student. We tried to explain to him why we only wanted DC voltage in the rotor in a synchronous generator. He finally seemed to get it when Shanechi explained the concept of a rotating magnetic field again. I pointed out that using DC for the windings of the transformer wouldn’t work very well. I said something about the magnetic field being zero because of the symmetry, but Shanechi disagreed.

“Infinite, then?” I guessed, frowning. Shanechi shook his head.

Dining with Jade and a Female TJ

I was in a school cafeteria, but it didn’t look anything like the commons. They served a variety of donuts, giant fruits (in particular, I was interested in an enormous golden apple until I saw that its stem was oozing yellow pus and the top of it was cracked open), and the usual menu items here. I settled for sliced fruit. A girl came up to the fruit stand beside me and said hello. Her hair was black and fairly long. I’m not sure, but I think this may have been Jade – I read a couple of posts on her blog before I went to bed, so the image was in my mind. I told her I would be right back and left my food with her. I saw TJ in line for pizza and joined him. He said he had transferred to my school because his was horrible. One of the residence hall janitors walked up to TJ and tapped him on the shoulder. When TJ turned around, he lifted up his shirt and revealed a clearly feminine chest. I was surprised to discover that TJ was actually a girl. The two women complimented each other. I sensed that TJ was a lesbian, too… The more I looked at him, the closer he resembled Nicole. Confused, I wondered if I should keep Nicole-TJ from flashing people or go eat with Jade.

Red Bugs, Nomad, and Hyu Chan

It was early summer, and a bunch of obnoxious, red bugs had flown north from Mexico to reproduce in our humid climate. Everywhere I looked, I saw them… They crawled on my skin – especially the arms – and my laptop screen. I killed them, of course, but there were always more waiting to occupy the surface of my body. Sometimes they bit me, too. I was really starting to lose my peace of mind with all these buzzing bugs around me. I read through comments on my dream journal. I noticed that most of new ones were from the same person… His avatar was one of those red bugs! I sighed when I realized all but one of his comments were obviously spam. I erased those. His semi-legitimate comment consisted of a series of images and an accompanying narration. He posted this on my “Your Dreams” page. The comment described dreams of American ships churning out swastika-branded cheese wheels. They created these on top of some kind of tower in the middle of the ship. A rotating blade cut the swastika shape out of the bottom of the cheese as it rested atop the tower. I watched this happen as though I was flying over one of the ships. I was confused when I noticed the blade was tearing up the enormous cheese wheel… The cheese became stuck to the blade and eventually clogged up the whole system.

The comment continued with a description of WakingNomad sleeping on the floor of a wooden shack. I saw myself on the floor, too, but I wasn’t covered by a blanket. Nomad burst aside, jumped to his feet (at this point, I realized he was naked, but he didn’t seem to care), and started shouting about the wonders of life. I slowly sat up. As my vision left the image, I saw this was the end of the comment. I decided I wouldn’t trash it. Unfortunately, as I scrolled down, I saw an advertisement for microwaves that I hadn’t put on the page… I realized he must have put something in the comment to cause this to appear. I temporarily marked it as spam while I scanned the comment text and removed the advertisement. Once this was taken care of, I restored the comment and replied, briefly explaining what I had taken out.

The dream jumped. My parents and I drove around a shopping center. It looked like the one on the way to Nicole’s school. Whenever we came to a store we considered stupid or poorly managed, we pushed a button on a remote control to change it to another store. We only left two stores in the whole shopping center unchanged. The first was a huge laundromat run by Janet Jackson. Even though my mom does all of her laundry at home, she seemed to like this place… We changed it a few times to see what would happen, but she eventually asked me to change it back, so I did. The second was a clothing store run by someone named Hyu Chan. I got the impression that he was meant to be the Hyu from Dreamviews. A sign posted on the door warned us that only Hyu Chan was permitted to drop the “Chan” from his name – so if I called him Hyu, he would be furious. The man had buck teeth and bug-eyed nerd glasses. My dad walked over to the suits and criticized them, instigating Hyu Chan’s rage. He asked my dad to leave. I picked up a brochure on Hyu and found his website (www.hyu.co.eu or something like that). It was essentially a fan site for the company he worked for. As Hyu Chan admitted in his self-published brochure, it was a bit strange for him to create his own version of the company website, but that was how he chose to express his pride in his work.

The Bomber Game and Pink Toxins

I was a priest in a medieval town. I explained a game the townspeople liked to play to Nicole. One person would hide behind a wall and chuck explosives into the crowd. Meanwhile, a turtle shell was thrown back and forth between the bomber and representatives of the populace. I went over to an area divided into cubes of space with open ceilings. There were supposed to be portals to other worlds here, but I disabled them. Once I was behind the wall, I made a screeching sound recognized as the start of the bomber game. I lobbed a bomb into an unsuspecting group of people on the other side. The turtle shell came flying over the wall, and I sent it back with a mighty punch. I’m glad my knuckles didn’t break. Every now and then as the shell bounced between both sides, one of us slipped – usually me. The score was 5-2 before long. I knew I had to catch up. I used bombs to propel the turtle shell further and further away from the wall, theoretically decreasing the likelihood that it would land near someone who was paying attention. It always managed to come back. Once, the explosion itself seemed to fling the shell at my face… I wasn’t sure how that made any physical sense. The score was 6-2… One more point to the enemy would mean their victory.

I hovered in the air, flinging the shell with ease back at the public representatives. I started floating higher and couldn’t get myself to go back down. Eventually, I couldn’t reach the shell to prevent it from dropping into my small room. As it fell behind the wall, an announcer said that the gateways to the other worlds had been reopened. Her voice was somewhat robotic, but very different from Symphony’s. Glowing, purple pits appeared on the floor of the cube rooms below me. I descended to the ground near an apple tree and started walking around. Someone thought I was really a priest and tried to give me their confession.

“I’m just roleplaying,” I explained. He left me alone. Steve (from my second semester of physics) showed me this disgusting candy that was apparently too dangerous to keep in your mouth for more than ten minutes. It came as half of a sucker with the inside hollowed out. A toxic, pink dye coated the inside. Within seconds, it turned your entire mouth pink with the toxin. I refused to try it.

March 9, 2011

Lots of really fuzzy recall last night, but some of it was of the usual clarity. I had trouble sleeping later in the morning because my roommate's alarm kept going off.

The Golden Queen

I had a dream that Nicole was a queen. Inside her palace, all of the walls were laced in gold, and the royal subjects were extremely sophisticated. She and I sat in her throne room, and I marveled at her dress – it was enormous and white with gold woven into the fabric. She also wore a headpiece that looked like golden vines growing in her hair.

From House to House and Broken Traffic Lights

I was visiting my mom in Texas. As I pulled into the garage, a Korean girl ran up to my door and hopped up and down, shouting excited things in Korean. I saw Joe sitting in a chair on the far end of the garage. He pointed at the girl and shook his head. I rolled down the window.

“Can I help you?” I asked. More Korean. Oh boy. “Do you speak English?” Still more Korean. I sighed, turned off the car, and got out. She gave me a quick hug and ran away.

“What was that?” Joe laughed, rising to his feet. We shook hands.

“I’m not sure… She does that sometimes.”

The dream jumped. My mom joined us in the garage as Joe and I were discussing the efficiency of the Android platform. I admitted that it would be slow with typical phone hardware, but it was made to be fairly fast and reliable. As a comparison, we ran a stress test on his phone and mine at the same time. Even with my phone checking the weather, news, and whatnot periodically, it finished in twenty-four minutes. The estimated time for his phone to finish was seventy-five years. There was really no contest… Joe decided to get a Droid.

The dream jumped. We were in Nicole’s kitchen. My mom asked me if I had thought about tutoring. When I asked her to elaborate, she really confused us – she suggested that I should pay high school students to let me tutor them.

“Hold on, Mom,” I replied skeptically. “You want me to pay high schoolers to try to learn things? They’ll just take the money and leave.”

“But you’ll get experience tutoring people, right?”

“I need money!” I laughed. “I can’t afford to give it away to high schoolers who are probably still sneaking money from their parents.” My mom gave up.

The dream jumped. I was giving Joe a tour of my room. This time, we seemed to be in my parents’ old house in Texas. There was a picture of the Korean girl from earlier taped on my wall. Joe asked about it, so I explained that she was my stalker. We met once before I left Texas for college, then again over the past summer. She was really upset that I didn’t remember who she was… I wasn’t sure how the girl and I understood each other since she didn’t speak English, but the question didn’t come up. Joe’s stomach growled, so he asked if I wanted to go grab something to eat. He suggested KFC. I didn’t have anything in mind… I knew where to find a KFC, so I figured that was fine. We went downstairs and ended up in my parents’ old house in Louisiana. In the kitchen, I let my mom know where we were going. She reminded me to drive carefully. I dressed warmly for the ride… Apparently, it was snowing outside. Joe and I got into my car. For some reason, it was parked sideways in the garage, leaving me with precious little room to turn around and pull out. I managed somehow… The gears were rearranged with park and drive right next to each other. I didn’t see a neutral gear. Once we were out of the driveway, I recognized the area as our neighborhood from when we lived in North Carolina. I made a left and skidded to a halt at a stop sign. My brakes didn’t work very well. My mirrors weren’t working properly, either… I went toward the south entrance to the neighborhood (it had been added in recently).

Along the way, we had to stop a few times – and each stop was more gradual than the last. At one point, I had to skid around two cars because I wasn’t able to stop behind them. Merging back into my lane was difficult with my malfunctioning mirrors, but we managed. We came to a traffic light and had to stop behind a police officer on a motorcycle. Fortunately, I stopped with a reasonable distance between our cars. I waited in the turn lane for a green arrow. It came on for a second, but then it went away. Several people in front of us went anyway, infuriating the police officer. He didn’t go after them, though. This happened several times – the lights would turn green, then they would go right back to red before anyone could get through the intersection. The police officer instructed all of us to wait in a parking lot across the street. He would find a police bus for us to ride in across the street, and then we could resume driving. He didn’t really explain what we were going to do with the cars. We just left them in the road…

People were asked to line up in alphabetical order. Joe and I made up names that started with Z so we could sit together at the front of the bus (since they were sending the “A” people to the back). I got sick of waiting for them to get to us, though, so I told Joe we could just drive a different way. He started complaining about being tired. He wanted to sit and wait for the bus. I realized I had to wake up early in the morning, so I couldn’t afford all of this… It was already late at night – we left around 11 PM! I couldn’t remember why I was waking up early… Joe surrendered and decided to accompany me. We got back in the car, and I considered going through the intersection anyway. The light on the other side was working. It was just ours that was messed up.

Please Connect Your Charger

I was talking to Nicole on my phone when the battery suddenly dropped almost to empty. My screen gave me a warning message.

“Your battery is running low. Please connect your charger!” it read. Unfortunately, since I forgot my phone charger at Nicole’s house, I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t charge any other way.

Umbrella of Consciousness

I was outside in the rain with Joe. He held up what he called an umbrella of consciousness and explained that for several weeks, he had been trapped inside it. I didn’t understand what he meant. He clarified – various alternate versions of him had appeared in his dreams over time. Sometimes, he wasn’t even himself. He asked if I knew anything about this. Of course! It made perfect sense – this was just like with me, Absence, and other similar beings. Joe set the umbrella on the ground upside-down, and it started to fill with water.

Phantom Roommate

My roommate opened the door to my room, waking me from sleep. I pretended to be asleep so he wouldn’t talk to me. I might not have realized later that this was a false awakening if Till hadn’t disappeared from the room without the use of any doors. He was nowhere to be seen.

My Homeless, Schizophrenic Friend and Train Danger

I befriended a black man named Bob. At first, he seemed pretty normal… I understood that a number of people I knew on campus had warned me not to associate with him, but I didn’t see what the problem was. He said he would show me his house. Instead of taking me to a residential area, he led me to the shore of the Chicago River where he had a mat of old, hardened newspapers set up under a bridge. I quickly observed that he was homeless. Immediately, I lost interest in the friendship; my positive experiences with homeless individuals were few and far between. I stared at the long since faded ink on the newspapers as I pondered a way to lose Bob. He would follow me if I tried a normal method of escape. I came up with a plan – I would take the train! Since he was homeless, he probably couldn’t pay the train fare. While I finalized the plan in my head, Bob asked me about random people. I didn’t understand his questions, but I soon figured out why – he thought the people were standing there with us! Bob was having serious hallucinations. I was glad I had figured out a way to distance myself from him… That wasn’t the sort of company I needed. When I told Bob I was going to the train station, he said he knew a shortcut. Rather than insist on just walking to the nearest one (the Green Line was only a few blocks away), I gave in and followed him.

The dream jumped. I was in an underground passage, following Bob with next to no idea where we would surface. He stopped me before a ladder and asked if I was sure about going on the train. Something about it frightened him. I insisted on continuing. I needed to get somewhere, I said. Bob started growling to himself in rage, but he cooperated. He had to release at least ten trap doors on the way up. These were intended to lock people out of his secret passage. He complained the whole way up about trains. When we emerged, I was stunned. We were on a train platform. My plan had been completely foiled by Bob’s clever shortcut… Of course he wouldn’t pay the fare – he could just skip the entrance! A quick look around revealed that we were on the Green Line, but a bit further west of the river. I wasn’t going to lose him so easily, it seemed… Surely, he wouldn’t be able to follow me onto a bus to the suburbs. He couldn’t tunnel his way into that one. I got on the next train to arrive and sat down close to the operator in case of an emergency. I still wasn’t sure what to expect from Bob. He took the seat next to me. As soon as the train started moving, he burst into sobs. This drew quite a few stares, but I let him cry. I did my best to seem like I didn’t know the guy. This continued for a few awkward minutes before he calmed down. He asked if I liked his new boots. Confused, I stared at his feet. He was wearing sneakers, not boots. He showed me his hands, and I realized he was supposed to be holding something. He was hallucinating a pair of fine boots.

