Thread: SD-1: Nephanim

http://www.dreamviews.com/f19/callin...l-call-109105/

I tried to find you last night, it failed, but it was an...interesting...attempt.

Danger! Incoming post! Everyone hit the deck!

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

http://www.dreamviews.com/f19/callin...l-call-109105/

Yeah, I've seen that thread. I'm not sure if the dream I had was inspired by that or something that came up randomly. I've had a few dreams along the same lines recently... I also frequently have dreams about fighting with teams of other people against forces of darkness, but I don't usually identify them as "dream warriors." I guess I just want to avoid reading too much into what might just be ordinary dreams.

Originally Posted by Queen Zukin

I tried to find you last night, it failed, but it was an...interesting...attempt.

I can't make any sense of that drawing, either! We'll have better luck next time, Zukin. XD Thank you for making the attempt!

March 26, 2011

Midnight Search

Eric came into Nicole’s room in the middle of the night wearing only briefs. He went straight to the window and lifted the blinds to look outside.

“Looking for something, Eric?” Nicole asked. I wondered whether or not we should tell him to leave…

“Yeah…” was all he said. He started to turn toward the door, but then he looked outside again and frowned.

Which Way?

I was in the car with Nicole and her mom. Nicole’s mom asked us which way it was to the airport. It seemed like a strange question.

“To Roosevelt,” I said. “It’s Midway.”

Firewood and Vampires

I was sitting with Nicole, Andrea, and Eric on the north side of Nicole’s garage. It was snowy outside, so I thought I would bring some firewood over there and start a fire. There was really nowhere to do it on that side… I didn’t consider using the preexisting fire pit at first. I walked over to the wood storage, put a big log in the back of the jeep, and visualized how I was going to turn the jeep around with three cars parked around it in the driveway. It was going to be remarkably difficult to get the jeep to Nicole. Phil saw me considering this and asked what I was doing. After explaining, I assured him I could get the jeep out… It would just require me to get out to verify how much room I had between cars periodically. He got in the jeep and easily pulled it out onto the lawn. I realized how pointless all this was… I could’ve just carried the wood, and besides, Phil already had a fire going in the garage. I managed to get her dad’s attention, and he rolled down the driver side window. The look he gave me when I explained what I just realized said it all – if I gave it three more seconds of thought in the first place, there wouldn’t have been any need to move the jeep. I got the wood out of the back and carried it back to the storage pile. I went back to Nicole to let her know the plan. By the time I got there, however, bats were attacking all three of them. I understood that they were vampires after Eric. After all, he was a vampire, too.

Secrets and Tension

Andrea sent Nicole a series of angry text messages because she found out that Nicole knows why Alex and Eric aren’t dating. Nicole refused to tell her why.

Pornographic Bed Box

I had a box surrounding my bed. Desktop wallpapers I used or intended to use in the future were posted all over the walls of the box. I noticed a punch of porn near the top end of the bed. I tried to hide this from Nicole, but she was the one who discovered it first, so she already knew.

“I don’t know why these are up here,” I commented, thinking more of their location than whether or not they should be on the box in the first place.

“It’s so you have something pretty to look at while you’re in bed,” Nicole said. Her voice dripped with animosity.

Demon Hunting with Neluna and Gaspard

I was part of a team responsible for hunting and banishing escaped demons. Neluna and Gaspard (.hack//G.U.) were the other team members. We were really close on a demon’s trail… Then we lost him. Just as I was about to call it a day, planning to resume the search in the morning, Neluna had a brilliant idea. We followed her into a supermarket. She found something the demon had touched. Using the energy signature on the object, she traced his movements. I saw the world from Neluna’s perspective as she climbed to the top of a merchandise shelf and started jumping from one to the other. We came to the toy section. Neluna went straight for a miniature basketball goal. She retrieved the tiny basketball attached to the rim of the goal and brought it back to me, beaming with pride.

“I got it,” she said.

“Got what?” asked Gaspard, studying the ball.

“It’s a portal to another world…” I explained. “Neluna found this demon’s lair.”

“Oh! Does she get two points since she found both things?”

“No… Just one…” We both gave Gaspard a disappointed look. I touched the ball and was sucked inside. The others followed. We were driving on a narrow highway. I telepathically booked a room for us at a nearby inn. Conveniently, Neluna notified me that the demon was in the same town as us. I told Nel and Gaspard that we would go eat takoyaki together after our victory. They were both pleased, especially Gaspard. We were close to the town, so we stopped the car and got out to walk the rest of the way… Gaspard went ahead of us. He started acting paranoid, and then he was attacked by a giant alligator. Gaspard thought it was a snake at first.

Art of the Violin

I was a soldier in this dream. I carried Symphony’s violin with me at all times. I chanced upon a community of musicians one day while we were stationed nearby. Against orders, I left camp with the violin to play something for the people in the musical community. I plucked the strings of the violin carefully as I strolled into town. Another soldier walked beside me, but I didn’t recognize him. At my insistence, the townspeople directed me to their leader. She was a famous composer. The woman looked like a gypsy and wore huge, golden rings in her ears. She wore a pink, shear garment over a tighter outfit made of black leather.

“You call this music?” she asked, raising an eyebrow as I plucked strings for her. “It must be difficult.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, ignoring what I perceived as sarcasm. “Would you teach me?” She seemed to be considering it, but she didn’t speak.

Aliens Invade Minecraft

Nicole and I were playing Minecraft. A rumor started involving aliens invading the world, and I wanted to investigate. We went to the mansion where the aliens were supposedly staying. The only way into the basement was opened by mining some fallen stone out of our way. We found Ben down there… He said he had finally joined our server. He had more money than me even though he had only been playing a few hours! Nicole and I went up to the third floor of the mansion. She looked out a window and saw Cleo sneaking past. The scene reset.

This time, Cleo made it past the window without detection. I saw this from a point of reference outside the window. Nicole went into another room and almost spotted Cleo walking past a second window, but the cat flattened herself against the building to stay hidden. Cleo finally jumped into a glowing, rainbow-colored portal that rippled like a neon sea. Looking at the portal gave me a sense of deep-seated mania… Nicole went in the portal after her. There were other portals throughout the mansion, but many of them were linked – so they didn’t really go anywhere. I followed Nicole and Cleo into this neon one. I arrived in a small body of water. No sign of Nicole, I thought… I waded to the shore, and as I walked up a hill, I spotted a grounded saucer constructed of brick and iron in the distance. This was the aliens’ spacecraft. So the rumors were true – sort of! I figured the UFO was really manned by humans. In direct response to my thoughts, a bunch of little green aliens in silver space armor waddled down from a nearby mountain. They were being chased by rapid, otherworldly beasts with multiple heads. I ran for the spacecraft, thinking I could use it to escape.

The dream jumped. Back at the mansion, Nicole and I were watching a reenactment of Twilight for some reason… We both agreed it was incredibly boring. Bella and Edward were whispering romantic things to each other and kissing. As we listened to the predictable conversation, it drifted to the subject of Edward’s erectile dysfunction. Bella was frustrated by the fact that she couldn’t arouse him. I decided to “turn them off.” The scene disappeared, leaving us with a black void.

Midnight Rage

Okay, this one was a little weird. I had a false awakening. Nicole’s dad was yelling really loud downstairs, presumably at her mom. As I lay with my head at the foot of the bed, I told myself to pretend to be asleep in case this was somehow my fault. He came upstairs and yelled at Matt in the kitchen for eating so late at night. Then, he yelled at Eric for being a burden on the family. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I hoped he was only saying these things out of anger, but I sensed that he was expressing his true feelings. He came into Nicole’s room and started yelling at us only to realize we were asleep. He started crying at the foot of the bed because he thought I couldn’t hear.

“I’m sorry…” he sobbed. “I’m so sorry…”

“It’s okay,” I whispered, sitting up on an elbow.

“You’re awake?!”

“What’s wrong, Phil?”

“I messed up, Josh… I’ve really screwed up this time.” I stood up, gesturing toward the bedroom door. I didn’t want Nicole to get caught in the crosshairs of her dad’s anger again.

“Let’s go sit in the living room and talk about it.”

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were at the grocery store. She asked where her dad had gone, and I tried to figure out a way to tell her the truth…

Who Are You Supposed to Be? (Lucid)

I was on a train. Two guys noticed that they both had Swiss Gear backpacks. I showed them mine, and they laughed when they saw I had one, too. I realized one of the guys was Eric Weller.

“Eric?” I blinked. He pointed at himself as if to make sure I was talking to him.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be Eric. Who are you supposed to be?” The phrasing of his question was bizarre. I replied in a manner that struck it down.

“I’m Josh.”

“Oh! Right!” Awkward silence followed. We got off the train and came to a room with strangely shaped windows… It was painted purple throughout. I thought about how much I wanted to realize I was dreaming. Then, confused by the origins of the thought, I looked around. I was dreaming! I grabbed Eric by the shoulders.

“Dude, we’re in a dream. What do you feel like doing?”

“I dunno…”

“Neither do I! Let’s fly!” I threw him out the window forcibly and jumped out after him. He didn’t know how to fly, so he just tumbled toward the rugged mountain valleys below us. I swooped down and pointed a finger at him to levitate his body in the air.

“What are you doing?!” he cried, waving his arms.

“Try moving. Float up.” As I spoke, he drifted upward. He panicked when he couldn’t change directions, however, and I had to bring him down with my magic finger. “You’re bad at this…” I brought him down to a boat on the side of a mountain. I gave my intent to summon Nicole, and voila! There she was, standing on the deck. She looked around, then at me. “Welcome to my dream,” I said. “Is it really you, or are you just ‘supposed to be’ Nicole?” Eric didn’t seem pleased by my teasing question.

“I’m me…” Nicole said. “So hold on, we’re dreaming?”

“Yes. I saw a portal while I was flying around. Let’s go into it!” Nicole agreed, so we flew up to a purple vortex in the sky. Darkness spiraled into it as it seemed to spin. We were both sucked in. Hopefully, dream Eric didn’t starve in the middle of nowhere – we left him behind. The vortex filled my vision.

I had a false awakening. I sat up in bed, staring down at my hand. My arm was incredibly long – at least five feet – and each of my fingers branched off into two. I felt like I was going cross-eyed. I couldn’t focus on anything properly. After a while, things stabilized, and my hand was normal.

“I guess we’re not dreaming,” I told Nicole.

Fused Embodiment of Several

This dream has been omitted.

Beyond Minecraft's Impassable Mountain

I was playing Minecraft with Chelsea. It seems that the game had an officially integrated storyline, and I had skipped most of it by jumping over what was meant to be an impassable mountain.

“Do you even have the red rocks yet?” my sister asked me.

“What? Redstone?” I asked for clarification.

“I don’t know… They’re just red.” I admitted I didn’t have any. Chelsea told me I should build a rocket ship and go to outer space. This was something she had accomplished; her house was built on the moon. I would need plenty of iron and coal to construct it, though. As I made my way down the sloped desert environment surrounding me, I found several broken pieces of a wooden ship. I took refuge in one of the pieces for the night.

Phil's Tale of Romance

As we planned a trip to her grandma’s house, Nicole and I discussed how we would get there and back. She suggested flying to Arizona, then to New York, then back to Illinois. That didn’t make any sense, of course.

“We should just fly straight there…” I said. For some reason, she suggested flying to New Jersey instead and driving into New York. That didn’t really make sense to me, either.

“Well, when we fly back,” she said, “just don’t fly to Australia. That’s the wrong way.” No kidding.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I arrived at a bed and breakfast hotel. We called it a “breakfast and bed joint,” though. She explained that this was her grandma’s shop. After we went inside, I fell asleep on one of the restaurant’s many tables. A bunch of health inspectors showed up. Instead of examining the food, they examined the structural stability of the building. Everything looked sound even though it was well over a hundred years old, they decided. They had a problem with me sleeping on the table, though… I heard one saying that there were beds for rent upstairs if I wanted to sleep at the hotel. I pretended to wake groggily as they yelled at me. I stumbled outside and fell face-first into the sand. It was nice and warm on my cheeks!

The dream jumped. We were going to Nicole’s grandma’s shop again, but this time, we brought her mom. As we drove up to the restaurant, her mom pointed out the Wendy’s and K-Mart she remembered from her childhood. It had been decades since she visited the area, so she was amazed these buildings were still around. The restaurant was situated atop a plateau with canyons surrounding on both sides. I showed Nicole’s mom how a fairy lived on one side of the plateau. On the other side was the dark lair of a Succubus Lord. I laughed when I saw Wendy’s right next to it. We concluded that Wendy’s was clearly evil. As we continued driving, we saw a number of animated erotic billboards. Nicole’s mom was terribly embarrassed by all of these… She said she remembered them, too.

“We used to go see those movies,” she admitted. After a while, she got angry at Nicole. “Why would you show Josh all this? He doesn’t want to see billboards of naked guys.” There were girls, too, but I didn’t say anything.

“It was my idea!” interjected Phil’s voice. He manifested before us in a flash of light. “I wanted to tell them the story of how we fell in love.”

“Oh no, not again…” Nicole groaned. My vision was overtaken by footage of Adam Sandler holding onto the roof of a small car attached to the back of a long, silver vehicle shaped like a snake.

“When you almost left me,” Phil recalled in Adam Sandler’s voice, “I didn’t know what to do – so I latched onto your dad’s car and refused to let go. When I couldn’t follow in a car, I held onto yours.” I saw the car break off the snake vehicle, and Adam Sandler jumped on the snake’s back. “I didn’t know how to make it right…” They entered a tunnel. A huge truck drove alongside the snake.

“One time, I stole an eighteen wheeler for you!” he continued. “Did you know that?! Actually… I didn’t. I was too scared. I’ve never stolen anything that big.” The tunnel began to narrow. It was impossible for him to continue riding the snake’s back; he would be crushed by the ceiling. He resorted to tearing the metal frame off the vehicle. In the process, he pulled three green plugs out. The snake’s engine stopped running, and it slumped to the ground. As a test, Adam Sandler put the plugs back in. The engine roared to life. He pulled them out again. “And that’s how I learned how to start your dad’s car…”

“What?! You’re crazy,” Nicole’s mom muttered. The memory sequence showed Adam Sandler standing with Nicole’s mom. They walked up to a stand with assorted Mexican candies. There were a number of cookies with designs on them, too. I walked up to the stand and tried the cookies. I realized they had laxatives in them, but only after I’d eaten several. I remembered something about Nicole’s dad buying Mexican candy from a stand recently and getting sick. If the story was true, it seemed strange that he would eat Mexican candy after such a horrible experience in his mid-twenties. Anyway, the Mexican man’s son came over to me and pulled on the leg of my pants.

“Hey… Chu have my figurine…” he said. I stared at him. I checked my pocket and found a tiny statue of Symphony. I tried to explain that it was mine, but he didn’t understand. Somehow, I felt that this was related to time travel… In his time, he owned the statue, but in mine, it belonged to me.

The dream jumped. I was in a parking lot with Nicole. Shanechi rode up on a bike and started toward his office. Nicole rode her bike up to me and stopped.

“You know that professor I told you about…? The one who said ‘Oh, you guys’ and made us all laugh?” She nodded. “That’s him! Let’s go talk to him.” She rode off on her bike. Fortunately, although I was on foot, I was able to keep up with them. We stopped outside Shanechi’s office, and he gave me a copy of the next homework assignment. For some reason, I felt that I had already received this… He also told me about a new policy for undergraduate students. If Shanechi suspected that a student didn’t have the necessary mastery of circuit analysis, the university gave him permission to put them back in basic circuit analysis. I agreed that this was for the best, even if it seemed harsh.

* * *

March 27, 2011

Neluna Tries to Help

I traveled to Japan to investigate the true source of the tsunami after discovering that it wasn’t really about the recent earthquake. While I was there, I saw that Tokyo had been raised off the surface of the planet several thousand feet on a plateau. I climbed up to the top, and a bunch of men in black suits captured me. I was put with a group of people they had captured recently. Eventually, we would be taken to a secure area and imprisoned for nothing. I probably could have taken care of this myself, but I heard a familiar, sweet voice in my mind.

“Don’t worry,” Neluna said, “I’ll light them up in flames.” I saw a vision of her putting her hands together as though praying. The succubus pulled her hands apart, and an enormous ball of flames swelled up in the space between them. It grew large enough that I was able to see it from Tokyo even though she was several miles away from the plateau.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked her telepathically. She ignored me.

“Here it comes!” she said, throwing it with one hand. The massive ball of fire roared through the air, grazing the edge of the plateau before rolling over Tokyo. I tried to fly out of the way, but then I realized I was chained to the other prisoners at the ankles. I gulped. The ball of flames rolled over several of us, dragging the rest of the prisoners with us as we tumbled end over end. I came to rest near the other side of the city with horrible burns all over my body. The others were in similar conditions – except I could regenerate, so I figured I was better off than them. I brushed off my legs as my body healed itself.

“That was the biggest fireball I’ve ever seen…” I said to myself. As I looked up, Neluna descended on one foot.

“Did I help?” she asked in that thickly sweet voice, holding her hands behind her back. Her wide smile made her hope for praise plain to see.

“Uh… I guess so.” Pleased, she stood at my side with her arms around one of mine. I looked over the burning city in silence. There was little chance of Tokyo surviving – and it had nothing to do with the recent disaster.

Smurfs and Snakes

I was living with the Smurfs. One day, we were attacked by snake people from another forest. The snake people surrounded our village and quickly backed us into a corner in front of Papa Smurf’s house. The situation was so desperate that some of the Smurfs surrendered, hoping for a better chance of survival if they appeased the snakes.

“You can’t appease evil,” I reminded them. It was too late for them to revoke their surrender, however; they were already within the bulk of the invading snakes. A man and his wife, Valhalla Smurf (imagine a Smurf in the golden armor of a valkyrie), surrendered to the snakes next. I couldn’t believe my eyes. “You know what they’ll do to Valhalla Smurf, don’t you?”

“Yes… I know…” the male Smurf said. He held his wife close and shed a tear. They walked into the mass of hissing snakes together, but I saw them get pulled apart shortly after. I turned to Papa Smurf’s house.

“Papa Smurf has magic, doesn’t he? Let’s see if he can help us…”

“I’m not helping any of you Smurfs!” announced Papa Smurf. We all looked up and saw him standing on the roof. He had a snake’s tongue.

“We’ve been betrayed!” I realized. The snakes began to close in on us.

* * *

March 28, 2011

Fighting Shadows with Fiction

I was fighting in a swirling, purple and black vortex. The ground was constantly shifting, so we had to jump from platform to platform to stay out of the abyss below. Richard Rahl, several Pokemon, and Sawada Tsunayoshi assisted me in fighting back an army of shadows. They started to push us back, but Sailor Moon appeared and cast them out of the vortex. We rushed through the portal at the end and found ourselves in a ruined city. Without wasting any time, we continued toward the source of the shadows.

Never Trust a Woman

I was in an attic. I watched extended previews of the upcoming fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It seemed more like a Sword of Truth movie than anything to do with pirates, though. Richard had been captured by a bunch of pristinely ungifted villagers. Commanding them, an Imperial Order soldier said that by defeating the greatest wizard in the world, they had all proven themselves to be wizards. Another man took the podium as applause filled the air. The first speaker looked at his hand. A circle appeared on one of his fingers with the number one inside. An ink serpent that was as black as the night coiled around his finger, then disappeared. I realized what this meant – the Master had taken over his body. The mark signified a mission that must be completed. He left for a while… When he returned, he addressed the crowd again, but more numbers appeared on his fingers. I already knew what was happening; the Master was about to kill him. According to dream knowledge, when all ten fingers were marked, the man would die. As expected, the lifeless body dropped to the ground as soon as the tenth finger was marked.

Nicole came up to the attic and asked what I was doing. She didn’t understand what Pirates of the Caribbean was, so I had trouble explaining. We talked about knocking out some of the walls in the attic to add more beds, but there wasn’t enough room anyway. I watched Cleo catch a mouse. Nicole chased the mouse out of my view and killed it with a fork. I felt nauseous listening to her stabbing the rodent. We both went downstairs to get drinks. I drank most of a glass of apple juice. As I was about to finish, Rayn came downstairs and commended me for not choking on it. I grinned. Taking the last sip, I inhaled and accidentally choked on the juice.

“Spoke too soon,” I said quickly between coughs. People began complaining about how long it took me to stop coughing. I really wanted to drink more apple juice because I was extremely thirsty, but I decided not to. I didn’t want to start coughing again. Nicole and I went back upstairs. We watched a live action Family Guy movie while I tried to fall asleep.

The dream jumped. I was walking to a festival with Till and his friends. We conversed in simple German. I kept making stupid jokes about how I was walking backwards. I ran out of ways to say it, so I started making words up. The girls played along. Once we went in through the festival gates, Till and three girls ran off together. I saw Amar go into a ticketing booth at the front. He was working at the festival. I asked the lingering members of Till’s group if I could walk with them. I really just didn’t want to be alone. They said it seemed weird, so I walked away… I didn’t need that kind of treatment. One of the girls said she would let me know later on Facebook if it was okay. I glared back at her. I walked around alone for a while, watching couples together. All this time, I seemed to have forgotten Nicole existed. I saw a muscular guy with Quinn (Glee). They kissed for a bit before going into a bedroom. Without following, I was able to see into the room by sending out my awareness. The guy had turned into Puck. He was wearing yellow rings in his hair and big, pink earrings. Quin came in and laughed at him.

“What’s all this?” she asked, covering her laughter with a hand.

“I heard you liked this show, so I decided to get into it. The guy I’m dressed up as was a total badass.”

“Puck, that character is a girl. You’re gay.”

“I’m… What?”

“Look at you! You’re wearing pink earrings, Puck. You’re definitely gay.” She waltzed out of the room, tossing her hair over her shoulder. All of Puck’s accessories fizzled out of existence. He slumped on a bed and started crying. I found myself in another bed in the same room. Red string was wrapped around my fingers, so I couldn’t really move them.

“They did it to me, too,” I lied. Puck looked up. “Never trust a woman.” I entered a vortex in the mattress beneath me. As I tumbled toward nothingness, I finally remembered Nicole. That’s right, I thought – I had a girlfriend after all! I would always have her, so at least I wasn’t truly alone.

