Thread: SD-1: Nephanim

Just a brief note about the dreams I've omitted... They're typically personal in nature. Anything that's password protected or private on my dream blog will be omitted here. I don't anticipate omitting any dream accounts which are available there, however.

September 17, 2010

Chick-fil-A Delivery Service

This dream has been omitted.

Tiny Robots

Nicole and I were building tiny robots out of whatever metal parts we could find. We had the power to bring them to life by touching them. I built one with a green sphere as its torso, two legs shaped like a sideways letter “L,” and Steve’s head. It was like a spider with six of its legs ripped off. I told Nicole we should check up on him later to make sure he had figured out how to walk. With unstable footing like that, I wasn’t sure he would. Nicole told me not to leave Steve out in the rain.

Music Video, Disney Music, and a Bad Ending

This dream has been omitted.

Our Car Commercial

Nicole and I were at a car dealership. We had just finished all the paperwork for our new car. Nicole got into her mom’s convertible to drive that home, and I was going to follow in the new car. As Nicole drove off, I asked the woman selling us the car if we could trade it in for something cooler. Nicole heard this somehow and laughed. I saw all of this as though I was watching a funny car commercial.

Postal Daycare

I was jogging on a trail with Nicole. The trail was set up along a highway, so there was a big, metal barrier between us and the cars. We caught up to this group of five or six kids and a woman in a white post office uniform. She looked at least sixty years old. Most of the kids moved to the right to let us through, but the woman and one of the kids stayed on the left side. I asked them to move, and the kid did – but the woman was oblivious to us. I understood that she was taking them for a light jog as part of some kind of daycare service… That just made me more irritated. How dare she teach kids to disregard common courtesy? I picked up a horseshoe (no idea where I found that) and chucked it at her. She lurched forward when it hit her back, but she didn’t make a sound or slow down. She just kept running. The kid who had taken the longest to move out of the way picked the horseshoe back up and threw it at me. It hurt for an instant when it hit my arm, but I didn’t care after that. It was just more fuel for the fire. I explained to the woman that the kids already knew what was right and wrong; the kid had retaliated in her defense when I attacked her! If she kept teaching them to ignore people, though, they would become horrible children.

False Awakening: I Can See the Equations

I had a false awakening in which the black, wooden parts of my desk had been replaced with sand, dust, and dirt. My laptop, TV, books, wallet, et cetera had all been removed. I didn’t really wonder where they were, but I spent a fair deal of time trying to imagine how I could keep my laptop stable on top of the sand… I scooped the gritty sand around in the desk, creating a level surface on my side and basically emptying the side closer to my roommate’s bed. I had a feeling my roommate would use the other side – although it’s actually my desk. I noticed there was even sand on my floor, pillows, and blanket. I decided I would need to borrow a vacuum cleaner and try to clean up the mess. When I looked up at the ceiling, there were elaborate equations written in blue ink. These covered the ceiling. I knew they were the answers to the universe’s deepest questions… They seemed to glow by virtue of their worth. Surrounding each equation was a succinct explanation of the physics behind the math. I felt a sense of power swell up inside me; I was the one with the gift. No one else could see the answers.

My roommate started talking in his sleep. He sat up while still mumbling to himself. In fact, he kept talking until he got out of bed and started walking toward the bathroom. I closed my eyes so he wouldn’t know I was awake. I opened them when his footsteps stopped. He was standing over my bed… I couldn’t believe it, but he was still asleep.

Everyone Will Do Their Laundry

I was in Nicole’s kitchen. Her dad was cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast. Austin poured himself a glass of apple juice, but he realized he didn’t want it. I was going to take it, but Nicole’s dad snatched it from him first. He poured the juice onto the bacon to flavor it. Nicole changed clothes outside my field of vision and threw her dirty clothes into the corner of the room. Strangely, the clothes were sitting where the oven should’ve been… I’m not sure how her dad was cooking in the first place! I didn’t understand why there was a pile of dirty clothes on the kitchen floor in the first place or why she would add to it. I told her not to leave her clothes in the kitchen and walked over to the pile. As I gathered the clothes, Nicole’s dad insisted that everyone was going to do laundry today. I wasn’t so sure he had the right to make me do his family’s laundry… I knew I had a few things at the house in need of a wash, but certainly not enough for a full load. I just took the clothes to Nicole’s room.

Fake Dream Journal Dream: POST OFFICE

In this dream, I woke up to write down my dreams… I was going to write out the dream about the postal worker and the kids, but to my surprise, it was already written out. Well, sort of. I had written a bunch of little notes about it at the bottom of the page. These notes were in all capital letters. One in particular on the left side said “POST OFFICE.” This caught my attention. I flipped to the next page to write my next dream down.

September 18, 2010

Pump Your Gas and Guzzle It, Too

I was in my dad’s car while it was parked at a gas station. Nicole, my parents, and my siblings were in the car. My dad got out to fill up the gas tank. Something went wrong with the pump, though, and it wouldn’t release any gasoline. My mom said that because the pressure in the gas tank was so much higher, it should start by itself. My dad argued that it wouldn’t. Indeed, it shoved a puff of noxious gas clouds out of the tank, but it didn’t pump any gas. He told me to hold the handle and got in the car. He started the engine. When he told me to get in the car with the pump, I reluctantly complied. Somehow, the pump managed to continue supplying gas to the tank even though the end of it was inside the vehicle. My dad started driving down the highway. I asked how much gas he wanted when I saw the counter on the pump. The numbers were fluctuating wildly. He didn’t answer. I asked if he just wanted me to fill it up, and he said yes. The counter leveled out at zero. I asked why he was driving while pumping gas in the first place. After all, that meant I would have to walk back on foot to return the nozzle to the gas station… Safety precautions aside. Besides, the tank was already full!

My dad realized his mistake as soon as I said it. He made a quick U-turn. I laughed at him; there were trees on the median, and the long, black cord connecting my end of the pump to the machine was going to get stuck. I said I hoped it wouldn’t get stuck on any trees, and he swore. He turned around and drove straight across the opposite side of the road into a junkyard. He parked there and told me to go back to the gas station. For some reason, I was only holding the end of the pump system; the cord had been removed. I climbed over some old, wooden fences on my way there. Most of them felt like they would break at any moment. I managed to keep my balance while stepping from frail board to creaky board to snapping board… I reached an isolated area with a colorful metal sign that read “VONGOLA.” I picked it up and brought it with me. I passed through a field. The grass was all the way up to my chest. After I returned the end of the pump, I went back the way I came. I showed Nicole the sign, and I said I had planned to give it to Austin as a birthday present. I admitted she probably wanted it, though.

…Austin doesn’t even watch Reborn.

The Moon is Falling

I was trapped in a looping doomsday scenario. The moon was falling from the sky on a direct course for Earth. When it approached, it caught fire in the atmosphere. Everyone in the area was crushed by the moon. Those in surrounding regions, I knew, would eventually die from related consequences. After the first few iterations of this, I tried to catch the moon in my hands. Some people saw this and joined me in the next cycle. I thought of them as fellow dreamers – although I wasn’t lucid. We were still flattened a few more times before we gathered enough people to stop the moon’s fall. Even when we succeeded, the world was left barren and lifeless.

Slain by Shiya and Neluna

I was in a war zone of some sort in full military uniform. My platoon and I crossed a muddy road under the cover of night, ducked behind an abandoned building, and continued in silence. I went in another direction (leaving my platoon to continue their original objective). This was my responsibility alone. I approached a grounded helicopter. The rotors were spinning, but they were decelerating. I pointed my gun at the door of the helicopter and waited. The door opened, and a girl in white was shoved out into the mud. She splashed mud in all directions when she fell. I ran over to her, but then two women appeared in the doorway – a pink-haired woman on the left and a black-haired one on the right. I recognized them: Shiya and Neluna. They both sneered at me. This was just a decoy, they told me. Indeed… It was a life-sized doll in a dress. I was lifted off the ground and electrocuted. As all of my muscles jerked wildly, I died.

Grapes at a Barbecue

Nicole’s dad woke us up in the morning for breakfast. He had a barbecue going outside on the deck and a table full of food. I followed him out there and inspected the selection. I decided I really wanted grapes, so I put a bunch of red grapes in a bowl. Aunt Susie got mad at me for taking so many. Apparently, Ricky would only eat grapes, so I was – in effect – starving my cousin.

*

September 19, 2010

There's Someone Else

The dream started out at a grocery store. I was looking through food aisles for something, but I couldn’t find it. I decided to check prices on vitamin B6 before leaving the store, so I wandered around looking for the vitamins. I kept getting calls from Kerry on my phone. The phone was frozen, though, so I couldn’t pick up. Instead of sending him to my voicemail, it just hung up on him each time I tried to pick up. I noticed I had a new voicemail, but I couldn’t get to that, either. I tried turning my phone off. It wouldn’t power down. The time on my phone was 9:30. I was supposed to call Nicole half an hour ago, but I couldn’t do anything about it. With a sigh, I gave up and put my phone away. Kerry wasn’t important enough to drop everything just to listen to his message… Nicole could wait ten more minutes for me to drive home. I went back to looking for the vitamins.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were using Austin’s room in my parents’ old house in Texas as our bedroom. She was sitting in bed on her laptop. I was on the floor with mine. I tried to figure out the name of the other vitamin I wanted to experiment with, but Google’s search suggestions weren’t helpful. I kept searching for “tryll vitamin.” I eventually figured out it was called “tryllizh.” Anyway, I talked to Nicole about it, and somehow we got on the subject of Kerry getting a cell phone. I told her he could call her whenever he wanted, but whether or not she picks up was up to her. I don’t know why I was okay with that.

The dream jumped again. I was in the living room of my parents’ old house in Louisiana. Nicole’s N64 was plugged into the old TV in front of me. I was on the phone with someone… We were talking about how their friend won $64 million in the lottery. The guy almost opened his own college with the money, apparently, but he decided to share the money with his friends. I kept prodding the N64′s audio/video cords during the call.

The dream jumped… again. I saw Brian (Family Guy) walk into the Griffins’ living room. He sat next to a much older version of Peter – probably in his eighties! Brian was the same age as always, though. He explained that the lottery winner only got $30 million after the bank took out taxes and whatnot. He had come to explain that Peter’s share would be half as much as expected. After Peter admitted it wasn’t that bad, Brian demanded some of the money. He suggested that Peter should make the password for their bank account “public.” He meant that Peter should tell him the password, not that anyone should have access to it… Peter seemed okay with this. Brian’s nose began to inflate, and he started laughing. His head exploded. Peter didn’t seem to notice any of this. He said Brian would need the money for his fortieth birthday when his bladder would shut down.

Brian decided to go to bed. He walked into a bedroom he and Stewie shared, and his head was back. Stewie laughed at him immediately for the bladder problem. Brian assumed at first that Stewie had just overheard, but Stewie corrected him: Peter told him all about it. Brian turned and yelled down to the living room.

“You didn’t have to tell him about my erect bladder!” He was furious.

The dream jumped (last time). Nicole was on the floor of our (Austin’s) bedroom in the corner. She wouldn’t talk to me. She told me she sent me a message, so I should start reading it. I found a text copy of the voicemail I received earlier in the dream on my laptop. I began reading it silently, but she told me to read it aloud. As I did, I got the impression that she wanted to leave me because I didn’t call her while I was at the store. I started explaining why, but she said I didn’t understand.

“It’s because there’s someone else,” she said with a smile. I already knew it was Kerry. I thought about how I was right after all; even Nicole couldn’t keep her promise to stay with me.

The Seller Makes His Demands

I got a response from eBay about my buyer protection claim. The message seemed like it had been written by the seller of the item, though, and not by an eBay employee. It told me to send the “misprinted” book (yeah, misprinted was in quotes) back within four days. The message told me to use media mail or a more expensive shipping method. I would receive a full refund if I met all of those conditions. The “-_-” emote was used in several places throughout the message.

On a related note, I still haven’t gotten a reply from eBay.

Phreebie Episodes

I was watching a marathon of “phreebie” episodes of Family Guy. They spelled it that way for advertising purposes, I guess, but I’m not sure how that helped. The episodes were designed such that they could be ignored without impacting the rest of the show. It sounded more like filler in an anime than a random episode in a comedy show with little to no continuity between episodes. These also had nothing to do with Family Guy except the opening theme. I don’t remember many of these, but in one of them, I went with Nicole to an apartment my family was renting in Las Vegas. We walked up to the door from a parking lot across the street. There was already a key in the lock for some reason… I took it out and put in the key my parents gave me. It opened the door. My mom gave us pizza and invited us into the kitchen. An old German guy sat down with us at the kitchen table and kept asking how to use the phone in German. No one else understood, so I had to translate for him. My mom pointed out a lighthouse model in the foyer. It doubled as a phone. I kept splitting off into clones of myself… In all iterations of myself, I was wearing Link’s tunic and wielding Apheri. I ran down a hallway while blocking their attacks. At the end of the hallway, I reached a room with a large, glowing metal arm. It was a device to determine which of us was the real me. We lined up in front of the device, and it released an enormous beam of white light. I knew what had happened: the device had determined that none of us were the real one. I, too, was just a clone. The light destroyed us. Luckily, my consciousness was transferred into a remaining clone somewhere else, so I survived.

Sonic Convention

I went to a Sonic convention in Las Vegas. Shia LeBeouf approached me on the street and grabbed me by the shoulders. He told me it wasn’t too late to transfer schools, and even if I didn’t think it was a good idea, it was the best decision. I shook him by the shoulders and told him I couldn’t afford it. He didn’t like that excuse, but he let me go. I got in the back of a truck for a ride to a photo shoot. The driver told me to hold onto the big, plastic balls in the back of the truck. If any of them fell out, he would get in huge trouble. Go figure – one fell out on the highway. I didn’t see what happened, but I got the impression that I caused an accident. I held onto the remaining two until we arrived. We went into a theater, and a professional photographer took pictures of the best costumes on stage. I was in that group. I think I was cosplaying as Sonic, but I don’t remember wearing a costume… A guy in front of me took his shirt off, grew breasts, and passed out. He drooled for the rest of the photo shoot. After the shoot, we were taken to another room. They were going to pay us for the pictures. My parents made me leave so they could talk to me about leaving me with Omi and Opi. I protested – not because I had anything against living with them, but because I needed to go back to school. They left me there anyway.

Chasing Dogs in the Rain

This dream took place in a scenario following Nicole dumping me. I walked outside by the garage and set up a blanket and a pillow. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep well outside (especially since it was raining), but it was the best I could do. I tried to go into the garage, but Scamper and Meg ran outside. My mom was standing in the doorway of the garage. I told her I would catch both of them. Meg was easy, but when I touched Scamper, he sank his teeth into my hand. He kept trying to bite off my right pointer finger.

*

September 20, 2010

Don't Let Him Out

I was visiting an island suspended above a canyon by stone supports at its four corners. The supports also served as bridges from the island to the cliffs surrounding the canyon. A wide river was flowing through the canyon below us. Basically, the supports were tunnels made of solid rock. They had holes here and there – windows, sunroofs, and surprise holes leading straight to the canyon below. I was there with Axis. I stopped by an ATM to check the balance of my savings account. I had to wait in a short line, but two people cut in front of me, so it didn’t seem short at all. When I put my credit card into the machine (interesting in itself since the card has nothing to do with my savings account), I was surprised that the machine didn’t do anything. It was only after I started to walk away that it printed out my balance on a receipt. I had $1736.00 exactly. I remember thinking that was much more than I expected. We walked through a hallway with several pillars on our left (kind of like the ones in that wizard’s apprentice dream). Eventually, we entered a building referred to as the “Golden Building.” There wasn’t anything golden there. We listened to Anju’s mom talking on the phone for a bit. She basically just told whomever she was talking to where she was.

The dream jumped. I was in the stone tunnel on my way off of the island with Nicole. We stopped and sat down by a small rock jutting out of the floor. After a few moments, a little girl climbed onto the rock and leaned over it to get a better look at us. She didn’t seem to have anyone supervising her, so we tried to keep her attention. I started making woofing and barking noises. Nicole and I pretended I was her dog – which caused the little girl to protest while giggling uncontrollably. “He’s not a dog!!” You get the idea, right? Anyway, her mom caught up soon after that, and the girl turned into a butterfly. A tiny collar was wrapped around her neck (although I guess she didn’t really have a neck anymore). The collar was attached to a thin string to form a leash. Her mother pulled her by force in the direction of solid ground. They were going to a museum.

As we stood up and looked around, I saw Axis standing on the island’s edge through one of those gaping holes in the tunnel’s ceiling. He was brushing something off his hand… When I saw what it was, I realized it was something important and leaped through the hole. I jumped a couple hundred feet from the stone bridge to the edge of the island, catching the piece of paper he dropped in the process. I landed a few yards away from him. It was a thin, paper doll with no detailing whatsoever. I immediately expressed my relief that it wasn’t wet. The leg tore while I was inspecting it, though, and I folded the doll in half to hold the leg there. I turned to Axis and explained that it was a vessel for my shadow. If it was destroyed, my shadow would be released… I’m certain I was talking about Absence. I put the folded doll in my pocket and scolded Axis for handling it so recklessly. He just shrugged off responsibility when I warned him that dropping the doll in the river below us would have doomed the whole island. He seemed to think he could stop my shadow single-handedly. I guaranteed he couldn’t. When he suggested he could use Lyra for backup, I was still convinced he stood no chance. Rayn and Nicole met up with us at around the same time. Nicole came from the tunnel, of course. Rayn came in from somewhere on the island. We walked down the stone tunnel in the opposite direction of the island.

Racing Goku

The world was ending, and we could only stop it by dreaming. I took the form of Lelouch Lamerouge (Code Geass). I was standing in the doorway of a traditional Japanese home. As I looked in, I saw Superbi Squalo (Reborn) sitting Indian style on the floor. He seemed to be really pumped… He shouted at the top of his lungs that he was going to dream. I saw myself in third-person perspective from a couple feet away. A bird-shaped crest with its wings spread wide appeared on my chest and began to glow blue-white. I smiled.

The dream jumped. I was racing Goku through a forest environment. For some reason, he didn’t fly, but he did activate his Super Saiyan form. Goku tripped and skidded across the ground, giving me the chance I needed to pass him up. There were a few people cheering me on in the background, but I don’t remember who they were.

September 21, 2010

Playing with Lizard Tails

I was examining the effects of a powerful electric field on a lizard’s tail. We attached the tail to a fixture on the ceiling and placed the field generator on the floor below it. The tail began to wriggle and bounce around when the field was generated. A man in a lab coat nodded and scribbled down some notes.

Shoes, No Shoes, and a Cyborg Dog

I went to the mall with Nicole to get a new pair of shoes. One side of the mall had most of the shoe stores, so we went in there. Several stands full of shoes had been set out in the entry area and where there are usually small jewelry shops in the middle of the hallway. I looked through these first, but they were way too expensive. I knew I could get a better deal if I just bought my shoes from one of the stores. For some reason, many of the shoe shops weren’t selling shoes at all… For example, Famous Footwear was a grocery store! I went inside to check and found that they didn’t sell anything related to feet – not even socks or sandals. I had the same problem with the other stores. One was an electronics store, one was a barber shop… The only one that sold shoes closed when I got to it. I decided I was just going to have to buy one of the expensive pairs. Nicole stopped me and asked if I would help her pick out a Christmas present for her dad. I was a little annoyed… After all, we had come to the mall just to get me a pair of shoes, and she wanted me to stop looking. Nevertheless, I agreed to help her.

The dream jumped. I was in my former high school’s auditorium. A big, gray dog was standing on stage. It was clearly an enlarged model of the dogs from the Legend of Zelda games (more specifically Majora’s Mask, since I’ve been replaying that). As I walked toward the stage, a woman standing by the front row asked me to move the dog. I figured I could just talk to it with the Mask of Truth and figure out what it wanted with the auditorium. The dog’s tongue was hanging out, and its entire body wiggled with excitement as I walked up to it. I put my hand on its leg, and it transformed into a cyborg. Its head was huge and spherical, and the rest of its body consisted of metal plates welded together inefficiently. It tried to grab me with these thick, metal plates, but each time, I either punched or kicked the approaching plate and broke it off the cyborg’s body. I jumped into the air and dropped down onto the plate at its core – which was evidently supposed to fling me into another dimension or something, but it just snapped in two from the force of my fall instead. I pushed the cyborg over. It didn’t rise.

The woman in the audience clapped slowly.

Having Fun

Nicole and I were at Disney World. We drove through the hotel area, and I complained about how boring the buildings were. I had a flashback to earlier that day. I saw Mickey Mouse standing in front of one of the hotels, explaining how it was the center of fun at Disney World – something like that, anyway. By comparison, the red building in front of me with its rough, jagged corners and flat roof didn’t look particularly fun. It looked even less interesting than my dorm building. We kept driving until we reached a fenced-off park. Nicole and I got out of the car there and climbed over the fence. I had to help Nicole into the park so she could play on the playground.

300 Degree Sausages

This dream took place at Nicole’s house, but Nicole’s family wasn’t present. I went outside and set up a grill in the area leading down to the basement. After checking a formula provided by IIT for the proper temperature at which to cook sausages, I started to grill them. The formula told me to keep the temperature at around three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. It said to cook them for fifteen to eighteen minutes. I went back into the house. To my surprise, there was a strange, Hispanic man living in our house… He smelled the sausage cooking and said he was going to eat them. I kicked him out of the house. The food was for my mom; I wanted to prepare breakfast for her since it was her birthday.