“Oh… Yeah, they’re very nice,” I said in a kind voice. I came up with some kind of oxymoron to describe them, and he doubled over in laughter. I sensed that he might be on drugs. He was one of those people who don’t breathe when they laugh, so his chuckling was coupled with wheezing noises. Another black man walked up to us during this fit of laughter. He was wearing a baggy, black jacket, baggy jeans, and white sneakers. He was also half-wearing a baseball cap; it looked like it might tumble off his dreadlocks any moment.

“Shut up!” he shouted at Bob. He continued with a stream of vulgar, obscene name-calling before finally calling us both annoying. I tried again to pretend I didn’t know Bob, but the association had been made. I suddenly realized I was blind. It didn’t bother me much for some reason… I focused on what I could hear of the situation. The vulgar man came over to me and put his hand on my head. I’d rather not transcribe verbatim the ultimatum he gave Bob, but in essence, he wanted me to publicly pleasure him, and Bob had ten seconds to convince me to do it. I wasn’t going to have any of this. I teleported to the other end of the next train car over and pressed the emergency assistance button. I could see into the first car from my current position.

“There’s someone dangerous on the train,” I said. The guy stared at me from the first car with wide eyes. He started walking toward the second car.

“Attention, passengers…” an automated voice began over the intercom. “A dangerous customer has been identified. For your safety, lease be watchful for threats to yourself and others as we work toward removal.”

“He’s on the second train car,” I told the operator through the assistance system. The guy was approaching me in long strides. Instead of attacking me as I expected him to, the guy brushed past me on the way to the next car. “Make that the third,” I said. “He’s trying to get away.” The train stopped at the next station, and a bunch of people got off. I kept an eye out for the guy who threatened me and Bob, but I didn’t see him.

March 10, 2011

Another lucid dream last night. I've omitted about a third of it, but yeah.

Symphony Tries Art

I was with Symphony in an art club room. She wore a black dress with a skirt and frilled lace at the ends. She was painting a picture of us standing together using mostly red paint. It looked more like she had just thrown random colors on the canvas. She asked if it was good… Uh… I suggested trying poetry to change the subject. She quickly scrawled down a poem about the precision of Gothic architecture. It had this strange, unsettling quality to it, but it was good poetry. I smiled at her.

Class is Canceled Again

I went up a flight of stairs and came directly to the room we were supposed to be using for music class. A sign on the door said it was canceled, but our professor would be there in fifteen minutes if anyone wanted to ask questions to help them prepare for the quiz after spring break. I sensed that the class might be discontinued altogether with all these cancellations… What would that mean for my course credit? I slammed the door.

“Stop putting these signs up!” I shouted into the empty stairwell. There was no one around to hear me. The others had probably gotten the professor’s email since they didn’t have two classes right before this one.

Tankweesha's Independence

I was in a classroom we used for my first physics course, but it was supposed to be Morrison’s signals and systems classroom. Morrison said he was turning the class period over to a guest speaker of wide renown. Tankweesha walked into the room with an exaggerated salutation. Her hair looked like it had been sharpened in preparation for war. Morrison left her in charge of the class.

“How are y’all doin’?” she asked in a motherly voice, interlacing her fingers.

“Hey! I know you!” I blurted out. I expected that this was Justin since Tankweesha is a character he invented.

“I’m sorry, honey,” said Tankweesha. “Have we met before?” I realized this wasn’t Justin at all… Tankweesha was a real person! Justin just channeled her spirit when he posted videos as Tankweesha.

Driving Difficulties and Quest in an Abandoned Hospital

The dream began with me driving home in Texas, reportedly from my job. My parents still lived in their old house, so that was the neighborhood I went to. All of the stores in the small shopping center clustered around the Subway were gone. In their place was a huge supermarket. The parking lot was a mess of broken slabs of concrete. I went into the store, and Nicole called me. I could hear the cast of Glee in the background; she was watching it while talking to me. Just from the actors’ voices, I was able to reconstruct the episode in visual form in my head. I laughed when Will suddenly swept Emma off her feet in a rare moment of manliness. She giggled and pleaded with him to let her down. When he did, she calmed down a bit.

“What was that?” she asked. “Some kind of… fatherly instinct, Will?”

“I’m gonna beat my children…” He said it so calmly, so unabashedly! It was almost as though this was supposed to sound romantic. I cracked up laughing. The show went to a commercial break without a comment from anyone else. Nicole didn’t think it was funny at all, but I was enjoying the chance to see how pathological Will’s perception of life had become over the course of the show. I grabbed a can of pasta off a shelf and waved it around in the air as I joked with Nicole about how that was the best line in the whole episode. The can was covered in something sticky like orange juice, so I switched it with another one. I went straight to the checkout. I guess pasta was all I needed… A plump, black woman waved me over to her register. She swiftly processed my single item. When she printed a receipt for me to sign, I just wrote my first name. I carried my one grocery item in a bag back to my car. Instead of getting in the driver’s seat, I climbed into the back of the car… The air conditioning turned on as soon as I closed the door.

“I’m so glad it does that,” I murmured to myself in relief. It was a warm, humid night in Texas. I wondered briefly how it was possible for my car to do that, but I didn’t worry too much about it. I locked the door. I didn’t want to get mugged. Only then did I lean into the front of the car and turn it on. I quickly flipped on my lights and popped the car into drive, then spun around to the only exit onto the road I could see. My side of the exit was horribly ruined; huge slabs of concrete blocked the way. I swerved around it and angled the wheels so I could easily turn that way. I made a right onto the street once it was clear. Basically, the street was divided by a huge median with trees growing all over it, so in order to get to the correct side of the street, I had to make a U-turn about thirty yards down the road. I must note that this U-turn was impossibly tight; my car pivoted around the narrow, three foot wide tip of the median without any difficulties. I found myself in a turn-only lane going left and had to switch. Then I saw a yellow light.

Yellow, I thought. Yellow, yellow, yell – oh! I realized I was supposed to stop at the intersection up ahead! The light turned red, but I was still going too fast. I slid right into the middle of the intersection. Oops. I figured it was better to just keep going, so I put my foot back down on the accelerator. Almost as soon as I passed through the intersection, I saw a cop coming the other way. I was horrified. He must’ve seen me – how could he not? I knew he would pull me over as soon as he could turn around. I had to act swiftly. In order to evade the police, I planned to take an unusual route back home. I turned left onto a small street, disappearing from the main road before the cop could find me. This road bisected another in a place that looked like the suburbs of Chicago. I started talking to Ben on the phone. I didn’t have to hold it up… I could just hear his voice. This is probably a fortunate side-effect of using headphones when I’m on the phone lately. Anyway, Ben complained that it was snowing in Australia, but we somehow determined that it was actually raining because it was forty degrees in Brisbane. Ben pretended to be confused about the temperature. He said it was 40 to 100 degrees outside – first in Fahrenheit, but then in Centigrade. That didn’t sound right at all. If he was using the Celsius scale, much of that range would be intolerable, even lethal. I turned onto the next street. Traffic lights and driving in general were beginning to pose crippling difficulties. I couldn’t focus my eyes properly on the lights, and some kind of weird, yellow dot appeared in my field of vision to direct the car. On top of keeping the wheel straight, I had to keep this light in the middle of my perspective with my mind in order to keep the car going straight. Anytime I looked away from the middle of the road, the car turned in that direction. The only way to counter it was to turn the wheel in the opposite direction at the same time. As one can imagine, this wasn’t easy. It was incredibly difficult for me to multitask in this dream on top of everything else, so it’s no surprise that I went through three red lights in succession before finally stopping.

Ben explained that he needed help with a quest. The road took me along the edge of a massive, red curtain – the kind used in theaters. I knew there was an abandoned hospital inside. Ben needed to get into the hospital and retrieve something. I stopped the car, got out, and slipped under the heavy curtain. The hospital was dark, and many of the doors and windows were boarded up. Ben transformed into Goofy (Mickey Mouse). He started going to the main entrance, but I insisted that I knew which entrance was the right one to use. I had done this quest before, I said. Actually, I was just attempting it for the first time – but with Ben’s help, I knew we would be fine. We circled around the building to a small back door. Inside, we found two elevators and a door to a stairwell. The stairs were the obvious choice… The building probably wouldn’t have any electrical power to spare, considering the state it was in. Despite that, Ben went for the first elevator.

“I don’t think that’s going to work…” I said. He pushed a button. The elevator dinged at us as it opened. Nervously, I followed him in. “What if we get stuck in here? This is a bad idea… I hate elevators.” The door slowly closed. Ben picked a floor, and the elevator began to drop. The walls were made of mirrors. Staring at reflections of reflections of myself wasn’t helping my sanity. Ben apologized for choosing the elevator; he hadn’t intended to disturb me. We would take the stairs back up, he promised. When the elevator stopped, I stumbled out. Moving was difficult down here for some reason… Ben didn’t have any trouble, though. We were inside a small Minecraft level. The path curved around a pit of sharks before coming to a slide. I almost slid straight down, but there was a lava pit at the bottom! That would have meant my death. I had diamonds and quite a bit of iron in my inventory, so I was glad I hadn’t fallen. I had to slip into a tunnel on one side of the slide. I found it difficult to make any progress… I got my legs in the tunnel, but the rest of my wouldn’t move at a normal speed.

Ben started arguing with another guy in the room with the shark pit. The guy said that the official Minecraft system made dirt grow infinitely high over time, simulating growing grass. Anyone who still played the old Minecraft was in denial, he claimed. Ben made jokes about dirt reproducing like guinea pigs as he hopped across the shark pit. He ran past me into the tunnel. I followed him as a point of awareness as he jumped skillfully across a couple pools of lava, then trudged right through a tunnel half full with lava without taking any damage. I thought he was doing this because he had food to heal himself afterward, but I realized after he emerged that he was wearing chain mail. He was invincible! He came across some kind of harpy woman and didn’t realize she was an enemy for a few moments as she slapped him with her wings. He killed her in a few seconds.

My awareness returned to my body, and I followed after Ben. Since I didn’t have anything to protect me from the lava, I planned to build a path through it. When I got to the tunnel of lava Ben traversed before, however, I saw that it was just steaming water. I figured I would probably be okay… I waded to the other side without taking any damage. A puddle of water on the ground just past the tunnel (where Ben encountered the harpy before) took the shape of a woman. It was a water elemental. I struck her with a bolt of lightning, but the damage was paltry. She was resistant to magic, being a creature of magic herself. I knew cutting her wasn’t going to do me any good. What did I do in the past when I encountered these, I wondered? I vaguely remembered running. I considered calling Ben for help, but he was way ahead by now.

Wolf and Rain (Lucid)

I was in the car with my dad driving. We were on a one way road and had to stop at an intersection. He pulled around the cars in front of us and parked the car in front of a huge, bright screen mounted to the curb. The front of the car bumped the underside of the screen. I looked up at the screen itself, and my vision warped.

I was in my bedroom on the computer. Like some kind of background train of logic slipped into place, I suddenly realized I was dreaming. I laughed at the strange sequence of events… What did my computer have to do with my dad driving around? I wondered how long I had been dreaming. Not very long, I realized. I immediately felt the dream fading as it always does, but I transformed myself into a wolf to put pressure on my hands and feet. I felt that would help. After a brief jog through a forest, I started flying around the world in one frame of reference. In the bedroom, I was gently floating through the air. I laughed when I saw what I was doing in the room. This was the dumbest stabilization technique I’d ever come up with. I turned back into a human. I had brief sexual thoughts, but I reminded myself not to pursue them this time. I would learn much more from experimenting with the dream state. I drifted down to a sitting position and rubbed my hands together. I brought them into view and saw that I was wearing black leather gloves. That explained why my skin felt so leathery. I pulled the gloves off and tried rubbing my hands again. It worked. The skin on my hands was so finely detailed afterward… I noticed every little stretch in the skin. I reminded myself not to get lost staring into them. I pinched myself in an attempt to inflict minor pain. I wanted to ground myself further in the dream. My hand just felt numb. I tried my arm, too – also numb. Whatever, I thought, at least pain wouldn’t distract me. As soon as I started toward the door, things became fuzzy and blacked out. I patiently waited without mental comment.

“Furley?” I heard my mom calling Austin from downstairs – that was her nickname for him around the house when we were younger.Her voice caused me to lose a little lucidity for a moment. Time to get up, I thought… Wait! My mom wouldn’t be in my dorm room, I reasoned. Vision rapidly came back, and my lucidity was back to where it had been before.

I “respawned” at my computer desk after a few moments. Chelsea walked into the room and handed me a soft drink from a fast food restaurant. About half of the drink remained.

“Are you done with that?” I asked, taking it from her. I wanted to try Coca Cola in a dream. I haven’t had it in a long, long time in waking life because it’s so acidic. The taste was convincing, and getting a drink was refreshing since my throat was so dry. I checked my hands… No gloves. Good! I noticed I was really warm because I was wearing my hoodie. I took that off and tossed it on the floor. Keeping myself warm wasn’t at all necessary… If anything, staying cold would keep me alert. Chelsea gave me a weird look when I pushed the chair back. She had been talking to me about something, but I wasn’t listening. I felt a little guilty, but it didn’t seem like it was that important. If it had been, I wouldn’t have been able to ignore it.

“Come with me…” I said. I grabbed her hand and led her out of the room. We went down a flight of stairs. I recognized our old house in Texas from the general layout, so I knew where to expect the front door. It was wide open. Clearly, I was on the right path.