Richard Invades Jagang's Camp

I was watching a Sword of Truth movie. It was several hours long and covered the entire series. I got to a point near the end of the book I’m currently reading (Chainfire) and watched as Richard used a portal to invade Jagang’s camp. I stopped the movie so I wouldn’t spoil the ending. I already seemed to have gone into the next book’s story.

School, Attacked by an Ape, and Lucille

I was at Nicole’s school. One of the students threatened a hall monitor named Steven (although his name tag said “Urth”) before the start of the school day. The principal happened to be listening in with the intercom system at the time, so he heard everything. He informed the student that he would be suspended immediately. I went into a mathematics classroom, and Nicole went to her first period class. As I waited in the classroom, I wondered if the teacher would realize I wasn’t one of her students… I decided that if I was going to get caught in her school, I might as well be in the same classes as her, so I went across the hall to Nicole’s classroom. When I walked into the room, I had trouble picking her out for some reason. Instead of desks, the students were gathered in tables of four to six. Nicole called me over to her table, and class began shortly after. We had to write a paper about Korea’s exports (“Other than the Koreans themselves,” the teacher added). I wrote about robotics and South Korea’s recent advances in the field. We all got Chick-fil-A coupons as a reward for writing the paper. For some odd reason, the teacher came over to our table and tried to get us to pray with her. Most of the students agreed to do it, but Nicole and I refused. Another guy also declined.

“I believe more in the voice of my thoughts than the voice of God,” I explained patiently. The teacher gave me a mean look and stormed off. There was some kind of weight loss contest in the class… Chompytehpenguin (from SIN Craft) planned to switch Nicole’s first place prize with poison. As expected, Nicole won the competition, but I urgently warned her about the poison. Chompy appeared on the news later for being a pregnant teenager. I saw Sue Sylvester (Glee) stomping up to the reporters. She held a condom in front of Chompy’s baby.

“Do you know what this is?” Sue asked the baby. The infant cooed at her. “That’s right. A toy. Indulge yourself, little one.” She tossed the condom at the baby’s face. The reporters were speechless. I found myself at the scene of the report – the lobby of a hotel. As I walked toward the entrance, a giant ape attacked the building. It was easily thirty feet tall. Its fists smashed glass windows and crushed helpless hotel guests. A police officer and I tried to restrain him with a huge pair of handcuffs. The plan was for each of us to take one of its massive arms and bend it behind the ape’s back so I could lock in the handcuffs. It all seemed to follow a black and white film reel I saw in my mind’s eye of a man saving his hotel from another giant ape. Although this happened sixty years in the past, I felt a connection to the man in the film reel… It was as though he and I were actually the same person. As we pulled the ape’s wrists together, I raised the handcuffs to snap them on. In the film reel, I saw a helicopter fly down into the hotel. I saw the helicopter in color as it crashed down on us, rotors spinning out of control. The ape recovered from the collision much faster than the police officer and I. In the confusion, the ape carried me away.

A narrator explained that I was found a month later on the side of Centennial Boulevard, bloody and bruised. I spent a week in the hospital. When I came out, I was hairy like an ape. I walked back to my home in the desert. A cameraman followed me to get the full story of my capture and disappearance. I warned him as a sandstorm approached us. It was powerful enough to completely block out our vision for several minutes. As the storm cleared up, I saw my cabin in the distance. A number of people were walking toward it from another direction. Among them, I recognized my wife in a bonnet and a white dress. One of them men in the group shouted something about a fire. I looked over at my house and saw it in flames. Screaming, I ran toward the cabin. My wife, Lucille, ran toward the house, too. I called her name, but she only gave me a momentary glance before forcing her eyes away. A man standing with her assured her that she was only hearing things; her husband was dead. I hoped she hadn’t remarried in my absence.

* * *

March 29, 2011

Antimatter, Panels, and Cats

Nicole and I went over to Andrea’s to talk about our panels now that they’ve been approved. I kept running into antimatter blocks floating in the air. They sucked out my energy, leaving me with so little that I could hardly even rise to my knees. I had to counter the antimatter flowing into my body if I wanted to survive. Eventually, I was thrown eighteen meters into the ground beneath my feet, and the antimatter sucked all of the matter around me into nonexistence. Meanwhile, Nicole was engrossed in Pokemon in Andrea’s basement. When I made it down there, she and I talked about possible rewards for panelists this year beyond just compensation badges. I felt I would be given nine diamonds and twenty-three gold ingots for attending. Andrea’s mom warned us that it would be a challenge to get Andrea to do anything outside of the house; she had become a home-bound slob.

The dream jumped. I entered a healing house with the number five over the door. The healer couldn’t do anything for me. I had to keep looking… My life depended on it. At Opi’s insistence, I put my mission to heal myself on hold to feed Andrea’s cats wet food. Before long, the cats were hungry again. I refilled their partially depleted bowls. Nicole didn’t seem to understand what I was doing.

Later, I was driving Nicole somewhere. I made a left at a red light onto St. Charles. I was glad I didn’t see any police. Honestly, as soon as I completed the turn, I was amazed that I’d done it. There had been no reason to act so thoughtlessly.

Thodiral's New Arena

Thodiral was redesigning the Capture the Flag arena for SIN Craft. I messed around with some of the blocks while he was reconstructing it. Surprisingly, he didn’t notice… He flew off to check something elsewhere in the PVP realm, leaving me alone with the half-finished arena. I hid under a platform with a diamond sword to wait for unsuspecting players.

* * *

March 30, 2011

And You Got Me a Pear

I went to a garage sale at Matthew’s house. His mom was selling a bunch of his old stuff. For some reason, I felt like this was actually Ally Tefft’s garage… I saw a Luffy figurine on sale for a few dollars. I reminded myself not to spend money on anything; I was already short enough on money. When I saw a pear on sale for $0.89, however, I couldn’t resist. I bought it and brought the pear back to Nicole’s house. I proudly offered it to her as a gift.

“What…?” She stared at the pear. “Why did you buy me this?”

“Because it was so cheap! I wanted to get the Luffy figurine, but…”

“There was a Luffy figurine? And you got me a pear?”

“Well… Yeah…”

Music Composition, Death Bringer, and VR XXX

I was in some kind of music composition class… My teacher had initially planned to grade our papers in class one day, but since she didn’t, we were half a day ahead of the lecture schedule. Brad showed up in his Kaku costume. The neck was much longer than I imagined it – easily four or five feet. I greeted him, but he didn’t seem to notice me. Before long, One Piece music started playing. Everyone else started dancing and marching around, but I felt too silly to play along. Nicole urged me to take part. I walked toward the back of the classroom and checked the lecture schedule. Only then did I realize we weren’t going to listen to One Piece music for the entire class period; we would transition to classical music halfway through.

I found a little kid near the back of the room who was being abused. I pulled him aside and convinced him to go to a foster home. We became friends. Unfortunately, someone used magic to wipe his memory; he couldn’t remember me or the fact that I’d helped him. I transformed into a horned beast with a long snout. Nicole was terrified of me. She teleported away. Intending to kill her, I teleported too. I found myself in the backyard of my parents’ old house in Louisiana. I sent a little mouse in through the back door. It was infected with a deadly disease. I hoped the mouse would spread its disease all over the building and ultimately infect Nicole.

The dream jumped. I was at a supermarket with Nicole. While she was waiting in line at the checkout, I went to the back of the store. The rest has been omitted.

Leroy's Horrible Concert

I was watching a newly animated episode of The Jetsons. Convinced that he was a master of the drums and keyboard because of his dad’s high praise, Leroy Jetson put on a concert at his school. He descended from the ceiling in the hallway, sitting on a drum set with a built-in keyboard. It had pedals, but he couldn’t reach them because of his short legs and the way he was sitting on the drums. The concert was terrible. For that matter, when I got a closer look at the music he was allegedly reading, I realized he was playing something entirely different. He didn’t even know how to read music! I gave him my honest opinion: it sucked, and his dad was horrible for telling him he had any hope of becoming a musician.

Abundance of Yellow Flowers <--- This was nice to wake up from.

Symphony and I were sitting together in a field of yellow flowers. There were so many that they hugged our bodies almost like fluid. She reached down and plucked one carefully, twirling in in two fingers. When she asked me what kind they were, I admitted I didn’t remember the name. She stared at the petals of the flower in her hand, deep in thought. I ruffled her hair with a hand.

“Do you enjoy ruffling my hair, Nephanim?” she asked.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I will ask you to do so more often in the future.” She smiled with childish excitement in her eyes. Infected by her happiness, I smiled too.

March 31, 2011

Dead Donkey and Grazing Hippos

I was in the back seat of Nicole’s parents’ convertible. Her dad was driving me back to the house. We talked about something unimportant; I wasn’t really paying attention.

“Did you see that dead donkey back there?” he asked. I glanced out the rear window to see it, but it seemed like we had already driven too far.

“No,” I said, turning back.

“It looked so pitiful… What kind of moron brings his farm animals out on the highway?” We passed a live donkey as it strolled along the side of the road.

“Well, there’s the donkey’s brother,” I joked. Within seconds, I saw several hippopotamuses gathered on the median. They seemed to be grazing. ”That’s a lot of hippos…”

“There are giraffes!” Nicole’s dad said. I looked around, but I didn’t see them. I wondered if the local zoo had accidentally let all of their animals loose. I saw a number of kangaroos hopping around on the opposite side of the highway. They were holding up traffic.

The Fifth and Sixth Rules

I was confronted by a living carving of wood. The man was at least nine feet tall and wore a feathered headdress. He held up his hand as he spoke to me.

“The fifth rule: bring an end to the Jewish regime.” I stared at him. “The sixth rule: if you see a child, share with it your most intimate passions.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked suspiciously.

“Just kidding,” it said.

Passion for Circuit Analysis and Prana

I was in a circuit laboratory. I somehow discovered that my parents were going to die soon. My siblings were also infected with the fatal illness, but they had much longer to live. I decided to honor my parents by kneeling before their graves in full diamond armor. At first, Chelsea and Austin didn’t really appreciate this; they thought it was dumb that I was still thinking about Minecraft after our parents’ death. After I left the graveyard, I became more active on SIN Craft. Feeling that I should stop playing Minecraft, Austin devised a scheme to keep me from connecting to the server. I’m not sure how, but he set something up between my computer and the server that prevented me from logging on… Anyway, I got on eventually. I prepared a helpful lesson on mining gold ore. I had a special mine shaft set aside and everything. My plan was to encourage my students to mine from layer 200 to 350 if they wanted to find gold. Chelsea confronted me while I was working on this and explained that it was strange that I could “switch modes” so easily after the passing of immediate family. I noted that I’m always capable of doing this – so it would only be strange if I couldn’t set my mind on something else with ease.

Succumbing to his illness, Austin began swimming in the ground. I’m not sure how the illness enabled him to defy physics, but apparently, it did. He thought he was saving someone. The water was ice cold, so before long, he exhibited signs of hypothermia. I told Nicole about a circuit that could ease his pain and lift the numbness in his body. Once we took care of that, I suspected the frostbite would go away. I couldn’t remember the specifics of the circuit, unfortunately… But Morrison appeared and agreed to draw it on a white board for us. He even explained its operation. Watching this, Nicole realized she had a passion for circuit analysis. She started writing her thoughts beneath her notes on the circuit. Morrison thought she was writing depressed, self-loathing things, so he started yelling at her… When he actually read it, however, he apologized for his rude behavior. After class, Nicole and I went to the circuit laboratory. I let Nicole connect stuff to a giant circuit board without providing any input. All of the circuit components were huge. The resistors – even small ones – were the size of my hand. Noel Deis saw Nicole’s misguided connections and insisted on helping her. I tried to explain the flow of current in the board by pointing out the bars of conductive material beneath the surface, but Nicole wasn’t paying any attention to me. We grabbed a number of capacitors, resistors, and meter boxes (which could measure voltage, current, or power depending on how they were set) to put in the circuit. First, we chained a bunch of ammeters in series to show Nicole the delay in the signal after each meter. It was slight, but the more we connected, the more significant the phase shift became. I asked Nicole what would happen when the magnitude of the voltage reached zero. She said she wasn’t sure. It would take way too many meters to show her experimentally with the input voltage set as it was, so I didn’t bother.

Next, we connected a bunch of the resistors and capacitors at the end of the circuit board. After connecting Austin to the output terminals, we were able to cure his illness and restore feeling to his legs. I decided to show Nicole something else, but I needed more wires for the meter boxes. Mike walked by with at least thirty of the correct wires. I asked him for some, but he said Noel had already taken a bunch, so I would have to get them myself. I went back to the place where all of the equipment was stored. When I returned, I entered a place reminiscent of Silent Hill. It was like an underground temple made of stone. Everything glowed in faint blue light.

“When you experience prana,” a voice said, “see with your mind’s eye.”

“Do people seriously still do that mystic stuff?” I heard Mike ask. I couldn’t see him anywhere.

“How do I figure out where anything is?” I asked the others, hoping they could hear me, too. I could see flashes of objects as I looked around, but then they were gone. I relaxed and focused on seeing with my inner sight. The world was restored, but everyone was gone. Nicole appeared after a while… She said she had lost interest in circuit analysis because she was no good at it. I took her back to the giant circuit board and explained the basics to her. I hoped that I could restore her faith in her ability – and maybe eventually get her to like mathematics, too.

Lesbians and Financial Support

I was in a classroom with several characters from Glee. Santana announced her lesbian attraction to Brittany. Although the latter didn’t accept them as a couple, Santana was certain that they would eventually become one.

“After all,” she said, “I’m her lover.” An exasperated Brittany shuffled out of the classroom.

The dream jumped. I was accused of raping a woman and fathering her child. The Glee club signed a petition to force me to provide financial support for the baby, but it was really none of my concern. I didn’t rape anyone. I stood in a line to talk to the person in charge of the legal decision behind this, but she denied me the chance when she saw me waiting. Finn led me aside and begged me to do it – for the baby, at least. I still wasn’t sure I could afford it.

The dream jumped. I broke into the school through Glee’s club room late at night. A bunch of elderly women were watching old movies together in the room. Santana and Brittany argued about their sex life as they followed me into the building. The elderly were terribly embarrassed by the conversation.

Double Sleepover

Nicole was explaining to me that she intended to have two people spend the night at her house. I figured one was Andrea, but who was the other person?

“You,” she said. My thoughts raced. How was that possible? Was I at Nicole’s house? I couldn’t make sense of it.

April 1, 2011

Revolution and the Traitor

Nicole and I seemed to be part of some kind of revolution. We followed Kelsey and a few others into the depths of a prison until it became a trampoline exercise facility. Then, we tricked the guard so we wouldn’t have to pay to enter. Before we went in, Nicole and I insisted that we had to wear socks. I wasn’t interested in getting HPV. Anyway, we got our own hotel room a few more floors down. The others left for a bit, so I had Nicole lock the door. I think Nicole was a hermaphrodite. Weird. Anyway, it was a water bed. Nicole accidentally spilled orange juice all over the wall and the bed. She even got it on her computer, so I had to clean it immediately. I finished that and left the room. A police officer in a tan uniform stopped me. He placed me under arrest for trespassing. Fortunately, when I told him I was there with Mistress Nyda, a Mord-Sith, he let me go. He was horrified of angering a Mord-Sith. As I went back into the bedroom, a video message from Nicole was played throughout the facility. I hoped it was also broadcasting to the entire world, but I wasn’t sure if we had succeeded in patching it into television stations. We promised revenge against “the traitor.”

Nicole and I reunited with Kelsey at a candy store (still beneath the prison). Kelsey seemed to have gathered more men and women to fight for her cause. She had all of them throw candy in the air and asked how refreshing it felt on a scale from one to ten. I wanted to say eight, but for some reason, the number eight was excluded from the scale. We stole a bunch of candy. When we went into the hall, the police reluctantly moved out of our way. We found their leader’s office, but he was gone… As we searched for clues as to his whereabouts, Nicole and I heard something ticking. I found a bomb on the inside of a roll of tape. We had less than six minutes until detonation. I told Nicole to start toward the surface; I would catch up with her after getting our stuff. I went back to our room and realized with dismay that I would have to put our laptops away before I could leave. I used a few of my precious minutes gathering our valuables. Another video message played, but it was from someone other than Nicole.

Sol Engulfs the Earth

I had a dream about a doomsday prediction. It said that the sun would engulf the planet in the year 3050. A female researcher explained that this theory was obviously false because of the rate at which Earth accumulates surface matter and expands. She supposed the end was much sooner – perhaps even just a few days away. Nicole didn’t believe any of it, but seeing a mental image of the blinding sun filling the horizon made me sick to my stomach. It wasn’t fear of being engulfed, but rather, I felt so small in comparison with our enormous star. Nicole got dressed and left. I followed her out of the house. At the door, she pretended to be a police officer.

“I’ll kill your mother!!” I screamed. Nicole started laughing.

“Elton John would love that,” she replied. I warned my mom about the sun. The world descended into panic.

Just Simulation

This dream has been omitted.

Removal of Blinds and Wooden Shelves

I had a false awakening. My alarm went off, so I understood that it was 8 AM. I sat up in bed to turn it off. When I looked over, I saw two guys from the maintenance staff in my room. They walked over to my bed to take the blinds down. I got out of their way and sat at my computer desk. They seemed to have trouble on my side of the room… The blinds on Till’s side had already been removed. Eventually, they got mine off, too. One of the guys asked if I had any plans to put a wooden shelf in the wall.

“Of course not,” I told him. “Neither do my roommates, as far as I can tell.” The guy gave me a suspicious look as I put my laptop away.

“Then maybe you guys have stolen some wood lately…?”

“No,” I said simply.

“Uh huh… There’s a long plank in your yard. It’s gotta be somebody’s.”

“Well, like I said, I don’t know anything about it.”

“You stupid kids… Are you going to give me that crap? ‘I’m not saying anything that could get me in trouble,’” he mocked. “That’s what Reece Jones said when we talked to him.” I stared at the man. Reece was at my school? I pretended not to know him.

“Reece Jones… Why does that name sound familiar?” I asked a guy sitting on my bed. He didn’t react.

Puzzles and Shark-Crabs

I went through a series of puzzles. If I failed a puzzle for any reason, I would be killed. There was one in which I had to sprint quickly across unstable, rotating shafts. There were specific places where I was supposed to jump to avoid being thrown off the side of the shafts. Later, I had to press a switch to deactivate a noose that would seize me if I tried to walk by it. I fought little crab bosses several times. Only the last one was any trouble… It transformed into a shark and took the fight underwater. When I barely defeated it, I gained a magic artifact – a blue wristband that would allow me to transform into a fish at will. I could also breathe underwater while wearing the wristband even if I was in human form.

* * *

April 2, 2011

Disorganized Organization

I was walking around near Harlem. I had an elaborate method of finding the Green Line station that involved walking all the way down to Roosevelt and turning on Harlem Avenue, but I quickly realized there were better ways… I met with Nicole’s family at the train station. Part of the station became Nicole’s basement, and Phil showed me a bunch of disorganized boxes. Although it seemed impossible to find anything in the boxes, he knew exactly where most of the contents were and could pull them out in a few seconds on command. He warned us all not to touch his boxes… Otherwise, his perfect system would be ruined. He went to retrieve something he wanted to give me.

19999

Nicole, Zedd, and I broke into a huge underground generator system. It seemed to have been in place for several centuries, but it hadn’t been used recently. The generators were placed back to back inside a poorly lit room. The floor and walls were simply dirt. As we approached the generators, a voice spoke to us.

“I am Generator #100000. You may refer to me as 19999.” We all stared at the metal generator that seemed to have spoken. This was definitely more than primitive technology. The name it gave us had something to do with its maximum voltage rating, but I didn’t fully understand.

“It spoke. How is that possible?” I asked.

“Magic,” replied Zedd. “19999,” the wizard addressed it, “we’re looking for something that’s been hidden down here. It’s very important.”

“You may retrieve it,” answered the generator in its robotic voice. “Only you are authorized to enter, Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander.” It even knew his name… Ridiculous. After a brief look at us, Zedd touched the generator with his hand. “Authorization verified. Please proceed.” The generator above 19999 slid upward into the wall, revealing a narrow crawl space going back into an even darker room. If the soft dirt in the tunnel collapsed, Zedd would likely be trapped. I offered to go in his place, but he dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand.

“This old man isn’t afraid of tight spaces. I’ll have the crystal out before you realize it.”

Mama's Magic

I watched an abusive mother and her toddler as they emerged from a crack house. The yard was torn up, and it was clear that the house hadn’t been taken care of properly… The mother led her toddler to the edge of the backyard and pointed at the overcast sky.

“I’m magic, you know,” she told him.

“No, you’re not, Mama…” the kid protested. He crossed his arms and pouted.

“Look, I can make it rain!” She threw her hands in the air, and it started raining. Her jaw dropped. “Oh my god, I’m really magic!” As she willed it to rain harder, it did. Her son stared at his mom in amazement as she danced around the yard. I sat down in a dry spot as I observed them.

April 3, 2011

Disrupted sleep, poor recall. My dreams feel out of focus with so many exams coming up...

Disorganized Dreams and the Boxes of Orden

I was playing some kind of tennis game. In order to unlock the mirror racquet, the best available, my opponent and I had to return the ball to each other one thousand times without scoring a point. It was easy to prevent myself from scoring, but the opponent wasn’t interested in letting me have the final racquet… When I came close, he would just hit the ball out and give me the point rather than allow me to unlock a new racquet. Yamamoto Takeshi suggested using my sword instead of the racquet. I knew that wouldn’t work.

The dream jumped. I was in a small hotel room. I became paranoid and thought everyone was trying to steal something from the room. I called the police and told them about the thieves. They refused to do anything.

The dream jumped. I was inside a car radio. I played songs from CDs, but even though I owned all of them, I hadn’t heard some of the songs before. Sonic the Hedgehog was driving, so whenever I played a song from a Sonic game, he cheered. I turned myself off after a while.