The dream jumped. I was standing in the driveway with my mom and a bunch of her friends. My mom was much older… She said later that she was turning sixty. The guy I kicked out of the house was there, too. My mom explained how she found sausages cooking outside her basement door that morning, but they were cooking at a really low temperature… She threw them out and made her own. She admitted that she suspected I had done it. I felt a bit like a failure. Then again, it was IIT’s fault. I checked the formula provided online and found that it was the same as the one I used. I notified my electronics professor in hopes that he would fix it.

My mom made an announcement to her friends: she was developing an intense attraction to young, Mexican men. The guy I threw out of the house stepped forward and offered to make her sausage biscuits. My mom accepted the offer straightaway.

Energy Pack

I was with my dad, Chelsea, and Austin at Wal-Mart. I told my dad I was going to buy an energy pack for my Transformers figurine. He said I couldn’t. To make sure I didn’t try to buy one, he had me wait in the car. I followed them inside anyway, and they didn’t notice until after I got the energy pack. It was basically just a yellow cylinder made of plastic. There was more plastic in the packaging than in the energy pack itself. I saw that they were selling the energy pack separately, the Transformers figurine separately, and both of them together. I would have to come back sometime to buy the figurine. It seems I didn’t own the figurine for which I was buying the energy pack… I couldn’t buy them both now; I had already explained what I wanted to buy. I thought to myself about how I never got a chance to enjoy the Transformers craze.

On my way to the register, my dad saw me. He didn’t say anything about how I was supposed to wait in the car, but he followed me to the checkout. I’m not sure if it was a sneaky method of catching me red-handed or honest laziness, but he asked me to go get the car and pick them up at the front of the store. This posed a problem for me: I couldn’t walk out the door with the energy pack in my pocket. I couldn’t just take it out, either, because my dad would see! I told him I was giving up and pulled the energy pack out. My dad said he had given up, too.

September 22, 2010

Battle Tower, First Layer

I had completed the first seventeen floors of a battle tower. Basically, it was just a huge tower with tons of obstacles and monsters scattered throughout. Each floor you completed was the approximate equivalent of a level in an RPG. The tower was constructed in such a way that the west side of the building brought you up from floor one to ninety-nine, and the east half brought you back down to the ground level. In this manner, those exiting from the east side would be leagues more powerful than everyone else in the world. I had only gone through seventeen floors of the first "layer" of the tower. I was in the jeep with Nicole while we discussed this. She was in a hurry to get home because her parents wanted the car, so she was speeding. She slowed down as she approached one intersection, however, and I had to point out that she didn’t have a stop sign. The house was modeled after my parents’ old house in Louisiana. When we got there, Nicole’s mom directed her around the van parked in the driveway and then toward the garage. Nicole tried to pull into the garage, but the pillar dividing the halves of the garage was in the way. She hit it with the front of the jeep.

Happy Birthday to You

Nicole was telling me about an email she got from Lauren. It was a long “Happy Birthday!” message. She was excited to know that her friends cared enough about her to tell her happy birthday outside of Facebook.

Cleaning the Toilet Bowl (Shared)

Gross.

I was demonstrating the proper use of a toilet brush for Nicole since her toilet was revoltingly nasty. No matter how much I scrubbed, I couldn’t clean the entire inside of the bowl… There were always little stains left over. I was also horrified to find stuff on the inner lid of the toilet, too. I couldn’t fathom how that had happened. I accidentally touched it and kept checking to see if it was on me, but I couldn’t see well enough to tell. It was too dark.

Retroactive Hair Dynamics

In this dream, I was looking at a bunch of pictures of myself from high school. They were lined up on my dresser in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I looked much older in all of them. In one, my hair was really short, and I had brass studs in my ears. In the others, I had a full beard. I kept wondering why I had gone so long without shaving…

Three Orphaned Puppies

I was at my parents’ old house in Texas. Nicole and I brought home three orphaned puppies. There was a black one, a brown one, and a gray one. They were all extremely shy. We played with them on my bed until one figured out he could jump down and run away from us. The other two followed suit. At that point, we had to follow them to make sure they didn’t go downstairs. We didn’t want my dad to find out because, at the least, he would make us take the puppies to a shelter. I set up a doggie gate at the top of the stairs. Nicole and I were on our laptops at the desk in the game room; she sat where Austin would have been. I played with the gray puppy on the floor while I waited for Nicole to log onto Minecraft. She saw me playing with him and said he was my favorite. I thought about keeping him.

We played an upgraded version of Minecraft. The graphics on this one were much better – at least Wii quality, but probably even better than that. My character was Link (the Twilight Princess version, complete with chain mail and hero equipment). To my amusement, his face was that of the Elegy of Emptiness statue from Majora’s Mask. This unsettled Nicole quite a bit. Chelsea was playing with us, too… She wanted to work on the house she built on the older version of Minecraft. There were stacks of books everywhere in her house for some reason… I saw them and got the impression that they were in her old house, too, but I don’t think she had that many bookcases. The game was closely layered with reality in that our map was modeled after my parents’ house, and Chelsea’s house was located where her room should’ve been. Austin found out we were keeping more dogs in the house (better him than Scamper, I guess) and went into our parents’ bedroom to tell my dad. He got on Minecraft after that and challenged me to a sword fight. I accepted, though I had no intention of actually fighting him.

We dueled on the stairs. The wall to our left had been replaced by empty space, so it was like we were on a bridge. I just stood there and blocked for a while as Austin tried to fake me out with feints and blows of alternating strength. The fight was similar to the sword fighting duels in Wii Sports Resort. Austin eventually landed a hit on my right side, sending me over the edge of the railing. I caught hold and pulled myself back up. When he started bragging about his successful hit, I struck him once in the side and flung him across the room with such force that he left an Austin-shaped imprint on the far wall. Nicole and Chelsea were amazed by the difference in strength. Although I defeated Austin, the puppies were not safe. My dad ordered me to bring them to him.

Bus Driver, Tribal Children, and Misadventures with the Family (Lucid at the end)

Nicole and I were riding a Pace bus back to her house from the Yorktown mall. This took place the day after her birthday (so tomorrow). We were the only people on the bus. She told me we should get off at Villa and stop by the coffee shop, so when we approached Villa on St. Charles, I pulled the yellow cord lining the sides of the bus to request a stop. For some reason, the driver didn’t stop. Nicole said it was probably no big deal, but I explained that we were heading further east – away from her house. The bus driver was a man with long, curly brown hair and a thick, brown mustache. He turned to look at me at a stoplight and explained that he was doing three different routes that morning, so he would get to Villa, but we would have to wait until he looped back around. I’m not sure why he couldn’t just let us off as we passed Villa. Anyway, we put up with the wait. No one got on the bus despite our elaborate detour. We talked with the bus driver about how Nicole had just turned eighteen. She and I stood together on the bus, hugging.

Nicole got a bag of chips out of her Chopper bag and shared them with me. When we started to get close to Nicole’s house, the bus driver let us know. Nicole said she didn’t recognize the area yet. I pointed out Elfin Road (I’m not really sure where that is, if it’s in the area). We passed through a couple of underpasses and went back into a residential area. She recognized where we were at that point. I noticed the bus driver was sitting down next to us with a bag of chips of his own. They were a different flavor, so I figured they were his; I said something about the bus driver’s “secret stash” of potato chips. He corrected me: they had been given to him by Nicole when I wasn’t looking. I told him I hadn’t realized I had looked away long enough for her to give him anything, but he insisted I was mistaken. It wasn’t really worth arguing over, so I let it go. He started driving again soon after.

The dream jumped. I was in Nicole’s kitchen. I had teleported there or something to prepare her birthday cake… It actually looked really good. It was nearly a foot tall and about a foot and a half thick. The outer coating was made of regular chocolate, and the inner filling was white chocolate. I put chocolate candles on top and set it down on the kitchen table. There were a few other things I wanted to rearrange, but I heard a noise outside and had to go investigate. I saw movement on the side of the garage closest to the church parking lot. When I went over there, I saw the bus driver in his boxers on top of Nicole. She was fully clothed, but he was pinning her down and kissing her. I shouted at him, and when he saw me, he rolled off of her. Unfortunately for him, I was in protective boyfriend mode at that point, and I pulverized him. While I was beating the crap out of him, a bunch of little kids wearing tribal masks appeared. They each had a silver spear. They stabbed through Nicole in various places with their spears, killing her. I tried to go after them, but everyone else disappeared. In place of Nicole was a small, gray skull. Everything else was gone, including the bus driver. I picked up the skull and walked inside in silence. I didn’t know what to do.

The dream jumped. I was in another house with my parents. My mom was talking to my dad about what happened to Nicole. I interrupted to ask if she had had the same dream as me, but my dad gave me an irritated look and explained that I left my dream journal on the kitchen table. My mom had just read the dream, and now she was afraid something bad would happen to Nicole. She kept bringing up how things in dreams sometimes happen the next day. My dad said he read the part about Nicole and I having a baby and naming him Abraham; although that was Nicole’s dream, not mine, I still laughed. He said he didn’t want to see any babies for at least a few years. He explained that the best thing to do is to intend never to have children. An image of a bridge took over my vision. There was stuff spray-painted on the side. The first thing said “Oops, I had one.” My dad read it out loud. The perspective moved to the right, showing another message. “Oh, another one…” Then another message. “I didn’t mean to, honest!” Then another. “And another…” And another. “Last one! Really!” But there were still more. I think the idea is pretty clear.

After the messages about having accidental children, there were messages explaining the safest place for a disgruntled parent to go. A list of cities including Omaha and Moscow appeared. Austin laughed at that one, too. I don’t think he was even in the room with us.

The dream jumped. We were inside a huge mall of some kind. We walked past a store called the Baby Irrigation Depot. It was basically a stylish diaper store. They had all kinds of diapers… Firefighter diapers, Cleopatra headdress diapers (I don’t think I want to know how that works), Chiquita Banana diapers… We looked through a bunch of them. I set my dream journal down on a table while I talked with my dad about the dream involving Nicole and the bus driver. I explained that I had talked to Nicole since then, and she was fine. He told me I’d better tell my mother. On our way out to the car, I was riding a motor scooter or something. I was also trying to calculate the angle between two vectors in my head for some reason… Apparently, it was related to a car intersecting my path to my parents’ car. When it was safe to cross the street, I took the scooter over to the car and looked for the power button. There wasn’t one. When I asked my dad where to find it, I saw it. I had already looked there, though. I got in the car and immediately realized I’d left my dream journal – but then it occurred to me that it didn’t matter if I left my dream journal somewhere in a dream. I hadn’t really written anything in it since I went to sleep! Oh yeah, I’m dreaming! And I woke up.

End of Reborn Serialization

I picked up a copy of the latest Shounen Jump. I was excited to read that it contained “the longest Reborn chapter ever released,” according to the cover. When I read on, however, this turned into disappointment. It was going to be the end of Reborn’s serialization in Jump; the manga was going on hiatus, and if it began running again, it would only be released once a month. I hoped it wasn’t going to follow in D-Grayman’s footsteps. I flipped through the magazine to the cover page for Reborn. It was in full color and showed Hibari holding some kind of banner up in one hand. The title of the chapter was Mist. I saw something before it and wondered if there was some kind of buildup before the cover page. There were four pages of hentai immediately before Reborn… I wasn’t sure how they made it in the magazine.

September 23, 2010

I had to wake up abruptly this morning... Tera and I both set our alarms, but neither of them went off. Argh. I made some sleepy notes on the first dream that ran over each other (reading that was fun), but that was all I wrote down. I'm surprised I was able to remember so much of the second dream. That one's been omitted, though.

BEN and the Secret Room

I was sitting with Nicole in her living room. The TV was suddenly overrun by repetitions of the name “BEN” in all capital letters. I immediately associated this with the viral entity from Jadusable’s haunted Majora’s Mask story, but as it turns out, it was just an announcement for a marathon of a hospital game show called BEN. The premise was as follows: contestants would enter an operating room where a comatose or otherwise disabled patient awaited them, and if they succeeded in waking or curing the patient, they would win ten million dollars. They could use any tools they wished. We watched the first episode and witnessed the comatose case. Jeff Foxworthy was the contestant. He walked up to the stretcher holding the patient with his hands on his hips, frowning. After a nod, he leaned down, tore the IV from the patient’s wrist, and put it in his mouth. He sucked some of the fluids out of the IV and nodded again. Then, after setting the IV down, he took the patient in his arms and kissed him. Without the IV, the patient was slowly dying. Jeff Foxworthy continued to kiss him until the man’s heart stopped beating.

The dream jumped. I had discovered a secret room on campus for clubs and organizations. It was configured quite like the Room of Requirement. I had slipped into someone else’s private room. It was built like a library, and a girl with short, blond hair and black-rimmed glasses was sitting in a chair near the other end of the small room. She smiled when she saw me, and we started talking about various things.

Washing Machines and the Toy Factory

This dream has been omitted.

He Eats Those Apple Cores

I don’t know how long ago I had this dream… It must’ve been within the past week sometime, though. I was in a hospital bed. I overheard the doctor talking to my parents about how there was nothing they could do for me. I had kept eating apple cores even after they explicitly warned me not to. It was only natural that I would end up this way.

September 24, 2010

Whoo! Good recall last night.

Ungauter of Aries

I was being chased by aliens. They had invaded our planet, and their mission was clear: to destroy human life in its entirety. I managed to escape in a spaceship called the Ungauter of Aries. After a long voyage through space, I came to a planet identical to Earth. When I landed, I discovered that it was a copy of our planet as it was before the aliens invaded. I returned home and continued on with my life.

You Know What This Volleyball Looks Like?

I was in what seemed to be an infinite field. There was a patch of trees in one spot, and a bunch of kids were playing volleyball there. They paired up to practice serves and returning the ball. I didn’t really want to play with anyone… I was just going to play by myself. I found a ball no one was using. It was partially deflated, but I took it anyway. One guy asked me if I wanted to join him and his friend. He had long, brown hair. I told him that wasn’t necessary and continued past him. At one point, someone hit a ball up in the air, and it almost landed on my head – but I blocked it with my deflated volleyball. The one who hit it ran up to me and started making a big deal about how I had hit his ball. I asked if he wanted to trade balls; I insisted mine was the best. As I listened for his reply, I examined the branches of the trees around us. There were volleyballs stuck high in the branches all around. I wondered why we didn’t just play outside the patch of trees. Anyway, the kid said he would trade, so I dropped mine and picked his up. It was oblong… For whatever reason, that was just its natural shape; it didn’t lack air or anything. The kid got mad when he realized mine needed air. I walked a fair distance, turned around, and held the ball out toward him with the long part parallel to the ground.

“You know what this volleyball looks like?” I called back.

“What?” he shouted back.

“Yo mama!” I yelled. I ran off with the ball.

Maximilian and His Beanie Babies

I was talking with Austin in my parents’ bedroom. It was the master bedroom from their old house in North Carolina. Austin was sitting up on the bed, but I was on the floor. He told me he had to write “some kind of tour through an adjacency list” for school. I was surprised by that; I didn’t know he was taking a computer science course! I admitted I was doing the same thing for a computer systems course and asked what programming language he was using. He said he didn’t know. All he had to do was type tour(adjacency_list adj) to do the assignment. That disappointed me a bit… It meant he had no idea what was actually going on. He was just learning function calls. I had secretly hoped we could help each other out. I was still stuck on my implementation. Anyway, I found a bear with vertical rainbow stripes on its fur sitting under the bed and pulled it out. When I asked Austin about it, he got angry. He said he had been looking for that forever… Then he accused me of always stealing his beanie babies. I was about to point out that it wasn’t a beanie baby anyway, but more importantly, I hadn’t stolen anything. I told him someone else had probably done it since I had been gone for months. He didn’t listen. I followed him out of the room, but he got to my mom before I made it down the stairs. Sighing, I complained aloud that he wasn’t listening to me as I cleaned chocolate ice cream off the stair railing. The house outside my parents’ bedroom was the old (but more recent) house in Colorado.

My mom came into view with her arms crossed. She demanded to know why I was stealing Austin’s things. When I attempted to explain the situation, she just came upstairs and grabbed my arms. She was so angry that her neck veins were popping out. My mom said I was nothing but trouble, and I should just leave. I tried one more time to explain, and… She calmed down. Unfortunately, it wasn’t because of my explanation. It was because she thought I was keeping up with American Idol. When she asked me about it, I lied and said I had been watching the episodes approximately two weeks after they aired. I added that it was the same for Heroes (though I haven’t seen the fourth season). It seemed my mom no longer cared about Austin and his beanie babies. Chelsea came upstairs with a list of adjectives she used to describe me. She asked if there were any I wanted her to add to the list. I saw “far fetchd” written on the wall across from us and suggested “farfetched.” She smiled, repeating the word. She quickly added it to her list.

I went down to the laundry room with my mom to talk with her about how to get episodes of TV shows after they air. She asked about torrents; apparently, she’d tried using them, but she was worried about getting caught. I told her she could watch a lot of shows online for at least a week after they aired, and after that point, there wasn’t much danger in torrenting them. Chelsea came into the room and sat down on a couch (why was there a couch in the laundry room? Weird, there was one in my laundry dream yesterday, too!). We decided to come up with a new name for Austin. I turned into Goofy and suggested “Maximilian the Third, Esquire.” Chelsea laughed so hard that she fell over.

Innocent Trip to the Store

I was on my way to the store to buy something. I made it there just fine from Nicole’s. It looked like a 7-Eleven, judging by the size of the store and the kinds of things it sold. At the store, a little black girl was buying candy, but she couldn’t afford it, so I paid for her. I got four pennies in change back, but I couldn’t figure out how to put them into my pocket while holding the stuff I wanted to buy and my wallet. The cashier was an old woman I met while working at Subway. I think she was the owner’s wife. Anyway, I didn’t want her to think I was trying to steal food, so I just gave her the pennies before I paid. On my way out, I walked behind a white truck. I touched the trunk and wondered what I would have done if it had opened. Would the owner have gotten mad at me? I wondered what was inside. I had better things to do than mess with some guy’s truck, though, so I got in Nicole’s mom’s convertible and drove back home. The way back didn’t go as well as driving to the store. It was dark, but my lights didn’t seem to be helping. I couldn’t reach the gas pedal properly for some reason, and I was trying to put my seat belt on while approaching a stop sign. I stopped a little too long at the stop sign because I wanted to get my seat belt on, and when I put my foot back on the gas, I saw three cars behind me in my rearview mirror. I was having trouble keeping a constant speed… Sometimes I would be going 15 miles per hour, and others I caught myself going 50. The speed limit was 25. To my horror, I realized just after braking to drop my speed from 50 to 30 that I was driving behind a cop. His lights flashed on, but he didn’t try to pull me over. His car turned into a taxi, and he made a left turn onto another street. I made it to Roosevelt, and I should’ve gotten in the left turn lane, but I thought I needed to turn right. I wanted to get over into the turn lane, but no one would let me in. I decided I would just drive straight into the shopping center across the street, turn around, and go to the right way. When the light turned green, however, the people in front of me turned left, too. Even though there weren’t signs anywhere indicating this, I assumed I could make a left turn. We all turned onto the left side of the street instead of the right. All of the cars disappeared, and we were walking on foot over a mural based off of a map of the Chicago area. I located my current position on the map and traced my way back to Nicole’s house.

As I started moving again, I overheard a couple of tourists talking about going to a mountain just outside Chicago. Of course, there’s no such thing, but I found it on the map anyway. It was near a town called Fairfield to the north of ours. I told the tourists it would probably take them thirty or forty minutes to get there, but they should definitely check it out. I suggested a couple of other cool places to visit, too: Rosa Park (har har, I’m so funny), Bonnie Springs (that’s in Las Vegas, not Chicago), and somewhere else I don’t remember. The woman told me their trip had already been planned for them. They paid a travel agency to arrange everything for them, so now they couldn’t decide where they wanted to go, only where they didn’t want to go. Shrugging, I continued along. There was heavy foot traffic on the road… I had to stop again before long, and the line didn’t seem to be moving.

NephXXXXXanim Gets Fast Food

I was approaching a fast food restaurant’s drive-through. I heard my computer science professor through a speaker in my ear. He said I could get an account on the restaurant’s computer if I wanted to, but since I didn’t need to learn how to do that until the next lab, he suggested just ordering food the normal way. I decided to be brave and sent a mental ping to the computer. It interpreted this as I expected and created an account. I wasn’t forwarded the account information, however, so I didn’t know what the username or password were. Instead of going through the drive-through like normal people, I walked in the back door of the restaurant and approached the manager at his computer. I told him I had an account on the restaurant computer and wanted to place an order. A username appeared before I said anything about the account: Nephanim. I told him I didn’t know what the password was, but he should try Nephanim. It worked. Since my account had yet to be configured, he asked for my full name, address, and phone number. I gave him my name as Nephanim Nocturn. As I told him the address and zip code, he put them in line with my name. He put my phone number where it was supposed to go, at least. I was just a little confused when I saw my name written as “NephXXXXXanim NocXXXturn XXXXXX Road.” Yeah, I’m omitting the address, but you get the idea.