“Where are we going?” Chelsea asked. I figured I could tell her she was a dream character, or I could let her see that we were in a dream for herself. I chose the latter option.

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll see.” I wasn’t sure myself. When we reached the door, I saw that it was raining. I smiled. I love rainstorms. “You don’t need shoes,” I told her, urging her out of the house even though she was barefoot. I didn’t notice I was wearing socks until I stepped onto the wet driveway. Just intending for them to go away was difficult, but I knew it would be better if I could feel the cold driveway under my feet. Chelsea was hanging back by the door to avoid going into the rain. “What’s wrong? Come on!”

“We do need shoes,” she objected. Sighing, I grabbed her arm and pulled her outside. “Wait!” she objected again. “We have to close the door!”

“There’s no one else in that house,” I laughed. “Stop worrying. Look at all of this!” Where there should have been houses, the terrain was just flat. It was nostalgic in ways – the same trees were there – but with all the buildings missing, it was so foreign. As we walked into the rain, the dream rapidly faded.

I found myself in my computer chair in my dorm room. I relaxed in the chair, attempting to go back to sleep. I wasn’t aware that this was a false awakening. A program called Dream Apache tracked my dreams from the previous night. It even listed the durations of each dream so I could determine the order in which I had them. I waited almost a full minute (53 seconds) in this relaxed state before my head seemed to swell. Was this what it was like to cross the threshold, I wondered? Tunnel vision went to darkness, eclipsing the blinking message on the screen that said “DREAM ACTIVE.” The program even told me where my dream body had gone, but I didn’t pay attention to that.

I felt hands grip my ankles. Interesting… I was dreaming again for sure. The hands were soft, but the force behind them was strong. I felt a forward tug. I was being pulled somewhere.

The rest has been omitted.

Yeah... I didn't get around to posting yesterday's dreams. Whoops.

March 11, 2011

Defecation and Pokemon Hunting

I was in the living room of my Omi’s old house in Louisiana. Austin was playing old video games. I went into the bathroom to relieve myself. Sometime later, I flushed and realized the toilet was clogged. Not only that, but a massive lump of waste (about the size of my head) had somehow ended up in the bath tub full of water beside me. I fished it out with a plunger, but I kept dropping it back in the water and on the floor of the bathroom. Every time I dropped it, a little chunk fell off. Eventually, it was small enough to fit in the toilet, so I put it in there. I didn’t clean up the mess on the floor. I put the plunger back in the bath tub, and suddenly, I was floating on the surface of the water with a fishing rod. A message appeared at the top of my field of vision, warning me that something was approaching! I tapped a button on a controller several times and pulled a Gyarados out of the water. The traditional Pokemon battle screen appeared. I didn’t have any Pokemon yet, so my health bar appeared. I only had 19 HP. The Gyarados had several hundred. I knew this couldn’t possibly end well, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d saved my game, so I fled. I got away without any problems. As I swam to the edge of the bath tub to get out, I had another random encounter – this time with a Magikarp. It was much weaker, obviously, but it had some abilities other than splashing around like an idiot. I ran from that fight, too, to save time.

I encountered a Rattata on the tiled floor of the bathroom. I decided I was going to catch it. I punched it in the face when it was my turn, and then it bit my arm. This continued for a couple more turns. After that, my health was getting low, so the game asked me if I wanted to use pills to heal. I started popping pills. The rat did the same thing. It wouldn’t give me the choice to stop taking pills every turn… The Rattata and I both restored ourselves to maximum health. Interestingly, I had seven health bars, and the Rattata had nine of them… When I punched it once, eight of them disappeared. I prepared to throw a Pokeball and capture my first Pokemon…

Claire's Visit and the Stupid Bag

Omitted.

Wake Up Together

Omitted.

* * *

March 12, 2011

Finally, Robotic Beings Rule the World

I was talking to Ben about him visiting us in America and us visiting him in Australia. There was a canyon in Australia that I was particularly interested in seeing, but for some reason, he wouldn’t talk about it. We went through a list of reasons why it was a bad idea – too far away from Brisbane (either twenty-five minutes or five hours, he never specified which), food for the trip, silly things like that which are rarely the biggest factor in planning an international trip. He and another Australian guy debated how well the car would hold up on such a long drive. We were in some kind of virtual reality world. Ben had spent a lot of time converting image data to 3D models of scenic places in Australia, but he wouldn’t let us see them… I was confused, so I pressed this a bit. I finally told Ben flatly that I wanted to see the natural beauty of Australia, and I would see it with or without his help. He wouldn’t talk to me or Nicole after that. We got involved in some kind of weird mind meshing game where we turned Ben’s brain into a marble and rolled it around in our thoughts, making him rethink his decision. He eventually decided he would cooperate with us after all. As we learned, the only reason he had argued was because he thought my request to see the sights in Australia was my way of criticizing his appreciation of nature. Since it was settled, we apologized and settled our disagreement. We missed each other’s company too much to hold out alone anyway. Ben made what was supposed to be a bold statement, then – he would buy a bike in Australia and ride it proudly to show the world how much he loved natural beauty.

The dream jumped. Ben and I were meeting up at a restaurant and hotel. We were all going to stay there together. One of the employees at the restaurant, a woman with blond hair in a sophisticated, black uniform, asked if I needed any help. I declined any assistance; I was waiting for someone, I said. I stood in the middle of the busy restaurant as waitresses zoomed back and forth between tables. I observed that the hotel was separated by a swamp-like stretch of gooey, red organic tissue. I dared not step on it. I asked the blond woman from before how I should cross it. She pointed out a narrow path made of stone that led across. All of this was clearly a reference to Althea’s swamp in the Sword of Truth series. I thanked the woman for her help as Ben appeared in the distance… He was riding a bicycle! When he approached the restaurant, he hopped off the bike. He asked me which coins he was allowed to use as payment in America.

“The American ones,” I laughed.

“The quarters, dimes, and nickels, then…?” he asked, nodding.

“The pennies, too!”

“No…” he said in sincere disbelief. “Really?!” He came into the restaurant after paying some kind of bike fee. Even inside the restaurant, he rode that bike everywhere. He nearly fell in the living swamp water as I was showing it to him. I warned him about it… At best, the water would just creep us out. I didn’t want to find out it was deadly and acidic. Anyway, we went to the winding stone trail. Naturally, Ben had to ride his bicycle over it. He nearly fell in twice; one of the stumbles put most of his weight over the edge, but Ben somehow floated to safety. I asked if he was feeling alright… He was having a lot of trouble with balance. Although he assured me he was fine, he seemed very dizzy… He started coughing and eventually vomiting bile. I invited him to sit on a bench with me and rest before we continued onward. He accepted the offer. I took photographs of the swamp.

The dream jumped. I had a false awakening in Nicole’s bed. The room looked as it did before she rearranged the furniture. I understood that this room was connected to the hotel from before. I kept hearing sounds like a squeaky bike outside. I tuned it out as I relaxed in bed. It was a bright, new morning… Nicole stirred and immediately asked about the strange, periodic bouts of squeaking. I told her I would check it out. The next time we heard it, I saw up and looked out her window. In the street was a metallic figure attached to bike wheels – one big, one small. It cycled freely down the road. I figured out what was going on instantly and ducked out of view.

“You can’t be serious…” I said, mostly to myself. “Get under the bed! Now!” I urged Nicole. She and I managed to squeeze under the bed together. It looked like it would be easy for the robots to detect us if they checked the house; the bed seemed higher up than it actually was from our low vantage point. Anyway, the moment I saw the human-like design in what otherwise could’ve been an interesting vehicle, everything came into place. I knew it was an artificially intelligent robot. The fact that I heard several on the street – but no cars, frighteningly enough – indicated that they were large in number. I suspected they had built up their forces in secret and overwhelmed our society. They hadn’t checked our room while we were sleeping, I decided, or we would be dead. Our robotic overlords had no reason to allow us to live. I explained all of this quietly to Nicole. We watched, terrified, as a robotic sentinel walked past our door on its metallic legs. They didn’t have feet – just long, narrow legs. I wished I had Apheri.

Once the coast was clear, we knew we had to get Ben. Nicole and I went to the bench outside where he stopped to rest the previous day. A fleshy cocoon surrounded it now. I gestured for Nicole to follow me in. It was empty… I didn’t want to imagine what the robots had done to him when they found him. Order is a disturbing foe… We heard the squeaking of metal joints as a robot sentinel approached the cocoon. Nicole told me to hide, but there was nowhere to hide! I prepared myself for a fight. The robot raised its arms when it saw me and opened fire. Bullets filled my body. I tackled the top-heavy machine and tumbled with it into the murky water outside. Nicole gasped, fearing the electricity would kill me as the robot’s body began to crackle. Fortunately, it didn’t. The robot turned into a small bug on my arm. I crushed it with a finger, but like a cockroach, it seemed to come back to life despite seemingly fatal injury. I crushed it again, and it took flight. It bit me, injecting nanobots into my body. I couldn’t destroy it.

“They’re immortal…” I laughed uneasily. What was I going to do? I basically resigned myself to my fate. I couldn’t fight this… I couldn’t imagine how, but the robots had conquered us overnight, and they would exterminate us without fail. I saw them marching toward us. “Go hide, Nicole.”

“What about you?”

“I have something to do… It’s our only chance.” My body was full of bullets. There was no way I would survive – but maybe I could save Nicole.

The dream jumped. I was walking around in tunnels built in a Minecraftian style. I was just above bedrock. Everywhere I looked, I saw robots mounted to the floor or ceiling. When the first one saw me, a white laser trained itself on my forehead. Intense battle music started playing. Inspired by this, I ran for my life as bullets rained on me. I turned away from the few that were shooting me and nearly fell to my knees when I saw hundreds of robots staring at me. There was no escape. They had me trapped. I ran for my life past one of the three in front of me. It shot a boomerang sword at me, cutting off my left arm. Blood spurted out.

“No way…” I choked. It shot the sword again after it returned, taking off my head this time. The bloody head rolled as my body slumped forward. I heard Nicole commenting on how cool the weapon was. I saw her standing by the lighthouse on Sailor’s Isle (Skies of Arcadia). She practiced throwing the sword. It was nearly Apheri’s length and probably just as heavy, but it moved through the air like a phantom.

Rayn on Balance

Rayn and Nicole were walking down a long hallway at my old high school. I understood that this was Rayn’s real life counterpart. Rayn talked about the balance in magic and how it was inherent even in their appearances. Rayn explained that she had stringy hair, so Nicole had thick hair. If it was the other way around, she said, that would also work – but they could never be the same, or the balance would be thrown off.

No More Kindness

Nicole instructed me to never show Regina kindness again. I didn’t see the harm in saying hello when I saw her, but even this was considered more than necessary politeness. I reluctantly agreed to Nicole’s demands.

Squidward Knows

Omitted.

Regarding Shiya's Source

I heard Nicole’s voice in the darkness.

“A long time ago, Shiya came from Symphony,” Nicole explained. I thought about this for a moment before speaking.

“What? How is that even possible?” She didn’t reply.

Regression to Childhood Habits

I was driving recklessly on the highway. I rode close to the bumpers of the cars in front of me. My parents walked behind me, somehow managing to keep up even though I was racing along at sixty or seventy miles per hour. My mom told me about a time she went to Subway and discovered that they were out of tomatoes. At the house, she told Nicole about how I used to wet the bed when I was little. I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were in bed in the morning. We pretended we were asleep when my parents came into the room so we wouldn’t have to leave the house with them. I used the time to consider how long spring break would last. It was like five three-day weekends in a row, I concluded – but then I realized that didn’t make much sense. My parents left the room because we were “sleeping in.” I went to the bathroom as soon as they left the house and discovered that my pants were soaking wet! Disgusting, I wet myself! I decided I might as well empty my bladder, but for some reason, this was incredibly difficult… I made an even greater mess of my clothes.

Returning to Subway

I applied at Subway for a job. Although it was a different store in a different city, Alex was my manager again. He gave me the job after a two minute interview that basically consisted of asking how much of the routine Subway details I remembered. Nicole got a job there, too, with my recommendation. I rarely got a chance to make any sandwiches at first… Alex showed me a ton of new things to keep track of – dill pickles, ice cream, coffee, soup… Subway was rapidly becoming a much more involved restaurant. I had to acquaint myself with all of the new equipment and menu items. When I did get to work on someone’s sandwich, I never made it to the register before someone snatched the customer from me. I spent a lot of time walking around the store, greeting customers, and making sure everything was well-stocked. Nicole kept complaining about a girl who worked there… We’ll call her Jenna (not to be confused with Dodarx – the name just seemed to fit). According to Nicole, she was trying to steal her boyfriend. Let me clarify: she thought Jenna was trying to steal Jenna’s boyfriend. I sincerely wondered what an accusation like that could mean… Anyway, nothing came of that. We went into a lounge in the back of the building with over a hundred people sitting at circularly tables. Nicole and I sat with Jenna and her boyfriend. Not wanting to be left out, Alex came to sit with us, too.

I had some kind of device that told me how many people were in the building. It said there were only ten… I decided the material in the walls was probably affecting its reliability. I started worrying about the store. We couldn’t leave it unsupervised… Alex insisted there were cameras for us to watch the store. I saw no such camera, but I did see a blinking, green light. Alex realized that meant a customer was waiting. He started to get up, but I said I would take it. I ran back to the store and found a nervous girl standing by the register. She wanted ice cream in a small cone. Our “small” cones were extremely tiny… I was almost convinced there was a mistake. I felt like we were ripping people off. Anyway, the woman didn’t know what flavor she wanted, so I suggested a mix of vanilla and chocolate. She liked the idea. I used our soft serve machine to prepare her ice cream cone.