The dream jumped. I was swimming around southern Louisiana in search of power crystals. A lot of people used crystals to power their boats, so I tended to sneak on boats, find their energy supplies, and swim away with it. In one instance, however, a couple of rednecks in a tiny boat saw what I was doing and electrocuted me in the water. I tried swimming under the boat to get away, but they shocked me on the other side, too. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was on the shore of the bayou. A man told me that if I wanted food, all I had to do was ask. I almost told him I wasn’t there for food, but since they were eating dinner, I decided I might as well join them. The redneck couple had a beautiful, blond-haired daughter. Surprisingly, she didn’t even have a southern accent. I found out she was ticklish. For that matter, she enjoyed being tickled, so I quickly took the liberty of tickling her all over. My hands went under her clothes without comment from the daughter. She finally warned me not to touch anything else since I’d felt everything but the private portions of her body. I hugged her from behind around the stomach, and we smiled at each other. I let her go. We had crumbly pork chops and rice for dinner. The girl’s father and I shared a plate for some reason…

The dream jumped. I was in the backseat of a car as Opi drove along the Red River. Nicole called and told us that she liked Opi’s voice. He thought that was extremely stupid. He even told her so, but she couldn’t understand him over the phone.

The dream jumped. I was in a busy town square as a shadow creature in the general form of a praying mantis appeared. Although I was the person fighting the shadow being, I sensed that Austin was controlling me as part of a video game.

“Do you have all three boxes of Orden?” I asked him as I approached the monster. The people in town didn’t seem to notice it, but most of them kept their distance. A few clueless people walked right past it. Fortunately for them, it was too busy with me to care about them.

“Yes,” Austin assured me. I didn’t bother checking… I trusted his word. The shadow creature let out a high-pitched screech when I came close to it. Red light sprayed out of its chest, and it began charging up to fire a beam of energy at me. I ran around it in a circle, rolling to avoid the beam when it fired. Immediately after the beam was released, the shadow creature was locked in place for an instant. That was my chance to attack. I drew Apheri in her original form and stabbed the back of the shadow beast’s head. It screeched again and swung around, trying to swat at me with its shadowy, skeletal hand. I jumped out of the way. Instead of firing the beam directly ahead, it started spinning and firing energy, forcing me to run along the edge of the beam. I pumped energy into my feet to speed up and made it behind the creature, but it was smart enough to reverse the direction of its beam to catch me. I barely turned around in time because of my momentum. When the beam stopped firing, I ran off to the edge of the square and checked my inventory for the boxes of Orden. It was time to place one. To my dismay, Austin didn’t have the boxes after all… He selected a stack of four red crystals.

“Austin, that’s not it… Those are used to make red gemstones.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what we need, right?”

“No… Red gemstones are used for spells… We need the boxes!”

“What boxes?” When he asked this, I groaned. I would just have to defeat it the hard way. A woman in the crowd grabbed my shirt. She had long, green hair and wore a dark green tunic similar to Link’s. She pulled me close and whispered in my ear.

“I know who you are. Let me help you.” I didn’t respond. “I’ll paralyze him. You take care of the dirty work.” I looked back at the shadow beast and saw it incinerating helpless merchants strolling across the square. They collapsed to the ground in flames. Lines of fire raged where the beam had hit the ground. Wordlessly, I accepted the woman’s offer. I ran back to the middle of the square to continue the fight. The shadow creature screeched at me and tried to fire its beam, but it froze in place. I held Apheri high over my head and brought her down in a fatal slash, tearing through the creature’s body. The shadows separated and scattered into little fragments before disappearing.

April 4, 2011

Beethoven at the Opera and Shapeshifter (Lucid)

I went to see Beethoven live at the opera. During the performance, Beethoven constructed a bridge on stage – but he ran out of wood before he could finish it! I tried to get up to the stage to help him, but he shouted at me to stay away. I went back to my seat. Between movements, I spoke to Kaitlen. She and I agreed that we could be of great use to Beethoven as assistants. We planned to present ourselves to him after the opera to see if he needed any help.

The dream jumped. We returned to the opera hall on a Sunday to speak with Beethoven. When we arrived, we learned that he was taking volunteers to seal and preserve a cake from his last performance. I was disappointed that he didn’t want any help with the bridge; it still wasn’t finished. I came to the conclusion that Beethoven was stubbornly racist. For that matter, he didn’t get along with foreigners of any kind. I decided I no longer wanted to work for him. Kaitlen showed me the back entrance of the opera hall. It seemed we had saved a little time by going that way, but I didn’t know where we were anymore… We just kept walking until we moved from the city to open countryside. Kaitlen eventually admitted that she was lost, but we continued. She said she wanted to meet Nicole. I didn’t see any problems with that, so I agreed – if we could ever find Nicole’s house, that is.

We crossed a busy street. It was large enough to be a highway, but it didn’t seem like an important road. On the other side of the street, we were nearly flattened by a bus which appeared out of thin air. I dove out of the road just in time to avoid the speeding school bus. We followed the road to a restaurant, and then we went into the basement. It was like a prison… There were cells with iron bars lining both walls. I found myself in one of the cells.

“I’m the only one who understands your smile,” Kaitlen warned me. I couldn’t see her, but her voice echoed all around me. It no longer sounded much like Kaitlen’s voice, but it was still familiar. “You don’t respond correctly to smoke, you know.”

I found myself outside. At this point, I realized I was dreaming. I was surprised by how long I had gone without figuring it out. I was in my grandparents’ front yard. A shapeshifter attacked me as nightfall rapidly approached. It took a humanoid form and presented a weapon that was hardly more than a long, iron rod with a sharpened tip. I tried to summon Apheri, but she appeared too short. Instead of relying on the sword, I fired bolts of white-hot energy at the shapeshifter. Its body hissed, turning into shadows whenever the energy touched it. I tried to turn night into day to improve visibility, but it took a while to produce any noticeable effects. I started worrying about waking up. The dream had already gone on for a while, I reasoned… I felt my tongue inside my mouth. The dream began to fade.

I lay in darkness. I knew I could reenter the dream if I wanted to. I didn’t have to get up and write it down immediately… If I was lucky, I could have another lucid dream. I lost myself in the darkness.

Um...

I'm really behind, I know. I've basically got a week of dreams to type up and post online. I could post a couple of dreams from yesterday right now, but for the sake of organization and preventing myself from forgetting I need to post the dreams before that, I'm going to hold off until I can catch up - probably later this week.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

Um...

I'm really behind, I know. I've basically got a week of dreams to type up and post online. I could post a couple of dreams from yesterday right now, but for the sake of organization and preventing myself from forgetting I need to post the dreams before that, I'm going to hold off until I can catch up - probably later this week.

eeks I know how it gets when you get backed up and you have so much to type that you dont type at all and then it builds up. Its cool that you can remember so many of them for so long or did you wright them in a paper journal already?

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

eeks I know how it gets when you get backed up and you have so much to type that you dont type at all and then it builds up. Its cool that you can remember so many of them for so long or did you wright them in a paper journal already?

They're all written down on paper, fortunately.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

They're all written down on paper, fortunately.

Good. I wright mine ina paper journal but I have been abridging so much lately that it only helps me remember for a day or 2. I just don't like taking to do it twice.

Well, I'm not caught up yet, but I'm posting what I've typed up so far. I'll try to catch up with the past couple nights of dreams tomorrow. Enjoy!

April 5, 2011

A Mustache Adds a Little Bit of Class

My facial hair was out of control in this dream, and Nicole used a pair of scissors to trim it down to size. She went to painstaking efforts to give me the ugliest mustache she could think of. It was shaped like an upside-down letter V, and the angle between the two lines of mustache hair was almost ninety degrees. I frowned when I saw it in the mirror.

“Is this really what you want me to look like?” I asked. As a joke, she snipped off half of one side, giving me what looked like a bald spot under my nostril. “Very funny…”

A Storm and Overloaded Trains

Nicole, Alex, and I were downtown. Some kind of huge storm approached the city, and we knew we had to get back to the suburbs before public transportation services shut down. We went into an eight story building that was supposed to be connected to the train system. Nicole wanted to go onto the roof, but even if we were allowed up there, I doubted the roof connected to the train platform. I suggested floor six or seven instead. As soon as I said it, I realized that was probably too high, as well… Fortunately, when we emerged from the elevator on floor six, I saw the ramp leading up to the train platform. It was divided into two lines. When we walked over there, a sleepy-looking guy wearing dark clothing said that the line on the left was for the train, while the line on the right was for people to gather and talk about their bruises. I didn’t like the sound of that… I turned around and saw Nicole waiting at the base of the ramp. I waved her over, but she wouldn’t walk. Sighing, I went back down the ramp to talk to her.

“Why aren’t you coming?” I asked patiently.

“Alex said she would wait…” Nicole replied. She pointed up the ramp at Alex, who was talking with another girl near the platform.

“Well, shame on her. Let’s go.” Nicole still didn’t seem interested in walking. It made little difference, anyway… A bunch of people started walking down the ramp, and I overheard one of them saying that the incoming train was overloaded, so they wouldn’t let anyone on. We would have to find another way back to the suburbs.

17,000 Gold

I checked my block statistics on SIN Craft. According to the stats plugin, I had mined over 17,000 blocks of gold ore. By comparison, I had only mined a few thousand blocks of stone. I didn’t know how this had happened, but I was sure I would be banned for it. I went searching for the gold ore immediately to dispose of it.

Murder in the Desert, Battling Marines, and Granola Bars

My parents moved into a house close to Nicole’s. They had walls around their entire lot, and the garage door was at the base of the driveway. I had difficulty getting used to the way to their house… Driving there always felt strange. Anyway, a woman came to the garage door and asked to see me. Austin let her in. She warned me that my time was running out; I needed to act swiftly. I pursued Austin into a desert and learned that someone was murdering travelers on their way through it. I located his lair beside a sand pit and destroyed him. I plundered the gold he had stolen from his victims. As I wandered back to the house, I turned into Luffy. I saw Garp and Kizaru in a deserted city. I chased Kizaru while freezing him with ice punches. Garp tried to stop me, but I was out of control. Kizaru turned into Bon Clay and escaped the fray. I knocked Garp unconscious and continued on my way. I soon found myself in a hot tub with Nicole. Glass walls insulated it from the outside. We took our clothes off and sat together in the water, just relaxing… When Nicole’s mom came up to the hot tub, I quickly put on my clothes and tried to sneak out. She didn’t seem to notice what we were doing. I talked to Austin about living on his own. Apparently, he was living with his girlfriend in a shack in the woods. They survived on a diet consisting entirely of granola bars.

War Horns and Darkness

I heard the deafening sound of war horns, and then I was plunged into darkness. I sensed that I was supposed to remember this, but I didn’t understand why. I was unable to remember anything past that realization.

The Dream Warrior Infiltrates Kahlan's Thoughts

I was helping Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor prepare for a speech to the D’Haran Empire. It seemed that the Imperial Order had finally been eliminated. The Mother Confessor became infected with a magic taint while Richard was away. I told her I was helping to remove the taint as she lay in a bed somewhere on my campus, but I was actually working my way into her thoughts to gain control over her. Kahlan trusted me; she didn’t suspect anything. I detected Richard approaching the campus, so I went outside to meet him. He thanked me for the insight I provided as a dream warrior. I thanked him just for knowing me – for being my friend. I went back to Kahlan’s room alone. She had already figured out that I wasn’t helping her. She demanded to know why, but I couldn’t tell her the truth. It had to remain a secret…

* * *

April 6, 2011

Blind Faith and the Imperial Order

I was in the kitchen of my parents’ old house in Louisiana, but it was more spacious. Somehow, my dad got on the subject of the Sword of Truth books. We talked about the Imperial Order. I was cautious not to offend my parents by criticizing the idea of blind faith, but as we conversed, I openly rejected the Order’s teachings of self-sacrifice in exchange for eternal rewards in a mysterious afterlife. I compared it to Methodism. I wanted to avoid making direct comparisons to my parents’ beliefs… My dad seemed interested in talking more about it, surprisingly. I was certain I would have angered him despite my caution.

Bus to Britain and Auto Failure

I was on a bus to the United Kingdom with twenty-two other people. We all had our passports, of course, but I wasn’t sure how we intended to get there by bus. We purchased a group insurance packet for the weekend for $230 (or $10 per person). Because of the rigidity of individual plans available to us, it would’ve cost much more to get everyone their own plan.

The dream jumped. We all got off the bus. I said goodbye to Amar and Aya. Somehow, I found a plastic jeep to drive… I was in Fairfield. I sometimes had trouble controlling the vehicle’s speed. The jeep would just stall out for a couple of seconds only to resume before I could do anything about it. I couldn’t get on the highway because I feared it would stall completely. The brakes were also unreliable. I went back to Nicole’s house and took her dad’s jeep instead. I got stuck behind a bunch of new drivers on the road. Strangely, I found myself walking instead of driving for a few seconds. The other drivers were also walking. We were back in our cars before long. Nicole and I devised a plot to prevent Jessica from getting any Christmas presents. We knew what she wanted, so we just had to buy it before she could. We also talked about Regina releasing an album of her singing with piano accompaniment. I thought her music was terrible, but I felt bad admitting it.

The dream jumped. I caught myself driving 70 miles per hour on a highway with a speed limit of 45 miles per hour. There was a cop nearby, but he didn’t stop me. I slowed as I saw a car pull off to the shoulder. Its engine had stopped working. The cop and I both pulled over to help. I figured the cop would take care of it, thereby allowing me to leave, but to my surprise, he went back to his car when he saw me.

“Wait! I don’t know how to fix anything!” I pleaded. “Don’t go! I’ve never done this before…”

“Neither have I,” said the cop. He drove off. I watched the guy remove a layer of insulation from his engine.

The dream jumped. The guy’s car was working again. I found a book of thoughts recorded directly from a woman’s mind. As I understood it, because of their periods, women were prone to hateful thoughts once a month. The journal regularly skipped two to four days each month to account for this.

The dream jumped. I was back in the jeep with Nicole. Her dad was driving. Nicole tried to explain the problems with Regina’s music. We solved some equations related to automobile engines.

Popcorn and Broken Figurines

I was at Nicole’s house. Her dad asked me to get rid of a bag of popcorn.

“Dispose it the right way, not the way you and Nicole usually do…” he commanded. I wasn’t sure what he meant. I went to Nicole’s room to collect garbage. In the process, I knocked over several anime figurines and broke half as many. I stared at Kite’s severed arm and Ayanami Rei’s shattered face on the floor in frustration. How could I be so incompetent?

Ducks and Mario Kart

I was at school. Despite knowledge of the fact that I needed to take an exam elsewhere, I went to the power laboratory.

The dream jumped. I was in my room. A guy and his girlfriend were there with me. He apologized for using her for sex. I gave the girl a high five for helping him realize the error of his ways. I went to the bathroom, but it seemed as though my bladder was clamped shut. A little concerned, I went back into my room. I picked up a box with the word FRAGILE printed in capital letters and carried it downstairs. Pockets and three other guys were waiting for me down there. We started playing Mario Kart on the Wii. The screen only showed one of the four players; I had to play based on my memory of the course and glimpses of my character on the first player’s miniature screen. Somehow, although I spent much of the race in first place, I finished dead last. I found that I could control my character without the controller.

“It’s not a dream,” I told the others, shaking my head. “I’m definitely controlling my character.”

I played a quick race against Austin. We both transformed into ducks in the game. I barely won.

Hot Chocolate and Girls

I was at my grandma’s house. Matthew kept trying to steal Nicole’s yellow hat. His parents showed up in a dinky car, and I carried him over there in my arms. He struggled the whole way. After stuffing him in the open door and making sure Lauren had securely locked it, I went back to the house. My grandma stopped me in the yard. There was some kind of celebration going on in front of her house. She asked me to fetch the hot chocolate mix from her medicine drawer “downstairs.” It didn’t occur to me that their house is only one level. Anyway, I went into the den and found the hot chocolate mix among various bottles. I brought it right back. I sat down at a picnic table once I had delivered the mix. A couple of hideous girls kept looking my way, and I knew they wanted to sit with me, but they were too shy – probably because of how ugly they were, I reasoned. I looked off to the side and spotted a Japanese girl giggling as she watched me. This inspired me to read a small book about the history of Japanese art.

My grandma tapped me on the shoulder as I was reading and asked if I would retrieve the “valentine” in her “left drawer.” I went down to her bedroom in the basement and searched for a long time in the darkness. None of the lights worked. An interesting book caught my eye. At first, I thought it was a copy of Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, but it was actually a book about Zorro. Brittney brought me the so-called valentine from somewhere upstairs. It was a rod made of dark chocolate. I turned this into steaming hot chocolate in a mug. On my way upstairs, I stopped too quickly to let one of my relatives walk by and spilled some of the chocolate on my hand. It hissed as it burned my flesh.

* * *

April 7, 2011

Neluna's Passport, Feeble Animals, and Blood

This dream has been omitted.

Light Ball and Sketch Neluna

I was playing a game involving balls of light. A bunch of spherical goal nodes were fixed to the ceiling with holes in them for the balls of light to pass through. Players carried a machine that resembled and functioned quite like a leaf blower. My opponents in the game were Reece Jones and Chelsea. Reece was busy figuring out what to do with his website instead of focusing on the game. For some reason, I called the site a blog, but I explained that it wasn’t really used that way. He had several YouTube tabs open to Winnie the Pooh episodes. Reece asked if I was watching them.

“No, of course not,” I laughed. I pointed my leaf blower in the air and tried to shoot one of the balls of light into a goal. The others weren’t really participating, but I felt like winning. Unfortunately, I had serious difficulty with this… I eventually just throw the ball at the hole by hand. The ball missed the goal sphere and landed near Reece’s head. He accused me of throwing it at him. I reminded him that it wouldn’t really matter where I had thrown it because of the speed at which I threw the ball; it could hardly have hurt him traveling at ten miles per hour.

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I could do much better if I wanted to hit someone,” I assured him. In my mind, I imagined I could throw the ball at least four times as fast.

I received a sort of notification from Thodiral. It was related to a bug on SIN Craft that was frustrating me recently. I sat down with a piece of notebook paper and drew a rough sketch of Neluna. Then, I started communicating with the sketch. I told Neluna I was going to quit Minecraft for eight months. She asked when I was going to quit.

“Immediately,” I told the blinking sketch. She turned, brushing her hair back with one hand.

“What angle do you want your head to make with the ground?” she asked. Her head started twisting around counterclockwise on the page. “That doesn’t sound healthy,” she admitted.

* * *

April 8, 2011

David Letterman's Rectum

I watched David Letterman on a talk show in 1938. In the middle of the show, he laughed at the audience and pulled down his pants. Like a hand reaching out of his body, his rectum inverted itself and waved at the camera. I was simultaneously amazed and disgusted. I quickly found myself on the second floor of the Discovery Center in Bossier City with Nicole.

“You know who’s really crazy?” I asked her.

“George Letterman?” she guessed.

“Wow… Yes. Wait, no! David Letterman.”

“Who’s that?” Prompted by the question, David Letterman appeared in a black cloak and laughed at Nicole. I hoped he wasn’t going to moon us.

Dream Telling, a Talking Cat, and Poison

I was in an old, collapsing mansion. A kid lived there with his grandmother. The mansion was said to be cursed… Several servants patrolled the halls. All of them had weird names, I recall. I managed to sneak into the mansion with Zoro, Usopp, and Brook. We all went to see a fortune teller of sorts on the top floor of the mansion. He specialized in tellings regarding dreams. Before we even arrived, he began printing my telling. I was stunned to see that he had already prepared several pages of information to share with me. It seemed like unshakable evidence for his talent. He handed me the stack of papers with a confident, tight-lipped smile. I looked at the bold-faced heading at the top: “SYMPHONY.” Indeed, most of what he had to say was about Symphony.

“You loved her the day before you destroyed her, and now the truth is clear…” it began. I wanted to read more, but I felt I needed privacy. None of the others knew anything about my path as a dream warrior. Once they received their tellings, we agreed to find rooms to sleep in. The mansion was big enough that the people living there would never notice us, Zoro assured me. I decided he was probably right. We turned to leave, and the wall behind us was destroyed with a flash of blinding, white light. The child of the mansion pounced through the fallen wall, striking me with a fist. I fell to the ground. None of us thought it was right to hurt a child, so I just restrained him. He stared at me quietly when he realized he wouldn’t be able to escape my grip by struggling. The room around me was replaced by a bedroom with six identical beds. There was no sign of the others.

“This is where you’ll stay,” said the child. “You’ll be my friend.” I reluctantly agreed, fully intending to escape as soon as he left my sight. He said he would be back in the morning and left the room. A black cat on one of the beds watched me as its tail flicked back and forth. When I went for the door, it blocked my path and hissed. I decided to sleep instead of hurrying to escape. There was plenty of time for that in the morning…

With the arrival of dawn, I found the cat asleep against my side. I carefully crept out of the room, then bolted down the hall. I could sense the child and one of his servants approaching on a different route. Their presences were white dots superimposed over my eyesight. When I got to the main room, I had to hide in the corner to avoid detection. One of the servants was walking through… Once the servant was gone, the child started toward the foyer. Having found my room empty, he intended to stop me from escaping. I could tell that much just by focusing on his presence. I ran down another hall in search of the entrance. How had we even gotten into this mansion? I couldn’t seem to find my way… Eventually, I came to a cold room with clothes, toys, and books strewn about the floor. Three TV sets decorated one wall. All three were on, but they showed nothing more than white noise. I turned two of them off – the third was too high to reach. I decided this room was a good place to read my telling, so I sat down with the stack of papers the dream teller gave me. I smiled at the thought. As soon as I looked down at the elegant font used for Symphony’s name in the header, the door opened. I jumped in surprise. The child ran in and pushed me onto my back.

“I know what you were doing!” he shouted. “Mr. Sylvester told me!” The black cat walked into the room. When I gave the kid a weary sigh, the cat sucked me into its gaze. It spoke at a rate of thousands of words in a second, suspending time around us to tell me the story of the child’s suicidal mother and deadbeat father in a span of time so narrow that only we could experience it. The cat finally explained that I was needed to home school the boy; he couldn’t be allowed in a public school. If his grandmother ever found out about me, though, there would be serious trouble… I gaped at the cat.

“I can talk to animals…?” I murmured.

“He talks to you, too?!” The child was clearly excited. He started hopping around the room.

The dream jumped. I tried to escape the next morning. This time, a servant caught me wandering in the foyer. I ran into a sort of kitchen area… I found three cookies on a plate, so I decided to eat one. I heard voices approaching. Stuffing the rest of the cookie in my mouth, I dove under the table for cover. The tablecloth was long enough to obscure me completely. Even so, the old women who walked into the room knew I was there – I left evidence in the form of a missing cookie and my overwhelming presence.