Best of all, I didn’t have to place my order. It was already on my account! I guess the computer understood what I wanted, heh. The manager pressed a key, and the register opened remotely. I walked toward the front of the store to pick up my $16.17 in change (apparently, they were paying me to order food). As I walked through the hallway separating the kitchen from the lobby, I passed a girl in a red uniform. Her visor was red, too. I heard her asking her manager why the register had opened by itself. The manager said he had opened it. I briefly wondered if it would be a bad idea to take my change from the register myself. After all, I had an account in the system, so it was almost like I was an employee… But I didn’t want them to think I was robbing them. The customers were an even bigger problem. In the end, I decided to wait for the money. I saw my food sitting on top of a sneezeguard – you know, those plastic windows they have over the food at Subway – in a green pizza box sleeve. I still didn’t know what I ordered. I guess it was probably pizza.

Zero Damage?

I was playing an online game. During fights between players, damage was divided by the square of the distance between the players. I thought this was particularly strange, however, because I was unable to inflict any damage at close range. It seemed as if there was a direct relationship between the distance and damage rather than an inverse relationship. Everyone was wearing really colorful armor. The moon was full, bright, and took up most of the sky. The dream took place on a path through a forest.

Microelectronics Invading My Dreams

I was sitting in a circuit laboratory with a breadboard on the desk in front of me. There were several red and yellow wires connected to it. I’m not sure what I was building, but I felt like it was working. I expected to be leaving soon.

Erasmus' Cat

I was at Nicole’s house. Cleo had been transformed into a massive, black beast. It was obvious she was still supposed to be some kind of cat, but calling her that suggests an animal of reasonable size. This thing was bigger than Nicole’s bed. I got the impression that this was the kind of evolution Erasmus Darwin had in mind.

Time Virus

I was playing a new Legend of Zelda game. I was basically done with it; only the final dungeon remained. The game itself was set up like Majora’s Mask with a three day time limit. In this case, however, the end of the third day coincided with the victory of the antagonists rather than the destruction of the world. I was in a circular building surrounding a pit. In the middle of the pit was the enemy’s tower. It looked similar to the setup of Ganon’s castle in Ocarina of Time, but perhaps a bit more involved. Anyway, I walked through a door and entered a courtyard. There were a few orcs roaming around here and there. They looked like the orcs in Ragnarok Online. I had my pet rhinoceros kill them for me. It looked like a Rhydon covered in steel skin. Its health was pretty low (below one fourth), but I knew it could handle a couple of orcs. I was irritated when it was unable to kill them in one hit. Weird things started happening after the orcs died. Nicole pointed out an orc floating toward me. When I targeted it, its name came up on the display as “Condor.” It was actually supposed to be a bird! Since I knew condors were passive, I walked right past it. It didn’t attack me. Nicole called Steven to tell him about the weird glitches in our copy of the Zelda game. I said it was probably because of all the ROM hacking I’d been doing. I don’t know what dream me was talking about.

When I tried to continue onward, a giant orc appeared in my path. It summoned a couple of baby orcs and the condor-orc to its side. I figured I would fight it initially, but then I saw that it had 3176 health. In retrospect, that wasn’t really much since my pet was doing 200-400 per hit. It seemed like a lot at the time, though. I circled around it and went through a door. This one led to a narrow, stone bridge connecting the outer building to the tower in the center of the pit. Because the pit was filled with glowing, purple acid, there wasn’t really a better way into the tower. After crossing the bridge without a problem, I went through a door into another courtyard. This one was shaped like a pizza slice. There was a door leading directly into the tower on the opposite end of the courtyard. A huge, phantom skeleton wearing a shredded, black cloak appeared. The cloak billowed as a violent wind rolled over us. In a booming, echoing voice, the phantom explained that I had served my purpose and would go no farther. It revealed the secret to the antagonists’ success – reporting a certain man to the authorities on the fourth day, thus preventing Link from interfering with his capture. To do this, though, they had to use a device to travel back in time six hours before the start of the three day cycle. This brought them to midnight of the 0th Day, using the game’s terminology. It was the night before the “Dawn of the First Day” message would appear. Having succeeded in doing so, they needed to introduce a virus into the system responsible for allowing the world to be reset. Link’s ocarina was basically a remote to a computerized time machine. The virus had disabled his ocarina.

I saw myself inside the tower a few days prior. I was installing emergency software on a man’s computer while he slept. I had intended to prevent the world’s destruction, but as it turned out, my enemies were the ones who hired me for the job! I had unwittingly installed the virus that sealed my fate. I called Nicole’s name, insisting that she was missing the epic revelation of the game’s story. I acted as though I had played the game before, but I hadn’t. I prepared for the hardest boss fight yet. When it began, the sky turned black and purple. The phantom fired a beam of white light straight at me. I rolled out of the way just in time.

Originally Posted by Nephanim

September 24, 2010

Whoo! Good recall last night.

Ungauter of Aries

I was being chased by aliens. They had invaded our planet, and their mission was clear: to destroy human life in its entirety. I managed to escape in a spaceship called the Ungauter of Aries. After a long voyage through space, I came to a planet identical to Earth. When I landed, I discovered that it was a copy of our planet as it was before the aliens invaded. I returned home and continued on with my life.
[/i]

Awesome recall! Aries FTW!

Originally Posted by Queen Zukin

Awesome recall! Aries FTW!

Thanks! I'm a Taurus, but I appreciate that Aries is so reliable.

I've got two days' worth of dreams to post tonight. I shared one with Tera last night!

September 25, 2010

Nikita

I was some guy living in an apartment in a busy city, maybe New York. My girlfriend came through the door into the living room while I was reading the newspaper in the adjacent kitchen. I flipped it over and set it down on the kitchen table. I didn’t want her to see the headline. She came over to me, hugged me, and pressed the side of her face against my chest. With a smile, she asked if I got the job. I told her I did. She was glad to know that the casting director hadn’t hired the Russian girl instead. When she saw a picture of said Russian girl in the newspaper, she picked it up. The woman had long, black hair and wore very little clothing. Just enough that she wouldn’t get thrown off the set, basically… She wore fishnet over her legs, black panties, and a black bra with flower patterns on the cups. She never smiled in pictures. The girl’s name, Nikita, was all over the article. As my girlfriend turned the newspaper article over, I remembered why I didn’t want her to see the headline.

“Nikita Wins Role in Film,” it read. “Everyday Schmuck Hit by Truck.” There was a moving image with the article showing me getting hit by a semi-truck head-on. Nikita was standing right there, but she did nothing to stop it. Because of my injuries, I couldn’t be considered for the film. I felt guilty for lying to my girlfriend, but what was I supposed to say? No, I didn’t get the job. I’m a failure. I waited for her to shout at me.

Orcs and Aliens

I went to some kind of camp with my parents. Nicole and I signed up as marriage counselors at a stand, using our five year relationship as the basis for our apparent understanding of marital problems. At a table near the edge of the camp, I asked my parents what they do when someone won’t pick up their phone. My dad said he usually waits a few minutes and tries calling again. He insisted that it’s a bad idea to wait until they come home. Calling as they pull in the driveway and saying “Oh, are you home?” tends to make them angry, he explained. I disagreed; I felt that it was the responsibility of the person receiving the call to return it. I decided to talk to my mom about it. Initially, it seemed as though she agreed that the caller shouldn’t be expected to keep calling… I brought up my dad’s example about calling someone as they came home, and my mom changed her mind. Apparently, he had done this to her so many times that she felt a caller should continuously redial until they made contact with the other person. She made it quite clear that if I didn’t do just that for Nicole, I would be in big trouble. I walked away.

I took a job as a lookout (jeez, was one job on-site not enough?). The camp paid me $30 per hour to sit in a chair at the top of a lookout tower and keep an eye out for orcs. Since there were plenty of security precautions between the camp and the orcs, I didn’t think I would have any trouble. There were machine guns set up on the camp’s borders, and further out, armed guards patrolled the perimeter. I got bored and decided to take a nap. After my shift ended, I met with my parents at the same table as before and told them what easy money it was. They felt the job was unnecessary. While I agreed, I didn’t want them to get me fired…

I walked outside the camp with some supplies (stored like ore in Minecraft). What had originally been a wooden fence surrounding the camp was now a solid stone wall. I began replacing columns of stone with a stronger material. It was just slightly brighter than the stone they were using before, so it was hard to tell the difference. I only had enough materials to replace a few sections, though… I replaced a broken area first and used the rest as I saw fit. I found Austin punching a stone block with his bare hands. An orc appeared behind him, and I used a strange style of martial arts to defeat it. I felt like I was making it up as I went, but Austin demanded to know who taught it to me. A few more orcs appeared. Austin and I karate chopped them to death. Austin asked me if I had learned the pogo dance yet. When I told him I hadn’t, he gave me a pink wig and told me to go marry the prince. I assumed it was just a joke, so I decided to play along.

We walked to a tent outside the camp. At this point, I was a woman with long, bright pink hair. I wore a white robe. Irie Shoichi explained that the aliens had helped human beings significantly in the field of genetic engineering. With their help, even humans had developed the knowledge required to create new animals. I got the impression that the aliens were still doing most of the work, though. Shoichi led us inside. The camp’s leaders were these aliens – a bunch of little frogs. The males were green, and the females were aqua. They introduced themselves, and then one started hopping all around me. In retrospect, I think he was looking up my robe.

We were suddenly in my Omi and Opi’s garage. Nicole and I were throwing frogs at each other.

Potential for Dream Animal Abuse...

I went to a restaurant with Nicole. It was like an old fifties diner. Scamper and Meg started running around after we were seated. Scamper had stolen someone’s socks, as our waitress quickly pointed out. No matter how stealthily we tried to snatch them from him, we were unsuccessful. I regretted that I would be seen if I hurt him. Since we were in public, I decided it would be better not to do him any harm.

Amduet's Complaints

A girl named Amduet posted a reply on my dream journal. It was the version I’m copying over to Dreamviews for Nomad and Raven Knight’s shared dreaming course. Amduet felt that with my talent, I should be having lucid dreams every night. She seemed really irritated, actually… As if I wasn’t trying hard enough to achieve my true potential. I spent a while trying to come up with a reply, but I had no idea how to respond to that.

Missing the Cubs Game

Nicole and I were going to a Cubs game together. She wouldn’t get off a chair on the deck because it was too comfortable, so I waited for her in the car. I guess we were already late, but I didn’t mind that she was taking too long. The windows were rolled down. I turned the car off so I wouldn’t waste any gas. The air conditioning kept going even with the car off. I decided that the energy of the air passing through the air conditioner must have been sufficient to power it. I didn’t really believe this; I made it up because I knew the air would stop blowing in if I admitted it wasn’t supposed to work. Basically, I understood that I had control over my environment, but I didn’t quite grasp the nature of said environment… Anyway, the cool air felt great. It was really hot outside the car. I poked my head out the window and told Nicole that Darmani was the most pathetic Zora ever. I was referring to the Zora from Majora’s Mask whose form Link takes (Mikau). I corrected myself immediately – his name wasn’t Darmani. I still got the name wrong the second time… I called him Dimitri or something like that.

I got on my laptop in the back seat of the convertible and checked my dream journal online. I had sixty views for the day, fifty-one of which had come from a submission on DeviantArt. Surprised, I tried to load it and see who was linking to my dream journal. Before I could see, Nicole came up to the car and asked if I had drawn something. She pointed at a drawing of Naija’s chaos form (the one with the fireballs). It was propped up against the pool next to the solar-powered frog lights in her yard. I told her it wasn’t mine, and she seemed a bit relieved – as though she couldn’t compete artistically with someone of that level. In fact, the drawing was hers! After she walked away again, I went inside the house. From the kitchen, I heard her talking to a little kid about cake. I saw her standing in the garage. A little girl in a pink dress and a boy in a green shirt and khaki shorts were in the garage with her. Both of them had blond hair. The girl’s hair was curly. Nicole cut a slice of cake for one of them and set it on a plate. I told Nicole I could see her, and she looked around. I could hear and speak to her as though she was right in front of me.

*

September 26, 2010

Caramel and Disaster

I was in a huge field. I could see a big, brown mountain off in the distance. Something triggered an avalanche, and a huge cloud of mud and debris rolled down the mountain into the field. I found my way to a large tree where a bunch of survivors had gathered. They were looking over tiny blocks of caramel stacked on top of each other in the tree’s branches. These caramel blocks were labeled with the names of cities and, closer to the top, with the materials needed for repairs. Someone was angry that the government had changed the labeling system halfway through.

Wrath of the Happy Mask Salesman (Shared... and creepy)

The dream started out in what looked like a library. I discovered after waking that the layout of the library closely paralleled the structure of South Clock Town in Majora’s Mask; the huge walls full of books corresponded to the city walls, and the tower in the middle corresponded to the Clock Tower itself. At the beginning of the dream, there were stone pillars at even intervals near the south door of the library. There was also a reception desk near the tower. I was playing as Link. These annoying kids kept running around behind the pillars. At any given time, I could only see two of them. They kept staring at me. I got a feeling they were going to steal my money, so I counted the change in my pocket. I felt a small coin (a dime), two slightly larger ones (pennies), and two coins slightly larger than those (nickels). The kids left without stealing anything. I saw the old chicken man with the mohawk from the ranch in Majora’s Mask staring at me. He was sitting on the far end of the library.

I walked down to the basement, and when I stepped into the middle of a circle of six people, they vomited in unison all over me. One girl apologized, but the rest of them didn’t seem to care. I threatened to anally violate the girl instead of showing appreciation for her somewhat sincere apology. She had short, brown hair. She laughed like the Skull Kid. I went back up to the first floor, and more people were vomiting there. I saw the chicken man sitting by the reception desk until 10 PM. I really just wanted a better way of telling time… When he left a few minutes later, I knew it was 10 PM. I decided I would go up to the top of the tower and meet with King Boo to complete my Bombers Notebook (it’s another one of those Majora’s Mask things – although King Boo certainly isn’t part of the Zelda franchise). I noticed I was missing my shield at this point. I climbed up a ladder onto a strange, wooden platform. A series of ramps led up toward higher platforms, but some of the ramps were dead ends. They branched off and curved downward as though a train had just rolled through and twisted the metal. I couldn’t walk properly… I kept trembling. I finally made it to the top, and an apparition of the Happy Mask Salesman was standing there waiting. He kept fading in and out… He laughed when I arrived, and everything became dark. The lights had all been forced off. A faint circle of light surrounded my body, and I knew that if I couldn’t keep the Happy Mask Salesman within the circle, I’d lose him. Something horrible would happen then.

I fell through a hole and screamed. I ended up in a small room with the Happy Mask Salesman. He smiled slowly, then started to run toward the only doorway in the room. When I turned into the hall after him, he was almost gone already. I rounded the corner, noted which way he turned at the end of the hall, and continued. Someone was singing in the background. Singing and laughing. I shook violently as I ran. The chase continued until we made it back to the ramp leading to the top of the tower, and then time started speeding out of control. I saw the clock on the bottom of my field of vision. The time indicator swung forward and backward like an upside-down pendulum. The clock tower’s bell kept sounding… It was constant background noise from that point until the end of the dream. I chased the Happy Mask Salesman through the library with just that front light as my lantern. I finally reached the front desk where his apparition was waiting for me. I was glad I had made it in time. Morning arrived, and I knew the library would return to normal… But then instead of going to day, the clock went straight back to the beginning of the night.

I was back in that small room with the Happy Mask Salesman. I chased him again, but every time I looked at it, an Elegy of Emptiness statue or a mask materialized where he was standing. They would stare at me no matter what. They were all oriented at weird angles, sticking out of the floor, walls, and ceiling or floating in place with total disregard for gravity. Many of these had rather disturbing expressions of either rage or extreme fear, but since I was running desperately through the halls, rounding corners and immediately looking for the Happy Mask Salesman on the other side – in the process, conjuring more statues and masks until they practically filled the halls – I didn’t get to study them. Sometimes, when I made it around a corner, I’d find him standing there with his angry face. He would make Skull Kid’s scream and try to grab me, then immediately teleport away and resume the chase. I was terrified, but I had to keep him within the ring of light around my body.

I finally made it out into the open area of the library with its tower in the middle (presumably the clock tower), and he stood around me with three copies of himself. They formed a square. All but the original turned into Elegy of Emptiness statues. The Happy Mask Salesman phased in and out of apparition form as he explained the ring of light to me. It was a manifestation of lucidity. I saw these blue blob creatures inside a circle of yellow light. I thought this was my awareness at first, but it became clear before long that it was actually his. The blob creatures wandered around within the circle. Their eyes were glowing yellow. They had arms, but no legs. Outside the circle, I saw a bunch of red blobs with blackened eye sockets. The red blobs tried to get inside the circle, but they couldn’t. They shrieked as they were incinerated. The Happy Mask Salesman said that as my lucidity weakened, it allowed the dark creatures on the outside to get in. The light weakened as my nonlucidity took control of its intensity. I was able to strengthen the light after focusing on it, but I still didn’t really understand my current state of mind.

The red blobs moved into the circle; the light was too weak to repel them. They killed the blue blobs and started laughing. The Happy Mask Salesman smiled at me, and there was a period of silence before I woke up.

I remember finding a golden mask roughly in the shape of Majora’s mask. It was a bit more like a lion’s mane, however, and the eyes were angled more. The mask was on an altar surrounded by circular, stone pillars. I’m not sure when I found the mask or if I took it.

Learning a Dubious Subject

I was in a classroom. The professor kept cracking dumb jokes. Some of them had been stolen from my German teacher in high school, and I was quick to point them out. The professor also asked if my sister had ever gone by the name “Little Pimple.” I almost said no, but then I wondered if she had. Shia LeBeouf, making another strange appearance in my dreams, said that my sister did use that name in elementary school. She went on to call herself “Big Pimple with Little Whiskers” in middle school. Since Chelsea didn’t even know what pimples were in elementary school, I really doubted his story. It reminded me of a pimple that had been bugging me for a while. I started messing with it, and it popped all over my hand. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and clean my face. I had a glass of red soda when I walked in for some reason… I set it down on the sink next to someone else’s drink as I walked into the bathroom. It became apparent that the building was modeled after my grandparents’ house. The classroom took the place of the den, and the bathroom just flipped to the other side of the hallway. I watched in a mirror as the tiny bit of inflamed tissue on my face oozed out a handful of white goop. It almost looked like finely chopped potato salad.

After finishing with that, I overheard a message to a team of students who were supposed to play assassins in an upcoming simulation. I made note of the time and location of their meeting after class. Anyway, when I went back to the classroom, my professor announced that he would be introducing a new, more efficient searching algorithm called “Judge search.” It consisted of two nested for loops with an infinite while loop inside. I know, that’s not a searching algorithm… It’s just a waste of time. My professor insisted we should use it, though. He got mad at Shia, who was listening to music with headphones over his ears. When my professor pulled the headphones off his head, he criticized their quality. Shia had apparently preordered them from Best Buy. I noticed I had the same headphones in the dream, but I was embarrassed to have purchased headphones of poor quality, so when the professor asked if anyone else in the class used Best Buy’s exclusive headphones, I didn’t answer. The professor went back to the front of the classroom, pointed to a sphere hanging from the ceiling, and asked Shia where on the sphere humans were most easily found. Shia said they would be at the bottom of the sphere. Impressed, the professor nodded. He presented a hyperboloid and asked the same question. I muttered under my breath that it was obvious; humans would have to live inside such a thing to survive. Shia said they would be on the exterior, though. My professor just laughed at him. I messed with vacuum tubes attached to a window by my desk until class was dismissed.

Cucumber, Cucumber

I was playing a first-person shooter against a bunch of people. There were three Russian players who wanted to kill all the American players. For some reason, I decided to help them. I stood on top of a building and dropped motion sensor mines on the floor inside. There was some kind of hole in the roof enabling me to do so. I didn’t kill anyone, but the Russians did. When time ran out, someone climbed up onto the roof. The person saw four of us and shouted that there was a cucumber on the Russian side. I knew automatically that he was talking about me. I jumped off the building on the far side. As in the previous dream, I was in my grandparents’ house. This building was part of their kitchen. I mingled with the others until someone new showed up. We were in Nicole’s living room instead of the kitchen. The new guy wanted to play Pac-Man Space (whatever that is). I found the cartridge on the TV stand and popped it into the Nintendo 64. I figured it would be another multiplayer game, but it wasn’t. I felt strange about these people coming into Nicole’s house and hogging the N64. Why were they even here? I heard them complain about how the game would never say what level they were.

September 27, 2010

My recall was a little weak this morning. Well, it didn't help that I convinced myself Nicole's brother was going to appear and write dreams down for me. I lost two dreams that way.

Interference

I was sitting on the couch in Nicole’s living room. It was dark outside. The TV and lights were on. I don’t remember what was on TV, though. I sent Nicole a text message asking where she was. When I got a message back, my phone suddenly shut off. The TV lost its signal at the same time, and the lights in the room turned off. I stared at the white noise on the screen while wondering exactly what had just happened. After a few moments, everything went back to normal. I tried to contact Nicole again, but I couldn’t; the lights, TV, and phone were disabled again. This repeated several times.