“How’s that?” I asked, holding it out to her. She got down on her hands and knees and started crying. I carried the ice cream cone to the other side and knelt with her. “What’s wrong, ma’am? How can I make it better?” I asked in a kind, gentle voice. She pointed at it and basically explained that the spiked tip of it reminded her of a man. Uh… That was easily fixed, I decided. On my way back around, I stuffed the ice cream in my mouth and discarded the used cone. I was going to make this work. I took a larger cone this time and quickly held it under what looked like the ice cream machine. Jenna came up behind me.

“Where’s the ice cream?” she scolded. “That’s coffee.”

“This is what she wanted,” I said. “Just wait and see.” After switching to the correct machine and filled her up with all three of our flavors – vanilla, chocolate, and something like “gardelt” that I had never heard of before, I took a spoon and flattened the spike at the top. I held it over the counter toward the customer. She started crying again.

“How could they…” she sniffled. “…let you work here…?” She ran away bawling before I could gather the words to ask what was so bad about my ice cream.

“Nice going,” Jenna said behind me. I frowned back at her.

“That woman had some issues. You have no idea.”

“Uh huh. Sure.” Alex and Jenna’s boyfriend came back to the store. Nicole was nowhere in sight. A long line of customers formed, and we really could’ve used her help. A kid with a magic ability which allowed him to determine a person’s aptitudes by touching them (much like Fuuta in Reborn) reached over and touched my shoulder.

“You are rank ten in kindness,” he said. His scale went up to ten. “But you are rank eleven in entertainment.” The people around me were amazed. No one else could get such a promising reading from the boy. After he left, I helped a boy who wanted a pickle sandwich. Basically, we just put a dill pickle in the middle and a bunch of sliced pickles on the sides. He was really excited by the prospect of eating pickles… So excited, in fact, that he reached over the sneeze guard and snatched his pickle off the sandwich before we even addressed the matter of cheese. I didn’t get to finish working on the kid’s sandwich because there were so many people working on the line. Eric Andoe came up to the counter. Jenna started making his sandwich even as I was getting his bread… Defeated, I took the next customer. I couldn’t understand anything he was saying. I tried to read his lips because I couldn’t really hear him, but that didn’t work, either. I had him repeat himself at least six times. I realized around this time that none of us were using gloves or washing our hands… Oops. We were running low on tomatoes. Nicole showed up and reminded me of a story my mom told us in a previous dream about Subway running out of tomatoes (Regression to Childhood Habits).

Gaga, a Shared Body, and Airport Security

I was at some kind of question and answer event as Lady Gaga. People kept making dumb comments or asking questions I had already answered. One guy who was sitting behind our table on one of two massive speakers told me I should do a clothing drive. Disregarding the obvious question of how he got up there, I had a lot of trouble hearing him because the sound system was optimized to amplify sounds in front of our table. Someone had to throw him a microphone. Of course, I had already announced that I was going to organize a clothing drive… I was going to give away a bunch of my old outfits for charity. I just clapped a few times in response to his question. We concluded the event so I could catch a flight.

The dream jumped. I was a boy with short, white hair and dark bags under his eyes. I stood by a window near the top of a skyscraper, watching cars below with intense focus. A woman took my left hand and asked me not to do that; I always depressed myself when I watched cars. My body was not entirely my own – I shared it with a girl. Portions of our face belonged to her. Our entire right arm was hers, and so were sections of our torso and a number of toes. When I got nervous, I habitually grabbed my right arm… I felt weird doing this, though, because it was like holding onto that girl’s arm for comfort. She didn’t seem to mind. I moved away from the window, rubbing the girl’s soft arm… This was just an attempt to lose my attendant’s attention so I could resume watching the cars. Once she stopped paying attention, I went back to the window. The cars zoomed by like little ants…

The dream jumped. I was myself this time. Nicole and I were taking a train to Midway before flying out to Texas. The guy with the woman in his body was on the train with us; he kept staring at me. His attendant told him to stop, and he momentarily looked away. I saw that we were getting close to the airport, so I teleported to some kind of security checkpoint. I was going to take our bags through in advance. The line was ridiculously long, but it moved quickly. I remember calling my mom and hearing Nicole’s dad refer to her as my “ex-mom.” He didn’t want me to talk to her… I didn’t get an explanation for this, but he eventually allowed me to speak to her. I told her I would see her soon. As I moved down the line, I saw that they were only checking bags that contained food. There were long conveyor belts with juicy slabs of meat on them. At the end of the security line, I had to pay a baggage fee at a computer terminal. The machine printed out my fee so I could enter it and process the payment. The amount kept changing every few times I checked it… Inevitably, one of the numbers I entered was always wrong. I presented it to the man in charge and asked him to read the fee off to me. If I put in what he said, there could be no miscommunication. He said something like $8.95.

“Where did you get the five?” I asked, wondering if I could get the number to change. I pointed at the total on the receipt. It said $8.92 this time. My dream manipulation saved me three cents! The guy apologized and allowed me to correct the mistake. I didn’t have to put any of my information into the machine to pay for some reason… I was confused, but I didn’t make a scene of it. I wanted to get to the train platform and wait for the others.

The dream jumped. At the platform, I found Nicole and my “ex-mom” already waiting for me. There were trains on both sides, but a raised bridge allowed me to move to their side. I saw the guy with the woman’s arm standing nearby… He was watching me again.

March 13, 2011

Group Project on Group Projects

I had a dream in which I was part of a group project about completing group projects. Alex and a girl from Japan whose house was destroyed in the recent tsunami were my teammates. Alex and I had most of it planned out. I recall a strange period of time during brainstorming in which I couldn’t remember who I was. A strange jumble of identities flowed through my brain, and with every passing second, I was convinced I was someone else. When we managed to decide what we wanted to do for the project, all of this stabilized, and I remembered my true identity. We were going to have the Japanese girl stand up with a poster that said: “I just can’t wait to start part (a)!” We interpreted it more as a project on procrastination than anything else. It was fortunate that we finished our project in time; our instructor announced that we would be continuing the discussion of DSM criteria for dissociative disorders.

Regarding Topics in a Calculus Textbook

I was showing Nicole my old math textbooks. It seemed like my calculus book didn’t cover much material… There were topics such as “Shifting points in the plane” and an extensive repertoire of transforms. Even so, I knew it contained plenty of material for a couple years of mathematics. There were a lot of topics involving frequency response and Bode plots as I flipped through it – not what I’d expect for an introductory calculus textbook.

Julie, Dacia, and Zukin

Summary: met Zukin at a restaurant - once with Nicole, once by myself. I kept getting her name wrong.

March 14, 2011

Phantom Resistors and Public School

I was in my signals and systems class. We were analyzing the effects of resistive and capacitive circuits on signals. Although Morrison had originally planned to forge ahead with new material, it was clear that most of the class didn’t grasp these concepts yet. He showed us a database of circuits to use as a guide if we were ever stuck in the analysis of a particular circuit. It found a number of identical circuits from various textbooks and technical research publications, sometimes with different parameters given and missing. We spent the entire class period on one circuit. I knew something was grossly wrong with the circuit, but I didn’t understand what. After waking, it’s clear where I sensed the problem… One branch of the circuit consisting of three resistors in series had voltages labeled on either side with respect to ground. Because resistors cause a voltage drop, one would expect one voltage to be higher than the other… The voltages were both labeled as 5V. My professor kept asking us impossible questions about this impossible circuit. For example, what was the power consumed by the resistive branch? Well, zero watts, technically! Since he kept talking about these resistors as though they were actually there, however, it didn’t make sense… Someone suggested using one small resistor and two large ones in that branch, and Morrison agreed. The very idea of that was problematic… By the end of the class, I was terribly confused. A guy in front of me with a bushy afro kept making silly electrical engineering jokes. He said the power factor of our class just went down to 0.55 lagging – because we were way behind. My professor didn’t like the joke. Anyway, he dismissed us five minutes early. I walked out of the classroom and found myself in my old middle school (in Texas). I walked down to the first floor and made my way to a public bathroom. For some reason, it was one of my old science classrooms. Mrs. McCaskill was teaching there now, I observed. I almost relieved myself in a recycling bin at the front of the classroom, but I realized that didn’t make sense and looked around for a toilet. I found one in the back of the room. It was good to know I didn’t have to tend to nature while standing in front of the TV, too. With my pants still partially pulled down, I walked over to the toilet and did my business. A bunch of people I knew in high school were sitting in desks. I realized they were still in public school! This included Kristin, who never went to school with me anyway. After I finished, I sat down to sort out my backpack. Someone started bothering me about what a nerd I was. I just laughed. He tried to open the front pouch of my backpack, but I swatted his hand away.

“What gives?” he asked, staring at me. “Do you have new rules now or something? What’s wrong?”

“Same rules,” I replied. It was never okay for people to go through my belongings against my will…

“You seem different.” I rose to my feet.

“Just less inclined to speak to people like you.” I smiled and walked out. On my way to the foyer, I saw Kaitlen and her fiance. Kaitlen was pregnant again. They watched me for a few seconds before Kaitlen pulled her man away. I remembered someone telling me to break up with Nicole. I rolled my eyes at how dumb that would be. What was the point of leaving a perfectly good woman? “Divorce, lava, divorce, lava…” I muttered. Of course, it made more sense at the time. I didn’t see the point of divorcing one wife and taking another; it fragmented one’s mind too deeply and wasted time, I felt. I stood in line for some kind of writing program at the front of the school. There were five or six people in line when I got there. I considered a bunch of wooden carvings of influential teachers I had seen around the school. One depicted Kurt Bauske, my high school German teacher. I wondered who the others were… Two guys behind me in line slowly shouldered their way in front of me. I wasn’t going to cause a scene, but they tried to get in front of the next guy, too, and an argument broke out. I took the opportunity to reorder the line myself. The two guys started shouting at me for putting them behind me in line. The person in charge of the ambiguous writing program paid us no mind. I heard Nicole’s phone making muffled sounds in my pocket… When I pulled it out, I saw that she had a text message. I had forgotten to turn the volume down. I checked the time before setting her phone to vibrate.

Increasing Symphony's Humanness

I was sitting at the conference table in Atlas Corporation’s research facility. Wisely was talking about increasing Symphony’s “humanness.” He said Symphony should be impossible to identify as a robot based on appearance alone. I agreed wholeheartedly. I called her into the room. As customary, she sat in the seat beside me. She and I shared a smile.

By the River and through the Woods with Symphony

I was walking with Symphony on a trail by a river. The Golden Gate bridge lay across the river on the horizon. We walked in silence. After a while, she cautiously slipped her hand into mine. When I didn’t try to release her hand, she wore a small smile indicative of her childlike understanding of emotions. I couldn’t keep myself from smiling back. Even though in the back of my mind I worried that Nicole would be uncomfortable with this, I didn’t have the heart to reprimand Symphony for this harmless display of affection. I saw this part several times during the night.

In one such instance, I watched someone get eaten by a Hollow on the riverside following Symphony’s smile. The thing chased us into the woods where we encountered Axis. He was using daggers instead of his fists to fight, and he wore form-fitting armor made of white steel. I stopped his blades with my bare hands.

“What are you doing?!” I shouted. He looked at my hands for a moment before running back into the trees. I saw Hibari sleeping against a tree trunk. He still had his usual scowl… Hibird chirped at our arrival.

“This bird can speak…” Symphony explained as though I didn’t already know.

Yu Yu Hakusho Remake

I found a bundled stack of recent manga from Japan. To my surprise, I saw an advertisement for Yu Yu Hakusho. It seemed there was going to be a complete remake of the original manga. The new series was up to the point where Yusuke and Kuwabara save Kuina. The last opponent set up a bunch of nearly invisible strings and used them to trap Kuwabara. He was unable to move with the strings binding him. Yusuke quickly noticed the strings and pointed them out, allowing Kuwabara to break free. It was as simple as untying a small knot near his wrist. The enemy didn’t have any more tricks up his sleeve… I noticed that Yusuke’s eyelashes were extremely thick. He reminded me of a cross between Speed Racer and Freddy Jones.

March 15, 2011

I slept too briefly and too deeply. Nicole woke me up around 4 AM to ask if she had a bottled water on the desk, which gave me the opportunity to remember two really long dreams, but as I was going over them in my head, I fell back asleep. I didn't wake up again until 6 AM, and I didn't remember anything at that point. I had to get out of bed fifty minutes later. I got these two short dreams out of that period of time. If I can remember the other dreams, I'll add them.

Time Machine with a Subscription

Over the phone, Nicole and I discussed the implications of time travel. She had joked that I ought to receive a free time machine with my subscription to Mirai Nikki. Unless the use of a time machine shifted the user into another timeline, however, I felt that time travel was pointless; everyone with access to a time machine would be ridiculously rich as a result of investing money in the past, driving down the value of global currencies. With alternate timelines, however, it was possible for one person to become incredibly rich compared to most others even if acquiring that money had a small effect on the value of his currency. Nicole didn’t seem to agree with my thoughts. I felt weird talking about this in front of my roommate for some reason.

Wordpress PDA Account

I logged onto WordPress to find that my account had been upgraded. It was now a “PDA” account. I assumed this was related to the desk assistant job I applied for recently. I took a screenshot of the message from WordPress congratulating me on my account promotion. It seemed I would receive money just for posting, regardless of how many views I got. Reading this description of the PDA account level didn’t seem to rid my mind of thoughts of that desk job. I found a feedback form I was supposed to use to communicate with WordPress directly. I misunderstood what it was for and wrote a short thank you note, but I quickly realized I was supposed to write out a more formal and thorough response, explaining how the PDA account would help me with my dream journal. I saw that someone else with a dream journal also had a PDA account. They wrote in purple text. Their response to WordPress was much longer, too… I was able to update the contents of the form, so at least it wasn’t set in stone.