The dream jumped. I was in a small room with Nicole. I saw a box at my feet. Cautiously, I opened it. Inside, I found the heads of two snakes. They wouldn’t allow me to close the box. I summoned Apheri and stabbed them both when one tried to bite me. I realized it was actually one snake with two heads. One of the old women from the kitchen walked in – the child’s grandmother. Her grandson stood by her side.

“Are you prepared to die?” the woman asked me. I readied my sword.

“Stop!” Nicole warned me. “You can’t win. It’s impossible…”

“Nothing is impossible,” I retorted.

“No, it’s really impossible!” she insisted. “This is the ending!”

“What? This game sucks… How do I die?” I abruptly fell to my knees, choking.

“Poison,” said the grandmother a bit too dramatically. I realized the snake had bitten me… I curled into a ball and slowly died.

Untouchable

This dream has been omitted.

Glass Workshop and a Badger

Nicole and I were snow sledding in the mountains. I borrowed someone’s snowboard and went down a hill after Matt. When Nicole caught up with us, she said she needed to get her mom’s Christmas present. She asked to borrow Matt’s sled for transportation. When he agreed, we left right away. We took Highway 8 through the mountains. I was glad to have a navigation system on my phone… I had no idea where we were or how to get back home. As we passed through a tunnel, Nicole pulled onto the oncoming traffic lane to let someone pass her. I was worried about opposing traffic… Sure enough, a car came into the tunnel from the other direction. I could tell instantly that someone was going to have to slow down to prevent a collision. The driver in front of us had to stop to let Nicole pull in behind the passing vehicle.

“Never do that again…” I warned her.

The dream jumped. We were inside a glass workshop. The young woman running the place was in her early twenties. She had thick, black hair and dull, brown eyes. Every now and then, she peeked into the shop from a back room to check on us. I could hear the shower running in the other room… It seemed we had shown up while she was showering. Nicole and I found an interesting sign.

“Look at these overpriced items and watch the price go up over time!” it said. Atop a pedestal were several glass boxes painted with red and orange designs in a South American style. They were priced between $500 and $1400 each! I saw the same boxes on sale for $1 each nearby… Suddenly, I began to wonder why we were Christmas shopping in the summer. Then I realized summer hadn’t arrived, either. Something was clearly wrong. My thoughts were disrupted when Nicole found a badger sleeping on a pillow in the corner of the shop. She woke it up, prompting the groggy badger to follow us around. Eventually, it climbed onto my back and started clawing at me. It was trying to pin me down. Nicole didn’t seem to care.

* * *

April 9, 2011

Visit to the Spectral Cloud City

In this dream, I was a woman. I used a bunch of helium balloons tied together to lift myself high into the clouds above Colorado Springs. There was a city at the top of spectral mountains in the clouds. I was left with just one balloon as I neared the city, so I had to switch my balloon out for a new batch to complete the journey. I knew that failure to do so would end horribly… I didn’t really feel like falling to my death. As I approached the city in the sky, I saw Zeus standing on the city’s border with his arms crossed. He smirked and threw a lightning bolt into the clouds beneath me. They buzzed with the low growl of lightning. Angels flew to and fro around the city as I entered. Everything was built in the style of Ancient Greece. For some reason, there were a ton of people in wheelchairs… I met up with Nicole, and we transformed into mythical creatures. I was some kind of cross between a lion and a serpent. She chased me down to the surface world.

The Value of a Quarter

I was at a baseball game with my family and Nicole. On our way out of the stadium, we stopped at a vending machine to get a bottle of water. I only wanted to put $1 into the machine since that was the price of water, but I didn’t have any singles… I put $10 in instead. At first, the machine seemed to have ripped us off; it didn’t give us the water even when we repeatedly pressed the appropriate button. Suddenly, however, it spat out the following: two bottles of water, eight muffins, a sandwich, and bags of assorted candy. Nine dollars came out of the machine, and I found three quarters in the change return basin. We basically got all of that for a quarter! Fearing that we would be seen taking all of this food on the surveillance cameras, I made Nicole take half and hurried out of the stadium. Somehow, we got separated on the way… I knew I was way behind my family, so I jumped off the side of the stadium as a shortcut to the parking lot. I landed without dropping any of the muffins!

Federation Reserve and the Golden Goblin

I walked into an auditorium to see a guest speaker. The advertisement called him Buddy Hudson, but it was actually Buddy Valastro from “Cake Boss.” Unfortunately, rather than speaking himself, he hired a comedian to do the work. Buddy just sat at a table in his chef outfit while the comedian entertained the audience. The comedian gave a little kid a free soda because he looked “depressed.” He seemed pretty cheerful to me. Something sparked a debate in the audience about the “Federation Reserve.” Nicole explained in a whisper that it was a new organization created by the United Nations – a group of nations which would fall under the same leadership in a time of global crisis. It sounded like Orwell’s greatest nightmare. The debate completely overtook the presentation… The comedian was unable to get in another word as people yelled back and forth. I started reading. Before I knew it, everyone was gone… I was the last person to leave the auditorium – except Buddy, who was still sitting at his table looking tense when I got up to leave, too. I saw him put his head in his hands.

I expected to meet Nicole right outside the auditorium, but she was nowhere in sight. I saw a holographic painting on the wall in front of me and recognized Nicole’s form inside it, but the figure warped when I approached it. Nicole waded through the crowd in the hall and pulled me outside. She mentioned a party later that she wanted to attend. I didn’t understand why she was telling me about it… She knew I was uncomfortable with her going, but she brought it up anyway. Since she insisted on going, I knew I had to go, too.

“If the Golden Goblin catches you,” she said as she explained a game we would likely play at the party, “you have to take off your clothes and run around.”

“That’s horrible.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Promise you won’t play that game…” I pleaded. She gave me a look that said I was overstepping my bounds, but when she saw that I was seriously concerned, she made the promise. She still wanted to go to the party, though. Nicole found a vending machine that dispensed T-shirts commemorating the party. After getting one, she got on a bike and rode off without me. I had to chase her on foot. By the time we crossed a busy street that resembled Roosevelt, I was on a bike, too. My brakes wouldn’t work. She veered off to the right in an empty parking lot, but I was unable to because of my incredible speed and failing brakes. I crashed into the curb at the end of the parking lot at full speed, destroying the bike. Somehow, I came out of this without a scratch. I eventually caught up to Nicole on foot.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were in her living room. The machine she got the T-shirt from was hooked up where one of the smaller bookcases should have been. She sorted through shirts to give as gifts to friends and family. She showed me a shirt with a bunch of metal chains and skulls on it… Apparently, this was a gift for Chelsea. I admitted I didn’t think Chelsea would like it. It was too big for Nicole to wear, for that matter, so I knew it was unreasonable for Chelsea. Nicole’s mom came into the living room to ask for a shirt. Nicole handed her Chelsea’s gift – I guess she was having second thoughts about it, too. As her mom held it against her body, she sighed in deep thought.

“Never mind…” she said, throwing the shirt back to Nicole.

The dream jumped. Nicole took me to a graveyard to film a video for Halloween. I didn’t really want to participate in the film… Nicole explained that we had done this once before, but I couldn’t remember it. She said she submitted the old film to Nickelodeon. I saw a video on TV involving cat puppets fighting in a graveyard. I knew right away that this was our old video. I was proud that our work had made it onto national television. I reuploaded the video to YouTube. At Nicole’s request, I even sent the video to Regina via AIM. Regina replied with a quick “g2g.”

“She always has to go right when I message her,” I muttered. “How convenient.”

Denial of Resistance (Lucid)

This dream has been omitted.

* * *

April 10, 2011

Tearing out Pages and Vegas

I was cleaning out my backpack. It was full of old, damp rice and textbooks from years ago. Nicole and her dad helped me. Her dad wouldn’t let me throw any of it away because he didn’t believe that I didn’t need it anymore. I gave up and agreed to keep the pages we were tearing out of my textbooks until the end of the semester. Eventually, he asked me to come outside with him. Nicole and I shared a look, but he warned her to stay inside. We went out into a barn and sat across from each other. He started asking me really vague questions about visiting my parents this summer. I answered his questions as directly as I was able, but unfortunately, that wasn’t what he wanted. He got angry at me for failing to understand the real meaning of his questions. He asked if I ever felt uncomfortable around him. I admitted there were times when his temper unsettled me, and I didn’t want to be around him until he cooled down. He started getting angry; I couldn’t get off that subject. Finally, he shouted at me to explain that he didn’t want Nicole visiting my parents with me anymore. I didn’t know what to do… Going back home by myself had the potential to be an extremely nerve-racking experience. When I started thinking about it, I realized my parents wanted to send us to Las Vegas. I didn’t understand why… We were going to fly to Houston to see them, then to Nevada, then back to Texas, then back to Illinois. I knew my parents couldn’t afford all of those flights. Besides, what would we do in Vegas? I supposed Nicole could visit her relatives, but was it really necessary? I decided I would have to talk to them about it.

Mari's EVA

My dad, mom, sister, brother, and I were in my mom’s car on the way to Houston. I found myself regretting that we hadn’t gone sooner; I might’ve had a chance to meet Notch! I concluded that it had already been a year or so since Notch came to Houston, though… We pulled into a garage downtown, and my dad quietly explained to me that we were picking up an EVA unit for Mari. My siblings – no longer in the vehicle – had been replaced by Mari Makinami. Mari didn’t seem to know what an EVA was… I grinned. My dad got out of the car to fetch the unit while I made preparations of my own. I put on a set of special headphones which would allow me to listen for disturbances in the EVA’s operation. I also found a small, portable console and tuned it into Mari’s unit. The wall in front of our car retracted, revealing a towering giant of steel. I smiled up at it. I asked Mari a bunch of questions about what music she had and hadn’t listened to. My intent was to find at least four tracks she hadn’t heard before which I could use as a baseline for a test. I asked if she was into Umineko. She said she had seen the anime. When I asked if she had read the visual novels, she admitted that she hadn’t. For some reason, she had difficulty understanding that I didn’t have the anime soundtrack or the background music from the first four novels with me. I’m not sure why it was so hard for her to understand… I said several times exactly what music I had. Anyway, I selected four random tracks from the visual novels and asked her to identify them. Of course, she didn’t know them. That meant I could use Umineko music for the test. I hooked my headphones up to the console as my dad brought Mari to the EVA. Once she was inside it, I could hear her voice through the console. My dad got angry at her for trying to use her own headset; the rated voltage of her headset was much too high for a living machine like an EVA. Once that was sorted out, he came back to the car.

“Activating the EVA…” my dad said, pressing a couple of buttons on the console in front of me.

“Preparations for launch complete,” I said after adjusting a few settings. “Don’t really launch, though, Mari.” I kept a close eye on the EVA’s pulse and operating temperature. Everything looked fine. I checked the synchronization data; she was doing really well. I sighed. “Do you think she’ll let me pilot it when we teach her how to fight?”

“No chance!” Mari said over the console. I wasn’t surprised, but I wished she would be more considerate. We shut everything down and gathered our things to leave. Soon, we would convert this building into our base of operations and conduct a field test of the EVA. Mari peered at me from the front passenger seat. She still seemed a little uncomfortable with all of this. We backed out of the garage slowly. Apparently, my mom had moved to my dad’s car at some point, and we nearly collided with it on our way out. Dan walked by and shouted random things at us, but I couldn’t understand him.

The dream jumped. I was playing volleyball with a bunch of people I didn’t recognize. Mari was on the other team. Our team included a boy in a wheelchair. He made the first serve. Instead of a volleyball, we were using something like a hacky sack. It didn’t work as well… The guy serving for the opposing team didn’t know any of the rules of volleyball. When we tossed him the ball to let him serve, he frequently just hit it back to us. I was surprised when someone on my team hit the ball back to that side as though everything was normal. We tried to explain the rules to avoid any future confusion. My team was the next source of grief, though… They put a wooden bench on my immediate right and crowded around my left, preventing me from moving anywhere… The ball landed right in front of me, but I couldn’t get to it. I asked them all to move. The ball started sticking to my hand when I hit it after that. It was like I just grabbed it when I slammed my palm into it. I even had trouble throwing it. I thought it had something to do with my ring (amazingly, even though I lost that almost a year ago, I was wearing it in this dream), so I took it off for a couple of minutes as a test. The ball still stuck to my hand. I decided to keep the ring on and ignore the problem. The next time the ball came my way, I saw that it was actually two balls tied together with a thin string. They wrapped around my wrist. I tried to throw it back to the other team, but part of the string stayed in my hand. It stretched, wrapped itself around a man’s throat, and strangled him. He had to be taken out of the game because of his injury. When I walked back over to my team, Dan was amazed. He said he could never have come up with something so sinister on his own. He said he tried to talk to me earlier when I was downtown, but I didn’t hear him. I admitted I vaguely remembered that.

Symphony in Contrast

I was walking through a clothing store. There were Japanese kids in school uniforms everywhere. One of the guys seemed to have modeled his hair after Neuro’s. Considering all of the anime and manga-related merchandise in the store, I wasn’t surprised. I saw Symphony waiting for me near the entrance. She was wearing an all-white version of the girls’ summer uniform. On my way to meet her, I tried to determine the store’s name. I saw it printed on the outside of the glass windows at the front of the building, so I tried to reverse it in my head. Before I knew it, the name was gone. It was as though nothing had ever been printed there. When I got to Symphony, she turned and gave me a blank stare. I felt a flash of something sinister… Her hair turned white, her eyes turned black, and the world around us became nothingness for an instant – but then everything was fine. I swallowed nervously.

And thus concludes operation you're-way-behind-and-need-to-post-those-dreams. It seems like the "dream warrior" theme is becoming more common.

April 11, 2011

Phantom Phone Calls

I was in my parents’ living room. My mom, Chelsea, and Austin were talking with me about the lot my parents just purchased. In the middle of this conversation, I got a call from my mom. It even sounded like her, but she was right there beside me and clearly not using her phone… I listened to my mom’s voice hissing threatening things into my ear.

“Mom…” I began to ask, but the surprise of the call ending stopped me. I stared at the phone.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“You…” I answered, showing her my received calls. She made a face at the phone. My mom checked her pockets, but she didn’t even have her phone. We were puzzled by this for a few minutes until Chelsea confessed that it had been her on our mom’s phone. Somehow, I wasn’t satisfied with this explanation. She had been sitting on the couch the whole time. I figured I would have known if she was talking.

The Room of Children in Darkness

I was put into a trance by a woman with a raspy, snake-like voice. She sent me into a system of caves to search for something. I wasn’t allowed to know what – just that it would protect her from those who would destroy her. She was inside my mind at all times, observing my every move. I quickly became lost in the caverns, but it didn’t matter. I would wander them until I died of starvation or found what I was looking for. I carried a torch with me as I walked through otherwise pitch black darkness. The smell of the burning pitch was one of the few sensations I was able to recognize. Even a fair portion of my vision was hazy with the woman controlling me. I came to several dead ends and had to backtrack. Finally, I found an old iron door. The wall it was on was made of iron, too, and there were tiny holes all over the wall as though worms had eaten through the patches of rust. The woman hissed with excitement, commanding me to go through the door. I obeyed. On the other side, I came to an expansive, square-shaped room. A pool surrounded a platform in the middle. Four small bridges, one on each side, connected the outer floor to the platform. Directly in front of me stood a figure composed of shadows so deeply dark that they seemed to absorb the surrounding light, darkening the space around his body. On the right side of the room, children walked single-file with their arms at their sides into a portal. The portal was contained within a stone arch that hard carvings of gargoyles climbing over one another. The one at the top seemed to howl toward the distant ceiling. On the left side of the room, grotesque monsters limped out of a matching portal. The carvings on this arch were mirror images of those on the other side of the room. The monsters seemed to be covered in shrouds of darkness… Somehow, it seemed like a skin disease. The woman whispered frantic things to me, ordering me to continue. I worried that I would be sent through the portal by the shadow man in front of me. It was easy to guess what was going on: he was sending these children through a monster factory. Still, I obeyed her commands and slowly walked toward the figure of shadows in the middle.

* * *

April 12, 2011

Popping a Bubble

I was floating around in a mall while talking to my mom. I wondered where this place was… Then, as I stepped outside, I saw hundreds of bubbles rising out of a fountain. When I popped one, I awoke with a start.

Weight Training with a Pillow

I was playing Minecraft with Nicole. The area surrounding us consisted of hundreds of skyscrapers built into a valley. Nicole spent some time increasing her skills (with mcMMO) before digging a tunnel to take her out of the valley. I followed her at first, but I decided there was no need to leave the city. As far as I could tell, there was nothing but endless grasslands beyond the valley. I sat down on a bed and began violently punching a pillow. I saw a note on the pillow about a “weight training” skill that was hidden from most players. I saw that it was now visible in my skill information. Although my skill increases weren’t displayed the way they should have been, checking with the appropriate command revealed that I gained twelve weight training skill levels in a matter of a few minutes. To gain experience, I had to hit something at a speed exceeding 40 miles per hour. The formula on the pillow said the speed would be divided by the force of the collision, but I understood it to be reciprocal; the force was divided by the speed. As such, I needed to punch the pillow at exactly 40 miles per hour and as hard as possible to maximize the rate of skill increases. I wondered how high Nicole’s skills were… I checked mine after a while and laughed when I saw that my power level was now over 9000.

Confessor, Divorce, and Stocks

I was at a store with my dad. He was paying at the cash register while I went to the back of the store to check something. For some reason, Port Gilead (a town on SIN Craft) was inside the store! I grabbed Confessor and ran back out of my house. I figured the ride home would give me time to read the book. I realized on the way that I could have just warped back to my dad, so I did – except he wasn’t waiting for me there. I went out to the parking lot. Nicole, Chelsea, and Austin were in the car, but I saw no sign of my parents. I waited in the car with them for a few minutes. A parade came through… Their leader was a giant clown – at least thirteen feet tall – who stumbled over to the car and smiled directly at Nicole. She had a panic attack. I comforted her until the short parade passed. We sat on top of the car to observe the stars. I spotted what looked like hundreds of stars swirling around a vortex just above the tree line, but upon further inspection, I realized it was just a strobe light from a tower nearby shining light on a thin cloud. Nicole waved a laser pointer around. I hoped she wouldn’t be arrested for possessing one.

By this point, it was clear there was a problem… My parents weren’t coming out of the store! I went back in and warped directly to Port Gilead. I found a park built into a bowl-shaped hole in the dirt where the fountain should have been. Capri and Amber were sitting together on a bench. They rose with smiles when they saw me. I knew I didn’t have time to waste talking to them, but I said hello and told them how great it was to see them, at least. Amber hugged me before I left. I went to a room on the side of the building and found both of my parents. My dad was sitting near the corner of the tiny room. I asked why they were still in the store, but they ignored me. I saw that my dad was reading the first page of Confessor; he must have found my copy somewhere, I concluded. The cover was missing… My parents continued arguing as though I wasn’t there. I got the impression that my dad wouldn’t leave until he finished the book. My mom, on the other hand, wanted to leave immediately. He suggested divorce, and my mom furiously snatched the book from his hands.

“These Sword of Truth books must be the reason…” she muttered. I rolled my eyes, hoping she wouldn’t try to prevent me from reading them because of this. We left my dad there and marched out to the car. My mom offered no explanation to the others.

The dream jumped. On the way home, my dad ended up driving… He told me about his stock market investments. Apparently, he found a trend in the market; a company with as few as nine shareholders always seemed to follow the same pattern of investments. If he bought several hundred shares in the morning and sold them all around 3 PM, he tended to make a lot of money. I tried this for three days in some kind of mental dreamspace simulation, during which the rest of the world was suspended in time. I only made about $5. I ended the simulation and sighed at the five dollar bill in my hand. Austin kept harassing me about buying something for him. I decided I could use my stock market earnings for that purpose.

Minecraft Chat via MATLAB

Nicole and I received a new Legend of Zelda game based in the world of The Wind Waker. When we got home, we went down an escalator to get to the living room. Nicole mentioned that she was considering a career in microelectronics. I blinked in surprise.

“That’s Elysium VanWong’s area of expertise,” I told her. She laughed at the mention of my professor. I considered the career path myself for a moment. “I could go into microelectronics, too,” I said. “Then I can teach you everything I know and help you get a job.” At the base of the escalator, Kelsey was running a lemonade stand. We showed her the game. She wasn’t interested, though; she wanted to play Mario Kart. Nicole and I went to the living room. Instead of playing our new game, we got on Minecraft. There was some kind of connection between Minecraft and MATLAB that enabled private chat channels and logging, but it was incredibly slow. It processed ASCII characters as blocks in a chunk if any chunks nearby were currently loading. Every message took about fifteen seconds to process. I suppressed MATLAB’s output on all of my messages after that, and things seemed to improve. I tried to explain how to do this to Nicole, but she didn’t understand. I started walking around on Minecraft.

The dream jumped. I had fallen asleep. I saw several messages on MATLAB from Nicole. I was just about to respond, but she signed off. I went back to Minecraft. One minute, I was shooting cliff racers with arrows, the next I was chopping up spike traps built into wood blocks. My skills gradually increased.

* * *

April 13, 2011

Alchemist Art

I was drawing Edward and Alphonse Elric standing with me on the edge of a cliff. Everything was dark and in shades of gray. It looked extremely sinister and depressing. Our eyes all glowed white with power. As I was working on this, I stopped and wondered why I was bothering. While Fullmetal Alchemist was pretty good, I haven’t seen it in years. For that matter, how did I draw all this? I became convinced that I had actually stolen the art from someone else. It was too dark… I tried brightening it and playing with the contrast, but that didn’t help. I closed it without saving the picture.

Energy Towers and Cyclops Orbs

I was on my way into the depths of a dungeon with an old wizard. He reminded me of Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander. We came to a sealed door. The only way to open it was to activate a series of energy towers built into the walls of the previous room, so we backtracked. The towers basically looked like giant computer towers. All I had to do to activate them was pass some of my energy into the metal plating on the front to act as an energy source. A bunch of floating, red-scaled orbs appeared in the room. They revealed large, green and yellow eyes. Some of them fired beams of golden light at us, others radiated fields of toxic energy, and some just floated toward us to self-destruct and presumably kill us in the process. The wizard killed most of them single-handedly, but I was having trouble on my own. I was chased by three of them into a corner as I activated some of the energy towers. I used Apheri to cut through two of them, but I took a number of hits from their energy beams, and I knew I was on the verge of death. The last one hovered right in front of me and began to wince in pain as it prepared to self-destruct. The wizard shouted my name.