Leaving the Airport

I was in an airport with my dad. My luggage consisted of the usual backpack and Nicole’s tablet – which I carried at my side like a briefcase. Austin was with us, too. We were on our way out of the airport toward the parking garage. Austin decided to exit through the security checkpoints even though there was a sign indicating that this was not permitted. I almost did the same thing because I was just following Austin, but my dad pulled me back. He didn’t bother to tell Austin about the sign. We went up an escalator without him. My dad suddenly started asking me a bunch of questions… He wouldn’t give me time to answer any of them.

Sharing a Kebab

Nicole and I were at some kind of festival in her town. We found Larry from Funky Java working at one of the stands. Apparently, he had prepared exotic barbecue for the festival, and he was planning on opening the stand any moment. We decided to wait there and be his first customers. As soon as we were given the chance, we each took a shish kebab.

Chelsea's Dream

Chelsea was laughing about a dream she posted on her online dream journal. I was excited about reading it since she hadn’t posted anything there in a while.

You always dream bookloads or just describe everything in an unnecessarily lengthy way?

Originally Posted by Blacklight

You always dream bookloads or just describe everything in an unnecessarily lengthy way?

I tend to recall a lot of dream content every night. That depends on how well I sleep and a bit of luck, as one might expect.

In terms of detail... I usually stick with almost exactly what's written in my paper and pencil dream journal (although I add things later if I forgot to write them down), so it's written to allow me to remember the dream much later rather than to capture the precise details. I give more detail to descriptions of new people I meet in my dreams in case it's relevant later. Other than that, I try to keep it concise so my entries are manageable.

September 28, 2010

A couple of these were really long...

Betraying a Friend, Helping a Friend, and Subway

I was back in elementary school. In the dream, my school was one that didn’t really care about bullies. The faculty felt that letting bullies cause trouble was the best way to get them to stop. The school was modeled after my parents’ old house in Louisiana. I walked into a storage area and stumbled across a box full of dolls fashioned after the kids of the small school. The list included such famous names as: Miles “Tails” Prower, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Chuckie Finster. Chuckie was my only friend, and for some reason, the bully usually beat him up. I present this as unusual because of the bully’s target selection methods. He would spill the dolls from the box and pick whichever one landed closest to him. Nine times out of ten, it was Chuckie. I decided I would give him a break one day, so I went to the storage room (where the kitchen would’ve been normally) and emptied the box’s contents myself. Knowing that the bully would walk in from the living room, I discovered that the doll representing me – Tommy Pickles – would be chosen. I heard the bully coming. I kicked a couple of dolls toward the door and hid behind a pillar in the room. I think the pillar was meant to be my parents’ refrigerator… The bully walked up to the closest doll and picked it up. It was Chuckie. I fell to my knees and broke down crying. I cursed myself for putting my friend in that position just to save myself. I thought about running straight to the administrative offices on the other side of the storage room (where the laundry room would have been), but I remembered something the principal had said the last time I tried that: “Don’t worry about Chuckie. There aren’t any bullies at our school.”

So I went to my classroom instead. It was one of three classrooms in the school. This one took the place of my bedroom. At this point, however, I merged with my normal self… Except I found myself in my algebra class from middle school (in Colorado). There was a man teaching instead of the woman I expected. I’m not sure what the subject was supposed to be. All he did was complain about the noise in the adjacent cafeteria. Our room was connected to the cafeteria of my middle school in Texas. I’ll note that this doubled as the floor of our auditorium since that comes up later in the dream. There was a stage on the south side of the cafeteria. Anyway, some guy from the main office came in with a stack of attendance sheets. He took one from the teacher and agreed to close the doors on his way out. The entire west wall of the classroom (adjacent to the cafeteria) consisted of openings: two garage doors and the usual classroom door. The attendance guy started closing the garage doors, and I noticed there were desks in the way. I was surprised that the door kept moving downward; usually, those have sensors… Two of the people behind the garage door moved desks out of the way, but there was a girl sitting in one. She had short, blond hair which curled near the tips, big, blue eyes, and a fairly light frame. She was oblivious to the world around her. I felt that I was her friend. I told her to move her desk, and she pulled it back into the cafeteria. As soon as the garage door closed, I left the classroom to help her move the desk back inside. She was happy to have my help. There were a couple others sitting in desks outside the classroom, but they didn’t seem interested in going back to class. As I carried the girl’s desk, a green pencil on the surface kept rolling toward the edge, forcing me to tilt the desk to catch it. At the girl’s request, I put her desk in between two rows instead of setting it down somewhere more orderly.

The dream jumped. I was in a food court with Nicole. We decided to get Subway, so we headed over to their stand. Nicole wanted a pocky sandwich (which they served, apparently, but the woman told us we would have to wait for them to thaw the frozen pocky). I knew I wanted a BMT, but I couldn’t remember the name of the bread I always get. I referred to it as the cheesy bread. The woman making my sandwich should’ve been able to tell what I meant, but she had no idea. I asked where the sign indicating the bread choices was. Even after looking around, I couldn’t find a menu. She said she would tell me my choices. Her manager – a huge guy practically covered in black hair with an uncharacteristically deep voice – pulled her aside and whispered something while glaring at me. His black eyebrows were furrowed from that moment on. The woman opened the bread cabinet, grabbed six inches of wheat bread for Nicole and a foot of Italian bread for me, and closed it. While it was open, I saw that they only had Italian bread left. Why hadn’t she said that in the first place?

Anyway, the manager made Nicole’s sandwich, but he told me that I would have to wait an hour and a half for the pocky. I said that was alright as long as we could just come back for it. I didn’t want to pay extra, nor did I want Nicole to wait ninety minutes for her lunch. He said that was fine. I started talking to Nicole about something, and she went off to find a table. When I looked back at our sandwiches, they were basically done. The manager wrapped Nicole’s up without asking me anything. I checked their vegetables and thought initially that stuff was missing – namely, the pickles and cucumbers. It was actually just mixed in with the meats… They had their roast beef where the tomatoes should have been. I checked my sandwich to make sure she hadn’t put anything nasty on it. I noticed that the food was on a tortilla instead of the usual bread. It wasn’t a BMT, either; there was roast beef on it. I asked for salt and pepper, and the woman proudly announced that it was already on the sandwich. Pleased, I said that would be all. I looked over my shoulder and saw Nicole smiling at me from the table she found. I smiled back.

The manager wrote out the price for each sandwich on paper, followed by the total. It came out to $90.87 exactly. I’m glad I questioned this, at least… I told him there had to be a mistake. My sandwich was $18.87 (which is horribly wrong to begin with), Nicole’s was $1.00, and the total was over $90. I said he must have made an error adding them and suggested $19.87 as the new total. As I said it, I looked down and saw exactly that written on the paper. I felt a bit stupid. I handed him a $20 bill and sighed. The total changed again – this time to $19.12. I told him I had change and pulled out Nicole’s wallet. Sure enough, I found a dime and two pennies. The man held out his hands. They were full of coins. I accidentally dropped two dimes into his pile, so I picked one back out. I hoped he wouldn’t suspect me of stealing spare change… The manager invited me to sit with him for a bit. He and the woman sat down with me and started eating. I talked to him for a few minutes, and then I moved to Nicole’s table. It was now occupied by five girls, counting Nicole. I sat across from her. She was talking about the things I do that annoy her when I arrived. I complained, but that just added fuel to the fire.

The dream jumped. I was back in elementary school. A powerful storm was on its way, so no one could enter or leave the school grounds. The bully wasn’t there, but neither was Chuckie. I was the only one in my class who had showed up for school that day. I walked through a replica of the living room (again, this was our old house in Louisiana) with a woman in a white lab coat. She had short, black hair and wore pink lipstick. She also had glasses. Because I was just a child, she was much taller than me. She told me we needed to get to a safe place before the storm arrived. Looking outside through the windows, I could only see raindrops being thrown against the glass at random. Mist obscured the rest. To me, it seemed as though the storm had already arrived. I walked into a shelter positioned where the classroom was before. I sat down with the woman in the lab coat and told her all about Chuckie and the bully, but she said there was nothing I could do.

The dream jumped. I was back in middle school – but again, I was my normal self. I got a text message from 497-5933 or something like that. It was Alex. She asked if she could come to the National Society of Leadership and Success speaker event with me. It would give her a chance to see how speaker events work backstage, she said. She added that she doubted I was interested in any of that stuff. I told her she could come and assured her that I was going for the same reasons she wanted to. That’s not actually true, heh…

The dream jumped. Alex and I were sitting in the cafeteria in front of the stage. The guest speaker was about to arrive.

Things in the Darkness

I was walking down a dark hallway. These eerie, white ripples kept appearing in the air. Some of them had more depth than others, and these produced more intense light. I was afraid to open any of the doors. I came to one that was already open and went inside. There was a bed, a small desk with a laptop (mine, I guess), and a coffee table. Chelsea was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dead look on her face. I had a glass of Hi-C. Chelsea told me not to worry – the things living in the darkness wouldn’t kill me yet. She showed me a video of myself walking alone in a canyon. The camera was fixed, so I gradually shrank into the distance. The video said it was uploaded “11 Fall of Courages ago,” whatever that means. I saw that many of the comments on the video were timestamped in a similar manner.

We watched another video. This time, it was captured Morrowind gameplay. The player character ran from Balmora toward the fortress outside town. Instead of going there, however, he made a left and went up a hill. I recognized the bridge where you’re attacked by a summoner on your way to a Dwarven ruin for a Fighter’s Guild quest. The player fought something, but it was invisible. He walked on and off the bridge without falling – as though there was an invisible platform beneath his feet. The video ended. This one was posted “17 seconds ago.” I had another glass of Hi-C. Chelsea left, and I tried to fall asleep before the darkness came for me. It was oppressively dark… I could feel the shadows clutching my shoulders.

Double Alarm - All the Way

I was about to go to bed. I set an alarm for 8:00 AM on my phone so I could wake up and talk to Nicole before she left for school. I noticed another alarm was set for 8:15 AM… That one was unnecessary, so I disabled it.

White Wasp Ferret

I was in Nicole’s bedroom with her. She and I were sitting up talking about our dreams when a white wasp landed on her shirt. I told her there was a bug on her chest, and she didn’t see it at first. When she pulled the bottom of the shirt away from her body, however, she did. Her eyes went wide. She flicked it off her shirt, and I thought it might sting one of us, but it didn’t. It just kept landing on her shirt and doing nothing. I told her to get it on the wall where I could smash it. She tried, but it would only land on the wall close to the floor. I wasn’t sure I could get it in one try that low… She got it to climb onto a green pencil (the same one the blond girl from my bully dream had on her desk). When she held the pencil up, the wasp began to change. Its head became longer, its wings shrank, and it grew limbs. Before long, it was a tiny, white ferret. We called it a mouse because of its size, though. She got angry at it for looking at her and threw it down. I was surprised to see that it hadn’t moved. The one inch tall ferret was still holding on to the pencil and staring at me.

Sasquatch Brothers

I was coming out of a huge building. Cameramen were all around me as though I was a celebrity or something. I was with another sasquatch (yes, I was a sasquatch too). We had come from somewhere in Canada to reveal the truth behind our race. I handed my sasquatch brother a white, metallic box. It was a relic I stole from somewhere in the mountains. He thanked me, walked a few feet ahead of me, and… A giant dolphin-dragon-serpent hybrid broke out of the earth, scattering cameramen. It soared through the air, opened its mouth, and swallowed my sasquatch brother whole before diving back into the earth just as easily as it came out. I knew instantly that it was my fault.

The dream reset. I told my brother I wouldn’t give him anything this time, and he was glad. Nothing happened to either of us.

South Peruvian Bolivia Vacation

Prior to this dream, I woke up and exchanged messages with Nicole about our dreams from the previous night. As far as we could tell, none of them were shared. I closed my eyes to try to recall what had happened between 7 AM and 8 AM during the night. I began writing down a dream about returning from a camping trip… Except I was writing the dream inside the dream itself.

I was sitting on the island in the kitchen (North Carolina) with a huge clock in front of me where there should have been a microwave. My awareness moved backward in time, and I was in the car with my family a few minutes prior; I needed to help carry things inside. I got a phone call from Nicole in the present (in which I was writing the dream). When I picked up, she complained that I was taking too long to respond to her.

I woke up and sent her a text message: “I’m still so sleepy for some reason.” My phone’s logs indicate that this part actually happened. My roommate came into the room, and I closed my eyes. I fell back asleep and resumed writing.

“My parents and I went on a camping trip in South Bolivia,” I wrote. “Aside from its hot, humid climate, it was nice.” I found myself in a park in Bolivia. I described it as I saw it: a green swing set, a slide made of twisted metal, a fountain in the middle with walkways leading in all directions, and picnic tables on the right side of the fountain. The kids, their parents, and I had a pointless argument about who actually built the park. They said my school had built it, but I didn’t believe them.

The dream jumped. I was in a car. I started writing about the dream as soon as I realized I wasn’t done with it. I saw a sign that said “Peruvia” and decided I should’ve noticed I was dreaming because of the changing name of our vacation spot. Amazing… My mom was driving on a highway. She kept asking which way was home. I told her west every time. I didn’t realize my dad was in the back seat with me until he asked if Mom was supposed to turn onto highway 42. I said yes even though I had no idea. When I checked the map between us, I saw highway 41, but not 42. I continued writing.

“Eventually,” I wrote, “we ended up in the forest. The god of the Bolivian religion was there, and my parents discovered they had been wrong all along.” Sure enough, we were suddenly driving between these huge trees, and a glowing, golden figure in a robe stopped us. I don’t remember the conversation, just that my dad wasn’t convinced. I went back and scribbled that part out in my notebook.

The dream jumped. I was outside the weird alternate version of my campus from an older dream titled Elephants Seeking Education. A golden version of Sturm (Advance Wars) was floating around me and firing balls of white-hot flames from his nose. I dodged them while charging energy with Apheri, my sword. As soon as the charge filled, I leaped toward Sturm and slashed at him several times. Repeat that for at least five charges. My dad started yelling at me, snapping me out of the battle scene. I was playing a game this time instead of writing the dream. My dad asked which way was home. I told him west like I’d been telling my mom the whole drive back. He accused me of misleading my mom and said that if I knew where to go – he paused, and I thought he would make me drive, but he just dropped the map in my lap – I should give her directions. I told him I would as soon as I finished the boss fight. I doubted we would pass the fork in the road before then. The same battle procedure resumed when the game overtook my field of vision.

I got Sturm down to 233 health points (out of about 25000) and found I could no longer attack him. He retreated to a balcony above the school’s main entrance and turned into some kind of two-dimensional, circular thing… I watched him from the ground while waiting for something to happen. Navi appeared and warned me about a portal behind me. Indeed, when I turned, I saw a circular portal with glowing, yellow edges. The portal led to some kind of gray-black world. Navi said that Sturm was going to shoot a Mega Blaster at me through the portal. When the fireballs came, I flipped out of the way. There were about a dozen of them, and they all curved in the air to follow me. One struck one of the pillars supporting the balcony. I knew I had to hit Sturm with his own attack to finish him off. I jumped onto the balcony, positioned myself behind him, and waited for the fireballs to do their job. They didn’t catch up to me, though. Sturm was already partially healed. He teleported to the ground with a deep laugh. I fought him again, but this time, I charged Apheri with enough energy to obliterate him in one strike rather than fighting him gradually. My mom started complaining about directions, but my dad said I would be done soon. He added that I couldn’t save my game until after the boss fight. I finished Sturm off by my school’s front door and saved the game.

September 29, 2010

Walgreens, Software, and Melting Ice

I went to Walgreens with Nicole, my mom, and my siblings. It was snowing outside, and a lot of the cars in the parking lot were trapped. The parking lot was huge – as though we were at a shopping mall. I went inside and sat down with Nicole by the customer service desk while my mom got whatever she needed. The guy there was preparing raw burgers for people. He was out of bread, though, so he just handed them the patty with some cheese. He made a joke over the intercom about how he was thirty-five and making burgers for a living. I thought about how easy his job was, but then I remembered he had other things to do, too. He got on the ancient desktop computer next to him. There was a virus scanner named Lil’s Buddy. The name referred to his manager. The antivirus icon was an animated male head. The head opened its mouth and eyes wide in surprise, and I heard a garbled “NURGH!” sound come from the speakers. The clerk decided to restart the computer… That was some kind of emergency alert.

I recall seeing a bunch of programs from the same people who made the antivirus. They were all labeled with “software for personal use only.” One was a program for making free phone calls. It called people with a number it said would display as arctan(y/x). It was written as the inverse tangent, though. I wondered about this at first, but when it said there was no way to trace the call, I decided it would probably work. We left Walgreens. In the snowy parking lot, I told Nicole to lock the car in case she forgot to before we went in. By that point, the car was already in view, so it was fairly pointless. I climbed over cars instead of walking around them. Everyone else followed suit. We came to a big empty gap in the parking lot with only a couple cars in front of ours. I told them to walk around the cars. One car almost pulled into a parking spot as I was walking past it, but the driver corrected himself and parked next to our convertible instead.

As we came nearer to the car, my mom said we needed hot spring water. I guess we had to melt the ice around the car. Austin was the first to object; the area around the car was strangely dry and grassy. There were even houses around us, so it seems we were no longer in the parking lot. I agreed that we wouldn’t be able to collect any spring water there… But I don’t think it mattered, since there wasn’t any snow in sight.

Catching Up with Sara

I was visiting Houston and decided to stop by the Subway I worked at in high school. It was after closing time, but the lights were still on inside. I tried opening the door; it was locked. Sara came into view inside the store. At first, she gestured as if to say “We’re closed,” but when she recognized me, she practically ran to the door and unlocked it. We caught up on each other’s lives inside, and then I mentioned the possibility of Nicole and I moving to Houston. I asked if the store needed employees. She acted like she wasn’t sure and said she would have to check, but I knew they would hire us regardless. Sara closed the store, and we went to this playhouse next to the Jewel. It was a big, inflatable building with all kinds of games. We each tried the carnival game where you have to climb an unstable rope ladder and ring a bell. We also played a shooting game. The inside of the playhouse was extremely colorful. After we left, we wandered around the parking lot. I told her I could make it rain.

“What are you talking about, Joe?” she asked with her hands on her hips. I made her put on a transparent raincoat. It started pouring extremely hard. It was such heavy rainfall that I couldn’t see an inch past the edge of the building. At my command, it stopped. I said I had noticed that the rain always followed me and learned how to control it. Sara was impressed. I told her I would be in touch and left.

Discomfort in Bed

This dream has been omitted.

Meeting a Mermaid

I met a younger girl with long, red hair. It was neon red, not the natural color. We were standing outside a store at a shopping mall. She was about sixteen or seventeen years old. She wore a gray beard. It was obviously fake – if not because she was a young lady, then because of the green tape holding it to her cheeks. The girl asked me to help her pick out clothes. She grabbed my hand, and the dream jumped in response.

I was in a clothing store. She looked through a bunch of clothes on a circular rack, tried them all on, and ultimately rejected all but one: a simple blue tank top. There was nothing special about it. As she examined it, her fake beard fell off. Her clothes fell off, too. She covered her breasts with her hands and started crying. The secret was out, she wailed; everyone would know that she was really a mermaid.

The dream reset. I met the girl again in the same place. The dream jumped to the store, and I rushed over to the blue tank top. I immediately showed it to her.

“This is perfect!” she exclaimed. “How did you know?!” I didn’t say, but I did hold her beard to her face while she changed. I didn’t want her to cry again.

Nicole's Heartbreaking Plot

This dream has been omitted.

September 30, 2010

Getting Married... Or Not

I was at Nicole’s house, but it resembled a hotel with bits and pieces from a few houses more than hers specifically. At the start, I was in a class taught by John Snapper. It was a computer science course with a little philosophy thrown in. Snapper didn’t expect the philosophy students to be great at coding, so he gave us a fair portion of the solutions to each assignment just for coming to class. I enjoyed this since it meant less time worrying about assignments outside of class. As he dismissed class, he barely remembered to announce that Ada had a new password (“adaplease”), so I stayed after class with my laptop to try it. It’s strange that there would be a password just to connect to the shell, though. Most of the people left. There was a cake waiting for them outside the building. I knew what they were talking about already; an image of a white cake with blue icing came to mind. Once I successfully logged into Ada, I closed my shell and started talking to Joe. He showed me his new online dream journal. He had a dream posted about traveling with John Lennon. I asked myself whether it was shared (because I remembered a previous dream in which I transformed into John Lennon), but I decided it wasn’t. I went on to warn him about something lurking in the dark recesses of reality.

I wrote a three-dimensional message in the air above a circular table in the middle of the room, and its shadows looked creepy as they were cast atop various trinkets which had appeared all over the table. It was the same table everyone sat at during class. I was sitting on the bottom portion of a bunk bed a few feet away from the table. Every now and then, someone came into the room just to ask why I hadn’t gone downstairs for cake. I kept sending them away. Nicole called me to ask the same question. She wanted to know where I’d been all this time. I told her I was going to come to the party, but I needed to change into a nicer shirt before the end. She told me she wanted me to wear my suit – meaning I would have to go back to my dorm, pick it up, and come back to Nicole’s house before I could even show up at the party. I saw a clock on the wall; it was 8:30 PM. If I did all that, I probably wouldn’t be back until 1 AM. When I told her this, I added that I went to bed at midnight the previous night – referring to the night I had the dream, heh. I didn’t expect to be awake at 1 AM.