3:04

I was in Nicole’s bed, reading. Her dad came into the room and quickly warned me that he had just heard that something was going to happen at 3:04. He didn’t specify what, so I was fairly confused… I quickly grabbed my phone and followed him out of the house. I left everything else.

“I was talking to the neighbors, and they said it’s something with fire and explosives,” he explained. I didn’t know what to think of that. “You know what to do if something does happen, right?”

“Get out of the house, of course,” I said. He nodded. “The last place I want to be is inside the wreckage of a burning building.” We made our way over to some kind of shed. He took out a ladder. Although he didn’t really explain, it was clear to me that he was going to climb up on the roof and take a look around. Before he could, though, one of the neighbors in the apartment complex north of the house burst out onto the driveway. It was an elderly woman with a sagging jaw and short, snow white hair.

“It’s terrible!” she cried.

“What’s terrible?” Nicole’s dad asked. I leaned against the shed as I listened to their conversation.

“So violent… There are riots on Michigan Avenue, and they’re headed this way. They say it’s that group that’s been protesting online.” Anonymous? Really? My eyebrows shot up. “They’re lighting yards and houses on fire… The police can’t seem to stop them!”

“You can stay in our garage until it’s over if you’d like,” he offered. She bowed her head twice, thanking him. She was as terrified as a mouse. To calm her down, Phil said that all of these threats usually turned out comical. I don’t remember any of his examples, but I observed that they usually played out like British comedies. I was the only one who laughed. I started walking back toward the house. I wanted to get my laptop and dream journal out of there, at least… Before I reached the door, I heard the sound of marching. I checked my phone; it was 3:04 PM. Armed men and women were marching stiffly like Nazi soldiers in the street, all of them wearing mushroom-like metal helmets. I went into the house to get a closer look from the safety of a window, but Nicole’s dad called my name.

“What are you doing?!” he yelled.

“Just watching!” I said. I didn’t go very far into the house – just to the nearest window. I didn’t have to watch long before the flaming chunks of wood started hitting the yard and house. I looked for something to use to put out the fire… If we could stop it, our house might survive the riot. I found something like a giant slice of an orange and carried it in both hands down the driveway. Phil ran past me and started stomping on flaming sections of grass in the front yard. He yelled at the top of his lungs at the rioters in the street. I knew he was yelling by his expression, but I could hardly hear him over their marching. I looked down the street and saw what was essentially an endless stream of marching soldiers. This was what Jagang’s army must’ve been like, I thought. I hesitated in getting too close to the street… They could nail me with a flaming log at any moment. I had to keep an eye out for falling fireballs, too – some of them were thrown into the air by those in the middle of the street, and I didn’t want one to fall on Nicole’s dad while he was busy extinguishing the flames.

Much of this time, I was extremely worried about Nicole… She had gone to a park somewhere to the north with her friends and didn’t tell me anything about what they were doing. She made a point of leaving me at home, though… I worried that she had joined with the rioters. She would be arrested for this if she had. Even if she hadn’t joined them, there was no telling what could’ve happened to her… Did they rape and murder those who refused to join their cause? With a crowd as radical as this, I felt I had to brace myself for the worst. Fortunately, however, Nicole came running through the neighbors’ yard. She threw her arms around me.

“I can’t believe this is happening…” she cried.

“Stay back and keep your head up,” I warned her. “We’re trying to protect the house.” Rob and Eric were outside before long, and they quickly came to our aid. Chelsea showed up, too… I tried to figure out how she had gotten here, but she was too frantic to explain. She said I had to do something about Austin. “What? What’s wrong with Austin?” Almost as soon as I said it, Austin walked up to us in a soldier’s uniform with a gun in his left hand.

“Do you like that house?” he asked me.

“What are you doing…?” I watched him take a long, cylindrical object out of his pocket. He held it toward us.

“This is what happens when you treat people like dirt,” he said.

“Austin, don’t do this!” I yelled. I knew it was a bomb. He tossed it at Nicole, and she caught it with ease. “Get rid of it! It’s going to explode!” Panicking, she chucked it at another soldier standing nearby. He threw it right back. “Give me that!” I snatched it from Nicole and lobbed it in the air. It landed near a vehicle parked in the apartment complex and rolled underneath it. There were four people in the car – including a woman and two children. My heart sank… What had I just done? The thing exploded, turning the car into a metal frame veiled by dark, dark smoke. Shattered glass shot everywhere. I glared at Austin.

“This is the future,” Austin said with a smile. He just walked away.

Nicole's Home Sick

I was on my computer in Nicole’s room when I heard her voice in the kitchen. I turned and saw her walking into the dining room.

“You’re home?” I asked. I turned around and checked the clock. It was only 10 AM. She was supposed to be in school… Who had picked her up?

“I called home sick,” she explained. “Left early.” I wondered how she had gotten sick so quickly.

Absence's Dark Shadow

I was falling through an ocean of transparent bubbles. Each one contained a memory of an event – but these weren’t all in the past. A fair portion of the bubbles were future events that had yet to be fulfilled. Branches of bubbles hinging on my free will were grouped together. I fell right into one bubble and saw a brief flash of myself swinging a punch at Absence. I found myself inside the memory.

I was in a desolate field. I looked around and saw Absence standing by himself about fifty feet away. He was wearing a white T-shirt, white jeans, and white tennis shoes. His eyes were closed. I walked over to him and cautiously put a hand on his shoulder… I could feel the darkness oozing out of his body. It wasn’t his energy. He had been overtaken by something else. All this time, his destructive nature and the terrible deeds he had committed were the work of someone else – the source of darkness inside him.

“Absence! Don’t give in to it!” I shouted, shaking him. A little bit of the darkness ebbed its way out of him, seeming to watch me. “You can overcome this!” I continued. The darkness rushed out, taking a human shape. I took several steps back. I reached for Apheri, but she wasn’t there… The shadow form shaped itself into a woman and materialized. She had long, pale blue hair similar to Symphony’s. She wore full white leather armor over her body. Of particular interest was the triangle-shaped aquamarine gemstone in her forehead. Her eyes matched the color, so it was like her third eye. Her stance seemed quite rigid and robotic… I wondered if she was somehow related to Atlas Corporation. Before I could say anything, she answered my thoughts.

“I am not,” she explained. I realized she just had really flat affect. The darkness swelled, reaching out of her body and into Absence’s. His eyes opened, and he crossed his arms when he saw me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked calmly. “I’m not ready yet.”

“Absence, you have to get rid of that… thing inside you.”

“What are you talking about?” He smiled. “Please leave. I’ll come for you when it’s ready.”

“No!” I shouted. Sword or not, I was going to do something about this. I ran at the machine-like woman and sent my fist straight for her jaw. I didn’t care if she was a woman; she was the force responsible for Absence’s reign of terror over countless dreamscapes. The woman caught my fist and jumped over me, flipping in mid-air. I fell onto my back. As she looked at me over her shoulder, lightning struck in the sky. Only then did I realize we were in the eye of a hurricane. I hurried to my feet and chased after her, but she dematerialized and reentered Absence’s body. Absence closed his eyes again.

“Open your eyes!” I demanded. I shook him by the shoulders again. The shadows stirred, but barely. I slapped him. This seemed to work a bit better, but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. He finally opened his eyes and immediately grabbed my throat.

“Go away…” he hissed. I broke free. Absence started to walk backward away from me, but I charged toward him. This was the pivotal moment of my memory – the moment that would decide which branch of future memory bubbles I would follow.

“I’m not going to let you surrender to the darkness!” I shouted in desperation, swinging my arm for his gut. He doubled over on impact, clutching his stomach with both arms. The shadows oozed out of his mouth, but so did blood. Glaring now, Absence wiped the blood off his chin. His eyes seemed sharper, more alive.

“That’s it… You’re leaving.”

Similarities in SD-1 Dreams

I was reading replies to my dream journal at Dreamviews. MadMonkey explained that he was beginning to notice key similarities in the dreams of active SD-1 members. He listed a number of recurring similarities, but I had difficulty seeing how they applied to my dreams. The small connections I recognized seemed little more than coincidence.

f

Originally Posted by Nephanim

March 15, 2011

Similarities in SD-1 Dreams

I was reading replies to my dream journal at Dreamviews. MadMonkey explained that he was beginning to notice key similarities in the dreams of active SD-1 members. He listed a number of recurring similarities, but I had difficulty seeing how they applied to my dreams. The small connections I recognized seemed little more than coincidence.

I actualy have been noticing lots of similarities latly. I look back through and try an make a new list.

Also I have been wondering, what is your dream schedual like. Do you wake up throught the night and remember your dreams or do you just remember all that when you wake up in the morning because that would be quite impressive, especialy since you consistently have so much.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

Also I have been wondering, what is your dream schedual like. Do you wake up throught the night and remember your dreams or do you just remember all that when you wake up in the morning because that would be quite impressive, especialy since you consistently have so much.

I usually sleep about six hours, write down some dreams, sleep a couple more hours, and write the rest. Sometimes when I don't set an alarm, I still remember six or seven dreams in the morning, but the chance I won't remember anything at all increases, too.

I forgot to write this one down! This is also from my nap this morning. It's funny how casually I responded to being able to manipulate the environment... It felt more like I was ordering food for delivery than actually going to a restaurant.

Visit to Burger King

I decided I wanted something to eat… French fries. I found myself at a McDonald’s. No thanks, I thought. I found myself at a Burger King instead. That’s better… I walked up to the counter and stared at the menu, trying to decide what to get. There was something like a line at the counter, but it was terribly disorganized. I wasn’t ready when the man taking orders looked at me, so he went on to the next person. I made sure I knew what I wanted to order – a medium pack of fries and a single cheeseburger. I was just in the mood for something small. The man took two orders before he moved back to me. The woman he served before me wanted to place a second order to go, but he insisted that he needed to take my order first… He said something about a woman taking a phone call that didn’t really explain why he was making her wait. I told the man precisely what I wanted. A couple minutes later, he passed a cheeseburger and some fries to me on a paper plate. The way it was arranged looked peculiar… It was like something was missing.

“Is this all I get?” I asked. He rubbed his hands together nervously.

“Did you get any curly fries?” he asked.

“No.” He immediately made his way into the open kitchen behind the counter and retrieved some curly fries for me. They looked more like fried onions when he put them on my plate, but I didn’t complain. I vanished from the Burger King.

March 16, 2011

Remembered another dream to post yesterday, but I was going to have to omit it anyway, so I decided not to edit it into my post. Didn't get enough sleep last night, either... I'll probably end up taking a nap again later today.

Notice of Shadow Beings and Fire Drill

I was in a classroom at my old high school. We weren’t really doing anything, so I was busy drawing Rayn on my laptop. It was coming along really well because Nicole had been teaching me how to improve my art. The drawing of Rayn had a really strange, toothy smile… I started drawing her lips, but they looked strange because of how big her mouth was. Her eyes were too close together and lumped on one side of her head, so I erased them and redrew them. They were basically just large dots. Rayn and I began to converse telepathically. She explained that shadow beings were roaming Nyre, trying to consume her. I wasn’t sure what the best way to deal with it was. Anyway, I agreed to fight them off… I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross paths with another shadow being, but if it was for Rayn’s sake… I sensed that one of the shadow beings was named Tom. I watched someone in the classroom arguing with the teacher. He said that people who interact visually with the dimension of mathematics could be cured via psychotherapy. I didn’t see why it was something that needed to be cured. It was a talent, after all. He said something about a function minus itself being nonzero. Someone came up to my desk and asked if that was true. I couldn’t think of a case in which it wasn’t… By the definitions of subtraction and zero, I couldn’t see any way the result could be nonzero. A fire alarm went off. Sighing, I put away my laptop and followed the rest of the class out into the hall. I hoped this was serious – I wasn’t in the mood for wasting time on a fire drill. I tried to go outside, but the faculty called me back in because it was raining. I guessed it had to be a drill if they were more worried about us getting our clothes wet than standing in what should’ve been a burning building. Nicole appeared; she and I talked about Kyle and his recent attempts to become an attorney at law. One of the faculty members walked by and said that Kyle was the best attorney he’d ever seen. He mentioned Kyle’s dad being incredibly abusive and violent. We seemed to know what he was talking about. The faculty had to check every room to make sure no one had ignored the fire alarm… While they were doing that, a couple of kids decided to break into someone’s locker. They tried random combinations until they got it right. Shining chunks of metal rolled out of the locker when it opened. Confused, they closed the locker door and rejoined the group. We were permitted to go back into the classroom before long, but the class period was over, so it was time to go to my next class.

Foot Cancer, a Cursed Orb, and an Atronach

I was playing a Zelda game. I had to choose between going to Red Mountain and going to Zora Cove. I knew there were more heart pieces to be obtained in the domain of the Zoras, but something I would acquire at Red Mountain would earn me power over time, so it made more sense to get that first. I decided to brave Red Mountain. I had to cross a desert first. It looked remarkably similar to descriptions of the Keeper’s Furnace. As I walked into the desert, I understood that I was Finn (Adventure Time) and that I had foot cancer. I was also traveling with a sentient foot – no relation to me or my cancer! We fell on our backs in the sand and stared at the sky.