“Get away from it!” he warned. I didn’t really need the warning; I jumped back to safety as the orb creature exploded, spewing silvery rainbow fluids all over the floor. The liquid ate through the floor like highly corrosive acid. I was glad I hadn’t touched it. “If that had gotten on your skin,” the wizard explained, “you would have died six times over.” I couldn’t wrap my head around that concept. I followed him to the stone door that had been sealed before. It was gone, allowing us to venture into the dark depths of the dungeon below.

“Are you ready?” he asked. I nodded. Cliff racers sat perched on pillars around us, watching passively. I was glad they weren’t hungry.

Cleansing Queen Autumn's Castle

I visited Nicole – now known as Queen Autumn – in her castle. It had been abandoned. The lower levels, including her bedroom, were overrun with zombies. I summoned Apheri into my hand and cut my way through the undead until I could lock the bedroom doors. I finished off the ones in the room. With that, I had created a safe zone for us to use as our base while I purged the castle of the zombie legions. It was getting late, so I wanted to make it easier for Autumn to sleep. Chelsea helped us fend off zombies for a while with taekwondo, but then she had to attend to other things. She warned me of Six the Daywalker before teleporting away. Heeding the warning, I kept an eye out for this Six as I ventured into the crypts beneath the castle. I figured she had something to do with all the zombies. There were many more zombies in the crypt, predictably. I eventually tired of the seemingly endless hunt and went back up to the bedroom to find that a couple of zombies had just broken down a door to get to Autumn. They had her backed into a corner by the time I was able to do anything. I swiftly split their bodies in two and shoved them aside. As I guided Autumn to her bed with my sword in one hand and my other arm around her waist, I watched the dark doorway they had forced open… I couldn’t leave it like that. Once she was safe in bed – I checked under it for monsters, too – I fixed the door. I searched the royal bedroom for anything that might explain the source of all the zombies. Autumn couldn’t remember much about her life before the zombie invasion.

I found a strange, black totem pole made of cheap plastic and broke it off near the base with brute force. Except its poor quality, it sort of resembled the totems Axis used to create the shadow curse in Withers. As I turned the severed piece of the totem pole, some envelopes fell out. It was full of messages. I sensed that Autumn had lost memories pertaining to her power… These old letters could be the key to restoring those memories. I brought a couple to her bed. They were all addressed to Queen Autumn from Queen Autumn. She gave me a weird look when I explained where I found them. What had been a piece of art valuable enough to keep in the queen’s bedroom was now just cheap plastic waiting to be discarded. Even after reading the messages, she wasn’t convinced of anything. She thought they were forgeries. Puzzled, I looked through the remaining items in the totem for more conclusive evidence. I found a phone and her Dead Master scythe key chain. I turned on the phone while she examined the scythe. Amazingly, the phone picked up a signal. Someone had paid for the subscription all this time… It must’ve been at least two years since the zombies invaded, I reasoned. Who was paying for this? Queen Autumn disagreed – she figured it was just a trick. I finally decided to stop trying to uncover the truth for the night. I could argue with her in the morning. Autumn and I lay in bed together, and I promised to protect her from anything that dared to enter the room during my slumber. I was among the most powerful knights in the world – a dream warrior – and I knew that nothing plaguing this castle could best me. I held Autumn close, sparking a little protest, but not much. She admitted that she enjoyed my company. A circular amulet around my neck with the number five on it told me I was only level five. I thought back to playing Phantasy Star Online years ago and how powerful my old characters had been. It was too bad I couldn’t use their equipment. As we drifted off to sleep, a distorted version of Marceline (Adventure Time) slipped into the castle grounds. I knew it was Six immediately. I jumped out of bed to confront the Daywalker.

Spotted Vision and Alcohol

Someone was scolding me for drinking alcohol. I told them I’ve never used anything illegally, but they didn’t believe me. The world consisted of gray and black spots which popped in and out of existence. I could only see about 40% of my full field of vision at any given moment.

Chinese Pocahontas

I was absorbed in a Chinese version of Pocahontas. The animation was stunning. As the wind guided waves against the shore, I could see its crest in the air glowing white. All of the colors surrounding me were vibrant. I soared over the ocean like a bird. As I descended to the top of a cliff, I heard Pocahontas singing in Chinese. A Chinese man with a wrinkled face appeared behind her. He was dressed in all black, and his hair was long and black, too. He interrupted her song to ask for her hand in marriage. He turned into a shadow cloud and slipped around Pocahontas to stand at the edge of the cliff. As his body reformed, I studied his nightmare eyes. Like Jagang’s, they were completely white. They almost seemed to have a life of their own as they rolled chaotically in all directions. He warned Pocahontas of the coming days of darkness. When she didn’t believe him, he teleported away. He came back with the skeleton of her father. I knew he killed her father, but he blamed it on a man named Duve. I saw a series of commands the man injected into the environment. From these, I learned his name: Pox. Pocahontas sank into despair at the sight of her dad’s skeleton. Pox motivated her to come with him and exact her revenge. They ran through a field to a bunch of school buses. When they got on a bus, I followed. I let my awareness slip into Pocahontas. The bus was full of savage Chinese warriors. They asked Pocahontas what she felt was shitty.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” she admitted. All of them laughed, assuming it was a joke. Once they calmed down, the bus driver urged her to speak the truth. I knew she would be executed if they realized she wasn’t one of their warriors, so I spoke her for in a nearly convincing voice. “Shit’s shitty,” I told them. They all erupted into laughter again. Pox and Pocahontas shared a diet Coke on the way to their destination. I thought it was weird that they had Coke in this time period… My awareness slipped away when I sensed Chelsea in another world. I found myself standing on a cobblestone road with her.

“How is Queen Autumn?” she asked. I noticed Chelsea was wearing expensive white sorceress robes.

“She’s alright… You should help me with her castle, though. It’s infested with zombies.”

“No way,” she sighed. “I gave up fighting a long time ago.” This seemed to take place both prior to and after our journey into Autumn’s castle simultaneously. My awareness was sucked back into the other world. I stood over a dog by a campfire. The dog had matted, gray fur. I tried to win his favor by petting him. Apparently, he could talk… He encouraged me to rub his belly, so I did. I thought I was gradually taming him, but it seemed I needed to feed him or work some form of magic if I wanted to accomplish that. I decided I needed a taming spell. I searched a spell database in my head and saw that I could purchase that particular spell form in the city of Haldron. It would allow me to turn animals – including humanoids – into my slaves. I realized I could also use the spell on Lord Vivec (The Elder Scrolls) or one of the Keepers of Order in Quo. I perceived these Keepers of Order as blue-skinned women in black armor. They were the elite guards of the Plane of Order. Anyway, I grinned at the possibilities. I saw such names as Shakespeare and Luigi in the list of suggested targets for the spell. I teleported to Haldron at once to get the spell form.

Instead, I ended up in my parents’ kitchen at their old house in Texas. I realized I had actually been looking at unlockable characters in a new racing game, not valid spell targets…

Anonymous Conquers Earth

I walked through a bathroom full of graffiti. The walls were almost covered. On the wall outside, I saw a message in blue paint inviting me to share an idea for a new meme with the collective masses of 4chan. I realized Anonymous had somehow taken over the physical world. It didn’t really seem like their style, but that was the truth of this reality. I ended up in another bathroom further down the hall. The floors were made of ice, and people circled around on bicycles. Anonymous had made this all possible. I had to wait behind a line of bikes to get out. Since the bicyclists were faster than me, they kept cutting in front of me in line.

Amulet of Neutrality (Lucid)

As the dream began, I was watching a guy on a four-wheeler riding around outside my dorm building. The area with the bike rack and trees had been leveled out and replaced with dirt. When the guy saw me watching him, he accused me of something that I knew would get me evicted. I was going to stand up for myself, but I didn’t have to; his mom yelled at him, and he retracted the accusation. As I stared down at the dirt, I realized I had to be dreaming. I could feel it.

The blinds were so detailed. I could see the photons dancing on their gray surface. I turned my head and looked at my ordinarily plain white walls. The walls were so detailed! Little grooves in my wall spelled out KISSING over and over on a scale that was invisible to normal human vision. I turned around to face the door, but everything went black.

I managed to recover the dream. I made a couple more attempts to walk to the door, but everything was way too fluid and viscous. The world almost seemed to be lagging. I felt like I was streaming my dream from a server running on a dial-up connection. The floor tiles beneath me seemed to sparkle. The tiny flecks of white lines in each tile were intense enough to captivate my attention, but I forced my eyes away so I wouldn’t get distracted. I didn’t quite make it to the door… Darkness swallowed me again. When my vision returned, I was on my back on the floor.

This segment has been omitted.

I lost the environment again.

“Okay,” I told myself, “time to focus.” I gave the dream environment the command to increase vividness and lucidity. When visuals returned, I closed my eyes and spun clockwise on the floor for about twenty seconds, then the other way for about half as long. I didn’t really care if it put me in another environment or not, although my dorm building is always a pain to get out of in dreams because of how many doors I have to go through. Sure enough, when I stopped spinning and opened my eyes, the dreamscape was incredibly vivid. I lay on my back in bed. I sat up and jumped out my open window, landing on the dirt below. As I walked into a patch of grass damp from the morning dew, I could feel my socks soaking up the water. Strange that I was wearing socks at all, I thought… I went to bed barefoot. I took a deep breath of the clean air and smiled. At this point, I realized I was walking on all fours – sort of. I was really just lying tangential to the world and rotating it beneath me to move forward. I prevented myself from focusing on one thing for too long, not wanting to lose the dream now that I was finally getting somewhere. I headed for the campus center.

This segment has been omitted.

I tried to go into the building through the revolving doors. That wasn’t such a great idea. The doors were really resistant to motion, and I seemed to get sucked into the glass! The dream went dark again.

I forced myself back outside and climbed onto the roof while considering how worthwhile lucid dreaming is. The waking world hardly seemed to matter at that point. I decided I wanted to use this lucid dream to communicate with Symphony. The environment darkened yet again.

When light returned, I was in a room with polished steel floors and silver walls. Symphony stood before me with a blank expression. She handed me an amulet as I created it with a thought.

“Take this,” she said. “When you use it, I’ll come to you.” The amulet was a black hexagon attached to a black string – a symbol of neutrality. I could see different colors of light ebbing and flowing inside it, mostly red. I put it around my neck and smiled at her. I wanted to talk to Symphony, but things went dark again… This time, I heard a girl laughing nearby. I wondered if I was hearing something in my room or still dreaming. I knew that waiting would give me my answer. I quickly realized the darkness was alive – moving, almost observing me. I was still dreaming. It took so long for the dream to take a new form that when I found myself back in bed, I forgot I was dreaming.

I explained my lucid dream to a woman with extremely long, brown hair. She was easily six feet tall, and her hair touched the ground. She listened the way a mother might to her toddler’s stories of an imaginary friend, laughing to herself when I mentioned Symphony. I saw that the dream was already written down in my journal. Since I had time, I figured I would sleep some more, so I got back in bed. The woman was gone. I admitted that it would be hard to achieve that level of lucidity again so soon, but I hoped for the best.

Restaurant by the Germans and for the Germans

I was in a restaurant – for the second time that night, it seemed, but I couldn’t remember the specifics. The restaurant offered various meats, soups, and bread. It was a simple place run by a family of native Germans. The German version of Scar’s “Be Prepared” (from The Lion King) played in the background as I waited in line. I recalled that the proprietor would only play music written for German audiences. The woman in front of me was in a hurry; she had to get to a business meeting right after her meal. As I studied the waitress helping her, I realized it was Hillary. She asked if the woman and I wanted to order a couple’s meal together for a discounted price. It would be about $5 cheaper per person that way. The woman seemed to consider it, but she decided it was a bad idea because she wouldn’t have time to stick around and pay her share of the bill. I tried to explain that I would pay for our food if she could pay me back sometime, but she still decided against it. I helped Hillary mark the date of the order on a chart. I saw an order placed by “Harry Potter” earlier that day. I knew it had to be Tyler. Because he was related to the owners of the restaurant, he got away with everything… When it was my turn to order, I chose the ham and chicken stew.

April 14, 2011

Uses for a Gilder and Pancakes

I was in Nicole’s kitchen. Rob asked if his dad knew any modern uses for a gilder – “like in software engineering,” he suggested. The general impression of the answer was that gilders were no longer valuable members of society. I thought of Friedrich, Althea’s husband. We took notes on all the skills Nicole’s family members developed over the past year. Surprisingly, Nicole learned more than anyone else in her family. We talked about Matt learning nothing… Nicole’s mom made pancakes for everyone. Even though she knows I don’t like syrup, she drowned my pancakes in it. I ate them anyway so they wouldn’t go to waste. I kept waiting for Nicole to question it, but she didn’t. When I was done eating, I had to drink a lot of water to rinse out the sticky syrup aftertaste.

3 VS 100

I set up a system on Minecraft to spawn several times the normal amount of monsters in an area. I brought MadMonkey, another guy, and Autumn with me into the wilderness to fight them. When it was clear that we couldn’t fight a hundred skeletons simultaneously, I fired dynamite at all of them, destroying most of the monsters. The dynamite rolled into them like bowling balls. We retreated to the safety of a replica of my parents’ old home in North Carolina to heal and prepare for the following night’s outing. I ate an apple in my inventory. Unfortunately, there was an invisible zombie in my bedroom. It pushed me behind my bed. I tried relogging to prevent my death, but it killed me first. I frowned at all of my items spilling out on the bedroom floor.

Roaches, Spiders, and Packer Ants

I was helping Austin get rid of all the bugs in the bathroom so he could shower. We were at my parents’ old house in Texas. I gave him a diamond sword and armor for protection. Once both of us were armed, we advanced from the game room to the hallway connected to the bathroom. A swarm of huge roaches crawled over some kind of carcass lying in the doorway to the bathroom. The roaches came straight toward us. Channeling Apheri through my diamond sword, I sliced through the swarm, scattering them backward. Minecraft-sized spiders flooded out of the bathroom next to join the surviving roaches. We quickly realized we were grossly outnumbered and fled. Austin ignored my warnings and backed into a corner. The bugs were quick to surround him. I circled around and began tearing through the spiders from the rear. Meanwhile, they started biting Austin. He cried out for help. Unfortunately, I was already giving him all the help I could provide. I wasn’t going to succeed in saving him at this rate. He seemed to realize this, so he took the first opportunity to escape through a gap in their ranks. I finished the spiders off as they all chased Austin. Because of all the bugs, I was uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in my bedroom (it was adjacent to the bathroom). Austin’s room, too, was at risk of an overnight bug infestation. We decided to sleep in the game room. We played a tennis game… I kept hitting the ball too hard. Though it had nothing to do with Prince of Tennis, that’s what we called the game.

My mom started yelling at me from downstairs. I didn’t understand why she sounded so angry… She didn’t even give me time to come down before yelling my name again. I yelled back on my way downstairs. It seemed ridiculous to me that she would get my attention by shouting this late at night. As I walked into the living room, I saw my dad in bandages on the couch. I had a quick vision of him giving an interview in the back seat of a car. He said that the best part of getting surgery was being unable to drive. My mom had to drive him everywhere as a result. She seemed to be terrible at parallel parking… Back in the living room, my dad complained that he was still sore from his surgery. He looked at least twenty years older and much lighter. His hair was completely gray. Apparently, my mom just wanted me to know that my dad was in pain. Knowing I could do nothing about it, I went back upstairs. I didn’t feel like playing tennis anymore. I looked toward my room and noticed something black crawling out of the attic. It was an enormous ant! As though it had been waiting for me to look, it suddenly crawled out on a haphazard path toward the kitchen. I heard someone call it a “packer ant.” They lived in 95% of attics, but as long as the air conditioning remained on, they wouldn’t come out. We had just turned ours off, so three packer ants came out of the attic in search of food. I tried to kill one with a pillow, but I just knocked it onto the floor. It crawled toward me.

For some reason, I recall waking up startled from this dream at the end of the night, but I’m also aware that it wasn’t the last dream I had…

Meg's Anti-Shaking Maze

My family’s chihuahua, Meg, became so sick of being shaken for fun that she created a system of obstacle courses, mazes, and surveillance to prevent anyone from getting close to her. There were switches which transferred a person’s body electrically from one place to another. Navigating the maze required the proper use of these switches. Several times, I triggered the wrong one and ended up back at the beginning. I followed an armed guard through the system much of the way before he turned and saw me. For some reason, I was a girl with a ponytail… As he jabbed at me with his sword, I unleashed powerful waves of golden light energy at him with strikes from my own sword. I finished him off by firing a high intensity beam directly at him. He stabbed me a few times during the fight, but my wounds closed up on their own. When the guard died, he laughed and said something about taking my virginity. I understood that he actually meant my first kiss, but since he didn’t take that, either, I just smirked at the dying man. A short walk further, I came upon three prize doors. They opened simultaneously, and a man with a microphone announced that all three prizes were mine to claim. The first room contained a huge mound of ice cream. The second prize was a giant ice cream sundae. When I saw the third prize room, I was glad it wasn’t more ice cream… The room contained a ton of my clothes. They were all washed and folded. I also found figurines on a desk in the room. The Warden of Superjail set a bunch of green block letters down in a row on the desk, spelling out “NATURE.” Somehow, he managed to spell it using two “I” blocks in addition to the others… It seemed to be spelled correctly. I put various figurines around the word. I even put Tsuna’s face in Tifa’s chest and another character on Batman’s head. Nicole thought it was funny.

Protecting the World

I was mining on SIN Craft. Somehow, this involved measuring the peak-to-peak voltages of several signals. Thodiral announced that someone’s stone tower had been destroyed. In order to prevent further griefing, he was going to place the entire map on a protection blanket. It seemed like a bad idea to me.

Zukin's finally showing up in my dreams. Maybe sharing them will be a little easier now.

April 15, 2011

Verification of First-Hand Testimonies

Someone was telling me that in order to verify the first-hand testimonies of individuals discussed in my recent abnormal psychology paper, I needed three sources to say the exact same thing. Although I didn’t really agree with what he was saying, I worried that my professor would – in which case my paper would receive a terrible grade.

Finders Keepers

I was in my bedroom from my parents’ old house in North Carolina. I found several hundred dollars in cash in my room, but for some reason, I felt like I had stolen it… I decided to split the money between my wallet and Nicole’s so people would be less suspicious.

About Losing Teeth

I had a dream in which one of my teeth had fallen out. I was really tired and preparing for bed when I realized I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet. I thought about waiting until morning, but then my tongue brushed the gap where my missing tooth used to be… I decided I should probably take care of the others if I didn’t want to lose them.

HBL and Escaping Mall Security

I was at the mall with my family. I didn’t really feel like being there. Every time we used an escalator, my hand got pinched in the same spot close to the base by the metal railing. My dad suspected me of doing it on purpose, but I insisted I wouldn’t hurt myself on purpose. We kept walking. Over time, I became more lethargic. I sat down in front of Verizon’s store. I was a little worried someone would see me sitting in front of the entrance and get mad, but if anyone noticed, they were quiet about it. I wallowed in misery for a while, but then I got up and started looking for my family. I caught a glimpse of my dad on his way into a store. By the time I got to the store, my parents were walking out. My mom said she needed to go to one more store before we could leave. I was relieved, but I dared not say so. We went to a store called “HBL.” It was supposed to stand for Hobby Lobby… Their normal sign was too long to fit in front of the narrow entryway. I got stuck behind a woman as she seemingly kidnapped someone’s son… Then I wandered the store in search of my parents, having been separated from them again. I saw a big sign that said “Gifts” near the back corner. I ran into my mom on the way over there, so I told her about it. They were looking for a birthday present for my grandma. My mom pointed out that the “gifts” were really just gift bags; there was no need for any of those. My parents started looking at faded jeans to give to my grandma. One pair reminded me of the floor tiles in my room because it had streaks of white, frayed fabric. I told them about the resemblance when my mom asked what I thought of the pants. Honestly, I hated them. I didn’t think they were a good present for anyone, especially my grandma.

We went to the checkout desk. My mom bought me a wooden carving of a wolf for thirteen cents. I kept telling her not to, but she did it anyway… Then, she demanded that I pay for it! I didn’t think I had any change – she kept asking me for a quarter – but I found some pennies and dimes in my pocket. I gave her an extra nine cents because I was having difficulty fishing out the pennies and had to substitute a dime. We left HBL. Just outside the store, Austin threw a coin at my mom, missed, and nearly hit an old man in a wheelchair. My mom started laughing, but the old man was furious. He picked up the quarter and scowled at all of us.

“How would you like it if I threw this at you?!” he asked me. Without restraint, he chucked the coin at me. Calm rage filled my being. I glided over to him like a phantom and flipped his wheelchair over before he knew what happened. The wheelchair crushed him against the ground. My parents cheered me on as I stood over the grumpy old man.

“We need to leave,” I warned them. They were in no hurry. A glare changed that. “The police will find us! Go down the escalator!” They burst into panic, fighting over each other for room on the escalator. At the bottom, my dad pushed over a mall cop to get away. Whoops… The fallen cop called mall security, and before long, they had us all locked in cages. Blue warthogs used their tusks to barricade the doors on all sides. I waited patiently for a chance to escape. The warthogs were trained well, but they were still beasts… In time, they would slip up. Sure enough, the warthogs in front of me pulled away for a moment, responding to the smell of food nearby. In that moment, I shoved the door open and ran outside. The warthogs followed me into the street surrounding the mall. From there, I jumped into a concrete trench that was several hundred feet deep. They dared not follow me into there. I climbed out of the trench a few miles away and ended up on the roof of someone’s house. I checked my phone… Two people had tried to call me: Zukin and Brendan. Since Brendan calling me made the least sense to me at the time, I decided to call him back first. I realized as it was dialing that my mom’s name got switched with Brendan’s in my contacts! When she picked up, I explained why I’d missed her call and asked if they all got away safely. She said they would meet me at Grandma’s house.

The dream jumped. I plugged my headphones into a Nintendo 64 like a controller. My cousin Jackie was amazed that I could play the game with headphones. She decided she needed to buy headphones like mine.