Nicole got upset and started crying. It turns out the party wasn’t so much a party as it was a wedding. I was supposed to be getting married to her. I got really nervous then… If I was going to be wed, I needed to buy a ring. That was one more item on my to-do list for the long night ahead of me. I imagined myself standing with her before an altar. When the priest in my visualization asked for the ring bearer to give us the rings, I told him there wasn’t one. He looked around in shock like someone was playing a prank on him. I snapped out of the visualization and told Nicole at once that we hadn’t made the necessary preparations for a wedding. Wanting to be in private, I walked out of the room while I waited for her to respond. I stopped in an empty bedroom with two beds. Through the doorway, I could see into another room which resembled my bedroom when we lived in Texas. Two Middle-Eastern girls were changing with the door open. I hid under the bed so they wouldn’t see me and freak out. As soon as I was sure they wouldn’t see me, I turned my body in the opposite direction and tried to reason with Nicole. She hung up on me.

Instead of going downstairs, I decided to check my dream journal on my laptop. I read a comment that went something like this: “So what is all this for?” I replied by asking them what they thought it was for.

I went downstairs and met with my mom in the kitchen. She was urgently finishing my wedding dinner. I sighed when I heard this. She asked why I wasn’t picking up my phone; my current ringtone was looping endlessly. I wasn’t receiving a call, though… It just wouldn’t stop playing. Once I started messing with my phone, it went silent. I wanted to talk to my mom about Nicole and the wedding, but then I saw Scamper limping into the kitchen. He was basically dragging the rear end of his body with his front legs. I commented on how pitiful he looked. My mom knelt down to pet him, explaining that he might be getting strep throat. She hoped not… She was apparently worried he would pass it to the rest of the family. I briefly thought about my parents having him put down, and I started crying. That was too much to add on top of Nicole getting mad at me. When my mom asked if something was wrong, I shook my head. She said something about the roast beef smelling good, then realized she didn’t have any roast beef in the oven… I understood that she somehow mistook Meg for a lump of roast beef.

Watching Inception

I was in a big room with a projector and an equally large screen. Nicole’s dad was sitting behind an office desk in the corner. I argued with someone online about whether or not lucid dreams served any purpose. As in the previous dream, we were arguing via comments on my dream journal. He insisted lucid dreams were boring. I assured him that his boring imagination was the only thing holding him back. Nicole’s dad asked if I wanted to watch Inception. I said yes, and it popped up on the screen. I saw a man working on a huge machine. It looked like a giant robot, but it was still in pieces. Some kind of alarm went off a couple minutes into the movie, and I saw a digital render of the world. A target was focused on Spain, indicating that the antagonist of the movie was inside someone’s dream in Spain. I wondered how they had the technology to figure that out with such accuracy, but other than that, I was glad to be following along.

Let's Be Friends

I was in a small room underground. It was my team’s private office. A small microphone and speaker protruded from a big machine. It was a computer, but it was easily as big as me. I started it up.

“Initial boot sequence complete,” the machine said in a dull, female voice. “I am Symphony I. Please state your name.”

“I am Nephanim. From now on, let’s be friends.”

Four Seasons of Battery Life

I was at my Omi and Opi’s house. My dad was taking Austin somewhere, so he asked me to install these new battery chips on my laptop while he was gone. They were called the “Four Seasons” chips because each was supposed to last an entire season, and they came in sets of four for a full year. My laptop was mounted to my cooling pad by some kind of high-strength adhesive. I was worried I would mess the adhesive up, so after touching it a couple times, I left it alone. I opened the bottom panel, and there were perfectly-sized slots for the chips. I installed all of them, including what was referred to as the “helper” chip. Basically, the Four Seasons chips themselves were the size and shape of Gameboy Advance games, but there was a big, gray one – the helper chip. This one was made identically to a traditional Gameboy game. It was meant to optimize the performance of the four battery chips, so it was placed in a slot between them. I had one more part to install: the activator. Without that, my laptop would just keep draining power from the normal battery.

This one was made like an SD card, but it was too big to fit in the appropriate drive. I looked all over my laptop and couldn’t figure out where to put it. The only conclusion I could draw was that, despite the slots prepared on the underside of my laptop, it was incompatible with these Four Seasons chips. Austin and my dad came home while I was fiddling with the activator on the couch. It sounded like my dad was making Austin get a job. He gave Austin a quick motivational speech and walked over to the couch to ask how the chips worked. When I told him I couldn’t figure out how to install the activator, he took one look at the front of my laptop and pointed out an SD card slot that hadn’t been there before. It seemed to have replaced the audio ports in the front. I knew I had tried all of the SD card slots, so even though I didn’t remember seeing this one, I was sure it had a problem, too. I told him the card was too big.

“Is it?” he asked. He took it from me and slid it right in. Astounded, I compared the slot to the others. It was much larger in size than the ones I had found.

Betrayal and Slaughter on Halloween

It was Halloween. I was at Nicole’s house, but it more accurately resembled a cluttered version of the Brundage house in North Carolina. Nicole and I left the house and went to a fountain next door. I was told that the fountain could shoot water higher than the one at Disneyland. The guy who was with us said it was better to see this one, anyway, since you could hear comets in the background at Disneyland. I thought I knew what he was talking about, but the more I considered it, the less I understood. Nicole pointed out a truck pulling into her driveway, and I stopped thinking about it. It was one of those vehicles people use to transport fruit across the country. This one was transporting eight huge cans of tuna instead. The driver turned around and pulled back out, but when he made the left turn out of her driveway, the back of the truck tilted, causing one of the massive tuna cans to roll out. We all snickered at the sight. I wasn’t sure how he was going to lift that back into the truck by himself.

He shifted into reverse and backed straight into the tuna can. It was such a fluid motion that it seemed as though he had done this before… To be more accurate, it had worked before, and he saw no reason why it wouldn’t work again. The truck dented the side of the tuna can inward, and the increase in pressure blew the top off. Tuna spilled all over the road. At this point, the driver gave up and drove away – but in the other direction. I watched him until he turned out of view at the end of the street. When I looked back at the giant tuna can sitting in the road, I saw a motorcycle parked in the road next to it. A police car pulled up next to it. A woman in all black stepped out. She wore a white helmet with her police badge attached. She was also wearing big sunglasses. The cop crossed her arms as she inspected the tuna. With force behind her strokes, she wrote out a parking fine for the tuna can. She didn’t do anything about the motorcycle, although that was parked illegally and… Well, at least that was a vehicle! Anyway, Nicole and I saw some trick-or-treaters walking away from her house and decided to head back inside so we wouldn’t miss any more.

I asked if we had candy on the way inside since there were already more trick-or-treaters waiting there, and she said yes. I found two sealed boxes of candy on the dining room table. This room was stolen from my parents’ house in Texas. I opened one of the boxes and found full packages of Hershey bars and similar things. I remembered Nicole saying something about setting aside boxes of candy for people and wondered if these were the boxes. I apologized in advance when I asked her about it, but she said those were intended for the trick-or-treaters. I gave out candy to everyone at the front door. The trick-or-treaters were pretty clever… They stopped at the front door first, then they went to the side door (where there should have been a garage normally) and got candy from Nicole. Some of the really greedy kids even went all the way around to the back door after getting candy from us twice. We gave out candy for a few minutes before Trish showed up, and then everything was put on hold. I asked Trish to wait in the foyer while I asked Nicole about her surprise. I notified Nicole, and we fetched a chocolate carrot with real carrot bits inside for Trish. I asked where the carrots were in a whisper as Nicole handed it over. She gave me the obvious answer: inside the chocolate. Trish heard us, but she pretended she didn’t know about the carrot bits. She made a bewildered face when she found the first piece of a carrot, but as she ate more of it, she started nodding and smiling. She seemed to appreciate that we were looking out for her health. She thanked us both, but I assured her it was entirely Nicole’s idea.

Nicole and I went outside onto the deck. In this dream, a thin screen surrounded the deck. It was supposed to keep bugs from coming in. Nicole and I accidentally let a bee into the deck area, but we got it to fly back out. We sat down to meditate. We both ended up in a zoo. Nicole kept running ahead of me, and I noticed she was with a girl I didn’t recognize. This girl was no more than two feet tall and could fly like a fairy. I chased them to a hologram-based performance near the dolphin house. There was a tank of water on either side of the path, and there were dining tables in front of one of these tanks. A projection of a man covered in snakes floated around above the dining tables while narrating the story of a bunch of virtual dolphins swimming in the water tanks. Everyone except the young children knew the dolphins weren’t real. I had to walk close to the man covered in snakes and felt a bit threatened, but I held down my fear so I could keep up with Nicole. I continued to the edge of the tank and found her. She was leaning way over the railing… I told her to stop, and she jumped right into the tank instead.

To everyone’s surprise, she only dropped into the tank far enough to get her thighs wet. Even the depth of the water in the tank was an illusion! Tons of people leaped over the railing and followed Nicole like her disciples as she paraded toward the dolphin holograms. One by one, they each disappeared as they drew close to the image. I was left alone in the zoo. I woke up on Nicole’s deck. I had fallen asleep, I realized… I didn’t have time to sort out what was part of the meditation and what was a dream. My attention immediately focused on a guy with hippie hair sitting next to Nicole. They had been talking while I slept. I told Nicole I was going to write down my dream, and she started to walk away with the guy. I decided I would write the dream down later and followed them.

The dream jumped. I was aware of the jump, however, and concluded that the hippie guy had done it to try to separate me from Nicole. I was on a busy street. Nicole and the hippie ran together in between the cars, but I was stuck on top of an orange ball that was too big to squeeze between them. I tried to get onto the sidewalk and chase them that way through an intersection, but my ball got stuck between a car and the curb. I knew I would lose them if I didn’t lose the ball first. At this point, I was close to lucidity; I was questioning how bizarre this situation was, and I knew I didn’t have to surrender to the environment’s restrictions, but I didn’t understand that I was dreaming. I jumped down to the ground, abandoning my ball. Since I didn’t have a vehicle, I decided to multiply my speed as I raced through the intersection on foot. I also summoned a scythe. I recognized in the dream that it was Neluna’s. I knew who she was, but I didn’t comprehend what she was.

A terrible wrath consumed me. At this point, I was quite disturbed with myself, but that didn’t matter. I was going to kill him, kill her, kill them both for betraying me. I grinned wickedly as I sprinted down the sidewalk. When I caught up to them, I erupted in laughter. One swipe of Neluna’s scythe beheaded them, but that was only the beginning. While the blood was still falling toward the ground, I mutilated their corpses with the scythe. I brutally tore them apart, and I enjoyed it. At the end of it all, their blood covered my eyes, and I couldn’t see anything anymore. I gradually became calm and found myself on Nicole’s desk. I could see again. I was still holding the scythe, however, and the blade was soaked in fresh blood. I decided I would pretend it was Kool-Aid if anyone asked. I couldn’t let them know I had killed Nicole. I walked out to the backyard, dipped the scythe in a tiny version of the pool, and continued toward the back of the garage to hide the murder weapon. I threw it over the fence.

I woke up again on the deck. This time, the backyard was really small. A message nailed to the fence said “Need wood?” in one person’s handwriting. Under that, Nicole’s dad had written “Not anymore.” Stacks of wood seven feet high appeared along the fence. There was enough wood to cover the whole perimeter of the backyard. I wondered if he bought all the wood just to spite Rob (who I knew had written the original message). Nicole’s dad came outside and asked what I thought about the new fence. The wood transformed itself into not one, but several concentric fences surrounding the deck. They were poorly made, to be honest; there were regular gaps in the fences that allowed me to look outward and see all of them at once. I noticed how small the pool was and how dirty the water was, too. Her dad started cleaning it, and the yard basically returned to its normal size. I saw a man wearing a Gibdo mask peek out from behind a wooden platform in one corner of the yard. The garage seemed to have disappeared again, leaving this platform. I walked over and found Nicole and the hippie-haired guy lying in the grass behind the platform.

“What are you doing?” I asked with fury in my voice.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Just hanging out.” She added that I had been asleep, so what else was she supposed to do?

“What are you doing?” I asked again. My suspicion came through in the words, and I knew I had successfully communicated that I knew she was cheating on me. I acknowledged that she would never forgive me if she wasn’t actually cheating on me, but I knew. I was ready to kill again. The guy disappeared. Nicole and I sat on the platform together afterward. She was angry – as though she had a right to be. I asked why she had cheated on me, and she said it was because I wouldn’t let her get birth control. Mind you, I only kept arguing because I wanted to win the argument. I realized at some point after arguing about the cost of birth control that I’ve wanted her to get it for medical reasons for a long time. I “gave in” and decided she could get it after all. I knew she would probably want to go this weekend to pick the pills up. She was calm again.

We watched her dad cleaning the neighbors’ pool. It was the yard behind hers… They don’t have a pool, of course. Her dad hopped straight into the muddy, brown water and announced that it needed to be shocked. I watched him dump chlorine all over the place, clearly getting it on himself in the process. In seconds, the water was only a faint brown.

“That really did the trick, didn’t it?” he asked me with a grin. I smiled back. A few seconds more, and it was clean. I could see into the windows of the house behind Nicole’s. The owner was on the phone in his kitchen. I worried that he would accuse Phil of using his pool without permission – obviously overlooking the fact that he had cleaned the pool for no charge. The guy got off the phone and stared at Nicole’s dad. Surprisingly, they were great friends, so he didn’t care. The owner of the house was a short, fat man. He was already shirtless, so he jumped into the pool, causing a huge splash. His beer belly seemed to float all by itself. He was mostly bald except for a ring of a gray hair around the crown of his head. I saw a message posted on the wall of the pool about racism in the union; it was from the guy’s son. They were referring to the stage hands’ union in Chicago. It wasn’t that the union heads were racist and wouldn’t hire him because of his ethnicity – rather, the guy’s son was just racist against the “coonies.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. Nicole and I went swimming in her pool.

The dream jumped again. We were sitting outside on the edge of the deck while Eric played a game that looked like a cross between Fire Emblem and Goemon. There was a widescreen TV set up in the yard, and the pool was gone again… Nicole suddenly remembered a video we watched with Eric about Captain Falcon’s apprentice, Agony. She kept trying to get me to quote the video, but I told her no one would get it except Eric – and maybe Matt. I ended up saying it anyway, although I was worried I would misquote it.

“Captain Agony, defender of justice!” I shouted. Incredibly, the game responded to the quote. Eric’s character was surrounded by seven deities who made quick work of every enemy separating him from the final boss. One by one, the deities flew forward, tore through entire buildings, and teleported everyone remaining to the new location. As the cutscene prior to the boss fight played through, Nicole grabbed a Nintendo 64 controller. She said the boss fight was intended for two players, and she wanted to help Eric. The fight began, and she couldn’t join in for some reason. I grabbed a controller and pressed the A button. A second player appeared on the screen. I explained to Nicole that she had the wrong controller. The boss fight was set in a two-dimensional room with a bunch of conveyor belts, orange balls, and spikes on the ceiling. The boss was an evil version of Mario; he dressed in all black and summoned zombies. Periodically, the conveyor belts would be electrified, so the only way to fight him properly was to roll around on orange balls. I let Nicole play when she asked for the controller. They didn’t have time to finish off the boss before the dream faded.

Rob's Citrus

This dream has been omitted.

I was reading a reply to my dream journal by WakingNomad which went like this, "You are dreaming. Why don't you do a reality check?" The funny thing is, I did not RC because I read that. I RC'ed because the words floated off the page and began munching at my flesh. It felt like being bit by a million fleas, but without the itch.

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

I was reading a reply to my dream journal by WakingNomad which went like this, "You are dreaming. Why don't you do a reality check?" The funny thing is, I did not RC because I read that. I RC'ed because the words floated off the page and began munching at my flesh. It felt like being bit by a million fleas, but without the itch.

It's a lucid dream waiting to happen.

October 1, 2010

A couple of these were pretty long. Too bad I had to omit the last one.

Antonia's Parents are Scared of Nephanim

The dream started at Nicole’s house. We walked out to the car to pick up dinner. We had to take the jeep because the convertible was gone, and Nicole didn’t want to drive… So I did. We were in the parking lot at the local bank for some reason, and it was busy. Several cars drove past us before anyone would let me back out. I didn’t have very good control over the vehicle… It was like only using one hand to do something I expected to have two available for. I adjusted quickly, though, and I made it onto the road. I came to a stop sign, but I couldn’t stop in time, so I just slammed on the brakes, causing the car to slow to about twenty-five miles per hour. That was as slow as it would go. We rolled right through the intersection. Before long, we were at Subway. It was built underground as a play on the name. Nicole didn’t want to order her food, so she paid someone $5 to order it for her. I decided I would have him order mine, too, to simplify things. In my case, though, he wanted $20. We settled on $15 for both – that way, he wasn’t paying out of his own pocket, but I wasn’t paying twice the price, either. Once we told him what we wanted, we started talking with Antonia about Subway. She was the only one working there.

I tried to ask subtly if she was the manager, but I never got a clear answer. Antonia let Nicole make her own sandwich. I knew that would never be allowed at the Subway I used to work at. I got to eat some of my sandwich, but it disappeared. I found out Nicole had put it back in the bag. When I pulled it out, about half had already been eaten. I decided I must’ve been really hungry. We all went to Antonia’s house after we ate. I don’t know why we bothered. We all just sat on our laptops in a room loosely adapted from Nicole’s living room. once we got there. I met Antonia’s dad… He looked like a pudgy version of Einstein. When Antonia said she was going to Brad’s house, her dad wrote down a bunch of stuff on the wall outside her room. The message required her to write down the time she left and the time she came back. He waited by it for a few minutes, but he didn’t come get Antonia. She was in a chair where the leather chair should have been. She kept looking over at me, and I wondered if she knew her dad had left her a message. I was too shy to tell her.

I went downstairs to get my laptop (it vanished at some point). It was in Antonia’s room… I checked Jadusable’s site and found that it had been updated. The main page listed just about every horror movie villain in existence. He was trying to tie all of those films’ stories together. When I saw Samara on the page, I knew Nicole would get a kick out of the new site. She wouldn’t look at it, though. She was afraid something would happen to her. I told Antonia about it, and then I started playing Majora’s Mask from where I saved. Amazingly, the save state had been modified. I was in an icy cave. I was missing some equipment here and there: for example, the Lens of Truth, the Mask of Truth, the Zora Mask, and most importantly, the Ocarina of Time! I didn’t realize the last one was gone until I tried to use it to play the Song of Soaring. I wanted to teleport to Snowhead to get the Lens of Truth back.

“He took my ocarina!” I laughed. Was I really supposed to walk all the way? Nicole was scared. I acted like I knew it was just an alternate reality game at times, but at others, I referred to “BEN” as though he existed. Anyway, I walked out of the icy cave. There was a crowd of ten or so Zoras standing outside. Their eyes had all been ripped out, leaving empty sockets. They surrounded me and began striking me with their arms. When I fled, they chased me. They ran like hill winds from Ragnarok as we made our way across the ice. When the Zoras caught me, they tore my body apart. The scene reloaded. This time, I tried shooting the Zoras with arrows. They were pushed back, but it didn’t hurt them. They caught up with me again, and once again, I was torn apart. This repeated several times before I managed to escape.

The ice gave way to Ikana. Living bombchus surrounded me. They didn’t explode immediately on impact… I decided this was because they had more health than usual. I started slashing at them with Apheri instead of Link’s sword. Eventually, they all blew up, and I collected enough hearts to make up for the damage I’d taken. I had to fight off a few swarms of these. All the while, I dreaded going all the way back to the Goron village on foot. I came to another cave, but this one wasn’t covered in ice. There was a green Jinjo (Banjo-Kazooie) standing on a platform in the middle of a pit. The only way to get to him was to jump across the pit using one of those Goron ramps. Any attempt to approach the ramp caused it to twist, and the Jinjo platform began to move in a circle. Nicole told me to get the Jinjo, but I wasn’t so certain it was worth the trouble. I explained that I would have to guess which way the platform would twist in advance, then get lucky enough to land right on the platform. I figured I’d try it once, though. I rolled up to the ramp in Goron form. I was perfectly aligned to the ramp the whole way by my miraculous luck. As I rolled over the edge, I prepared myself for a rough landing. I tried to make a sharp turn to avoid rolling off the edge. As I did, I told Nicole I had made it – but then I rolled off. To my surprise, the Goron grabbed the side of the platform and climbed back up. I couldn’t recall that ever happening…

I collected the Jinjo, wondering why this was the first Jinjo I had ever seen in a Zelda game. I started to question it, and the dream jumped. I was in Andrea’s kitchen with my laptop. It had crumbs all over it, especially on the underside, so I was carefully collecting them and throwing them away. Antonia’s mom decided she was going to make pancakes for dinner. I expected to be leaving soon, so I didn’t ask for any. Nicole and I were only staying until Brad came home. In any event, Andrea’s boyfriend Eric was there for no reason. He was wearing a feathered crown. I thought about asking about his car, but I decided not to. Eric asked for help with the syrup. I told him I was busy dumping my laptop crumbs into the trash. Andrea’s dad complimented me on how well I opened the trash can. It was a two-step process… I had to open a drawer on the island, then open the trash can while the drawer retracted. If I failed to give the drawer time to close, my crumbs would fall into the drawer instead of the trash. At the same time, they would end up on the floor if I was too slow. My laptop was basically clean except some stuff stuck to the bottom. I decided I would scrub that off later. I agreed to help Eric.