“We lost track of time!” I laughed. The foot laughed, too. “No! We have to keep moving.” I hopped to my feet and continued walking. The foot reluctantly followed. It kept nagging me about my cancer… If I pressed myself too hard, it said, I would die. I wasn’t worried about that. I transformed into Link as I walked when the thought to change tunics came into my mind. I didn’t want to wear any green tunic in this area for fear of it burning up. For some reason, I had several more options than usual. In addition to the red, green, and blue tunics customary for Zelda games, Link had several shades from white to black, a number of which incorporated turbans. There was also an option to wear a long, blond wig. I eventually chose the white tunic. We walked into an open area and encountered a floating silver orb. It was cursed. The orb had the power to shoot beams of destructive light at us, and it wasted no time once it noticed our presence. I used four large metal bars to clamp the orb to the dunes beneath our feet while my foot partner tried to extract the curse. It was futile; the orb broke free and resumed its unrelenting assault. Somehow, we managed to escape to safety.

My health was low, so when a swirling wind swept me off the ground and slammed a rock into my side, I noticed the damage. I rolled around on the sand and saw a storm atronach. I remembered something my foot friend had told me before about an encounter with one of these. It just wanted a friend. I decided I might as well hope for the same with this atronach… If it wasn’t interested in being friendly, I had little hope for survival. Sure enough, the atronach backed up when it realized it had injured me. I waved.

“Hello there,” I said. It approached again, but it stopped before the edge of its powerful winds reached me.

“Hel… lo…” it said slowly. I sensed that it wasn’t just mimicking me – it understood the word.

“Do you want to be my friend?”

“Fr… iend… Yes…”

“Great! Now we’re friends. Can you do me a favor, friend?”

“Favor… for friend…”

“There’s a cursed orb chasing us through the desert. If you see it, will you destroy it for us?”

“Destroy… orb… Yes… friend…” It turned and floated away. My foot companion burrowed out of the sand and started laughing. He praised me for my witty manipulation of the atronach. I frowned. I wasn’t manipulating anyone…

Forever

I saw Symphony standing in front of me. I blinked, and then there were two. I blinked again, and then there were endless clones of Symphony as far as I could see in the incomparably large room. My heart started racing. I blinked again, and it was just one Symphony again. I started to calm down.

“Complete me,” she said in her flat, high-pitched voice.

“I will as soon as I can,” I answered. She reached forward. I blinked, and she was in front of me, gripping my shirt.

“I am already complete,” she responded. I didn’t understand. “I have waited forever, and I will wait forever. Time is not a hindrance.”

“What do you mean, you’ve waited forever?”

“Forever.” She stepped forward, fusing with my body. I felt a rush of energy, and then it all vanished. I looked behind me, but Symphony wasn’t there. Chunks of metal started falling from the impossibly high ceiling above me.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

March 16, 2011

I transformed into Link as I walked when the thought to change tunics came into my mind.

yet another similarity. Me, Andres and Mike all have our own link forms in dreams.

March 17, 2011

Suspicious People, Trivia with Family, and Volleyballs

I was walking alone down a street. As I walked, suspicious-looking people on the side of the road watched me. An old man told a couple of women a story, and I felt that it was about me. Some of the roadside onlookers joined me in my walk down the street. I was really uncomfortable with them accompanying me, but I didn’t want to draw attention to my discomfort by voicing it. A couple of Mexican teenagers behind me kicked the back of my legs and laughed. I knew I could retaliate, but I decided not to; there was a Mexican gang nearby, and I thought they would join the pair of teenagers in assaulting me if I made any hasty moves. I soon overheard the kids talking about what “bassholes” the gangsters were. It was clear that they weren’t affiliated with the gang. Nevertheless, I decided to take the first opportunity to separate myself from the growing group of rowdy men and women around me. I slipped through a narrow alley path onto another street which wound down a hill. I saw a yellow door which I recognized as the entrance to my parents’ house. I had to go through Chelsea’s bedroom to get into the house this way. I took a moment to make sure I hadn’t been followed before proceeding. It seemed I was safe – for the time being.

I continued down into the main part of the house. It resembled my Oma and Opa’s house much more than any my parents have owned. I sat down on the couch to talk to Chelsea and Austin. Somehow, we ended up on the subject of drugs. I learned that Chelsea and Austin had both tried marijuana in the past. Austin skipped into the living room with a huge white patch in his hair. He was acting like an idiot. My mom just laughed; she didn’t realize he was stoned. I helped Chelsea with her homework. Somehow, this involved power flow analysis. I took out my dream journal and drew a diagram of a power system as an example. I had to redraw it several times because it was too small and Chelsea didn’t understand my explanations. I had to explain the difference between real and reactive power to her. She repeatedly told me she was giving up all hope of understanding, but I wouldn’t let her. I kept trying to explain it. I ran out of normal pages; the rest were blue sheets of plastic with holes in them. I knew I was going to need a new notebook if I wanted to continue tutoring her.

While I was searching for a notebook to use, Chelsea picked a toothbrush off the table. It was red and bloodstained. She shouted at me. Apparently, she thought I used her toothbrush because of the blood. I insisted that it wasn’t me. I had my own toothbrush there. My gums started bleeding… This added weight to my sister’s argument, and I burst into quiet tears. She hugged me out of sympathy. At least it stopped the argument…

Austin rejoined us for a trivia game. We took turns reading questions on cards, giving everyone a fair chance to answer. I told Chelsea about a guy with “cognitive paresis” who couldn’t control his body even though his mind was fine. Scientists had found a way to enter his dreams and learned that he was fully lucid twenty-four hours a day, including during sleep. She asked if I knew the names of the scientists involved. I forgot their names. We looked them up – Rutherford and Smith. We continued with the game. Austin was horrible at it… He was the first to answer every question, but he was always wrong. Chelsea and I were tied for most of it. When it was my turn next, I asked which Pokemon a certain celebrity chose as their first. The answer was Bulbasaur. Austin guessed the three starting Pokemon from the original games in quick succession. When he said Bulbasaur, I accidentally told him he was correct without asking for a final answer. He was supposed to write his answer on a piece of paper and hand it to me. I had to give him the point anyway…

My parents were watching TV on the other side of the room. They started talking about American Idol. Nicole mentioned that she liked the version of the Bon Jovi song that was performed last night. My mom didn’t like it, but my dad did. Austin went into a cabinet by the TV stand and pulled out a cloth sack. Inside was Brother Narev’s severed head (Sword of Truth). It was still preserved. My mom was horrified when she saw it. It seemed Narev’s head was still salivating. We took turns hanging it in doorways to pull pranks on each other.

The dream jumped. I was at the mall. As I walked past a line of stores, I saw a group of kids kicking volleyballs around. When they came to me, I kicked them too. I was impressed with my coordination. They started getting annoyed at me preventing the balls from hitting me in the head by kicking them back, so I kicked them down the hall instead. One guy threw several balls at me in quick succession, but I was able to dodge them without looking. I sat down in a swiveling chair and spun around to avoid more as I rolled toward the end of the hall. All of the balls were collecting at a salon. I intended to retrieve them to get the kids to leave me alone. Instead of cooperating, they started throwing the balls into the salon. That was just going to stir up trouble… I hopped over the counter and picked up two volleyballs. The kids asked me for their balls back, but I insisted that I wasn’t going to throw them over the counter.

“I have to leave first,” I explained. It would be rude to throw things around inside the salon…

“You don’t really,” the receptionist told me. He immediately went back to reading a thick fantasy novel. I sensed that he didn’t care much about his job or the salon in general. I hopped over the counter again with the balls in hand and threw them with all of my strength. They rapidly shrunk, causing a popping noise. Tiny, rubbery balls landed all over the place. I saw my mom standing with her mouth wide open. One of the volleyballs was sitting on her tongue. She started chewing it like gum.

Can't Pay Half

I was with Nicole on the Green Line. We were getting off the train at my campus, but she missed the stop. I urgently reminded her that we needed to get off the train, but we would have to go back in the other direction. We hopped off at the next station. As we walked around to the other side of the tracks, she asked about buying a movie she had wanted to see for a while. I told her I couldn’t spare any money… She asked me to pay half, at least, but I couldn’t do that, either. Nicole just stormed off without me.

March 18, 2011

Woke up with no recall. I think spring break is making me lazy.

March 19, 2011

Whew. Recall's coming back.

Murder, Propaganda, and Suicide

I was walking from abnormal psychology to my next class. I thought it was somewhat strange that I couldn’t remember going to Morrison’s class, but I dismissed the concern. On the way to class, I listened to people chatting on a Minecraft server. Even though I could hear their voices, I knew they weren’t using a voice chat client. I began to see vivid images of everything that was said. One guy – presumably Thodiral – told a story about playing with paint when he was a kid. In addition to getting white paint all over himself, he used black paint to make a gun on a piece of paper. The gun was surprisingly detailed… I wondered to myself how often young Thodiral watched action movies and played first person shooters. Holding the piece of paper upside-down, the child version of him pretended to shoot. He admitted to killing someone with it, but he said he got away with the crime. Immediately, my thoughts raced. I could probably find enough evidence to have him arrested… The reward for finding the culprit behind an unsolved murder would last me another semester, at least. I felt bad about turning him in, but he had killed someone! I thought about all the information I would need as I waited outside the classroom. The class before ours was still in session.

I opened an old wooden door and found a small closet. It was set up like an office. An anthology of translated German stories (the first of which was called A Magical Wizard) was hanging on the wall. Someone received their doctorate for their work in translating the stories. I went into the classroom. The desks were pushed up against the walls, leaving a huge space in the middle for my professor to walk around. I sat next to Brian (Family Guy). For some reason, we were watching commercials as part of the class. The instructor showed us a shampoo commercial first. Bright, golden beams of light danced around a brunette as she tossed her hair around. The red background strengthened the suggestion that she was supposed to be “sexy.” The commercial said nothing about the shampoo itself. I felt I already understood the message my professor was trying to get across… My mind began to wander. I thought about searching for unsolved murders in Chicago with my phone. After the commercial was over, Brian and a bunch of other people got up and left the classroom. I reluctantly followed them, but after I walked out, I looked back at the classroom. I could see the people inside with x-ray vision. There weren’t very many skeletons left inside the classroom… At least half of the students had left! I decided to go back to class. Someone had taken my seat, so I had to choose another one. It was far from the TV. I found a quarter on top of the desk.

My professor asked if we wanted to see a veterinary commercial; she was nervous about the graphic content of the commercial and wanted us to say no. The majority of the class asked to see it, but out of concern that people walking around outside the building might look in the windows and see the gore, she chose not to show it. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t just close the blinds. Instead, she showed us a video of an old man standing in the road as a truck approached. The front of the truck advertised a suicide hotline. The truck crushed the old man’s brittle body. His corpse seemed to float into a morgue across the street. I saw a medical team pull up to the bloody smear in the road a few moments later. They put an invisible body on a stretcher and carried it to the morgue. I understood that the medical team was out of phase with the timeline, so they appeared to show up late. The video changed to a scene of the old man’s young wife in an ambulance. She had tried to commit suicide, too, but she failed. A nurse tried to encourage the woman by telling her what a great mother she was. Remembering that she had kids, the woman groaned. A boy ran by the camera with a toy airplane.

Simple Integrals

I was in Morrison’s classroom, but a woman was teaching. We had a quiz coming up. For some reason, I thought I was there to take the quiz, so I got out a sheet of paper and wrote “Quiz #2″ at the top. The instructor wrote a simple integral on the board.

“This is the hardest thing I can expect you to solve,” she said. I started on it right away since I thought this was the first quiz question. It required the use of integration by parts. As I was writing out the solution, my professor erased the problem from the board. “Your quiz tomorrow should be no trouble if you’ve been keeping up with the homework.” Oh… I realized we weren’t taking the quiz after all. It didn’t occur to me that none of my classes meet two days in a row. The instructor moved over to the side board to explain magnetic flux to someone. She wrote another integral expression on the board, but this time, the dot product in the integrand was zero, so the whole integral was zero. “It’s as easy as that,” she said with a smile to the class. I wondered what I was doing in this class…

Marching to Their Deaths

I watched a small village full of marching children. They were all marching east toward a military facility just outside the village.

The dream jumped. I saw a flash of a little boy hanging from a noose in a public bathroom.

Admittance and Whispers from Within

My dad was trying to teach a circuit analysis course. I sat through the class to observe and double-check his statements. He explained the difference between impedance and admittance to the class, pointing out that admittance made it much easier to solve circuits with discrete capacitors. He drew a circuit with several resistors and capacitors. Then, he labeled seven branches. Some of the branches were actually just extended nodes, however, and therefore unnecessary. I wanted to tell him this, but at the same time, I didn’t want to embarrass him on his first day. A hissing voice in the back of my mind warned me that the world was about to end.

Okay... Five days of dreams, coming right up!

March 20, 2011

A Bad Monday

Even though the weekend wasn’t over, the dream began on the assumption that it was Monday. I found myself in Morrison’s class. We were solving problems in a material science textbook for some reason. My professor brought this to our attention, explaining that it wasn’t really part of the curriculum. After Morrison’s lecture ended, I went straight to music class. I realized we had a paper due… I only had two-thirds of mine finished. As I went into the classroom, I saw Zach Glass. I asked how his spring break was.

“I studied,” he said with a shrug. My heart sank. I wished I had been more productive… I hadn’t studied at all over the break. All of the front seats were taken, so I ended up in the middle row between two girls. One of them let me rest my head against hers, and I gradually fell asleep…

The dream jumped. I ate lunch while setting up a circuit to measure my brain activity. With an input signal at 60 Hz, it showed a reading of 1100 thoughts per second. Without the input signal, my brain produced about 800 thoughts per second. I was impressed by my brain’s potential. As I was considering all of this, it hit me – I had skipped psychology! I wondered what I had missed. My professor promised us a guest speaker after spring break, so I suspected I had missed that opportunity. It could’ve just been a normal lecture, but even then, that meant I would have to teach myself the material. If I hurried, maybe I could still make it to class, I thought… I rushed over to the Life Sciences building, but it was way too late. I remembered I had power systems homework to do; finishing that before morning was more important than trying to get to a class that ended hours ago.