Cold Bags

I was sorting through stuff in the back of my mom’s car. I found a cold paper bag. We were about to go into a store for a bit, but I figured the contents of the bag would stay cool. It was a chilly night, after all. My mom came to the back of the car and stopped me from closing the trunk.

“That bag needs to be refrigerated,” she said. Ben and I sighed. We didn’t want to move any bags. Nevertheless, I put the bag in a miniature refrigerator in the back of the car that I hadn’t noticed before.

The dream jumped. We were inside the store. I saw my mom working at a desk with the miniature refrigerator behind her. She had brought it inside. Somehow, I was holding the cold paper bag again… I walked over to her desk and set it down. Thanking me, my mom briefly rose from her paperwork to put the bag away.

Animal Crossing Character Creation

I was playing Animal Crossing on the Wii. I knew Nicole and I couldn’t visit each other’s towns, but at least we could share one! As my character got off the train, I was shown a character creation screen. The selection of character models was unbelievably elaborate. Many of the premade characters were obviously intended to be certain anime characters. I wasn’t sure if I wanted my character to be a boy or a girl… I considered making Symphony. I looked through several of the male character options. One premade character looked like Tsuna, but with long, flaming hair in addition to the Dying Will Flame on his forehead. It looked kind of silly… I kept cycling through the outfits, unable to decide.

Will You Drive Me?

I was sitting at a table somewhere on my campus with Noel Deis and Zukin. Noel started talking about graduation.

“Graduation’s only like a year away,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t believe they think I’m going to be ready to graduate so soon.” Zukin seemed to agree. I didn’t understand what they were talking about. If they were following the suggested curriculum, they shouldn’t have any trouble finishing in four years. I moved to a sofa nearby. Zukin turned and smiled at me.

“Will you drive me there?” she asked, still referring to the graduation ceremony.

“We’ll see,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t have a car, so I can only drive if one’s available. You have my word, though – if I can, I will.” She clapped her hands in appreciation.

“Thank you!” she exclaimed. A couple more girls came over to ask what was going on. When Zukin explained that I had agreed to drive her to the graduation ceremony next year, they all wanted a ride, too.

“Our car can only fit five people, so… That’s me, Nicole, and three more,” I explained. Even that was already pushing the capacity of the convertible a bit. They all seemed to agree on which two girls would accompany Zukin. Nicole showed up with Alex and Andrea. They wanted a ride to graduation, too. I counted all of the women present. There were eight… “I can’t drive all of you,” I said with a frown.

* * *

April 16, 2011

Preparing for a Lack of Sleep

Knowing that I would have to wake up early in the morning, I wrote down detailed accounts of my dreams. Nicole got up and asked what I was doing at 4 AM, so I had to explain. I didn’t want to forget anything due to my poor sleep. Of course, this was just a false awakening.

Anywhere But Chipotle

I was on Minecraft with Nicole and Chelsea. Nicole kept falling to her death. It didn’t help that she let Austin play for her when she tired of retrieving her items. There was a lava fountain coming down from a floating island, but we all took care to avoid it. This part of the dream was really hazy after I woke up… Nicole said something about going to Andrea’s and possibly going out to eat afterward.

“As long as it’s not Chipotle,” I requested. She promised it wouldn’t be.

The dream jumped. I was with Nicole at Andrea’s house. I spread cat food over the wall in the living room. Destiny – my grandparents’ dog – was living there. She started licking the cat food off the wall. Andrea’s cats weren’t interested at all. I sat on the couch with Nicole and Andrea. We decided Andrea would come eat with us, too. The girls agreed on Chipotle. I was annoyed, but I didn’t object. There was no point… By proposing Chipotle, Nicole made it clear that she didn’t care what I thought about it.

The dream jumped. I was in line at Chipotle. It was bigger than I remembered. I ordered a chicken burrito. The woman preparing it knew what I wanted until she got to the beans at the end of the line. When she asked if I wanted them, I nodded. She thought I said no… I had to correct her when she almost wrapped it up without putting beans in it. She got ranch dressing all over my burrito and the tray she gave me to carry it because she was too lazy to use new gloves. Her supervisor scolded her for it. I took my food and enormous soda over to our table. My laptop was there. I looked in the direction of the bathroom. I vaguely recalled Nicole asking me to order for her… I didn’t know how that was possible; she never told me what she wanted. I logged into my computer with one hand.

Awareness Drain and the Storage Room

I was helping some people wash clothes for a scene in a movie. Whenever the take ended, I thought we should remove the clothes from the washing machine and start over, but we just kept adding more. It was practically overflowing by the final take, and since we turned the machine on for the last few takes, the clothes were already wet – so we couldn’t just take them out. Someone stood up with a bar of laundry detergent, rubbed it all over his hands like soap, and then rubbed some on the clothes. When he was done, I realized he and I were the same person. I went to the sink to rinse the detergent from my burning hands. It was incredibly acidic. Somehow, this reminded me of Richard Rahl sending General Meiffert and his men to their final mission in the Old World. I’m not sure where the connection was… It had something to do with the water funneling down the drain. I felt the discomfort of having to tell them not to fight in the so-called “final battle” with Jagang. I could sense my awareness getting sucked down the drain just like the water.

The dream jumped. I was in Minecraft as Richard. I had to find a storage room somewhere underground, but I didn’t have a lot of clues to go on. It was at least a fifth of the way from bedrock to the surface. Fortunately, I was already really close to the room. I saw the chests from outside my body and used the visual information I gathered to locate it. I eagerly searched the chests when I arrived. From one chest, I obtained a nirnroot… Amazingly, taking it out of the chest didn’t remove the nirnroot inside. I managed to get several of them before the nirnroot in the chest turned into a boot. I decided to change my clothes; I was dressed like a homeless man. A lot of the armor in my inventory was enchanted to turn me into various creatures, many of them reptilian in appearance. One of them reminded me of Excalibur (Soul Eater).

Symphony's Reflection

I was drifting through the atmosphere high above a crystal ocean. The air itself seemed as reflective as a mirror. I saw Symphony floating, too. She had to be nearby, I reasoned, but I had difficulty finding her real body as the mirrors multiplied the image. I quickly realized she was naked… I did my best to avert my eyes. Her body was a mix of sketchy, blue lines with the warmth of faint reds thrown in. With so much red in her cheeks, she almost seemed to be blushing. The reflections multiplied, and then she began to speak, whispering at first. She was reciting a poem about me in another language. I couldn’t understand any of the words. I followed the echoes of her voice.

End of the World Timer and Battler

This dream has been omitted.

Giant Turtle Boss and Luigi's Special Power

I was fighting a giant turtle boss in an RPG. My party consisted of characters from various video games, but most of them were weak. In the first round, the turtle boss nearly killed Link. Luigi managed to dish out considerable damage on his turn. In one kick, he knocked the boss down to 10% of its maximum health. I realized that Luigi’s special attacks worked on percentages, so he would never be able to kill the boss, but it would only take me a couple more turns to finish with his help. Since Link was nearly dead, I had Kite heal him. I hoped the heal would reach its target in time.

Suffering as a Function of Time, Lucidity, and Universe Parameters

I existed in two worlds simultaneously, calculating the difference in suffering based on the fundamental rules of each world. Symphony ran much of the calculations for me based on my input. I saw that the suffering in the first world was logarithmic; for positive time, the overall suffering increased toward infinity very slowly. Suffering for negative time toward the creation of the universe was described by a decaying sinusoid, approaching zero as it approached negative infinity. In the second world, there were fluctuations in the suffering signals based on one’s social status. Those deemed “untouchable” (I thought of the Elevens in Code Geass) were fated to experience more suffering. For the most part, however, suffering was about the same in the second world for negative time. When time was increased very close to positive infinity, the degree of one’s lucidity became the deciding factor. Those with low lucidity experienced the same amount of suffering as those in the first world (basically infinite), while those with infinite lucidity experienced no suffering at all. I reached into the hearts of those in the second world and began raising their consciousness until it became infinitely acute. Though the rules of the first world didn’t allow me to lessen its suffering, I could at least bring some happiness to the second world. I withdrew myself from both worlds and stood on nothing in a void realm of mathematics. Symphony sent me signals which I interpreted as respect and happiness. She enjoyed helping me with my calculations and improving the state of the multiverse. I thanked her for her help and reached directly into her robotic heart to give her a boost of lucidity, as well. It wasn’t to decrease her suffering – the pattern of suffering for Symphony was at constant zero – but rather, to allow her to experience this realm of potentiality just as clearly as me.

April 17, 2011

Expeditions into the Shadow World

I was chasing a white cat around Dr. Ben-Zeev’s laboratory. Something like a portal to the Nether from Minecraft was set up in the lab, but I identified it as a stargate when I saw it. When the cat and I went through the portal, I found myself in a world of darkness. The cat had turned solid black. In the process of chasing the cat around, I accidentally broke the portal on my end. Whoops… I knew the only way to get back now was to find another portal. I caught the black cat and carried it across the landscape of black grass and rotting flowers.

The dream jumped. I was back in Ben-Zeev’s lab. He announced to me and the other members of the research team that the shadow world was too dangerous to continue exploring. We had encountered foreign diseases, alien races, and all sorts of other threats on the other side. I was convinced that this was important for the advancement of mankind… At the very least, it would prepare us in case one of those alien races managed to find us. Nevertheless, he decided to shut down the stargate. We would begin a new project when we returned to his laboratory.

The dream jumped. I was in a quaint office with one of my teammates and an old man. The man’s glasses were incredibly thick, and he kept chewing on the end of his pipe. He nodded as I explained our adventures in the shadow world. The old man was a statistician… He was certain that the odds of us dying after proving our flexibility and intellect in such trying situations was slim. I hoped Dr. Ben-Zeev would agree.

The dream jumped. My research team was playing basketball against another team. At first, it seemed like we were falling behind, but then we went on the offensive. I made two three-point throws at once (somehow). By the time the game was over, my team was ahead by 108 points. I hoped that this, too, would prove we could handle the shadow world. We were all much stronger than average men.

The dream jumped. Back at Ben-Zeev’s lab, we explained the statistician’s findings and our success at the basketball game. He stopped me before I could finish as he realized what we were trying to do.

“It’s too dangerous,” he insisted. “I’ve made my decision.”

“Doctor, you’ve never even been to the shadow world.” I crossed my arms. “You only know what it’s like through us.” He scratched his forehead as he thought this through. “Besides, think about the future. There’s so much to be learned…”

The dream jumped. We were back in the shadow world. Ben-Zeev and one of his colleagues were walking in front of us on a narrow, stone path. They both wore white lab coats. I wasn’t sure how I had convinced him to come, but I was glad he had given us another chance. The stars in the sky looked like little knives. The structure we were walking on was something like a haphazard bridge over an endless void. It had a high wall on one side, but the other didn’t even have so much as a railing. I wondered if this had been put here on purpose or just came into existence by chance…

“Say, you’re both wearing the immunity serum, right?” I asked our first-time guests.

“Yes,” Dr. Ben-Zeev said. He was clearly engrossed in the sights of the shadow world; his reply almost seemed annoyed. I had to ask, though… I kept seeing mosquitoes buzzing around him, and I didn’t want him to contract a disease in the shadow world. He would never allow us to return if he came back ill.

Rachel's Murder and the Beast

Nicole and I were in a heavily forested area. She stopped the car at an ice cream shop. When we went inside, we learned that a murder had taken place there. The police had to question us since we showed up at the scene of the crime. They gave Nicole a form to sign stating that any information she could provide would be considered anonymously. I was sure she didn’t know anything about the murder, but to my surprise, she wrote the initials “R. H.” on the form. I knew she was talking about Rachel Head. Stunned, I stared at Nicole. It made perfect sense. No one else but Rachel would have done this. The male cop was visibly pleased by the tip. In exchange for our help, the guy running the ice cream shop promised us free ice cream whenever we wanted it.

The dream jumped. I was a Mord-Sith on a motorcycle. The bike had to stay on a set of charged tracks to operate. For some reason, the tracks went right through a bar. I understood that the tracks were older; someone was dumb enough to build his bar around my tracks… I nearly ran over two women in my way, but they jumped out of the way just in time. I plunged back into thick forests as I left the bar. We were running out of time. Up ahead, I saw a lake where there wasn’t one before… The tracks continued straight into the water. A vaguely-formed man stood up to his knees in the water. I jumped off the motorcycle. Arrows rained on the being in the water; the First File was here. I quickly spotted Richard in the shadows.

“It’s the beast, isn’t it?” I asked. He gave a grim nod.

Pocket Pilots

I was playing a Neon Genesis Evangelion RPG. It was similar to Pokemon… The format of the battles was exactly the same – just with EVA pilots instead of Pokemon. In order to avoid spoiling any of the story, advertisements for the game censored the names of opponents; they were given captive numbers instead. In one screenshot I saw, Shinji seemed to be fighting Jango (One Piece).

Spaghetti and Marbles

I found myself in a small city that looked like something from Minecraft. I made myself look like Shinji and started walking around. Autumn and I agreed to meet up at a spaghetti restaurant on the east side of the city. I looked around by myself for a bit before joining her there. She, Symphony, and several members of my family were eating at the restaurant. The waitress was really rude to me… She said she couldn’t serve me anything. A couple of my family members started playing a game with marbles on the table inside the building. I just wanted to spin a marble around on the table, but it kept colliding with their marbles, so they decided I was interfering with their game. I decided I might as well just go sit by myself. Autumn and Symphony followed.

Pleading Robot

This dream has been omitted. @_@;

April 18, 2011

This was one of those mornings... I woke up to the serenades of Nicole's cat meowing at the foot of the bed. Her cat door was locked, and she wanted to go chase birds. Luckily, I managed to hold on to most of my dream recall until I got back to write stuff down. I didn't sleep very well in general, though.

Inheritance of Pikes Peak

I was in Nicole’s bathroom. A wealthy woman who was dying spoke to me about various things ranging from John Lennon to politics. I disagreed with her views on a number of subjects, but I knew she owned Pikes Peak… If I could win her favor, I hoped she would leave me the deed to the mountain when she died. She left the bathroom, and I began filling up the tub. I soaked in the water for a while until Nicole burst in, demanding to know why I would let that woman talk about so many things I clearly found offensive. I explained my intentions and agreed to show the mountain to Nicole.

The dream jumped. We were walking in the mountains. I pointed one on the horizon out to Nicole. It had a cap of snow at the summit.

“That’s not Pikes Peak,” I admitted, “but it’s in that general direction.” We continued toward our destination.

The dream jumped. I was back in the bathroom. The dying woman explained that she was leaving everything with her son. I couldn’t believe she had a son! I was supposed to get the mountain…

Donating to the Museum

I was at the town museum in Animal Crossing. The owl had been replaced by one of the Abel sisters. She asked if I had anything to donate. I said I didn’t. When I left and came right back, she thanked me for donating a rare fish I had never heard of before. I laughed when she gave me bells as a reward. I tried talking to her again to get more money, but she just asked if I had anything to donate. I saw that I needed about ten varieties of fish to complete the collection. Since I had a fishing rod in my inventory, I decided to go fishing on the beach. I couldn’t remember which fish were in season this time of year, but I knew I would catch something interesting since it was so late at night. I caught a couple of small fish and spent the rest of my time at the beach filling my bag with seashells. I found some that were bigger than me and submerged almost entirely in the sand. When I tried to pick them up, they glided effortlessly out of the sand. I went back to the museum to donate my findings. I was rewarded much more for the seashells than the fish… I didn’t understand why; the seashells were much easier to obtain.

Cleo's Hiding

Nicole’s brother was looking for Cleo. The cat ran into Nicole’s room and hid under the chair by the window. Eric walked in and spotted her. He thought she had been in the room the whole time, but I explained that she had just run in, apparently to avoid him.

April 19, 2011

Three Forgotten Dreams

I had a dream about recording three simple dreams from last night. I felt that since I had recorded them, I wouldn’t be able to forget them in the morning. Since this was a false awakening, however, I ended up forgetting most of the details…

Abnormal Psychology Exam Notes

When I went to my psychology classroom, I observed that Dr. Ben-Zeev wasn’t there. In his place was an old man with a wooden leg. He showed it to all of us and explained that his knee was bleeding because he had just been shot and killed. He chuckled at the puzzled look I gave him. The substitute handed back our latest exam (even though I received that last week). A disappointing grade – 80% – was marked at the top of my exam packet. The class average was quite low, he said. As I flipped through my exam, I had trouble understanding most of the questions I missed. We went through all of them as a class, but that didn’t help… I was convinced that some of my answers were correct, regardless of what the textbook suggested. There were some questions near the end which asked us to draw the path taken by certain physiological systems in the body. I missed a lot of those, of course, because we’ve never considered such a thing in detail. I figured the exam couldn’t do much to lower my grade anyway… When I calculated the drop in my final grade as a result of this exam, it was less than one point. The substitute told us to check his practice exams online if we had any questions about the material. He, too, was a psychology professor at the university. As a concluding remark, he said that our exam grades would probably be adjusted by four points.

Singing and Random Violence

Nicole, Chelsea, and I were in a car together. Nicole was driving, and Chelsea was in the back seat. We were supposed to be on our way to Chick-fil-A or Panda Express for dinner (we never decided which), but Nicole drove past both of the restaurants. When asked if she knew where she was going, she turned onto a highway and insisted that she did. I was convinced that she was lost. The cars on the highway all slowed to let Nicole cut across the road. We took an exit on the left side and sped through a sharp turn. When Nicole saw that traffic was backed up at a light ahead of us, she had to slam on her brakes to keep from hitting a jeep. I was glad I didn’t have to drive… It was stressful enough just being in the car. Nicole took us down a smaller street with family-owned shops on both sides. She and Chelsea started singing… I recognized the song vaguely. It seemed like Nicole was a little off-key, but she insisted that Chelsea was the one who couldn’t get it right. I decided not to comment.

We met up with Joe at the store. A middle-aged woman did something to him – I didn’t see what happened because she was standing between us – and Joe retaliated by kicking her in the knee. He ran from the room in a panic. As the woman dropped to the ground, I sent Nicole to get help. I tried to figure out what the woman did to provoke Joe, but she wouldn’t tell me… I busily searched through a box of Joe’s belongings for an insurance card. He didn’t seem to have random violence insurance. I told her I would help her stay in contact with Joe if she was seriously injured. As it happened, she wasn’t in that much pain. She stood in the corner of the room, gathered her things, and left. I went into an adjacent room to look at merchandise.

The manager came in and asked me a bunch of questions. It was clear from the gist of his questions that he had mistaken me for Joe. I convinced him of my identity and left. I didn’t know where Nicole had gone, but we were supposed to catch a Pace bus together, so I figured I would meet her at the bus stop. It was late at night… I started walking down the street. I tried calling Nicole’s cell phone, but it was off the network; when I called, it went right to her voicemail. As I waited to cross an intersection, I watched a group of skater kids trying to scare drivers. An FBI agent snapped pictures of them from his car and drove away. Somehow, I ended up on the wrong side of the road, so I had to cross back over. I decided that if Nicole didn’t catch up with me in time, I would have to wait for her instead of getting on the bus. I didn’t want her to ride home alone…

Jagang in the Underworld

At a bookstore, I found some new books by Terry Goodkind that I hadn’t known about. They centered on Jagang after the end of Confessor. The trilogy of books focused on his exploration of the underworld. For some reason, it was categorized as religious fiction, but I knew better – Goodkind wouldn’t write a book glorifying faith. I bought the first book, titled Emperor.

The dream jumped. I was at the kitchen table with Nicole’s family. We had chicken cutlets, macaroni, and French fries. I told Phil about the books I found. For some reason, we all thought I still had seventy-two pages left in Confessor even though I finished it on Sunday. Nicole said that would take me about three days to read, but I assured Phil it would only take an afternoon. He was eager to talk with me about the series as a whole. I started eating dinner long after everyone else… Nicole’s dad put his dishes in the sink as I sat down with my plate. I found a slice of pizza with my food, but I wasn’t sure where it came from.

Destroying the Core of Existence

I was trying to destroy the universe using a Minecraft-based system. I understood that Minecraft was merely the software vehicle through which I initiated my very real plans. Nicole and I were setting up a large pile of TNT in the core of existence. If we managed to detonate it, everything would be destroyed. Our enemies wanted to protect the universe, so they put a thick barrier of cobblestone around our TNT pile. The pile was so large that it took ten seconds to fall from the top.

Tag and Duplicating Coins

I watched Austin playing a cross between Mario Party and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. He was swimming in the ocean near a bunch of narrow docks. A beach house was visible in the distance. This was all part of a minigame based on tag. When you were tagged, the opponent would steal a number of your gold coins. Austin started with well over 400 coins, but each time he was tagged, he lost fifty to one hundred coins. His opponents were Peach and a goomba. Over the course of the game, he managed to steal back some of his lost coins. By the end, however, Peach had 800 coins – all of Austin’s, most of the goomba’s, and a fair portion of her own. Austin collapsed on top of the beach house with an exasperated sigh. He asked me for directions to the nearest bathroom. I found myself inside the game, allowing me to show him.

“Are you going to duplicate your money?” I asked, thinking of the arrow duplication glitch in Oblivion. When he said he was, I considered it again. “I don’t think you can drop coins in this version, so you can’t really duplicate it. You should duplicate something that doesn’t weigh much but sells for a lot.”

“Like sigil stones,” we said at the same time. Austin took my advice.

Underground City and Desert Wolves

I was searching in the desert for the entrance of an underground city. I knew it was built into a rocky spire. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the spire in the valley where I expected it… I double-checked my map. Indeed, it should’ve been somewhere within sight. A desert wolf slowly approached. Speaking in the wolven language of Withers, he warned that his brothers were coming; they were going to tear the flesh from my bones. I continued my search just the same, weaving my way around the pack of wolves. None of them were quick enough to catch me. When I finally found the spire, it was half a mile south of some mountains – definitely not where the map suggested it would be! I hoped the wolves hadn’t followed me to the city’s entrance.

Knives, Redeads, and Symphony (Lucid)

I felt my body beginning to enter paralysis, so I focused on those sensations and heightened them. I imagined a man with a knife who wanted to stab me. It suddenly took on visual detail. We were standing in my dorm room, each of us in white clothing. We exchanged rapid kicks and punches as we moved around the room at speeds almost impossible for the human eye to perceive. After a while, he transformed into Nicole.