He asked how to properly pour the syrup. His idea – which he insisted most people do – was to pour a bunch of syrup into a pitcher, put that in the microwave, and then dip the pancakes in that. I didn’t feel like arguing, so I decided to do exactly that. He stopped me before I poured any into the pitcher to ask if I knew what I was doing.

“I’ve never used syrup before,” I said. He was dumbfounded.

“Well, put it in the microwave, not in there,” Eric responded. I looked around, but I didn’t see a microwave. The dream jumped. Antonia’s mom got mad at us for not eating her cooking. She thought we were hungry, so she made extra… The pancakes she brought us were filled with alcohol, though… I wouldn’t have eaten them even if I was hungry.

The dream jumped again. Nicole and I were in a car. We couldn’t communicate directly, so she spoke to me over a radio transmitter in my ear. We were secret agents working for the government. A demonic version of me teleported into the car. He called himself Nephanim. He told me that my transmission was too loud. The transmitter broke without him even touching it. Nicole climbed into the back seat, and we discussed our script briefly. I guess we were filming a TV show or something. My character had a “550 bullet” in his pocket, which the demon pointed out. It was a bullet unique to one gun, and that gun was only used to commit suicide. At this point, Antonia’s parents came into the scene. We were sitting on the couch in Nicole’s living room. I pretend to be Brad, and Nicole pretended to be Antonia. It was too dark for them to tell who we really were. Nicole announced that I had decided I only loved her as family. Antonia’s mom said that was practically incest. I told her dad I had a 550 bullet in my pocket, and I was going to kill myself. He started asking questions as though reading from a script (he probably was). I reaffirmed what I had already told him; I was about to commit suicide. He started praying to God, and we noticed that information about the creator was on the back side of our script. Everyone prayed as they sang a hymn… Except me. I shot Nicole a questioning look, and she said with her hands together and a saintly expression that it was fun to roleplay. I wanted to leave. We had been there for hours already, and I had better things to do than pray about demons I was only pretending to encounter.

Making Improvements

This dream has been omitted.

Eels

Nicole was playing with eels. I think we were at a supermarket.

Fake Dream Journal Dream: A Continuation

I got up to write out the continuation of my first dream entry of the night. It was really short and had something to do with Nicole giving me a gift. I spent so long writing it out that I was positive I had really written it down, though.

Three of the Three

This dream has been omitted.

October 2, 2010

Airport Delays and Alien Messages

I was at an airport with Nicole. We were at our gate an hour before the scheduled departure time I watched an airplane pull in front of ours as the pilot tried to come up to the gate. This delayed our flight by over an hour. After sitting at our gate for over two hours, I was starting to get impatient. I started talking to an airport staff member, but he disappeared in the middle of answering a question. Nicole said she was so busy complaining about the flight that she forgot what we named our baby – because apparently, we had a kid. His name was Alloc. The airport worker reappeared and laughed at the kid’s name.

I was in outer space with a team of astronauts. I entered a small, rectangular room with an interesting message engraved on the wall in alien symbols. Someone was decoding the message… It mentioned peace, he said. An echoing, whirring sound filled the room, and a green orb appeared around the translator. He turned to look at me.

“Don’t listen to that. It’s a trap.” A sinister smile was on his face. The echoing noise played again and again, causing more green orbs to appear around him. I didn’t know who to believe.

83% Chance of Survival

Nicole drove us to a restaurant downtown. After we went in and ordered our food, she made a big deal out of how dangerous it was to eat there. Traffic problems outside the restaurant were so bad that 17% of the customers ended up in the hospital while trying to leave. I couldn’t fathom why she wanted to come to a place where one in five customers got into a car crash after their meal… She said the food was worth it.

Dream Machine

I was buying groceries at the store. For some reason, this store was set up in a way that customers had to pay to get in, but they could take whatever they wanted after going in at no additional cost. I paid with my credit card and went in. I found a device that promised to increase the frequency of any specific type of dream. I was set to increase a classification called “Long Epic Nonlucid Dream,” so that was why I wasn’t having lucid dreams every night! I found the setting labeled “Lucid Dream” and switched it on. The dream type ID was the newline character followed by psi. A counter on the device told me I would have one in two hours. It also told me that the more I used the machine, the greater my chances of having a lucid dream would be.

Sleep Scientist

I was a sleep scientist. I was monitoring someone’s brainwave readouts as they slept. My job was to keep an eye out for the tell-tale signs of a dysfunctional mind. Someone explained that I couldn’t study sleep disorders properly this way; I needed to monitor myself for a night first as a baseline.

Galaxy World and an Emergency

I was at Galaxy World with Nicole. She had around 600 tickets, and I had an additional 434. We needed to leave, so we looked around the prize area. A girl about Nicole’s age was working there. The line for prizes was huge, but one person in front of us gave up and left. I let Nicole get her prizes first. The prize girl somehow convinced her to get thirty-two marshmallows. Nicole let me eat one. She still had a bunch of tickets left over. I already knew what I was getting. There were these stuffed parrots sitting up on a ledge, 200 tickets each. I was getting two – one for me and one for Nicole. I wandered around the prize area for a bit. When Nicole said she might get these strange masks with eyes on them, I went outside. It looked like we were in Louisiana… I walked toward the car until I saw a Roman candle set up unattended. I knew it wouldn’t end well… I couldn’t figure out why people were setting off fireworks in the middle of Fall. I briefly saw Nicole walk by and warned her not to stand in front of the Roman candle. It went off, firing sparks in a straight line through the air. A kid walked up and started looking inside it. I had a bad feeling it was going to fire again. Indeed, it did, and he started crying as soon as it hit him. I immediately carried him over to a table, set him down, and called 911. The girl on the other end was having difficulty understanding the situation. I felt like I explained it pretty well… I couldn’t remember where we were, though. The kid was going to have burns around and possibly on the surface of his eye. I wanted to get an ambulance there immediately so medical professionals could take care of him.

I walked around in the street while I explained what had happened. There were police cars all over the place for some reason, but none of them would come over to me. I looked over at where the kid should’ve been, but he was gone… So I went to his house and entered without knocking. His mom had given him an ice pack to hold over his eye, and he seemed to feel better. His eye looked horrible, though. It was like someone had spilled tar over it, except the skin was just burnt crisp. Just to be sure, I stopped him on his way out of the house.

“Hey, can you do me a favor, buddy?” I asked him. He stopped in the doorway and smiled at me. “If your eye gets any worse – like, you can’t see as well in that one as in the other one – let me know, okay?” He said he would, thanked me, and walked off. I thanked the 911 operator for her help, explaining that he looked like he was going to be okay.

“Just as long as you know we do whatever we can,” she responded. I got off the phone and went back into Galaxy World. Nicole was still selecting her prizes.

“You’re still deciding…?” I asked in disbelief. I had been out there at least twenty minutes. She said she couldn’t decide between Little Mermaid stuff and a One Piece shirt. The shirts were only big enough to fit on her fingers… The choice was fairly obvious. The prize girl was disgusted by the mention of Disney movies – she hated Walt Disney and everything he ever worked on. I think she liked anime, though.

Bauske's Harassment and Brittney's Pickles

I was on my way to German class. I haven’t had any formal German instruction since my junior year of high school. The class was where my humanities class this semester (Schmaus) is. When I walked in, my German teacher was standing next to what looked like his clone. He explained that the other one was his doppelganger. The students were out of control after that… They threw things at him, shouted random things in various languages while he was trying to teach, and ultimately organized an effort to have him fired for sexual harassment. I thought some of their claims were ridiculous, so I decided to stay out of it. Jordan and I conversed in broken German about random things. We agreed that we loved Engleutch. My German teacher (Bauske) asked me to come to his office, so I did. As soon as he closed the door, he grabbed my butt in both hands. So it was true, I realized…

I left to join the anti-Bauske group. We somehow got him fired. The school even took away his dog! I knew I couldn’t keep him, so I gave him to someone else in the class.

The dream jumped. Bauske’s office had become mine. My Aunt DeAnn came into the office with a laptop. She asked me to search for “Paling in Oklahoma” and see if I could find it. I had a lot of trouble with her tiny keyboard, and since I didn’t know what I was looking for, I was fairly confuse.d I tried looking on my laptop. After some careful questioning, I learned that I was actually looking for “Kaling in Oklahoma,” a grocery store. The map said it was two hours away. I asked why she wanted to drive all the way there for groceries, and she said she needed to buy Brittney’s favorite dill pickles. She described them as “the pickle slices with the holes in them.”

“Oh, like the ones Grandma always makes.” She nodded, pleased that I knew what she was talking about. Of course, my grandma isn’t known for making pickles… I saw cucumbers matching the description on Kaling’s website. They were listed under “dill pickles,” so I assumed they also came pickled. Aunt DeAnn thanked me for my help and left.

Reality Ripple and the Dragon Devil

I was in a ruined cathedral with two other guys. One of them was Axis. I didn’t recognize the other person. In this dream, my hair was shorter and had returned to its original blond color. We had come to intercept a demonic ripple in the fabric of reality. It appeared before us, taking the form of a manta ray. It had four tails – two protruding from the back and one on each side of its body. These were each about eight feet long. I ran up to it and slashed straight through with Apheri. Nothing. It was like cutting air… I kept trying, but it was useless. My blade just passed straight through the manta ray. It started to latch onto me like a parasite, tearing holes open on my body and sucking the blood out. I tried to keep my distance while I waited for another chance to hurt it. I had taken significant damage, though, and I was becoming frustrated. Why couldn’t I destroy it? Just one hit would probably be enough… Yet I couldn’t touch it. I spent a fair deal of time evading. Axis and the other guy spent this time watching me; they knew they couldn’t do anything if I couldn’t.

At some point, I realized there was no point attacking the manta ray. It was just an illusion created by the demon. I closed my eyes halfway, forcing them to defocus. I saw everything without watching anything. A shadow being appeared in my field of vision. It hovered beside the manta ray, connected to it by a thin, black cord. The shadow was about seven feet tall and resembled billowing smoke in the shape of a human. I charged toward it and gave it a slash through the chest. Apheri flew just as easily as before, but this time, I was doing real damage. It only took about three blows to bring the shadow down. It turned into a black lump on the ground. I looked through a section of the wall that was missing and saw another shadow being in the distance… This one took the shape of a dragon, and it was easily several hundred feet tall. Because it was so far away, I thought we had some time to prepare. I recognized it as the dragon devil. I saw it throw its head back, and then it spewed black-orange flames out of its throat. Axis and the other guy congratulated me on defeating the demon. I pulled them away from the missing section of wall, and fire rushed in a moment after. The flames vaporized the shadow being I defeated. The dragon devil had no further use for it.

Another man came into the cathedral with a sword similar to mind resting against his side. He introduced himself as Cicero. I was embarrassed that I was still covered in wounds. It made the shadow being I defeated seem several times more powerful than it really was. I regenerated my body immediately. Cicero said he wanted to take the name Nephanim, but I told him plainly that he was too late to use the name; it was and forever would be mine.

The Game is Not Over

Nicole and I were in bed. She sat up with a look of intense discomfort on her face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I need to finish the game,” she said. I asked what she meant and tried to get her to lie back down. “Majora’s Mask. I need to finish it.”

“But we already did that… Go to sleep.”

“No!” she shouted. “It’s not over…”

October 3, 2010

Bowling the Right Way

I got in the car with my Omi, Opi, Oma, and Nicole. It was her first time int he car with Opi driving. He still had his red pick-up truck. He drove behind my dad for a bit, but when he decided forty miles per hour was too slow, he pulled around my dad and sped up to eighty. Omi complained, especially since he wouldn’t be able to keep a job if his license got revoked. A car pulled out in front of us, and he swerved into the other lane to avoid it. A sharp turn was coming up… There wasn’t a sign indicating a safe speed, but if I had to guess, I’d say it would’ve been as low as fifteen miles per hour. It was practically a U-turn. Opi said he didn’t need to slow down yet. He ended up scraping the side of the car against the barrier, then riding on top of it in the second half of the turn. Almost half of the car was over the barrier. I told him to slow down, and he just laughed. We came to another bend, and the car flipped over. We were stopped for about a second before he floored the accelerator again. We came to a bunch of bowling pins, and they exploded on impact. We almost fell off the road there. It seems the road was out… I caught a glimpse of the world half a mile below us.

The dream jumped. I was with Oma, Austin, and some random guy at a bowling alley. The others were in the building, too, but they were buying food. I started looking at bowling balls lining the wall. I kept wondering why they were so fuzzy until I realized they were just bowling ball cases… I showed them to Austin, and he thought the same thing I did at first. They even had a panda themed one. We went with Oma to pick up our food. The other guy wasn’t paying attention, and I didn’t know his name… So I just kept snapping my fingers and trying to make eye contact. When he finally saw me backing away from him, he gave me an irritated look. I don’t think he was really with our group. Austin saw the line for food and complained that it was too long. There were separate lines for popcorn, pretzels, drinks, and one for everything else.

The dream jumped. I was in Andrea’s car in the parking lot of the bowling alley, and I was crying. I saw my mom coming, so I tried to stop my tears. I popped the trunk for her when she went to the back of the car. Oma got in the car, too, but then Nicole appeared in her place. My mom found a full bottle of sunblock in the trunk. She also found the receipt. According to her, my dad said he had sunblock for Chelsea at work, so he didn’t need to buy any. It was clear that he had bought some just that morning, however… We walked back inside, and I saw Chelsea talking with Omi near our lane. She was wearing a pink skirt and… No underwear? I frowned. Nicole agreed to talk to her about wearing underwear. Once we met up with everyone, I told everyone a story about a dream character teaching me the real way to bowl. I said the best way to get strikes was to throw the ball in the air and let it fall down on the pins. I felt this dream character’s knowledge of bowling provided unshakable evidence of shared dreaming for some reason. I wasn’t thinking very clearly.

Barrage of Criticism

I was at my parents’ old house in North Carolina. Nicole and I were talking in the living room, but she was mad about something. We went into the kitchen and sat at the island. Dinner would be ready soon. I saw Austin and asked why he was so far away… He was right next to me. My dad made a comment about how gay that sounded. I said I just wanted a hug; Austin never gave out hugs anymore. My dad continued by criticizing my intelligence. Somehow, he got the idea that I didn’t know how to send an email. I asked Nicole if she would teach me how. I really just wanted to get away from my dad. She left, but she didn’t want me to follow her. I did my math homework to distract myself.

Suicide Mask

I was playing a Zelda game on Nintendo 64. I ran around a forest looking for a way into a particular area… I got the impression that I was supposed to go there earlier in the game because the entrances were all blocked off. The fairy fountain music played in the background. I tried cutting through the wooden barricades and blowing them up, but nothing worked. Eventually, I came to the Zora’s Domain. There was only one Zora in the main area, and she was wearing a cowgirl outfit. She sounded just like Joan Cusack. She told me to let her join my party, but she added that her “papa” always told her not to let anyone push her onto the bench. She was going to stay in my active party indefinitely. She told me not to treat her like any ordinary soldier. I saw a flash of Rayn in her; for an instant, Rayn was standing there instead of the Zora.

The dream jumped. I was riding Epona into a cylindrical room. A spiral path made of vines wound upward along the inner walls, leading all the way to the roof. I dismounted and started to walk. As I did, I turned into a black wolf. I saw a kid with a weird, depressing mask sitting on some vines higher up. It wasn’t very detailed… Just a simple circular, black mask with two small, orange eyes. Just looking at the mask made me want to kill myself, though. I started crying and fell off the spiral platform. When I landed, the depression was jarred out of me. I wondered what had happened. When I got back up there, the kid with the depressing mask told me I was incompetent. He disappeared. I ran the rest of the way to the top.

The dream jumped. I was walking along a frozen cove. I tried to blow up some silver rocks I thought were indestructible. Normal bombs blew them up, though… I decided I should blow all of the rocks up in case there was a hidden grotto. When I placed a bomb, sometimes it would roll over into the snow and go out. Other times, it wouldn’t be extinguished, but it rolled so far from the rock that it didn’t destroy it. My solution was to dig a hemispherical basin in the snow and set the bomb down there. It worked like a charm. There was nothing under any of the rocks, though. The masked kid came back. Matt was giving me advice, but I didn’t listen. I think he was my fairy… The masked kid floated in the air nearby while I tried a couple of masks on. He didn’t react to any of them. I was confused when he could still see me with the stone mask on. I accidentally struck him with Link’s sword. It’s really too bad it wasn’t Apheri… That might have saved me some trouble. The masked kid shot a fireball at me, and then a blazing pillar rose out of the ground all around me, trapping me in a small circular space. Bats flew through the fire and swarmed me, then a bull ran me over. I tried to get out of the circle of fire, but I was thrown back. The masked kid landed and threw a punch my way. I tried to block it with my shield, but I was thrown back into the flames. I tried to guard and talk to him like you can in Oblivion, but that didn’t work either. I couldn’t understand why he was doing so much damage… At any rate, I had 110 red potions (Ragnarok style) set to one of my C-buttons, so I used those to heal myself and ran away.

False Awakening: State Farm

I snuggled up with Nicole while she slept. I started singing.

“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there…” Nicole woke up, laughed a bit, and tried to go back to sleep. I think my chin was hurting her. We both suddenly had laptops. She asked me via MSN why I always wake her up at 3:00, 6:00, 8:00, and 11:00 AM. I said that was just when I usually wake up.

Seeing Two Movies

I went to a movie theater with Nicole, Andrea, Austin, and Chelsea. I got there after the movie started, so I just slipped into their room without paying. There were two screens, each playing a different movie. Everyone else had 3D glasses, so I assumed they were watching the one on the left, which was clearly abusing its three-dimensionality. I watched one of the animated characters look at the audience and wave a doll at them. Everyone “ooh”ed at the contour of the doll’s head as it popped out. The theater disappeared, and we were sitting on a blanket on the side of a road. Nicole had me fold the blanket to cover her feet because they were cold. We were just stopping for a few minutes on the way to a fair. Several cops drove by us; each time I saw one, I worried they would think we were homeless people trying to live on their street. The cops just gave us weird looks. I waved at one. Nicole complained that the new voice actors for the Arcobaleno in Katekyo Hitman Reborn: Generation X were going to be terrible. I couldn’t believe they had picked new voice actors.

Prophetic Lucid Dreams

I was standing in Omi’s kitchen. Everyone else except my mom was getting ready to eat dinner at the table. Omi started talking about dreams. She said that she waited until the spirit watching over her disappeared, and then she would enter a lucid dream. She made it seem as though dreaming was caused by the absence of her guardian spirit. She mentioned something about dream interpretation… Her description of “lucid” dreams didn’t sound relevant at all… I asked her about her definition of lucid dreaming since it seemed to clash with the definition I’d always given her. Opi seemed annoyed that I would even ask such a question. Omi explained as I pretended to look for food in the refrigerator and pantry that she referred to prophetic dreams as “lucid” because they allowed her to see the truth clearly. She had to be consciously dreaming to have a prophetic dream, though. I saw a map of her lucid dreaming realm. The “lucid” region was in the southeast corner of the map near an ocean.

I had a false awakening right after in which I told Nicole about the dream. I said that the layout of Omi’s dreams was similar to the maps charted by the original Dreamhackers, but I immediately realized that wasn’t significant at all. Of course my dreams reflected the Dreamhackers’ findings… It would only be meaningful if someone in waking life came to the same conclusion.

Play Twilight Princess Forever and Ever and Ever

I was playing Twilight Princess to kill time. I started out in Prontera. Wrong game world… I decided I didn’t really want to play, so I talked to a kid on the street to save my game and quit. The game kept trying to get me to change Link’s appearance. I saw that I could give him lighter or darker skin as well as alter the clothing however I saw fit. I wasn’t interested, though. After that, it made me play a photography minigame… I quickly realized I couldn’t skip it, so I played along. I got points for every person I captured in a picture, and I had unlimited pictures. Certain buildings gave me bonus points, too. After one minute, my points were totaled up. I didn’t get anything as a reward.

I ended up in a sewer dungeon after that. It didn’t occur to me that I had intended to stop playing… I entered a room with a treasure chest on one side and a swarm of rabid rats on the other. The rats were jumping up on each other’s backs to try to get to me, but an invisible wall separated one half of the room from the other. There was no way to cross except by going through the doors. The chest contained 50,000 rupies. I thought that must’ve been a cruel joke by the developers… I could only carry 200. I walked back out and saw two heart pieces near the ceiling in another room. The room didn’t have a floor. One false move would send me tumbling down into infinite nothingness. I figured out a way to get up there by jumping from one platform to the next. The platforms bobbed up and down in the air. I fell into the darkness once while trying to jump up there. As soon as I was close enough, I leaped toward the rafters and grabbed the edge. I was on the opposite side of the room, so I had to work my way back toward the door to get to the heart pieces. The clawshot made it fairly easy. I kept missing the wooden parts of the rafters, though, and every time the claw clanged against metal, I sighed. I was starting to realize that I didn’t feel like playing anymore, but I wanted to accomplish something before I quit. When I got to the heart pieces, I leaned over the edge to grab them. It turned out that they were just decorations… I bent one out of shape and left it hanging there. I remember telling Nicole how stupid it was that someone would hang fake heart pieces on the ceiling for unsuspecting adventurers to sacrifice their lives over.