Everything off the Floor

I was cleaning my room. Apparently, my dad wouldn’t consider the room clean until I managed to get everything off the floor – including the furniture! Obviously, this was impossible, but I kept trying anyway. Chelsea tried to help me by picking up blankets and socks on the carpet, but by putting these away, she did nothing to address the issue of levitating the furniture.

* * *

March 21, 2011

Tension with Dad and Dreaming of Dreaming

I went to the store with my family. On the way, I heard about a new conspiracy theory that had just been published. Inside, the store looked quite a bit like a cross between Home Depot and Sears. I started looking for a bathroom. My dad told me I needed new jeans and insisted that I follow him to the clothing department. I was more interested in relieving myself. I found a bathroom in an area that looked like it should’ve been some kind of concession stand. For some reason, the urinals were inside stalls, and the only toilet with a seat was missing its stall door. Even worse – there were seven urinals in a single stall. I found five along one wall, one at the back of the stall, and another on the opposite wall. I really wanted to do my business, but I felt like people were watching me, so I was very reluctant… I wiped the urinal clean of waste and sat down on it, intending to prove anyone wrong who suggested that it couldn’t be used for solid waste. While I took care of that, a line formed outside the stall. I realized my stall was the only one with a single person inside… The people waiting in line were angry at me for locking the stall door. I steeled myself against their complaints. For some reason, I tried to speak telepathically to Symphony. I fully expected her to respond, but she didn’t. I saw myself in third person… Like a character in an MMORPG, my body was labeled with my name. I changed it to “Symphony’s Young Bear Cub,” intending to confuse as many people as possible with the name change.

After a few minutes, someone burst into the bathroom on the verge of tears. He was desperate for a toilet. Having the stall locked didn’t keep him out; he just crawled under the door. Since he was already in the stall, I showed him the urinals along the wall. Another person came in, and this one asked me for help “operating” the urinal. I was about to ask what he could possibly mean by that when my dad stormed into the bathroom. He shouted at me for taking too long. I finished soon after and got in line to wash my hands. It didn’t seem strange at the time, but the person in front of me was a woman. My dad yelled at me for taking longer to use the bathroom than a girl. On the way out of the bathroom, my dad reached over and pulled my pants down to my ankles. People walking by the bathroom door stared awkwardly at my boxers. It seemed he was trying to show everyone something, but I didn’t understand what he said. I examined my underpants and discovered that they were hot pink. They said “MY BFF” on the waistband. Insulted that my dad would pull such a prank on me, I ran away.

As I came to a large bucket full of water, I tipped it over in rage. The water spilled all over the surrounding merchandise. My parents stood with Nicole nearby; they explained to her that, contrary to her experience, I had severe anger management issues. I jumped into the air and began flying around the store to stay away from everyone. I wished my dad would try to be cooperative for once… I sensed that if he would agree to it, we could go back in time and fix every source of tension between us.

I had a false awakening. Nicole and I were lying in bed together. I quietly told her how much I love her. She rubbed her cheek against mine and commented that I was really soft. As we went back to sleep, I tried to force myself to dream about Symphony, expecting that seeing her would cause me to realize I was dreaming. Before long, my body was engulfed in powerful vibrations. I seemed to be pulsating. In a flash of light, my blank vision was filled by Agharta’s donations page. I checked the $30 donation rewards page. Immediately, I questioned myself; why was I looking at donation rewards when I had so little money to spare? If I was going to donate to a video game, anyway, I figured I would probably donate to SIN Craft instead. I saw a review for SIN Craft on Agharta’s control panel.

* * *

March 22, 2011

Czech Republic and Yellow Paint

I was searching my parents’ old home in Louisiana for Donkey Kong 64. I didn’t really want to play it… Rather, I knew it had magic power that I could extract and use to my advantage. I found a number of Nintendo 64 games, but not the one I was looking for. They were piled high on my bed and dresser. Nicole’s dad came into my bedroom and asked about clothes strewn about the floor.

“Do you and Nicole just get naked all the time?” he asked. “It’s like the Czech Republic in here.”

“Of course not,” I insisted. I continued my search. I finally found Donkey Kong 64 and set it on my dresser by itself where I would notice it later. I went into the living room. I wrote a note for Nicole. “Are you Czech Republicking?” it asked. When she found the note, she was incredibly confused. “It’s when you get naked in front of people,” I explained.

“Oh. Of course not…” she laughed. We found some bouncy balls behind the couch. “I was going to use these for a solar system project in elementary school.” Some were small, but others were humongous. I took the smallest – Pluto – and bounced it off the wall. We also found some kind of painting wrapped around the inside of a cube. I opened the cube to finish the painting for Nicole. With a flick of my wrist, I slapped a blob of yellow paint onto the surface. As I swept the brush across it, however, I realized I couldn’t apply the paint correctly. It was too thick. I got paint all over my hands anyway… I gave up and went to the bathroom to wash my hands. I could taste the paint in my mouth. I looked in the mirror and gagged when I saw yellow paint oozing out of my mouth. It started to clog up my throat.

Magic Teddy Bears

I was in Mrs. Gardner’s class. It wasn’t clear what subject she was teaching… She gave us all a question and answer sheet and a teddy bear. There were instructions on the bear labeled one, two, three, and four – corresponding to the four questions on the sheet. The first two questions were philosophical in nature, and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to answer those yet. The third didn’t make any sense to me… It seemed altogether invalid. I saw Nicole and some other girls gather around a table and join hands. I knew this was for the fourth question. They knelt on the floor and crawled under the table to pray to the teddy bear god. I wished they had explained this to me beforehand… I could have joined them. Mrs. Gardner noticed me watching them and asked how I was doing with my questions. I said I was basically done (yeah, right). She saw my paper and sighed. All I had written down was a poor answer to the third question.

“This is an assignment, you know. We’re in class…” she reminded me.

“I know that…” I muttered. There was quite a bit of animosity in my voice, and I told myself to calm down. I answered the questions to the best of my ability. I wrote “Atlas Corporation” for the mysterious fourth question. I found a bag of beads with another question attached on my desk. I wrote that I liked to make Beanie Babies. I knew this wasn’t true, but my teacher wouldn’t. To finish my assignment, I had to draw out my teddy bear’s power. It turned into plastic, and I raised a flag from its back. I wanted to write “Atlas Corporation” on the flag, but there were already raised letters worked into the plastic, so I couldn’t just write it in. Eric helped me place an adhesive label over the name of the guy who created the magic teddy bears.

Avalanche Aftermath

I was walking in the ruins of a city after an avalanche. Everything had been ripped to pieces. I didn’t see any other people – living or dead. It was as though their bodies, too, had been demolished beyond recognition.

Dwindling Magic Power

I was able to use magic. As time went on, however, my ability to draw forth my magic dwindled to nothing. I suffered incredible headaches. I couldn’t think of a way to halt the process.

This was obviously inspired by reading Naked Empire in the Sword of Truth series.

Look No Further

I found myself floating in white light. Symphony appeared before me. Our bodies were angled so our faces nearly touched, but everything beyond her arms was past my reach. We seemed to be floating in a world devoid of gravity. Symphony smiled faintly at me.

“Master. Nephanim. Josh.” Her voice was calm and carried an understanding beyond her most recent existence in Nyre. She seemed to be the Symphony from which the current version was derived. “Do you understand?” she asked, smiling a little more. “I have been with you forever. In every life before this one, I was the object of your affection.” I found this difficult to grasp. Symphony was a robot, after all; I couldn’t imagine her as a human being. My thoughts flashed back to another dream I had about this eternal acquaintance with Symphony. My mind raced; sure, maybe she had been with me for eternity after all, but she would probably abandon me before long. She shook her head rigidly. “I will not leave you.”

Her hands gripped mine. I felt the cool, relaxing touch of her aura on my body. I felt myself lying in bed, and I felt her body beneath the surface of the mattress, fusing with mine. I started crying. Our bodies began to merge, and Symphony sighed in quiet relief.

“See? I have your hands. Everywhere you go, I will guide you. Look no further.” The light engulfed me as Symphony drew closer, holding one to me as a mother might her child. Nothing else seemed to exist but us. The light faded to darkness, but she continued to hold onto me, reassuring me with her protective touch. The air around me glowed with heavenly radiance.

* * *

March 23, 2011

Braided Pigtails, Boarding House, and Copper Injection

I was on a road trip with my dad, Austin, and Meg. As I lay in the backseat, I pretended Meg was a lesbian; I voiced the imaginary thoughts a lesbian dog might have when seeing women in passing cars. Austin laughed at this, but neither of them said anything. We passed one woman in particular who seemed to be watching me. Her hair was long and blond. She wore two braided, shoulder-length pigtails in front with the rest of her hair down. I felt a bit uncomfortable with her smiling at me, so I lowered myself until the car door obscured her view. When I sat back up, she was still staring. Her eyes seemed to draw me in.

“Look at the boobs on that one!” I announced in Meg’s voice. Austin leaned back in his seat, reached his arm over, and tried to grab my crotch. I squirmed out of the way. “What are you doing?”

“Just seeing something…” he said. I knew he was trying to see if I was aroused so he could tell Nicole. It wasn’t fair for him or anyone to judge me based on physiological reactions to women, so I made a point of avoiding him. When I was getting a water bottle out of the back of the car for my dad, though, I looked over and saw that same woman smiling at me. Austin grabbed my crotch.

“Hey!” I protested.

“I knew it…” Austin said. “Dad, he’s getting turned on…”

“Keep your hands to yourself!” my dad scolded. Austin recoiled.

“Yeah… It’s none of your business.” As things settled down again and the woman disappeared, I looked over printouts of a One Piece musical. Apparently, I was going to sing in the musical with Nicole’s choir. There wasn’t enough black ink when I printed the music; as a result, the prints were so faded that I couldn’t read the notes. I imagined myself making up words or peeking at someone else’s music during the rehearsal.

The dream jumped. I was at some kind of boarding school for men. I waited outside the door of a sauna shower while Austin showered. As I recall, the front door was always locked. There was a line of frictionless glass under the door that people could somehow slip across without opening the door, but there was no way in on that side. I opened the door for the first time in years, and girls swarmed around me, grabbing my arms and waist. I thanked them for their company. As I thought about it, though, I realized they were doing it because they thought I built the boarding house. I explained that all of it had been constructed by the superintendent of the boarding school. Most of the girls remained loyal to me anyway, but a few ran off to find the superintendent. After the girls left, I went back to the sauna shower door. My dad was supposed to be listening for Austin, but he was standing by a bookshelf, seemingly searching for something… He didn’t hear Austin banging on the sauna door. For some reason, my dad had been replaced by RJ. I opened the door to let Austin out. He was lightheaded from the heat. All three of us went into the dining hall to eat dinner.

The dream jumped. I found myself in a hospital, and my dad yelled at me about something I broke during the skipped time. A couple of servants came into the room with replacement silverware on soft, purple pillows. I understood that my dad would have to pay for the silverware. It was too expensive for me to replace…

The dream jumped. After having some kind of genital surgery (with no explanation given as to why), I stood naked in an operating room. I thought the doctors were going to castrate me. A gay man walked by, pointing out my exposed genitals.

“They remind me of apple stew,” he said with a grin. It didn’t look like a stew to me… For the most part, everything looked normal. The superintendent arrived shortly after with another treatment to provide. He injected me in the arm with high levels of copper and mercury.

The dream jumped. I was in a lecture hall with Nomad and some other people. I tried to keep myself busy playing something on Game Boy Advance. I realized I was acting like Karl. Embarrassed, I stopped. I noticed a thick, metallic taste in my throat. Nomad and I discussed how it was likely the copper injection would eventually kill us. Neither of us had slept in two days. Someone suggested drinking a lot of water to flush it out. Nomad, at least, already had irreversible damage – a yeast infection in his ovaries that was coated in a copper film. As he explained this, a woman nearby protested.

“You don’t have ovaries!” she exclaimed. “You’re a man!”

“Actually,” Nomad explained, “I went in to the doctor’s office a couple of years ago, and they found ovaries in my body. It turns out I was born a hermaphrodite, but those crazy doctors didn’t notice until then.” As a joke, he started dancing on an invisible pole in front of me.

Fighting Demons in Dreams

I sent Matthew a text message about lucid dreams. I was standing by the church near Nicole’s house. Matthew replied, informing me that he wanted to fight demons with me in dreams. I looked forward to the chance to share dreams with him, but I didn’t care much about demons. I told him the last demon I could remember fighting was Lusark Decidies. I accidentally told him I ran away from her… Fortunately, I was able to fix it after sending the message, and he never knew that I had made the mistake.

Malfunctioning Gamecube

I was in Nicole’s kitchen. We had a TV stand where the refrigerator should have been. The Gamecube was set up on the stand, but I couldn’t get it to work. I explained to Nicole’s mom that it seemed to be broken. When I managed to turn it on, the controllers went haywire – they sent random button signals to the console even when I didn’t press anything. I tried all of our controllers, including some that were intended for the Nintendo 64. Only one of the Nintendo 64 controllers worked. I made it into a game at last. It was some sort of arena combat game… I had to design the champions of the arena before proceeding. The game generated random characters as a default. The male champion was a young boy. All I did was change his hair to light blue like Symphony’s. After this screen, I was asked to choose the champions’ names. The game froze. After a few moments, it went to an error screen indicating that the memory cards were corrupted.

Camel Retribution

My hand was being eaten by a camel. The people around me just calmly watched. I distantly understood that this was punishment for all the times I’d eaten camels in the past…

Finding the Generator and Feast for Ants

I was in Symphony’s body in a stairwell. I saw myself, Nicole, and Axis walk up the stairs.