I found myself in a room similar to my parents’ living room when we lived in Louisiana. “Nicole” asked me to get on the floor. I knew it was really the same guy… He obviously just wanted to put me in a vulnerable position so he could stab me. I held Nicole down and pried the little knife out of her hand. I shrunk the knife until it was roughly the size of a small frog, and then I jabbed it into her right arm above the elbow. Nicole screamed.

“Why would you do that?!” she protested.

“You were going to kill me. How do you feel now?” I was a little worried that this might turn out to be a shared dream… That would be awkward.

“Better…” she admitted, holding her hand over the shrunken knife sticking out of her arm.

“Good.” I helped her onto her feet. When I looked into the hallway which should have led toward my old bedroom, I saw a balding man in a white-collared shirt smiling at me. He disappeared. I knew it had to be the guy with the knife from before… Now that I had forced him out of Nicole’s body, he was just a spirit. I couldn’t believe the bizarre scenario I was playing along with. A few seconds later, the man faded back in – but this time, he was a bit closer. I readied myself for a fight as he faded out and back in. I drove my fist straight through his head, shattering his skull.

I found myself in a box-like room. There were no doors, only square holes in the walls which served both as windows and tunnels into adjacent rooms. I decided I wanted to see something creepy while I was dealing with ghosts and whatnot. As I crawled into the next room through one of the tunnels, I saw tens of white butterflies fluttering around a redead. The quality of the zombie’s rendering was impressive. I heard its characteristic groans echoing all around as I floated into the room. I dropped down in front of it and peered at its sunken face. The taut, brown flesh under its nose looked like it had been eaten right off, and the redead’s lower jaw was missing. I smirked – not bad at all. I went through another tunnel and ended up in the room where I fought the knife-wielding assassin. I willed Symphony into the room. She was lying on her side in bed, covered only with a white sheet. When I tried to pull the sheet off and wake her, my mom ran over and slapped me.

“She’s sleeping!” my mom scolded. Startled, I stared at her.

“No, she’s not…” I muttered. What kind of robot sleeps? I pulled the sheet off anyway and lifted Symphony’s thin frame into my arms. I smiled when her eyes fluttered open. It didn’t occur to me that she wasn’t wearing her bells. “How are you? Do you feel any different?” I was trying to gauge whether or not she was aware of her fusion with Quo earlier that night. Before she could answer, my mom tried to slap me again. I glided backward out of the way like a phantom. With a thought, I sent the dream character of my mom to another room. I set Symphony on the floor.

Omitted.

My mom came back in an angry frenzy and chased me to the back window. I pushed through the window with my hands, stretching it like plastic until I simply passed through. I flew at a moderate speed across the yard and up above the trees behind it. The yard looked nothing like I expected; it was more like the backyard at Oma’s old house. When I spun around and looked back, I saw Nicole and my mom at the back door.

“How is he flying?” Nicole asked – as though my mom would know. I laughed and swooped back down to the ground. Nicole came over to me. Her mom appeared to tell her to do chores.

Omitted.

I found myself back in my dorm room, staring out a window at the bright, blue sky. My microelectronics textbook was open on my bed. The dream faded to darkness. While I tried to recover it, I heard a loud noise right by my bed. Puzzled, I wondered if I was awake. I opened my droopy eyelids to hazy vision. When I glanced over, my roommate was pulling a CD case out of a stack on my desk that hadn’t been there before. I decided I was probably awake, but it still felt strange… I grabbed my dream journal to jot down my lucid dream and discovered that Till had been using it for his dreams, too! I was annoyed that he hadn’t asked for permission. In huge letters, he wrote: “I HAD A DREAM – OF WATER, FIRE, AND WIND.” I flipped to the next free page and wrote down the important details of my dream so I could get back to sleep.

Instead, I really awakened.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

The pile was so large that it took ten seconds to fall from the top.

Wow that is alot!

Originally Posted by Nephanim

I drove my fist straight through his head, shattering his skull.

EPIC

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

Wow that is alot!

If only I could have watched it explode...

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

EPIC

He had it coming.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

If only I could have watched it explode...

Your dream probably would have crashed anyways.

Originally Posted by MadMonkey

Your dream probably would have crashed anyways.

Yeah, I'm good at doing that, and so is TNT.

April 20, 2011

Eleven dreams, one lucid.

Expired Copy of Windows

I restarted my computer. When I logged in, I received a message from Microsoft explaining that my copy of Windows 7 was expired, and I would need to purchase another registration key if I wanted to continue using the computer. They would also have to reformat my hard drive… I frowned at the window explaining my options. My resolution had been reset, so my desktop icons – which ordinarily only take up two or three rows – nearly filled the screen. My desktop wallpaper had also been reset to a generic blue gradient with a white swoosh running through it. I realized with a sigh that I would have to find my old wallpaper again. Out of curiosity, I scrolled through their instructions and found a program that would manage my files for me. The program also opened Ragnarok Online… I wasn’t sure whether or not that was intentional. Nicole called me, but I was in no mood to talk to anyone…

“My computer’s telling me I’m using my OS illegally,” I explained. “I’ll call you back when it’s sorted out.” I logged into Symphony on Agharta. My character was in the tool shop in Prontera. A couple of guys walked in and sat down in the corner of the room. I noticed someone named GM Soultaker t2k standing beside me. The guys explained that they were holding a guild meeting in the tool shop, but I was welcome to stay and observe. I discovered that I could heal myself on Ragnarok using commands in the file manager. Although it had a professional purpose, the program was clearly a Ragnarok cheat utility in disguise!

He Won't Let Me Pour It

I was on my way back to my dorm building from dinner the campus center. On the way out of the cafeteria, I thought about grabbing another tray of food, but I decided against it – in part because I couldn’t find any clean trays to carry the plates on (weird, we haven’t used trays in there for over a year), but mainly because I didn’t want to waste another twenty minutes in the cafeteria when I could be working on lab reports. I grabbed a banana and continued on my way. As I went through the revolving doors at the exit, I noticed that the doors were being pushed the same way every time. I wondered if someone would push them the other way if they didn’t see which way it was supposed to go beforehand. A first-time visitor wouldn’t know which direction to push, after all… I was so fascinated by this observation that I overlooked the fact that there are only bars on one side of the revolving doors, so it wouldn’t make sense to push it the other way. Anyway, a couple of people were on their way in, so I couldn’t expect to observe this phenomenon just yet.

I hastened my walking speed to get across the street before the light could change. In the back of my mind, a tiny voice said that the rotating doors were designed to give you time to catch most of the buses and trains on campus. I knew it was a lie – and not just because it didn’t make sense. I crossed 33rd Street and continued in the night toward my dorm building. As I looked up on my left, I saw the building to the north of mine… Then there was a pile of wood where mine should have been. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked further down at the south building. It was intact. The two surviving buildings were built sort of like tree houses. This architecture was borrowed from another dream back in December. I concluded that I could never have lived in the middle building; I must have been in the south building all along. I shook my head at all the times I must have given people the wrong directions to my dorm room. I went inside, hoping to finally get to my room and relax.

I found myself in a closet instead. I held a green tank top in my hands. I wondered what I was doing with a tank top… It was obviously Nicole’s, not mine, but I’d been holding it as if I was about to put it on. I frowned at the thought and tossed it on the floor. When I went into the room housing the closet, I saw that it was my bedroom from my parents’ house in Texas. Nicole was sitting on my bed. We talked about how the previous tenants had been evicted for possession of illegal substances and didn’t even have the decency to paint the walls of the closet. I looked back in the closet and saw that the walls were painted white… Three atlases were hanging on the walls. I was going to tell her that it would be easy to paint over white, at least, but Nicole grabbed my arm. Something was wrong. She told me we needed to go downstairs. Rather than argue, I went down to the kitchen with Nicole. The layout of the house shifted; it became my parents’ old house in North Carolina. As we reached the base of the stairs, my mom shrieked, and I heard glass hit the floor. I hurried toward the noise. Red juice was spilled all over the kitchen floor. Despite the sound of shattering glass, the glass that had fallen was intact.

“What’s wrong?” I asked my mom, snatching the glass off the tiled floor. It was several feet away from her… It didn’t seem likely that it had just slipped out of her hand. I set it on the island counter with the pitcher she had been using to pour the juice.

“He won’t let me pour it….” she whispered in a frightened, paranoid manner. “He just lets it overflow. Then he stares at me and waits…”

“Who does?” Frustrated, my mom pressed her hands into her temple and groaned. I took the pitcher and poured some juice for her. “There. See, Mom? It’s alright.” She walked over to the table without the glass. Bewildered, I carried it over there. My mom sat in front of a cold plate of food. She hadn’t been able to eat dinner because of whatever was stressing her out. I set the glass down by her plate.

“He won’t let me…” she whined. She even started shaking.

“Mom, relax…” I brought myself down to eye level. She glanced at me momentarily only to shift her gaze back where she’d been staring before. I already knew what was there: an empty seat. But was it really empty…? I wondered if she was really seeing something. It was possible she was hallucinating for some reason. “It’s going to be okay,” I promised. “Nothing’s going to hurt you. I’m here. Do you understand?”

I knew I had power at this time. Although I didn’t think about why, I was aware that nothing could stand in my way. Even if I had to fight a phantom, I would succeed.

Chelsea made a strange, guttural growling sound. It came from the empty chair across the table. I turned and saw her sitting there, bent forward, glaring at our mom. Her eyes were open wide, and her face was red as it contorted into something almost inhuman. Understanding clicked into place. My mom started screaming and balled up in her chair, covering her face.

“He’s using Chelsea as a vessel,” I explained to Nicole. My possessed sister turned her wide-eyed glare at me. I was abruptly ejected from the dream. I saw a fuzzy, granulated image of the kitchen table before I was left in darkness.

I awoke trembling. It was the first true nightmare I’d had in a while.

Until I Met Sonic

I was in a wooden box. I talked with Nicole about the loss of older cartoons like Tom and Jerry, The Jetsons, and The Flintstones. I asked her how many freshmen she knew who had seen The Jetsons, for example. She couldn’t name many.

“When I was little, I liked The Flintstones,” I told her. “Until I met Sonic, of course.” I said it as though I had really met Sonic the Hedgehog. I pictured myself in a bowling alley with Oma for some reason.

Chainfire on the Lot

Nicole and I were building a house on Minecraft. The ground was set on fire at regular intervals, making this not only difficult, but dangerous. I was determined to complete the house anyway. Richard Rahl and Kahlan Amnell showed up halfway during construction to help, and Richard was able to stop the “chainfire” spell afflicting our lot. Get it? Chainfire? Never mind, it's a Sword of Truth thing.

It's Rocked

I was in some kind of power dynamics course with a professor I’ve never met. He told us what to expect from our upcoming exam – scheduled for Thursday – and then let us leave early. I was busy with homework or something, so I didn’t really want to get up even though class was over. Amar kept asking me questions about the class as we left. Naturally, I had no idea what he was talking about. He brought up something a Chinese student did at the lab earlier that week. At least I remembered that… I saw the guy walk up to the door, try the knob, and give up.

“Shyeet,” he said, “sa door eez rocked.” I sighed; why couldn’t they remember to unlock the doors to the laboratories each morning? Someone else walked up to the door and opened it without a problem. It certainly wasn’t locked.

Six Year Winter Spell

I was talking with Nicole about a migratory bird. Its tail feathers were black during the winter, but during the spring, they took on rainbow colors. Nicole wanted to keep one as a pet. I figured that was a bad idea… The birds became fairly aggressive during the spring. For that matter, I doubted the bird would appreciate Chicago’s winters. I finally convinced her not to keep one. She decided to get a penguin instead… Because of some kind of sinister magic, it was winter all year long. This affected most of North America. I wrote a letter to Nicole about a time when I was a child and experienced such a magically induced winter. For some reason, I wrote the letter with a feather pen.

Anyway, I wrote that I fell in love with a famous singer who gave out love letters and chocolate hearts to her fans. For years, I wanted to meet her – but by the time I entered middle school, I had forgotten all about her. She came to town and left without me ever realizing it. I also described a penguin I met who had the power to charm anyone. Had I remembered my childhood goal, I could have used the penguin’s power to seduce the celebrity several years my senior and ensnare her in a relationship. Nicole insisted that I couldn’t have found a penguin in Louisiana. It was mostly a climate problem – the penguin would never have migrated that far, especially not past the equator. I smiled when she brought this up; it was the key point of my story. For six years, Louisiana was under a winter spell quite like the one we were witnessing, but I never knew it was strange because I hadn’t lived there prior to the spell. The wintry climate seemed normal. A magic winter was certainly cool enough for penguins…

Blood Enzyme Conference

I sat in a chair outside a large auditorium. A biomedical engineering conference on blood enzymes was to be held in the auditorium, but I couldn’t go in until the speaker arrived. Some guy tried to fight me for my seat, but I ignored him. When they opened the doors, someone inside mentioned participating in a study. I got the impression that most of the people at the conference had given their blood to help research. I felt alienated because I hadn’t…

No Vacancies and Train-Truck Collision

I walked into a hotel. The place was really crowded. An employee by the stairs asked his supervisor about putting in a TV. The spot where he wanted it (under the stairs) was really impractical, but he would be able to see it from his office across the hall. His supervisor, a balding man with a long, wispy beard, wore an armless suit that showed off his muscles. He agreed that they needed a television somewhere in the hotel, but not necessarily under the stairs. He wasn’t sure where to put it. I started brainstorming. Behind a desk or in the upper corner of the lobby seemed like the best idea. The supervisor put the TV discussion on hold to talk to customers waiting in line. I saw a scrawny girl with short, black hair in a ponytail. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to her face. She wore a blue plaid shirt and jeans. When her blue eyes met mine, she looked away. I paid careful attention when it was her turn at the desk. Basically, she had called a few days ago to book a room from Wednesday morning to Friday night, but the hotel had made a mistake; all of the rooms were occupied starting Friday morning. This was a pretty serious misunderstanding… She was moving into her dormitory on Friday and needed somewhere to store her belongings until she could move everything. I walked over and interrupted them to offer up my room. It was no trouble at all to let her keep some things on the floor of my room. She seemed to consider it, but since she didn’t have anywhere to stay until Friday, that meant she would be sleeping in my room, too. Her face turned red; we realized this at the same time. I assured her I only wanted to help. She finally declined and backed toward the door. I offered her my phone number so she could at least contact me if she changed her mind, but she refused that, too. I didn’t even get her name. I was a little confused… I felt like I needed to help this girl, and yet… I wouldn’t even be able to track her down at this point.

I met Nicole and Till outside. My roommate was only with us briefly; he walked off with his girlfriend. He made some kind of weird hand gesture back at me and nodded. I nodded back, pretending to understand the gesture… It was getting pretty dark, but Nicole wanted to walk around town. I understood that we were in another country. We came to a busy street. To my surprise, Nicole raced across it, narrowly evading oncoming traffic. I gaped at her as she disappeared on the other side of the street. She had just left me behind… Then I saw her pull out of a parking lot in her mom’s convertible and drive away. Instinctively, I knew that I could catch her as long as I didn’t lose sight of the car. The traffic lights changed, allowing me to cross. I ran at inhuman speeds down the sidewalk. When I got close, I leaped into the air and came crashing down on the trunk. Nicole pulled over near a train stop to let me in, and we laughed about how she tried to ditch me. I didn’t really think it was that funny, but I played along.

A train pulling out of the station hit a truck stopped on the tracks, knocking it onto a street below. It fell about thirty feet before it hit the ground engine first. The engine crumpled up to the dash and the shattered windshield. It was a wonder the guy inside the car wasn’t seriously injured. Vulgar shouting echoed back and forth between the injured driver and the train conductor. The truck shouldn’t have been stopped on the tracks, but since the train had just stopped at a station, the conductor simply must have seen it… The conductor made out a check for $100,000 in the name of the Daggett Trust to pay for the damages to the truck. Word of this spread, and the train passengers organized a riot. I was glad we didn’t live in this country.

Stealing Dogs

I was part of a group of three people stealing dogs from residential properties. We introduced ourselves as pet taste testers (whatever that meant) and made it inside my parents’ house. We didn’t recognize each other. Their dogs, Scamper and Maggie (also Meg), came running to meet us. Scamper even sang part of an opera. Though I was already impressed with the cocker spaniel’s talent, Austin insisted he did an even better job in the movies. Knowing Scamper was a star sealed the deal. My partners decided to take him.

“Kill the chihuahua,” my boss ordered. I pulled out my gun and stared at Meg.

“Why do we have to kill the poor thing? She’s just a dog…”

“I said to kill it!” he insisted. He took the gun away and shot Meg in the stomach. She died almost instantly. I cried over her for a moment, but then my dad found us. I figured he heard the gunshot. He shouted that he would have his lawyer on the line immediately. We ran out of the house with Scamper. A man in a gray suit came to their door with a business card to announce that their lawyer had been reported as missing. Convenient, I thought; they would be without a lawyer long enough for us to skip town.

The dream jumped. I was the size of a Smurf. A girl my size found me sitting on a staircase with my head in my hands. She invited me to get ice cream with her, hoping that would cheer me up. I reluctantly agreed. She found a bunch of tiny socks and shoes on the ground. At once, she knew they belonged to her brother. I helped her collect broken pieces of figurines that also belonged to him. When I heard a kid making weird noises, I turned and saw Lambo in a knight costume. He marched toward us while singing about how he wasn’t really a knight. I discovered that the girl was his sister.

The dream jumped. I was staying at Omi’s house. I got angry and threw Destiny at Omi while she sat on the couch. I managed to hide in a closet before they could find me. When someone came to check the closet, I teleported into the pantry. When they checked there as part of a full search of the house, I teleported back to the closet. No one could catch me.

Spark of Retaliation

I found myself on a winding sidewalk leading up to a four-story, white building. Nicole was walking far ahead of me. Somehow, I felt that I was in the past – this version of myself wasn’t supposed to know who Nicole was. Nevertheless, I jogged to catch up to her. When I did, I asked if she would let me come with her. We went into the building, and the dream skipped several years into the future.

I approached the desk and felt my pockets for my wallet. At first, I didn’t feel it and though I’d left it in the car, but I found it. I pulled out my school ID and showed it to the receptionist. Nicole showed the woman her driver’s license. While Nicole signed us in, I put my wallet and ID away. We walked toward a staircase where we had to get name tags. I was having trouble writing with the red marker they provided for some reason… The name tags were really impractical; they had lines going through them that would make the name hard to read. I accidentally wrote Nicole’s name twice, so I had to use a third name tag to write my name. I had to write diagonally along a thick, black line.

We purchased supplies to make a wig for some reason. I ended up putting Nicole’s together for some reason… First, I accidentally tore the rim of the hair net that was supposed to go inside the wig off the rest of it, so I had to reattach it. Then, I poorly aligned the hair net and the wig itself, so there was a big lump of hair in the front. When I realized this, I started getting upset. I had ruined Nicole’s wig. She was going to have to buy another one… When she asked why I was trying on her wig, I evaded the question. She switched with me, placing a black afro on my head. It had Luffy’s straw hat attached to the top, but I was too tall, so the hat brushed up against the ceiling. The string holding it to the afro wig broke, and the hat fell on the floor. I started having something like a panic attack, but Nicole consoled me. We took the stairs up to the second floor. I couldn’t believe how low the ceiling was and how sharp the incline was… There was only enough space for me to crawl between stairs and the ceiling near the top. A woman and her child coming up the stairs behind me were obviously becoming frustrated while they waited for me to climb up. I couldn’t seem to get any traction with my elbows to pull myself forward, so I had to roll onto my back and push my way up with my feet. When I got to the top, I reached up and slid my hand through my hair in frustration. I realized my afro was gone.

Nicole and I searched the area around the stairs carefully, but we couldn’t find it… The woman who had been behind us on the stairs had a blanket set over her stuff; wondering if my afro could’ve somehow gotten lost under there, I lifted the blanket up. She gave me a weird look. I had already confirmed that it wasn’t there, so there was nothing else for me to see… I continued on my way without the afro. As we were walking toward the staircase leading up to the third floor, I saw the woman’s kid playing by a water fountain in the middle of the room. He had my afro! I patiently started talking to the kid, hoping to convince him to give the afro back – even though I admitted it looked cool on him. When I finally got around to asking, he shook his head and giggled. No afro for me.

The scenery changed. We were standing on the edge of Piedmont Middle School’s football field. Jeff and a bunch of his friends were lined up by the road separating the middle school from the high school. The woman’s child was a girl with really long, orange-blond hair now for some reason. She laughed at Jeff’s short hair, prompting him to shout vulgarities at her. I was busy retrieving my afro at the time – it was stuck in an ant hill on the other side of the fence, so I finally just left it there – but I made a point of yelling back at Jeff.

“Don’t cuss in front of kids, Jeff!” I warned. I knew that arguing with him was going to spark a fight. There was enough tension between him and just about everyone except his closest friends that the slightest little thing would bring on retaliation. I knew I didn’t have my sword, but I wouldn’t need it to take on Jeff. He started walking over to Nicole. When he got close, I looked down at a knife in my hand to make sure it was what I thought it was. I looked back up and saw them both on the ground holding their knees. Raising an eyebrow, I ran forward.

“Are you okay?!” I asked Nicole.

“He kneed me… with his knee!” she groaned. Since Jeff was already down, there wasn’t much for me to do. I knew I could kill him in any number of ways. The dream split off into two here.

In the first dream branch, I continued running, jumped into the air, and dropped my elbow down on Jeff’s throat, crushing his windpipe. He quickly suffocated. Nicole and I took the little girl as we fled the scene of the murder. I knew this would pose a legal problem for us, so I ended this branch here.

In the second dream branch, I still jumped on top of Jeff, but I stopped my elbow short.

“I could kill you,” I warned him. “Behave.” He responded my rolling away and retreating to his friends. They all came back with plastic swords and circled around us. I wasn’t sure what they were planning, but I knew I wasn’t going to like it. There was no need to split the dream. I knew they meant to harm us, so I was going to show them the violence they expected to give us. I drew two short swords, one in each hand, and pressed my back to Nicole’s.