As I turned to leave, I saw a real heart piece spinning in the next room. I aimed my clawshot at a partial wall below me and then used the second one to get the rest of the way to the doorway. The next room had a floor, and there was nothing separating me from the heart piece except a thirty foot walk across the grass, but I wanted to look cool when I grabbed my heart piece! I zipped up to the ceiling with the clawshot, zipped over to the wall, and then descended onto it like a ninja. I tried to save and quit immediately after. I didn’t understand at all why I was still playing… I was pretty sure I had beaten Twilight Princess a long time ago. I couldn’t figure out how to save. I finally did, and I was teleported into the sword master’s dojo from Majora’s Mask. There was a white vortex behind me that would bring me straight back to the sewer dungeon the next time I played.

Lack of Amusement at the Park

Despite being the last dream of the night, this one was pretty unstable.

Nicole and I met with my dad at an amusement park. The park attendants required a ticket for admission, of course, so we paid for our tickets while my dad parked the car outside the amusement park.

The dream jumped. Nicole and I were playing Ragnarok Online in a hotel room. She was using a desktop computer, but I was using my phone. I couldn’t really do much other than send and receive chat messages. The letters came up really colorful and shiny on my phone. I showed Nicole, and she seemed impressed that I was able to tolerate chatting in such a roundabout manner. We were getting ready to leave. I forgot my belt… I left it on the desk behind Nicole. Honestly, the layout of the hotel room was ridiculous. It had like twenty desks arranged in a fashion reminiscent of a computer laboratory. There was a small bed in the corner. With so many desks, it’s not surprising I didn’t see my belt. Anyway, I had to walk by myself for some reason. Nicole and my dad were going to follow me a bit later in the car. The dream skipped outside, and after walking for a few seconds, the environment morphed into my college campus.

I was on the phone with Nicole. I flew up into the air and noticed a building was missing its roof. I could see right into a classroom full of people – women, mostly, but the professor was a male. The women were all scantily clad. Some of them ran out in tears when the professor spoke to them. I described what I was seeing to Nicole, and she suggested that it might be a support group for the morbidly obese. I realized she was right. Most of the women weighed several hundred points, although a few didn’t seem to belong. When one of the women in the back sat up, her sweat caused her skin to stick to the chair, and it peeled right off her back like an old sunburn. I decided this was really all I could stand to watch and dropped back down to the ground.

I noticed I still had the Shockers her mom bought at the grocery store. Actually, I was getting it mixed up with beef jerky, but that’s alright. It was sticking out of the right pocket of my jeans. I told Nicole about it, amazed that I had been sleeping with it in my pocket for two days without destroying the packaging. I started wondering what day it was… What had happened after I slept through the previous night? Hm… Nicole avoided the question when I asked about it. She said she was almost there and told me to meet her at the checkout. I was at a train station and no longer on the phone. I saw some games on my phone and wondered if I should play them… Then I was in a grocery store. I called Nicole as I neared the checkout to ask where they were in line. I made it to the speedy checkout before she told me that was where I could find her. My dad saw me first. I put a finger to my lips to indicate that I wanted to surprise Nicole. She looked right at me, though, and I hung up the phone. She kept talking to someone… Obviously not me. They finished paying for their groceries (my dad had a big box… I have no idea what they were buying) and left without me. I didn’t mind since I needed to pay for the Shockers anyway. My dad said something about the car.

My total came out to $1.43. My pants were falling down because I didn’t have a belt, so I had to pull them up in order to remove my wallet. I pulled out a single… Then a $20, which I put back in… Then a $5 bill, which I put back in… Then I saw a number one in the corner of a bill and thought it was another single, so I put it down on the counter. It turned out it was a $15 bill. I apologized for the mistake and went back to fishing for a $1 bill. I guess I was too embarrassed to wonder how I got a bill that doesn’t exist. I finally found the single I was looking for and completed the transaction. The cashier gave me a dollar and coins in change. I didn’t question that, either. I put my stuff in my pockets and headed into the parking lot. I soon realized I was still inside the amusement park. The car was in another parking lot outside the park gates. I went out through an elaborate, wooden gate. A sign on the door said the park was closed. From there, I roamed the parking lot in search of Nicole and my dad. Every time I thought I saw them approaching in a car, it was actually someone else.

October 4, 2010

Surprisingly poor recall last night. Oh well, that's a consequence of having to wake up earlier than usual.

Random Adventures in the Woods

At the start of the dream, I was reading through the descriptions for two new computer science labs. One was the usual operating systems stuff, but another was a strange image decoding lab designed for the United States military. The description made it clear that the military would be using whatever we came up with. I talked to Nicole and learned that the military was coming to her school to talk about a training camp. Austin had heard about it, too. I paid particular attention to the military lab because it was so unusual… I would need to process images entirely via system calls in the command prompt. The images were given to me in the description; they consisted of various drawings of bears with different emotions: including happy, sad, and a strange one called “negative.” When a bear felt negative, it turned into pure, white light and lost its arms. The other lab was more complicated, so I didn’t feel like starting on it yet… Then again, the military lab wasn’t due for two weeks, and I only had thirteen days for the other one.

Chelsea watched me working on the military lab. I had a packed of printed information that I was filling out… My writing was about as legible as my dream journal when I write stuff at 3 AM. Everything ran together, and the lines weren’t straight. I erased everything and started over. As I was trying to remember what I had written, Austin called me to complain that the military wouldn’t leave him alone. They had followed him to school in an attempt to recruit him. Joe called right after Austin to ask for advice; the military was banging on his front door and threatening to kill his whole family if he didn’t join them. I told him the obvious solution… Call the police. The military has no right threatening the citizens it’s supposed to protect. A TV nearby turned on, and we could see everything unfolding in Joe’s house live from a video camera. The camera kept jumping cleanly from one person to the next, and I realized it couldn’t possibly be a live stream. Joe was just messing with us. A blond-haired guy standing with Joe came to the same conclusion I had – that the police could help them. I turned the TV off.

The dream jumped. I was on an airplane with a metallic plate. The plate had several ridges, and I was writing in between them… The ridges made an M-shaped path, so my lines still weren’t straight. I remembered I was supposed to be copying what I had written on my report before. Most of what I had written was about how bad the flight was. I erased everything from the metal plate and decided to try a third time.

The dream jumped again. I was in a store… I started walking immediately. A voice told me to hand in my permission slip by Monday. I got confused, thinking it was Thursday… As I kept walking, I found an envelope containing $958 from the 2012 Democratic candidate for the presidency. His name was Senator Danon. It seemed Obama was either running with a different party or had been eliminated altogether. My dad criticized me for liking the Danon guy. I realized I knew nothing about his political views and threw away the envelope (and the money). I saw a flash of a fat politician browsing a bookshelf. He said something about how empty financial promises were the best way to get into public office. The smaller the promise, the more votes – and the easier it would be to snatch the money back from the people. He likened it to stealing from a bride at her wedding. He said he would know all about that. After all, he did the same thing before he got his sex changed to female. Since he was a man, I decided he eventually changed back.

Anyway, I kept walking… A Beatles song got stuck in my head, and I started skipping to its rhythm. People started singing it, and then I was too. I stopped walking to talk to someone about the song, and then I resumed in the same direction. The environment began to change into a forest. Pretty soon, I came to an abandoned campsite. I had a weird feeling about it… Like something had happened to the campers. I sat down and pulled out my wallet. My driver’s license and school ID were missing. I checked everywhere and found them in a stack of photographs where I keep my other cards. There were several photographs of a Japanese girl with long, black pigtails. She looked like Black Rock Shooter. I told myself I had just met her a couple of days ago, but since Nicole and I forgot to ask for her contact information, we would never see her again. A couple of the pictures were a bit incriminating… I was sure someone else had taken them. There were several other girls in the photographs, too. Nicole was in all of them.

The more I thought about meeting the girl, the more I realized I had never really met her. That was just a dream. I had forgotten to write my dreams down that morning! I decided to start on that as soon as I put my money away. I had several hundred $1 bills… It was so ridiculous that I asked myself aloud where I got all of them. I stuffed wads of money into my wallet so I wouldn’t waste any more time. I didn’t want to forget about my dream. I walked over to the picnic table nearby. It was covered in half-full bags of potato chips and paper plates. I picked up an empty bag on the ground and put it on the table. I thought for a minute about what I was doing; would I attract wild animals if I left their food out? Well, it wasn’t really my problem.

I started to write out my dream, commenting on how it was the only one I could remember… Then I saw a dog. It was looking in the direction I came into the forest from and barking. There wasn’t anyone there. A couple more dogs started barking. I barked at them, and they all turned. The first one licked its lips, and it occurred to me that they were probably hungry. I decided to play the Song of Soaring to leave. When I completed the song, I got an interesting message.

“Your notes echoed far, but nothing happened. Try using ROLL & BOLL. Step on the mirror, play one note, then move to another mirror.”

I found mirrors covered by gray tarps on the ground. I stood on one, played a low note with my ocarina, and walked over to the next one. A black vortex sucked me in. I popped out of a mirror right next to it. This repeated a few times, but then I realized I really needed to write down my dream before I forgot it! I think I woke myself up…

Bleach, Google, and Deception

This dream has been omitted.

Spades of Eva Revived

Nicole linked me to a roleplaying forum she had started with some of her friends. I saw that the title was the same as one she and I ran last year – Spades of Eva. I wondered why she hadn’t just asked me for that one… We could have continued it without Regina.

October 5, 2010

Yay~ After almost two weeks without a lucid dream, I had one last night. The first part of it may have been shared, but I still need to compare dream accounts to be sure.

Austin's Black Holes

Austin and I looked up at the night sky from Nicole’s deck and saw a ring of golden-white light. It intensified every few seconds, then became dull again. After a while, these silvery-white bands of dust surrounded it, forming right angles with each other. It looked like someone had drawn a white X across the ring of light. We weren’t sure what was causing the weird display of lights. Nicole suggested that someone might be doing fireworks, but that didn’t sound plausible at all. Every once in a while, the bands spread out like wings and tail feathers, forming something that looked quite like a bird. The bands of lights would swing around elegantly before collapsing back into the original pattern. Most of the time, though, only the ring of light was visible in the night sky. We couldn’t see any stars near it, so Austin and I decided it was a black hole. Austin was obsessed with all theories pertaining to black holes. Chelsea and Nicole still thought the lights were caused by fireworks, but I didn’t understand how they could stay in the sky so long.

Austin started bringing up some crazy theory about black holes being toxic leaks from another plane. He said the darkness coming in would make us all sick and kill us. I told him I wasn’t familiar with that theory, but I would look into it if he gave me YouTube videos to watch or an article to read. I told him we didn’t have to worry about black holes killing us any time soon.

“Black holes don’t move, after all,” I reminded him. I left out the detail about the black holes subtly attracting the Earth. Despite his interest, I had the impression that black holes terrified Austin. I said I doubted we would ever see one with our naked eyes, and if I ever did, I would probably shoot myself to avoid being pulled in and killed. I realized that death by black hole might not be so bad considering the rate of increase of force while approaching it. The force would become so strong that I would just suddenly be crushed.

Then I realized we were probably looking at a black hole already. I wondered how far away it was, how massive it was, and whether or not we should be concerned… There was no way of knowing.

Ms. Fritz and the Magic School Bus

Nicole and I were trapped in this bizarre reality controlled by Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus. She had taken on the name Ms. Fritz to better suit her violent nature. She killed us in elaborate, creative ways… For example, while we tried to run through a building, she lifted the walls off the foundation, repositioned them in the air, and slammed them down to squash our torsos. At one point, she turned the floor into lava and began toying with gravity, so the lava floated endlessly when our movements caused it to stir. Once, I found myself in an amusement park. Nicole was strapped to the inside of a spinning top… Except it was rolling in a circle instead of spinning. I tried to talk to her when she got off the ride, but she didn’t recognize me until the dream changed back to the nightmare world. We collected pieces of a key in a number of treasure chests along our way through Ms. Fritz’s world. The key was the only way to escape. When I collected the last piece and completed the key, she invited us on the Magic School Bus. She said she would drive us home. The bus only had two rows of seats for some reason. Nicole sat in the front with Ms. Fritz (who had turned into a will-o-wisp for the ride). It seemed like Nicole would actually be the one driving. I questioned the seating arrangement… I wasn’t sure I wanted Ms. Fritz in a position that allowed her to attack the driver. I was sure she wouldn’t allow us to leave. There was someone in the back seat with me.

Recalling this dream was frustrating because it was so jumbled and disjointed. It also made me feel sick to my stomach for some reason. It may be that I was feeling sick to my stomach in my sleep, and that discomfort influenced the dream.

Symphony Meets a Horse

I took Symphony to meet a horse. I’m not sure what, but something horrible happened to the horse, and I was upset about it. There was also something important happening with a timer.

Attempting to Reach the Monolith Gardens (Lucid; confirmed synchronicity, may or may not be shared)

I was walking with Eric (from school) across the intersection at 33rd and State. It was lightly snowing, and about four feet of snow had piled up. The street was mostly clear. We waited unnecessarily long to cross State even though the light was red, but it didn’t matter since we made it across before the light changed. We crossed 33rd and continued south. The path changed. We were walking on a winding trail through the woods. It resembled a trail by a park in Texas where I did some tennis practice a couple of times. Eric kept talking about bad movies I’d never seen… He mentioned a movie called “Spiderman Creed.” I was pretty sure it didn’t exist, but I pretended I had seen it. He criticized a number of the voice actors (so I guess it was animated), and I agreed that they were horrible. Anyway, I was walking ahead of him, and before long, he disappeared. I was in another environment – the path from the middle school I went to in North Carolina to the high school across the street. The high school had been replaced by a row of really tall buildings. The one in the middle of the row was the Egyptian Sphinx. I called it my dreamscape, but I wasn’t lucid just yet. I ended up on top of one of the buildings just by thinking about it.

I saw some video surveillance cameras rotating on a cylindrical tower next me. I decided I would turn the Sphinx into a giant surveillance camera and become the Big Brother of this humble dreamscape. I would have flown straight over there, but I noticed one of the surveillance cameras on the tower wasn’t working. When I looked at it, the others stopped working, too. The whole system was unplugged. I found an outlet on the wall right next to it and plugged it in. Bits and pieces of surveillance footage flooded my field of vision. Most of it was insignificant – just crowds of people roaming the streets. Eventually, however, I came to a clip of Nicole and Andrea walking down the street. Nicole looked really different in this dream… It’s weird – when I woke up, I thought of her hair in the dream as shorter than it is in waking life, but actually, it was a bit longer. I suppose my dream self was used to her having long hair. Anyway, her hair was black and slightly curly. She wore a white shirt with black tiger stripes from one side to the other across her back and tight, black pants which showed off the fact that she had finally reached her ideal weight. I didn’t pay any attention to Andrea. I watched them across multiple camera feeds as they passed the Sphinx. Nicole walked behind a potted tree and pulled off her shirt to change her bra. She pulled her right breast out, put it in her mouth (try to imagine my bewilderment), and changed her bra while everyone who could see her stared in disbelief. I made a mental note to scold her later. It was just common sense that she should behave even when I’m not watching her; I shouldn’t have to watch her on surveillance cameras to make sure she’s not doing anything stupid. I knew I couldn’t trust her anywhere without me.

I was suddenly on top of the Sphinx building. As I looked out over the dreamscape, I realized I was dreaming. I thought for a moment about what I was supposed to be doing and remembered my goal to reach WritersCube’s Monolith Gardens dreamscape. I opened a vortex in the air below me. It was solid black, and it spat blue-white sparks of electricity in all directions. I jumped off the edge of the Sphinx and dropped through the vortex.

I ended up in a freakishly rearranged version of my parents’ old house in Texas. Everything was colored blue or solid black. Weird polygons jutted out of the walls, and the doors were missing. The garage was missing, too, so when I walked out the garage door, there was just a big wall on my right. I flew straight up to the roof. It was nice to see how easily I could control my dream body. I flew swiftly and without difficulty. I glanced across the blue-black world. It was possible that this dreamscape was connected to the Monolith Gardens somehow… But I doubted it. I decided to teleport again – this time by closing my eyes to help eliminate my conditioned belief that closing my eyes while lucid will wake me up.

When I opened them, it was clear that I was still asleep… But it wasn’t obvious where I was. I could only see solid white, and I was extremely cold. I shivered and asked myself aloud why I was so cold. The surrounding air was light, and I felt myself sinking. I had a brief thought that I might be in one of the floating rivers in the Monolith Gardens, but that didn’t explain the almost blinding whiteness surrounding me… I fell out of the whiteness, and there were clouds beneath me. I fell through those, too. Beneath the clouds, there were dozens of fairly massive trees beneath me, and indeed, there was some kind of bluish-white mountain the distance that I thought could be the crystal mountain, but I immediately felt that this wasn’t my destination, either. The trees were separated from one another by an orderly system of spacing, and none of them were tall enough to reach the clouds. I also didn’t feel like the trees were of the correct variety… They looked like they had been shaped to keep from touching one another. Their trunks reached a few hundred feet off the ground, and then the leafy parts continued about three times that distance into the air. I noticed that the rivers were also missing…

I lost the dream before I landed due to my roommate’s alarm going off.

Linked List Cakes

I was in Nicole’s kitchen. Her mom was talking about how she had decided to take a computer course at my school. I found out she was in an introductory computer science course. She even had George Koutsogiannakis as her instructor. Neither of us could properly recall or pronounce his name. She said she was programming a linked list and enjoying it. She added that it was like baking a cake with a computer…

Scamper's a Troublemaker

I was at Jewel-Osco with Nicole and my mom. Nicole wanted an empty cardboard box, so we removed the drinks from a twelve pack of root beer and brought that with us to the checkout. I was worried the cashier would charge us the full price of the soda just for the box. I guess she didn’t, though, because my mom didn’t complain about the price. We went to the bathroom after my mom paid. On the way, Scamper and Meg ran out from behind me, knocked over some beer bottles propped up against the customer service desk, and disappeared. I hoped we wouldn’t get thrown out for bringing our dogs into the store. My mom was upset when she saw that the beer bottles had broken and spilled everywhere. The area surrounding the desk smelled strongly of alcohol. I asked why she was so upset, and she explained that they had removed everything from my room, but the movers had left some beer bottles there. If Scamper spilled them all over the carpet, the room would stink, and my dad wouldn’t be able to sell the house. It didn’t occur to me that Scamper was with us, so he couldn’t spill bottles back at the house.

My mom went into the bathroom. Scamper appeared again and followed her in. After a few moments, I heard my mom talking in Lois Griffin’s voice. She was complaining about something Scamper was doing. Scamper responded in Brian’s voice… He was touching her, and it became clear that she secretly enjoyed it. I thought I remembered seeing an episode of Family Guy like this. I expected my mom to have a change of heart and yell at Scamper at any moment.

October 6, 2010

My alarm didn't wake me up at 4 AM like I intended, but I had another lucid anyway.

"No Late Work" Policy

My dad was taking college classes on Saturdays and Sundays to earn his master’s degree. When I asked why he wasn’t doing any homework, he said it was because his professor had a “no late work” policy. This was interpreted a bit differently than one might expect; it meant that the professor graded all assignments the same whether they were handed in on time or at the end of the semester. No point deductions for handing it in late, basically. I got the impression that he had just taken a midterm exam as easy as the one I had yesterday, and now he felt like the homework was pointless. This dream took place in the living room of my parents’ old house in Colorado. I was standing on the stairs.

Fake Dream Journal, Fake Lucid Dreams x3

I woke up, checked my dream journal, and saw that some of the text was blue. The text was crisp and precise as though I had typed it. I knew the blue text was reserved for lucid dreams. All three of the dreams written on the page had at least some portion written in blue. At first, I was proud of myself for having three lucid dreams in one night, but when I read through the entries, I was disappointed. The first and third were definitely not lucid. I don’t remember exactly what was written, but the entries suggested that I was just using dream powers. It was as though the blue text I had so much faith in was completely arbitrary… The second one on the page was more believable because it mentioned realizing I was dreaming, but there was hardly anything written there – just half a sentence of details. There wasn’t enough information to tell whether or not I was really lucid, and since I couldn’t remember the dream, I had to go on what I had written.

Star Wars, Animal Crossing, and Mario

I was sitting on a couch while watching my roommate playing Super Mario Brothers. It was the original game, but with new, more difficult levels. The score text was larger than normal and was positioned in the upper-middle portion of the screen. He was already on the second level. Something killed him. He saved his high score and quit.

The dream jumped. I was in a small room with a man in a white robe. The man was sitting Indian style. I gave him some money, and he seemed surprised that I knew he was homeless. What? I didn’t know that… Well, anyway, he explained the general plot synopsis of Star Wars. I found out I was going to replace Luke Skywalker. The man didn’t give me his name, and he wasn’t a regular Star Wars character, so I’m not sure what to call him. Obi Wannabe will do. He led the way from the building to my house. Instead of walking, he levitated about a foot off the ground. In a way, it was impressive, but since I was looking down on him the whole time, it had the opposite psychological effect. Obi Wannabe was surprised – perhaps even disappointed – when he saw the inside of my house. The floor was just grass and dirt. Some rubber mats spread across the patchwork lawn served as my bed and sitting area. The walls weren’t painted. It was evident that I was just as poor as Obi Wannabe claimed to be, if not poorer. He said that he would teach me everything he knew. I saw a shot of his face superimposed over a transparent image of a ship in outer space. I turned the game off.