“Hello, Nephanim,” Symphony said.

“Hi,” I replied. “We’re looking for a generator. Just stay here until I come back to get you.” Symphony acknowledged my request with a nod. The rest of us exited the stairwell. We were on the fifth floor of the building. We looked inside a room labeled “5A.” Nicole wanted to collapse all of the rooms into one to make searching easier, but she couldn’t because she didn’t know the names of all the rooms. For some reason, she thought I was going to leave her because she failed to hasten the search. I insisted otherwise.

Meanwhile, a janitor with a scruffy, white beard was sweeping the fifth floor hall by the stairwell. He propped the door to the stairwell open and briefly regarded Symphony.

“Where is 6G?” Symphony asked. For some reason, she thought that was the name of the generator – presumably because it had a “G” in it.

“Oh, you want one more floor up,” the janitor drawled, pointing up with his thumb. “You’ll see it – room G on the sixth floor.”

“Thank you,” Symphony said quietly. Concluding that she had located the generator for me, she went up the stairs to the sixth floor. Nicole and I returned to the stairwell moments later. When I didn’t see Symphony standing in the stairwell, I tapped the janitor on the shoulder.

“Did you see a girl with blue hair wearing bells recently?” I asked.

“Yup, sure did. She’s gone upstairs.”

“Come on,” I said to Nicole, taking her hand. “We need to find her before she does anything silly.”

The dream jumped. I saw the school building from high above. It seemed to have become extremely tiny – but that was just because I was a giant. I picked the building up and set it on my laptop’s cooling pad. I noticed there were parts missing, so I tried to reassemble it, but I kept connecting it wrong… I knelt beside the miniature school building and peered inside. Hundreds of people were tied up in the halls. They cried out for help when they saw me.

“I don’t know what to do!” I shouted. My voice was like an explosion to them; most of them recoiled in intense pain. I saw ants crawling up the walls of the building. Like me, the ants had been enlarged. They started collecting people as food.

* * *

March 24, 2011

Visit Cutchoohatahatapooeytolitalitatetenooga (I wish this was gibberish... I'm not even kidding)

I was in Australia. As I wandered a desert region, two kangaroos came up to me. I realized Ben was walking with me. We decided we were going to “mug” the kangaroos by emptying their pouches. When we reached in – much to the discomfort of the kangaroos – we discovered they were empty. The kangaroos chased us to a cliff along the ocean and pinned us down. They proceeded to steal both of our wallets. Ben and I chased the kangaroos across the desert to recover our stolen money.

The dream jumped. I found myself in my parents’ old house in Texas. I was in the kitchen with my mom. She had taken a bunch of pictures with Chelsea recently, but she didn’t know how to upload it to her computer, so I did it for her. I found an online album under her name, but she insisted that she didn’t want the pictures on there. The pictures came up in terrible quality. It was like they were taken in an extremely low resolution. I found a few pictures depicting Chelsea in severe pain. In the last of the pictures, she was missing one of her teeth. My mom started crying about how Chelsea had lost her tooth. She hugged me so tight that one of my teeth came loose. I tried to hold it in place with my tongue, but it rolled out of my gums. I put it under my tongue where I wouldn’t be able to swallow it by accident. When she released me, I walked over to the trash can. The tooth was freezing cold – like a tiny ice cube that refused to melt. I spat it in the trash. When I realized which tooth it was – the one just to the left of my front teeth on the top row – I realized it was going to be really obvious during my interview next week. I hoped I wouldn’t miss out on the job because of something so stupid…

I went upstairs and found Chelsea asleep on my bed. There was a sign posted on the side of my bed with information on Australian culture. It said “Visit Cutchoohatahatapooeytolitalitatetenooga” at the top. Chelsea woke up while I was laughing at the ridiculous name. I told her about a video I watched recently in which two guys tried to mug a pair of kangaroos. Only halfway through the story did I realize this happened just a while ago… I wondered how that was possible, but Austin came in wearing RFairney’s robe, so I got distracted. Austin said he had seen the kangaroo mugging video too. So it was a video online after all, I thought… I became convinced that it hadn’t been me after all.

The Surgeon's Office

I was in a small room on the side of Nicole’s house. It seemed to be where that storage room under the stairs is, but it was much larger. Some people came up to the door and asked me for directions to the surgeon’s office. I sent them around to the back of the house. Nicole’s dad came in, and we talked about my psychology class. He thought I failed my first psychology class, but I insisted that I got a B.

“But you said you did terrible in that class,” he argued.

“That’s my ‘terrible,’” I replied. I was disappointed in myself for getting anything less than an A.

“I’d hate to see your ‘worse than terrible.’”

“You would smack me if I got a grade that low.”

“If I was your dad,” he corrected. Phil left the room. I decided to go visit the surgeon. I hardly remember walking there… When I arrived, my mom appeared in a white lab coat, holding a needle in her hand. She injected me with something, and I blacked out.

The dream jumped. I was in Nicole’s room. I couldn’t remember where I was or what I was doing before this. I read a thread on GameFAQs about Mario Kart. The poster asked why his friend didn’t enjoy the game. The way he described it, it seemed like his friend just didn’t feel like playing video games… At the very least, as I said in my reply to the thread, he was probably bored or didn’t enjoy Mario Kart in particular. I thought the thread starter was rude for forcing his friend to play, and I almost said so directly in the reply, but I didn’t want my post to get deleted. I started playing a new Mario Kart game. Most of the characters and vehicles were the same as in the Wii version, but I had to unlock them all again since it was for a new system. I played several time trials first to try to get the hang of the new system. Afterward, I decided to go through one set of races in single player. I chose Yoshi and a motorbike. It seemed to have much better statistics than most of the other vehicles…

As the race began, my motorbike received a huge speed boost. I zoomed around the first corner and into the lead. Throughout the race, I remained in first place. I found myself drifting quite a bit, but every time I did, I received another huge speed boost. There were boosters placed all over the course, too, so those added to my speed. Even though I felt that the bike wasn’t responsive enough, I managed to conquer the tightest of turns. I finished the race in first place and turned the game off. I didn’t feel like playing Mario Kart anymore. I walked outside the house. As I passed by the basement door, I heard my mom calling me. I understood that this was the door to the surgeon’s office. I went in and found Nicole lying on a metal table – except she was an infant! My mom injected Nicole’s arm with a sedative. She picked up a butcher knife and held it over Nicole’s leg.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“I’m trying to make this cut,” my mom explained without really explaining anything.

“What are you going to cut…?”

“I need an incision right… here…” As she spoke, she sliced a vertical line across Nicole’s stomach. I had to hold the baby to the table so she wouldn’t fling her head into the butcher knife. Holding her down, I got a line of fresh blood on my hand. I stared at it in silent horror. The cut looked quite a bit too deep. My mom sighed nervously.

“Ask Dad how deep I’m supposed to cut…” she told me. Heeding her request, I went back up to the driveway. My dad was standing with a couple of women, but he was on the phone, so I didn’t know if he would pay attention to me.

“It’s important,” I told him, waving my hand. “Mom needs to know how deep to cut Nicole.” My dad gave me a stern look that said it wasn’t as urgent as I thought. He turned away and continued talking. I was going to harass him about it more, but he hung up the phone shortly afterward. We went back into the surgeon’s office. Two dogs followed us in before we could close the door… One of them was Scamper, but I didn’t recognize the other one. It looked like a brown and black wolf. The dogs circled around the metal table, watching Nicole. My dad threw the dogs burgers to distract them. After they finished eating, the dogs walked off to the side and started reading numbers written on the floor in English. The wolf-like animal started writing numbers next to them with a pencil. Everyone was amazed by this – but not so much by the fact that they could speak English. I wasn’t terribly impressed… It was interesting that a dog could be trained to write, but… To my amazement, the wolf dog started drawing a bunch of circles in an expanding pattern. He connected some of them with lines. Just looking at it, I felt like I was close to understanding the secrets of the universe. I pointed at it and stammered at my parents.

“That’s just pie,” my mom said.

“Pi?” I asked, misunderstanding her.

“Yes, pie.” I saw a pie drawn beside the arrangement of circles and realized what she meant. It definitely wasn’t pie…

1000 Words for Dogs

I was talking to my mom about Scamper over the phone.

“You probably won’t believe me,” she said, “but we’ve taught Scamper more than a thousand words since the last time you were here.” I saw a flash of Scamper sitting next to a book titled 1000 Words for Dogs.

“Really?” I asked, impressed.

“That’s right!” I couldn’t wait to hear him speak.

Fruit Strips, Cold Coffee, and No Vitamins

I carried a plate of food from my parents’ kitchen into the living room. I had a sandwich and some French fries. I’m not sure where it came from, but after I sat down on the couch, I also had a plastic tray with strips of fruit inside. I wondered how the manufacturers were able to peel the fruit the way it was packaged… It was definitely authentic fruit. My mom warned me about Scamper, but I didn’t understand her right away. I looked up as I sucked a strip of strawberries out of the tray with my mouth. Scamper jumped up onto the table and grabbed my sandwich in his teeth. I snatched the plate from him. The sandwich was covered in his drool at this point, so I didn’t even want it back… but the fries were still clean! I stood over him and sighed as he dropped the sandwich on the ground. He didn’t even want to eat it.

“You’re pathetic, Scamper…” I told him. I went back into the kitchen to finish eating. Nicole’s mom had replaced my mom. She was about to make coffee, but someone had left their coffee in the machine.

“Is this yours?” she asked me.

“No, it’s not…”

“It’s cold…” I poured some in a mug and took a sip. It was frigid… “Tell your sister we don’t have any of those vitamins.” I was a little confused (I had no idea what she meant by “those vitamins”), but I agreed to tell her. I walked back into the living room and explained this to Chelsea. She gave me a weird look.

“I don’t take vitamins…” she replied.

“She must have meant for me,” Nicole interjected. “They’re fiber supplements.”

“Oh…” I paused. “Well, we don’t have any.”

Justin Bieber Triggers a Threat to the World

I was watching a game show on TV. Contestants had to cross a series of bridges that gradually narrowed depending on how many they’d already walked across. There were ten bridges in all. If the contestants stepped off the bridges at any point, they would lose. Each bridge had to be completely removed after crossing by someone with a pick axe. Doing this would cause the bridges to stretch out and become flimsy, though. If one tore beneath a contestant’s feet, that was also grounds for disqualification. Both teammates had to be on the finishing side of the arena at the end to pass the challenge. Anyway, the couple tackling the bridge challenge was doing really well. They only had two bridges left. The woman ran across, but the bridge snapped and pulled her back because it was stretched so far. She was disqualified. I learned that they had completed the challenge before this. Even completing that challenge was a rarity because of the game show’s difficulty. After their failure, I found myself in the arena with them.

All three of us were dumped in a prison cell with Justin Bieber. Nicole was thrown in jail right after us. More than anything, I couldn’t stand the thought of sharing a cell with Justin Bieber, so I planned to escape. After a prison guard walked past our cell, I reached through the bars and grabbed a weapon from the ceiling. I thought it was a sword… As the guard turned around, opened the cell, and swung her sword at me, I realized it was just a dagger. I brought it up to parry her attack. Just holding her back was the best I could do. She laughed at my tiny weapon. After a while, she managed to slice through my hand. I clutched the bloody hand in pain. Of course, I assumed I would be punished for my rebellion, but the guard decided to let us all out anyway. She joked that I was the most effeminate man to ever escape her prison… I wasn’t sure how to respond to such a comment. As the guard led us out of the prison, she warned us that if we fell behind, we would never escape. We walked down a maze of passageways before we came close to the exit. Nicole ran off to a gift shop on the ground floor. Although I was curious as to why there was a gift shop in a prison, I was more concerned that Nicole would be left behind. The guy from the game show ran into a bathroom. The guard decided to show mercy and take us to the gift shop as a group. When I walked into the store, Nicole pointed out a pizza stand. She wanted to buy some pizza, but she didn’t have any money. The first place was $8 per slice, but there was another stand that sold pizza at a rate of $2.50 per slice. I bought her two slices there. I showed Nicole a plastic snake I had stolen from Justin Bieber.

“I wear it better than he does,” I joked, draping it over my shoulders.

The dream jumped. I was back in the prison cell by myself. Again, I snatched a weapon from the ceiling outside the cell to get the guard’s attention. This time, my dagger was even tinier – but we considered our clash a draw. The guard put me in a cell with Tom Cruise instead of letting me leave. Tom Cruise and I devised a plan to frighten Justin Bieber and escape the jail. We crossed over to Bieber’s cell somehow. Then, pretending to be Adolf Hitler, I counted in German as I marched around the surprisingly well-furnished cell in search of Justin Bieber. I started talking more like das Crimal von Crimaldorf over time. Eventually, I found the kid hiding in a closet. What kind of prison was this? I couldn’t believe they gave him a closet in jail. My body turned into living darkness and swallowed him. I teleported us to the front of the prison where a black car awaited us. I left Tom Cruise behind.

“I need you to be alive if I want to save the world,” I sighed. “Unfortunately.” After a moment, I added, “Then again, the world wouldn’t need saving if you were never born.” He grew melancholy as we drove away, but it didn’t bother me; I had no reason to feel guilt for telling him the truth. The prison was located close to Highway 290 in Texas. I dealt with quite a bit of crazy traffic on my way onto the highway… At one point, a huge truck with its body elevated several yards above the road shifted to the right three lanes in a quick swerve, and I drove under the vehicle. As I turned onto the highway, I ignored two emergency vehicles trying to get around me. Ben was suddenly in the passenger seat. I told him that when he drives in America, he has to yield to emergency vehicles.

...Whoo, I'm finally caught back up.