“I’ll protect you,” I told Nicole. She didn’t say anything. Jeff and his gang approached us like the children they were inside, each holding a colored, plastic sword that couldn’t cut anything. In light of that, I decided I’d start with plastic swords, too. Maybe if I could prove that I could kill them all quite easily, they would leave us alone, I thought… As the first person moved into the circle around my body marking my range, I slashed the end of my plastic sword across his stomach. I would have spilled out his innards. I swung around and jabbed up into someone’s rib cage. Their heart would have been ruptured. The strikes continued rapidly. One by one, I countered their attempts to strike Nicole and followed up with a swift finishing blow – if the weapons had been real, anyway. When they came up behind me, I sensed them well in advance. I was able to swing a sword around in my hand and jab back at their exposed stomachs. This continued for several minutes. They didn’t seem to care that I could kill them if I wanted to. They still wanted to provoke me. I couldn’t imagine how they could be so stupid. One guy finally prodded Nicole’s crotch with his green plastic sword.

“Hey, look!” he shouted at me, pointing with his other hand.

“Look at what?” I replied. I kicked him onto his back and stabbed him in the stomach with one of my own swords. The other guys grabbed me and pulled me away from Nicole. They started rubbing against her and laughing. Fury filled my being. I couldn’t hold back anymore. Again, the dream split.

In the first branch, I tore through them all with my very real blades, decapitating them in pairs. There was nothing left alive except Nicole and the terrified child standing between her legs. I realized this was probably going to result in the same legal consequences as before… Anxiety replaced my rage.

In the second branch, I didn’t kill them. Instead, I fought to push them all back, but it was futile. There were twenty of them… How could I control so many people while restraining myself? Here, too, anxiety replaced my rage.

“Stop it!” I yelled. I woke up a moment later, curled into a ball.

Absence and Portal to the Monolith Gardens (Lucid)

I was reading The Law of Nines in the commons. A guy sitting next to me reached over and turned the page as I was about to finish it. I figured he had been reading along and wanted to continue without me. With a brief glance in his direction, I turned back to the previous page. I made a point of taking a slow drink from my glass of water to show him that I wasn’t going to speed read for his satisfaction. He turned the page again. This time, I glared at him. It was Absence. As usual, his hair was white, but it was shorter. He had his own copy of The Law of Nines, but he was much further in the book than me. I made sure my glass was almost empty before spilling the water all over his copy of the book.

I set the glass down and rose from my chair. There was no need to worry about what he might do to my book. I was only dreaming, after all. I left my backpack on the floor. I took the quickest path outside – straight back to a garden. I realized I still had the book and dropped it right there. Bringing it would just get in my way. Once I was outside, I looked up at the open sky. Smiling, I took flight. The walls narrowed near the roof of the building, so I had to turn my body to fit through. To my surprise, I looked over my shoulder and saw a library on top of the campus center. Weird. I flew further up, kicking off walls to better navigate what quickly became a maze of black metal. It looked like another bizarre architecture project. I wanted to find a portal to the Monolith Gardens. If I was lucky, I might even meet up with WritersCube! I saw an old furnace inside the third floor, but I realized making that into a portal wasn’t going to be as easy as finding a preexisting one. I was sure a portal would turn up if I kept searching.

The fourth floor was a GameStop. I saw the sun rising on a TV and focused my attention on that. I remotely paused the video when the sun was clear of the horizon. It began to glow white. Since I proved to myself in my last lucid dream that I could easily pass through glass quite easily, I ran headfirst into the TV screen. The sun portal widened as I approached and engulfed me. I fell through it with no more sensation than an internal shift in my weight. I pictured huge trees in that brief moment between entering the portal and appearing on the other side. Instead of reaching the Monolith Gardens, I found myself back at the open window through which I entered the fourth floor. I hit the ground running and picked up still more speed. This time, as I fell through the glowing, pulsating sun portal again, I summoned a vivid picture of the Monolith Gardens in my mind. It still didn’t take me there; it just dumped me into emptiness. I frowned.

I waited for the dream to come back, but after a while, I was sure I was awake in bed. I went back to sleep, intending to do better next time.

April 21, 2011

The Animal Project

I was in my music class – except we were meeting in a large room that looked nothing like the usual classroom. My professor was trying to print out an assignment for us to work on in groups. Each page of the assignment would go to a different group. They each had the name of a modern music movement at the top and a bunch of related terms at the bottom. We were supposed to figure out what everything meant and explain it to the class. It sounded like busy work, but I wasn’t surprised, since it was coming from Betts. The first two pages printed out fine, but Amar pulled the third out prematurely (despite my warnings against doing so), and the fourth printed on a folded up piece of notebook paper. I realized it was one of my power systems assignments. There seemed to be problems involving digital systems, too, for some reason… I also found one of Amar’s assignments when I unfolded the paper. Betts gave me a look that said she wanted to know why I was folding and unfolding her group assignment, but I patiently explained that she hadn’t put enough paper in the printer. She didn’t have any more printer paper…

The teaching assistant, Fred, managed to find some extra paper in a cabinet while Betts talked about our final exam. She said it would be held at 7:30 AM on Wednesday, May 4th. At first, I groaned because I thought that was the day I didn’t have any finals. When I thought about it a little more, however, I realized that I did have finals on Wednesday… I had one at 8:00 AM and another at 10:00 AM. I would need to arrive promptly for the 8 AM final, so that left me with half an hour or less to take my music exam. I didn’t like how that sounded… I was going to bring this to her attention – and probably remind her that she’s breaking university policies by ignoring the official final exam schedule – but she started talking about what we still needed to do before the final. She was giving us one last assignment. She called it “the animal project.” Amazingly, that’s all she said about it.

Fred set some paper up in the printer and told the professor she could try reprinting the assignment. Naturally, she printed all four pages again even though we already had the first two. She didn’t even select the right printer… It went to another printer on the other side of the room which had enough paper in the first place. There had never been a reason to fret over running out of printer paper. I drummed my fingers while I waited for her to say something about this group assignment she wanted us to work on. She never did. Someone in the back of the classroom mentioned schedule conflicts with the final, and she agreed that there would probably have to be a change in the schedule. She referred to Tuesday as the “stay home and party” day. I thought that was weird… It was as though she knew I didn’t have any finals on May 3rd.

After addressing the question about the final exam date, Betts left. Fred seemed to disappear, too. I wandered around the room in search of the supplies necessary to start working on this so-called animal project since everyone else seemed to be busy with it. They had plastic frames with holes in the middle, and they were threading yarn through the frames like shoelaces. I saw that some people had patterns for stuffed animals ready. Others were already finishing up their projects as they stuffed fluff into their animals. I wasn’t sure what this had to do with music or how I was supposed to know how to make one, but I knew I would figure it out if I really needed to. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this assignment couldn’t possibly be a large chunk of our grades. I had seen the syllabus enough times to know that my grade was basically set in stone at this point. I sat down at a table and watched some people working on their project for a while. I found some quarters in my pocket and put them in my mouth without really thinking about it. I realized how disgusting that was and spat them out, though. Even disregarding how dirty the coins probably were, I was worried about choking on them. My tongue seemed swollen. I kept spitting out coins, but I could never get rid of all of them. Instead of a quarter, the third coin to pop out was a dime. When I tried to spit out the fifteen cents remaining, I got a nickel. Next came several pennies, then smaller versions of the dime and nickel. I always had something metal stuck on my tongue… Eventually, I rid my mouth of the coins, but by that point, I had two hands full of moist currency! I saw the coin bank I left at Nicole’s house and decided to put the coins in there. Betts appeared to ask what I was doing when she saw me pulling the top off the coin bank.

“Putting these coins in here, of course…” I explained. The bank overflowed with all the metal coins. I put some in another coin bank beside it, and that one overflowed, too. I raised an eyebrow when I saw that there were coins all over the floor. This had to be a decent amount of money… Where had it all come from? I was distracted from this by a Japanese girl with long, black hair in a white lolita outfit coming out of the closet. She started dancing for no apparent reason. When she saw me laughing, she became self-conscious and stopped.

I went back to the table where I’d been sitting before and found a box labeled “Animal Project Supplies.” Inside it, I found some felt and spare frames to use. I still didn’t really know what I was doing, but I figured I could at least throw together something ugly and get a decent grade.

Sent by Bananas

I sat up outside on a stone railing. I was on the roof of an old building, and I had woken up just in time for the sunrise. I knew I needed to write down dreams and get ready for class, but I wished I could just sit there and watch the sun come up. The sky was painted beautifully in reds and oranges. Rays of golden sunlight poured over the horizon, reflecting off the surface of wispy clouds above my head. Before long, everything would look normal again… I wanted to savor that brief window of dawn beauty. I flipped through my dream journal while keeping most of my attention on the rising sun. I noticed that I had written down dreams I didn’t remember on the last page of the journal… When I flipped a few pages over, I found more. It seemed like I had skipped some pages. As I shrugged, I decided I could just fill in the empty spots since they were all clearly from last night. I noticed movement in the corner of my eye and looked over at a castle. A green dragon was chasing a cow out of the front of the castle. I quickly wrote this down – understanding that I was recording a dream, but not quite what that meant for my current state – and scurried away to find somewhere to hide. I didn’t really want to be burned alive by a dragon. I came to a wooden door leading into a small, isolated room on the roof. I had to fight a walking skeleton for the right to enter. When I struck him down with Apheri (still in her old form, I noticed), I turned to find two zombies lurching toward me. I jabbed my sword into one’s stomach and forced him back onto the second one. They tumbled to the ground together. I saw the dragon land on the roof as I swiftly ran through the doorway. I locked it behind me. I quickly realized that something was horribly wrong with this room.

Where it had been a simple, rectangular room before, it was now a long hallway that defied reason. The room couldn’t have been this long, considering how it looked from the outside. Still, I had nowhere else to go… I wondered if it would take me to a better hiding place. I reached the end of the hall and saw two doors – one on my left and one on my right. Both of them seemed to be suspended in an otherworldly mist. The walls gradually started to look more misty, and then they turned into black, metal gratings. I saw raging flames on the other side. The hallway leading back was gone. In its place was a bolted and locked door with flames licking the chains wrapped over it. There was no way to turn back. I chose the door on the right. It wouldn’t open. Suddenly, all of this started moving. I was sure I would be burned alive in the flames, but they seemed to disappear as the platform with the doors glided across a pit of lava beneath me. It came to a stop on the edge of a stone platform, and the door that should’ve led back to the hallway burst open. The broken chains hissed into the pool of lava. I saw a man in a black cloak standing on the stone platform. He gave me a sinister smile. I already knew he was immortal.

“They’ve made a mistake by sending you here…” he said in a raspy voice. “I guess that’s to be expected of Bananas.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew fighting him wasn’t going to work. Getting past him to the portal on the other side of the platform was my only chance. It looked like a smaller version of an Oblivion gate… I wasn’t sure it was a safe choice, but it was a better alternative than being thrown into the lava pit.

Umpire Field and Shampoo

I was in my dad’s car. He was trying to get me to do something, but I refused. Nicole and I got out of the car and wouldn’t get back in until he let us have our freedom. We went into a store and bought some expensive shampoo.

The dream jumped. Nicole was taking the convertible off-road… We drove over a baseball field, and Nicole and I argued about umpires. The field was actually named “Umpire Field,” so I said there were umpires everywhere. She insisted that there weren’t any. We snaked around ditches and holes as we made our way toward a dirt bridge over a stream. Nicole wasn’t sure it could support our weight, but I told her to go ahead. Sure enough, it was fine. I noticed some of the dirt breaking apart as we drove away on the other side, so I advised Nicole to find another way when we came back. We went up a steep, uneven hill. I had to shift my weight to keep our tires on the ground because there were so many huge bumps and dips. When we finally got to the top, Nicole stopped to relax.

We were in the middle of a road, however, and someone in a track wanted to drive down the hill. I urged Nicole to park the car somewhere else. There were loosely designated parking spaces all around us. The guy trying to get past us gave up and parked instead. We squeezed our way between people who were just standing around in the road to get to a parking space of our own. Nicole made me drive with these buttons on the dash. There was no way to slow my acceleration or slam on the brakes with the buttons because they were preset at certain intensities, so I insisted that Nicole would have to park. Wherever we were, I was glad we finally made it.

This segment has been omitted.

Dog Me and Restaurants

I was a dog. I sat behind a gate designed to keep me in the bathroom. My mom wanted me to be on tile flooring in case I decided to relieve myself. I begged to be allowed to roam freely, but my mom didn’t think that was a good idea.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were at a fancy restaurant. When our names were called, we followed our waitress to a table for two. I don’t remember actually ordering food.

The dream jumped. We went to the same restaurant again later. This time, we had come specifically for dessert. We had food in boxes from some other restaurant. An older couple next to me recognized the boxes and told me they had just been there. The man said he went to the one with all the cops. They started laughing.

“Really?” I asked, faking a laugh. I didn’t get the joke.

When it was our turn to be seated, Nicole changed her mind; she said we should just order it to go. She already knew what she wanted, but I hadn’t really given it any thought… I looked up at the menu on the wall to choose a dessert while the waitress took Nicole’s order.

Stop Playing Games!

I was playing Minecraft with Nicole. Lyra came to us in wolf form and told me to stop playing games. I was impressed by how well she rendered in a game with such simple graphics.

I wonder if she seriously needed help... lol...

Like Trying to Grab Water (Lucid)

I found myself looking around from within my bed. I became lucid as I was looking around my room at hazy images. Till seemed to drift around the room aimlessly. I saw a clock on the ceiling that said it was already 8:30 AM. I wasn’t sure if it was right, but I had gone to sleep at around 8 AM, so I knew I would have to go to class soon. I avoided focusing on the fuzzy details… If I was going to maintain the dream, I needed to pay more attention to objects that looked more stable – like the crisp, floating screen of my laptop above my bed. I tried holding onto the dreamscape as everything started getting hazier, but it was like trying to grab water… Everything just slipped away.

April 22, 2011

Out Comes LCL

I was standing over a hospital bed. A woman in the bed had her legs spread, apparently ready to give birth. The doctor looked up at her and nodded.

“The LCL fluid is spilling out!” he told her. “You’re almost there!” LCL fluid? I arched an eyebrow. I wondered what sort of disgusting fluids the EVA pilots were sitting in all the time… More importantly, the thought of Mari deciding that smells good was a little more disturbing.

Improving Oblivion and a Ten-Step Guide to Piano

Austin was looking for an Oblivion mod to improve his game’s performance. I found a suggestion for one on the forum, but no matter where I searched for the modder’s name, I wasn’t able to find this particular mod available for download. I checked her website and found a few other mods… She also had a video of her hosting a party for two famous Japanese animators. The audience broke into song at one point, and she started conducting them with her hands. When it was time for her to introduce the special guests, she spoke in perfect English. I couldn’t believe it. Then again, considering her mods were in English, I decided she had to be pretty well-versed in the language. One of my searches for this woman’s mod brought up Jonathan Biss’ Ten-Step Guide to Piano. I didn’t understand what that had to do with Oblivion at all… I kept looking for a reliable way to improve the performance of Austin’s game client, but nothing sounded as efficient as that mod…

Scamper started eating something I had left on the floor. I couldn’t remember anything being on the floor of my room, so I wasn’t sure what he had, but I worried it was valuable. My mom helped get it away from him. It was a chibi Reimu figurine. Her face was chewed up and sticky.

Early Exam and Book Damage

I went into my music class and saw everyone sitting at a circular table. There was supposed to be a review for the final exam, but instead, we were just taking another exam. Since the final in Betts’ class isn’t cumulative, that didn’t make sense; it would leave no material for the final exam! We were basically just taking the final early without a review session. I didn’t have any notes with me to prepare, so I just sat down beside Nicole and started reading The Law of Nines. Nicole accidentally cut several pages near the spine because she wasn’t watching her hands while snipping the air with a pair of scissors. I brought the damage to her attention at once. Amazingly, she said that if her dad hadn’t damaged the book before I borrowed it, the cut pages could only be my fault. I hardly even knew how to react to this.

“No, no, no… You don’t seem to understand,” I explained. “I saw you cut your dad’s book just now. All I’m saying is that you should be more careful.” She didn’t seem concerned (in fact, I doubt she believed me). I put the book away with a sigh. My professor asked me a question about a quiz grade, but I didn’t understand until she handed it back to me that she was asking why my grade was so low (91%). I put the quiz away without further comment. We were about to start the test.

Search for Power

I was in an abandoned facility somewhere downtown. I didn’t really understand why I was there except that I was following something powerful. Whomever or whatever it was, I needed to recover this power as soon as possible. I strolled down a huge, spiraling ramp in one of several towers around the perimeter of the facility. The ramp led past hundreds of shops as it made its way from the roof of the skyscraper back to ground level. I walked across a sky bridge connecting two of the major buildings. Despite how industrialized the area was, a lot of the natural beauty around the city was still preserved. I watched a river flowing through a stretch of forest below the sky bridge. In the next building, I saw beds that retracted into the walls to create an ideal lightproof, soundproof sleeping environment. I also came to several dead ends in the older part of the facility where the traditional elevator systems were. No one used such primitive technology anymore. I spent a lot of time there, but my memory of it is fuzzy since I was mostly focused on getting closer to that power source. It disappeared before I could reach it, and I knew I would have to wait until morning to search for it.

The dream jumped. I was in a car with Nicole, but we weren’t moving. A blizzard raged all around the vehicle. I could see about ten feet outside the car… Police officers trudged through the thigh-deep snow, checking each car in turn for traffic violations. They had everyone on file, so it was as simple as scanning their license plate. I showed them three cards which somehow granted us immunity to the legal system. The police officers nodded and continued down the line. Before we drove off, I told Nicole to wait; I spotted a train pass in the snow outside our car. When I opened the door and looked out, I saw several more cards sticking out of the snow – my driver’s license, my school ID, my credit card, and other important items from my wallet. I pulled it out and saw that they had been taken out. Immediately, I decided the police must have done this somehow… I dug the cards out of the snow with my bare hands, oblivious to the cold. Someone I recognized walked up to me, and we shared our complaints about the police treating people like that. I was glad I noticed the only card that hadn’t been submerged in the snow before we drove off. Otherwise, I would have left all of this in the middle of nowhere…

Confrontation with a Cashier

I went grocery shopping with Nicole and Andrea. I followed them at a distance while trying to ignore a feeling of impending doom… Everything felt wrong. Someone cut me off with their shopping cart, and I saw that it had an extra black cart attached to the back. There was a grill on the black trailer. When they made a sharp turn at the end of the aisle, the grill got caught on something and fell off. I walked over and got their attention. They didn’t thank me for bringing their grill back, but I didn’t want them to lose it. I caught up with Andrea and Nicole as they discussed various lethal poisons. They found one that would slowly drain the calcium from the body, replacing it with a brittle salt. It sounded like a slow, painful way to die… We went to the other side of the store. A woman with a shopping cart full of my favorite brand of apple juice walked by, separating me from the others again. I went to the garden area and spoke to some reeds with eyes. They were terrified of everything. I knew it would only take a little encouragement to get one of them to help me. I walked up to the young reed and introduced myself. He eventually agreed to my request…

When Nicole walked over, the reed swung past her and hit Andrea in the face. I was nowhere to be found – so they couldn’t really blame me for it. They left the area so they wouldn’t have to deal with anymore attacks from violent plants. I decided I wanted a chocolate-covered donut, so I went to the back of the store to get one. There weren’t bags for the donuts, so I just ate it right there. Nicole decided she could have one, too. We went straight to the checkout. This barely gave me enough time to finish my donut before any employees saw me with it. There were several open registers, but Nicole and Andrea insisted on choosing number eleven. The old cashier had already scanned all of our items by the time I got there. I hooked my fingers in my pockets and smiled at Nicole.

“Would you like your wallet so you can pay for this?” I asked. I knew her answer before she said it.

“I don’t think I have enough.” Of course not. It was $36. None of us had that much cash with us.

“Well, neither do I.” I nodded at Andrea. “I guess you’re paying.” She looked like RJ for a moment, so I wasn’t sure what to call her…

“Don’t look at me…” she said. “I’m broke.”

“Well, you’re both broke,” I laughed. I turned my smile on Nicole. The flames of an industrial boiler churned inside me. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t know what kind of power was at my disposal. “You’re driving on the way home,” I reminded Nicole.

“Is there a problem?” asked the old cashier. When I looked at him directly, I recognized him. It was Thomas Matus.

“Yes, but I’ll handle it,” I assured him. I took out my credit card. At his insistence, I walked over to the machine and swiped my card. He asked me to write my initials on the screen. I did it anyway, but I admitted it shouldn’t matter since that’s not a standard verification method. Then I saw a whole form I had to fill out to use my credit card this way… I had to provide my previous billing address, three verification numbers (I wasn’t even sure what I would use for the second one, let alone the third), and other things… I had trouble using the pen, too. It was hypersensitive. The cashier saw me make a mess of the screen and canceled the transaction. I frowned at him.

‘You know, there was a ‘clear’ button I could have pressed.” He said something about it, but I didn’t understand… Then he asked for my card. When I reluctantly handed it to him, he took it to a machine by the cash register. It beeped as it scanned my card number. He said the total was now $50. I crossed my arms.

“Why don’t you tell me why it’s more expensive? Is there some kind of fee for what you just used?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just $50.”

“It was $36 a minute ago. Don’t play dumb.” He stood next to me with a hand on my shoulder and spoke quietly. Because I was raising my voice, the other customers in line were starting to get uncomfortable.

“These things could be as much as $200,” he told me. “Isn’t it nice to have only $50 come up? Think about it… $50 is not that much. You’ll never notice it.” I glared at the man. I was noticing it now. My hand snatched the collar of his shirt, and I held him up with a tight fist.

“Listen carefully,” I said in a venomous hiss. That dark smile was coming back. “I have $200. That’s all. I’m not paying a quarter of my savings for a few bags of groceries. You’re going to ring everything up again the right way and charge me the right price. Do you understand?” I dropped him onto his feet, and he backed away. I glared back at the line of people behind me. “Save yourselves some time and go to another register. This man is incompetent.” I turned back to the register with a balled fist. I was glad he didn’t know about the donuts we ate.

Nicole's Cat Eyes (Lucid)

I saw Nicole staring at me and smiling. Her big, golden eyes were like those of a cat. I remembered I was dreaming. It was really strange, though. Nicole’s face disappeared, leaving me with darkness.

“Is that it?” I thought. It wasn’t a very long lucid dream if it was already over. I saw little flashes of silver light and gray bubbles, and then I could feel my body back in bed. I wondered if I had become lucid during non-REM sleep or something.