I was still in the same room, but this time, I was sitting on the floor. My roommate’s friend was on the couch behind me. There was a Gamecube in front of me. I took the Star Wars game out and put it back in its case, deciding that I would play Mario and beat my roommate’s high score. For some reason, I put Animal Crossing in. I was using a cheat that allowed me to walk in areas that don’t normally exist. From the train station, I walked directly east along the tracks until they abruptly ended. If you do this in the actual game, there’s just a tunnel that drops off into oblivion, but the tunnel was gone, too. He laughed when he saw the tracks stop because he didn’t know about the cheat. I headed south on the other side of the eastern cliff that usually blocks the player character during normal gameplay. The cells over there were nothing but grass – no flowers, no trees, no rocks… I pulled up the map, and it had expanded to show a column of grass maps to the east of the normal map. There were also tan-colored maps surrounding the old map. I knew these were desert cells. If I walked in any direction other than south, the desert cells would continue infinitely. Going south, of course, I would just see an endless ocean. I remembered I was going to play Mario… I reset the game; I knew I would have to deal with Mr. Resetti, but I didn’t care.

When the Animal Crossing title screen came up, I reset again. With the game still playing, I put Mario into the Gamecube. Again, the title screen for Animal Crossing came up, but it was pretty messed up. It looked like all of the darker colors had been scrambled with mixes of black, red, and green, and the bottom of the screen was just a series of flashing blocks. I let the title video play while I fixed the reset button. It had popped out while I was changing the disc… I found three loose rubber bands inside the Gamecube and decided they were probably used to hold the reset button in place, but I didn’t want to set them up, so I just screwed the reset button back in and turned my attention back to the game. I hit start to begin playing.

My controller had the following buttons: A, B, start, two directional pads – referred to as D-pads (one was the “DD-pad,” which is read as “double D-pad”; it was basically the same as pushing the equivalent button on the normal D-pad twice), L1, L2, L5 (not a typo), R1, R2, and R3. It also had the usual control stick and C-stick (which did nothing).

So I started playing, and I quickly discovered that the glitchy version of the game I’d inadvertently created was even harder than the version my roommate was playing before. The monsters were all invincible, and so much as touching them killed Mario. I had to avoid them entirely. I made it halfway through the first level and wanted to activate the checkpoint flag, but I needed to hit the D-pads in a sequence to do so (while avoiding angry enemies, of course). The sequence went something like this: double left, down, double right, up, left, right. I didn’t want to use the DD-pad, but for some reason, hitting left twice didn’t give the desired signal to the game. i died while trying to do it with a combination of the two D-pads. Fortunately, I discovered I had infinite lives, and instead of going back to the beginning of the level, I went straight to the second level… I kept playing and soon beat my roommate’s score.

The Reborn Movie Sucks

I was watching a Katekyo Hitman Reborn movie. All of Tsuna’s guardians had been killed except Gokudera and Yamamoto. The three of them sat at the base of the stairs in his house as Ginger Bread prepared to kill them, too. For no apparent reason, Tsuna began to sing in a soft, feminine voice. The others started singing too. I was disappointed that the movie was going to end with such a stupid twist. I wished Tsuna had gotten to use his X Burner at least once during the movie.

Living Doll

This dream has been omitted.

War Days and Unstable Dream Environments (Lucid)

Prior to the dream, I woke up and wrote out my other dreams. I went back to bed at 9:00 AM.

I was a soldier in a hospital. Three of my war friends came to tell me all about how I got my injury. I couldn’t remember. As it turned out, I was never injured at all. They just faked it to get me back home to Nicole. If they hadn’t, though, I probably wouldn’t have survived. Their secret would’ve been safe, but one of the other soldiers overheard and spread the word throughout the infirmary. Soldiers protested angrily. When one of the soldiers who brought me back to America spoke, they all shut up. Some of them had families, too, he said; now that they had been sent to America, their war days were through. He said they had no right to try to deprive me of that. We said our goodbyes, and the three soldiers left. They were going back to war. In a way, I wished they had let me go back with them…

I got out of bed and walked out of the infirmary. Nicole and Eric followed me out. Eric was making weird faces, and I kept guessing who they were. If I didn’t know, I made a name up – but I always got it right. The hallway leading out of the infirmary brought me into the hospital lobby, and I walked alone from there out to the drop-off area in front of the building. I felt like I had just come out of a cinema for some reason. I stood in the drop-off area because I could feel someone’s presence there. It was like a magnetic attraction to something invisible. I looked around, and Andrea’s boyfriend Eric was standing on the other side of a small group of women. He was staring at me, and his eyes were solid white. I looked away. I saw a white van in the road and suddenly remembered I was dreaming; I had just gone to bed, after all.

I saw Nicole getting into the back of the van with some other people. I walked toward the van – well, it was more like floating, but whatever. I thought about teleporting directly into it, but that didn’t work. I suddenly felt the characteristic vibrations of sleep paralysis, and the dream imagery faded out. I couldn’t see anything. I wondered how long I’d been asleep… After the vibrations stopped, I waited patiently. Music started playing in the background. I reminded myself that I wasn’t wearing headphones, my laptop was muted, and I didn’t have this song on my phone. It was the Silent Hill 2 theme song. I was still dreaming. I tried to get visual data back… Getting to the Monolith Gardens was going to be weird without a dream environment to manipulate. I got a computer screen instead. The image kept looping over itself vertically like a bad film, and the browser window on the screen minimized whenever I tried to type into the address bar. It was like it was mocking me. I tried to come up with a solution, but when I tried blink-teleporting to the Monolith Gardens, everything went black again, and this time I was really awake.

It was 9:23 AM.

October 7, 2010

Man... My alarm really screwed with my recall. I lost dream content all over the place last night.

Penguin Wings and Explosive Air Tubes

I was at a grocery store. While Nicole was at the checkout, I decided to look at a big freezer full of penguin meat. The store had a robust selection. I wasn’t sure what to get, so I waited until someone else grabbed a box of meat and took the same thing as them. I planned to work for their company if the food was good. Sounds like a retaliation to Nicole’s turn to vegetarianism…

The dream jumped. Nicole and I found a tube full of air by the checkout. It was packed so densely that the slightest touch could’ve popped it. Leaving it there would endanger innocent lives. We weren’t sure what the best way to handle it was, but we decided to let all the air out as gradually as possible. It worked; neither of us were harmed. WritersCube was there with us, and he said he had gotten seriously injured once by popping one of those tubes.

Digital Time Portals

Nicole was picking me up from school, but she came a bit early, so we went to a lecture on digital time portals or something bizarre like that. Michael Saelee was giving the lecture. I left at some point to get my laptop from my room, but as I reached for the AC adapter, I heard my professor say that since the laptop was plugged in both in the past and the future, I didn’t really need the adapter. It would last forever on the battery by funneling electrical energy through time. I took the adapter anyway so I could keep everything together.

I was back in my seat in the lecture hall as though I had never left. I realized I had just been daydreaming while listening to the lecture. The professor finished up his lecture, and Nicole complained that it had been boring. I recalled seeing her laugh at the professor’s dumb jokes, but I guessed she just didn’t understand them. She was sitting on my right, but there was another familiar girl sitting on my left. She never said anything. I didn’t get a good look at her, either.

Fake Dream Journaling All Night Long

I had a series of dreams throughout the night in which I recalled dreams and wrote them out in my dream journal. I was surprised each time I “woke up” to write stuff down to find that the page was blank. Each time, I recalled three dreams. One of them was particularly elaborate and probably happened, but I forgot it.

Moving Back to Texas

I was in the car with my family on the way to Texas. My dad asked me where I wanted to sit for the trip, and I asked for the back seat so I could sleep the whole way. Chelsea didn’t have any objections. Austin had already asked to sit in the middle row of seats. Since there weren’t any conflicts, I figured I would get the back seat. For some reason, my dad told Austin to sit in the back… I’m pretty sure he just did it because I wanted that seat. We stopped for ice cream on the way out of Las Vegas. The ice cream shop was one in Texas, however… Chelsea complained about all the packing my family’s been doing this week.

Synchronizing with Reece Jones

This dream may have been shared. I’m awaiting confirmation. The dream took place in at least five segments over at least two sleep cycles.

At the beginning, I was watching a video uploaded by Reece Jones on YouTube. He was shopping at a supermarket. In part, he wanted to put the video up to show people that he was a normal person like them, too, not just someone with his head in the clouds all the time. The rest of it was more typical: he had an intuitive urge to go to the supermarket and film himself there. I’m not sure who was recording the video… He didn’t have to hold the camera, and it definitely wasn’t his laptop. Anyway, he looked through some fruit, commenting on how cheap the pineapple was. I don’t remember what it was, but he came to something else in the store and realized that was what he had come for.

The dream continued with a second video. This one showed Reece inside a bank. He called it “the Blue Blank.” He talked about why he was there first. The bank had apparently mistaken him for someone else and cheated him out of money, so he was sitting in the bank until they would answer to his complaints. He had also gotten the police involved, but they didn’t seem willing to help out. That wasn’t why he made the video, though. The important aspect of it was this: while he was waiting at the bank, an old man came inside, walked straight to him, and handed him a book. He said it was a very important book, and he had to give it to Reece. After that, he walked out of the bank. He showed the book in the video, but I don’t remember what it looked like…

At that point, I entered the dream. I was standing outside a tall building in the same general shape as my dorm building. It was painted a vivid, metallic blue. I saw a police car parked outside the building, and there was a cop with an afro in the driver’s seat. He pulled over to me when he saw me standing there, and I asked what was going on. I also noticed at close range that he had a thick, black mustache. He said that “some kid” had called him to talk to the bankers. He didn’t seem interested in helping out, though. He drove away from the building, which I now knew was the Blue Bank from Reece’s video. I walked over to the doors and peered in. Reece was sitting in a chair off to one side. He saw me and jumped up onto his feet as though he’d seen a ghost. After taking a moment to collect himself, he waved me inside with an arm. I walked in. He said he had seen me before. I told him I had seen him, too; I had just watched a couple of his videos. There was an open seat across from where had been sitting, so I sat down there with my laptop. I tried to plug it in, but I realized I was missing my adapter. I blame the Digital Time Portals dream for that. Anyway, I saw that the old man who gave Reece his book was there, too, and he seemed buried in another thick book just like it. Reece was going to tell me something, but then the dream jumped.

I was walking back from class when I got a call from “Reece Jones.” I thought that was weird since I don’t have his number (and he doesn’t have mine), but I picked up anyway. As it turned out, he was contacting me because he had a synchronous dream a few nights ago involving me at a library, and then another one the previous night involving me at a bank. I was really excited about that. I vaguely remembered having a dream about a library. Actually, the most recent dream I’ve had about a library was a week and a half ago on September 26th. Anyway, I asked him if he was sure we didn’t really meet at the Blue Bank… The experience seemed so real to me that it was really puzzling. He told me with a laugh that it was definitely not a dream. Oh, you.

I got in the elevator at my dorm building. It was halfway off the ground, so I had to climb up to get in it. I told Reece about how messed up the elevator was. There were only two floor buttons – the ground floor and the second floor. I pushed the second. Someone tried to get in the elevator as the doors were closing, and then three more people tried to shove each other in, but none of them made it because the first guy threw them all back when he gave up. The elevator went right past the second floor and stopped on the third floor. I tried to explain all of the stupid things the elevator was doing, but I kept losing my train of thought… There was a man scrubbing the floor with a sponge in the third floor lobby. I went past him and found some ridiculously elaborate staircases that couldn’t possibly have just taken me down one floor… Yet I knew I was on the second floor after going down at least eighty feet of stairs.

Instead of the second floor of my dorm building, it was the second floor of a supermarket. I started talking on the phone about how I wanted to go to the supermarket, but I didn’t understand why. I realized it was exactly like Reece’s video. I walked around for a bit, talking with Reece about my shared dreams with Nicole and WakingNomad. He said he was having more and more shared dreams lately, too. After walking to the other side of the store, I saw an old woman in a flashy, black trench coat teaching a kangaroo how to flail like a bird. I waved my arms like an idiot in an attempt to help, and amazingly, the kangaroo learned it on the spot. It was at that point that I realized I had a tiny, square piece of paper in my hand. I didn’t try to read what it said, but it was legible. Something about Reece. Anyway, he told me that he had found me online ages ago. I wasn’t so sure about that… I didn’t even talk to him until around the same time last year. I told him to text me if he had any more shared dreams with me; since I get unlimited texting on my phone’s service plan, that would always be free. He could also call me, but I mentioned that second to try to deter it. I didn’t even think about how many minutes I was using with this conversation.

Near the middle of the store, I was stopped by two drunk guys holding one another around the waist. One of them pulled me against his side, and he kept telling me I looked gay. It’s not that I was particularly offended by the suggestion – I’m not gay, but whatever. It was more that he would use it like an accusation, especially with someone he didn’t even know. I glared at him, and then I saw Reece walk by. He was grinning. I did a double-take and sent him a text message. He said he was grinning because he had no idea I lived in California. I was going to say that I didn’t, but I woke up.

The dream continued in the next sleep cycle, although the content branched off quite a bit. I was investigating the identity of the person Reece found online who he thought was me. It was an overweight kid of around fifteen years. He had red hair. Some of his videos talked about how he was what he referred to as an “amplipath.” He could perceive potential futures and amplify them into reality. The rest of the videos seemed more like independent films. They were about a couple who fell in love while roleplaying in costumes together. The guy was a Batman fanatic, and the girl was really into succubi. Their friends included Spiderman, Catwoman, the Incredible Hulk, and a host of monsters from various video games. I watched the video of their wedding, and Batman kept telling the succubus to get down on her knees or go back to hell. She dropped to her knees and started shrieking. Catwoman started crying; the situation was just too tense for her to handle.

October 8, 2010

Chocolate Sewage

I went to the bathroom in my parents’ new house in Texas. It was clearly a direct copy of my Omi and Opi’s house in Colorado. When I flushed the toilet, it got clogged somewhere and started oozing nasty, discolored water. The water came from the bottom of the toilet where it was attached to the floor. I heard people coming in the front door – they were back home from wherever they had gone. I didn’t have much time… I grabbed a handful of toilet paper and started cleaning it up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get rid of the smell right away, but at least no one would see it if they walked by the bathroom. No matter how much I cleaned off the floor, there was always more. I tried to flush the toilet paper when it was no longer of any use – but that was a horrible idea! The toilet clogged again, and this time, it overflowed from the bowl. I looked in the mirror and saw crap all over my face. It covered my mouth, and there were big splotches on my cheeks. Disgusted, I grabbed some toilet paper to wipe it off so I wouldn’t have to touch it. More fecal matter kept appearing on my face wherever the toilet paper touched it. The problem just got worse. It started spewing out of my mouth, and when I tasted it, I realized it was just chocolate. I licked my lips. Chocolate indeed! I even dared to try the stuff on the floor, and I found that it was also chocolate.

Paying for a Wedding Ring

I was swimming around in a closed-off area. It must’ve been some kind of Zelda game since there were eight blue rupies in the room. The room was constructed roughly as follows: there was a circular platform in the center of the room that rose just above the surface of the water. The ceiling was about thirty feet above this platform; at each of the four corners of the room was a rounded platform – these would form a full circular platform if pasted together, and they were much higher than the central platform; forming a plus sign with the center platform at the point of intersection, there were four raised ledges about twenty feet under the water (the rupies were positioned on these, two per ledge); from the underwater ledges, the floor sloped downward into a basin in each corner of the room. I dove into the water and collected the rupies one by one. Somehow, I missed one and had to go back after collecting the other seven. The eight rupies turned into a golden ring on my left hand. It seemed to pulsate with power. I heard Nicole asking what the ring was for, and I explained that it was a wedding ring. We were communicating telepathically. I had notified Austin earlier and asked him to tell Chelsea about the upcoming wedding, but I realized he hadn’t.

Visiting Her Pigsty

I was with a woman I don’t recognize. We walked into her bedroom, and it was a mess. There were blankets and articles of clothing strewn about. A pink stuffed rabbit lay on its side on her coffee table. I remember thinking my room looked great compared to hers.

Running and a Failed Reality Check (Lucid)

I went to a store to buy supplies for a camping trip with Nicole. We needed folding chairs in particular. I walked around the store for a bit and didn’t see any folding chairs. I saw a sign that said telescopes were free, though, so I grabbed a pair of them. I figured Nicole would enjoy the surprise. Andrea’s mom was the store’s owner, and when I walked up to the cash register with my two telescopes, I was certain she would expect me to buy something else with them. To my amazement, she didn’t. The store was about to close, so she said I had to leave. She escorted me out with my telescopes. After we left the building, she stood outside and watched the parking lot, evidently waiting for someone. I said bye to her and started walking along the row of buildings in the shopping center. I was looking for Nicole’s mom’s convertible… Despite there being so few cars in the parking lot, it was hard to find. I worried that someone had stolen the car until I found the keys in my pocket.

After walking to the end of the parking lot, I turned around and saw a car that looked like the right one. When I got closer, it turned out to be a much older car… I turned back around and started walking down the parking lot. As I did, I did a quick reality check. One, two, three… Huh? Two of my fingers were pressed together. I never do the reality check that way. The fingers unglued themselves without my assistance. I was sure it was a dream, so I kept counting my fingers. One, two, three, four, five fingers. Hm… I was about to check the count in the other direction for a comparison when my ring finger just… disappeared. Only a stump was left in its place. Oh, I really am dreaming, I thought.

I decided not to try anything radical at first. I was just going to run around at high speeds. I could feel the asphalt beneath my feet as though I wasn’t wearing shoes. I rubbed my hands together, then across my pants. The sensations strengthened the dreamscape. I was wearing brown shorts for some reason… I told myself to just focus on the dream environment, but that made me think of my waking body, so when I blinked, I worried that I would destabilize everything. Sure enough, the world started crumbling into black nothingness. I dropped to the ground and rubbed my hands against the pavement. The dream environment came back from almost nothing. I had successfully restabilized it. Well, it seemed so. Then I heard Nicole’s voice in my ear.

“Josh, I said I love you…” she said. I opened my eyes. We were on the phone. My mind was extremely foggy. I felt like I had slept for days.

“You just made me lose a lucid dream,” I complained. I realized it was rude as soon as I said it, but I was a little annoyed. What was she doing calling me from school?

“Huh? What do you mean?” she asked.

“I just had a lucid dream. You woke me up.”

“You were dreaming on the phone with me? Why can’t you just talk to me?” she asked.

“It’s not that, I… How did we end up on the phone, anyway? I thought I set my phone to alarm only before I went back to sleep. I’m amazed I even knew you were calling. Wait, even then, I would have had to grab the phone from the desk behind me. There’s no way! How did we start talking?”

“You’re so annoying…” Hearing her say this, I thought about false awakenings and wondered if I was still dreaming. I did the hand reality check like before. One, two, three, four, five. Normal number of fingers. Normal skin tone.

“Weird… So I’m not dreaming?” I murmured. Nicole started talking about something she had seen on Facebook. She hung up in the middle of it. I tried to get out of bed to write my lucid dream down, but I became extremely lightheaded and fell straight back as soon as my feet touched the ground. I heard my head thunk against the wall by my bed. It didn’t hurt. I decided to tell Nicole about it…

Maybe she would feel guilty for hanging up on me, I thought. Then pain rushed through my head. The pain had just been delayed… I talked to her on the phone again later.

Emails from Ben

I checked my email to see if Ben had replied to a message I sent him last night. I saw two responses. The first was just a generic “Oh, I’m great – how are you?” reply, but the second one said he was coming back to Agharta! I knew Nicole would be thrilled to hear the news.

Sanji's Cousin at a Daycare

I was at a daycare center with Nicole. We were walking down a hallway leading to the lobby. A mother in front of us was walking really slowly because her son kept kicking and trying to run off. He was probably about three years old. He almost kicked Nicole, so she brought it to his mom’s attention. The mother apologized and jerked the kid forward. When he really did kick Nicole, his mother glared at him and then gave us both a look of sincere apology. I hugged Nicole and told the woman it was alright. The mom dragged her kid down the hallway into the lobby. When we walked into the room, he was sitting in a chair next to her while she scolded him. I noticed he had eyebrows similar to Sanji’s – asymmetric ones, that is. They were shaped like the letter S instead of Sanji’s snails, though. The mom heard me point this out and said she thought the same thing when he was born. I felt like she misunderstood me. Nicole and I laughed on our way outside. She climbed up on a table and lay back, closing her eyes.

A Bad Day to Be Bugs

While I was talking to Nicole through text messages, I started to doze off.

I saw Bugs Bunny get thrown down a hill. He rolled to the bottom of the hill where he fell into a cannon, which flipped over and fired him into another cannon. That cannon fired him into another cannon – and so on for several cannons. When he escaped the chain of cannons, he rolled across the ground in exaggerated motions until he reached a cliff. He just barely tumbled off the edge. Nicole and I laughed at it, but I remember thinking it was pretty ridiculous.