Morning Strikes Now!

Thunderscream

2012-01-24T00:01:00.000-05:00

Several summers ago, when I was living in Lake Ridge, I was in the middle of a dream (the bulk of which I can't remember) in the morning. Outside, it was raining heavily. In the dream, someone right in front of me, practically in my face, was getting ready to scream.

And just then, as I woke up, a huge roar of thunder came from very close by.

I have a hard time believing that the coordination of the dream scenario and the real world lightning strike was a coincidence — people screaming in my dreams is, in itself, a pretty rare thing, and to be perfectly timed to a very close lightning strike (also somewhat rare, though not as rare during the summer) is... Well, I think I can come up with a couple possible reasons for it.

One possibility is that the lightning struck brightly, and I registered it unconsciously through my eyelids while still asleep, and somewhere deep down, I knew there should be a really loud noise following shortly thereafter, for which my dream world constructed the image of someone getting ready to scream.

Another possibility is that I woke up to lightning and thunder, and only after waking up did I imagine that I had dreamed of somebody about to scream, but for whatever reason, the chronological order of the memory was quickly scrambled.

I guess the third obvious possibility is that there was no real correspondence between the dream and the events going on outside my window, but the salience of the experience caused me to assign more meaning to it than was really there. A good point of evidence why this could be the case: I can't recall ever having had another experience quite like this.

Friendly biker and snakes of unusual size

2012-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was walking/jogging along the median side of a two-lane road (reminded me of Old Bridge Rd near Smoketown Rd in Lake Ridge), when a woman, perhaps in her sixties or seventies, came up behind me on a bicycle. Instead of cutting around and passing me, or at the very least signaling her presence, she instead crept up next to me, between me and the median, until we were side by side, and she kept pace with me.

I was annoyed, and I asked her why she hadn't just gone by on the other side. She seemed a little annoyed too, but she was really trying to engage in conversation with me while riding along -- probably just trying to be social, whereas I don't go out walking or jogging or biking expecting to end up in a social encounter with a stranger.

We had turned left into a sparsely built, hilly housing area with plenty of trees around. We ended up chit-chatting a little bit, as we went down the sidewalk alongside the winding street/hill. I had already had one or two songs (sung by John Flansburgh) running through my head before we met, and then something she said made me think of yet another Flansburgh song, and I had to force myself not to break into song (figuring it would be kind of antisocial to do so).

We came to a bend in the street (the sidewalk had now ended, and the street was unpainted asphalt), where the street hooked almost 90° to the left, passed alongside the front yard of a single family home, then hooked around 180° and continued down the hill.

Standing at the end of the driveway to the house was a young, vaguely punky woman in her twenties, with brown hair. We both seemed to recognize each other, though neither of us seemed really sure where we could have known each other from. So we said "hi" to each other and looked at each other for a moment before I continued on. Besides the initial confusion, she seemed to have a bemused and self-satisfied expression on her face.

In the stretch of grass delimited by the curved street, there was a single round deciduous tree with a small animal standing on one of its lower branches. Below the tree, a giant snake (at least ten feet long, and perhaps six inches in diameter) came creeping up, and then suddenly sprang up from the ground and swallowed the animal in what seemed to be slow motion. I was pretty sure the snake belonged to the girl living here.

The last thing I recall before waking up was that I had gone a little further down the street/hill, and was now either floating or being held up by a burly man, three or four feet off the ground, and a different snake of identical proportions was lurking on the ground below. I had every suspicion that it was going to go for my foot.

Spinning chamber, and "Freedom From Glory"

2012-01-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

I (female) was lying on the ground, face up, in the central part of a weird dark spinning chamber, maybe 20-30 feet in diameter. I could vaguely make out a few reflections of myself on the outer edge of the room, as well as a few reflections coming off triangular mirrored columns closer to me. Due to the movement, the reflections were mostly indistinct.

Although I was lying down, I was moving my feet as though walking (or skipping/running). As I spun around, I kept catching sight of one clear reflection of me. This reflection was walking / skipping / running the perimeter of the room at the same rate I was spinning, and she was always facing to my right, so I saw the right side profile and never much of the face. She duplicated the motion of my legs, even though I was lying down and not really walking. When I moved my arms, she did the same.

For some reason it bothered me each time I saw my reflection looking away from me. (That might bother me a little in reality too. I'll leave it up to you to imagine a situation where that happens.)

I noticed this song going on just as I was about to wake up:

"Till you earn your freedom from glory, glory...."

And the "glory, glory" line repeated for a while before I realized there was even a song going on. My brain pieced together the beginning of the line (or made it up (which might be the same thing)) as I was waking up. I recorded this demo of it later in the day, because I'm tired of writing down dream music in text notation that people are unlikely to really appreciate :)

Interesting toothpaste.

2012-01-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was using some kind of product that enhanced my feminine traits. ... Physical traits. Particularly in the bosom area. I was hanging out/jogging with Cassi K at a running track next to a grassy hill, remarking on how we'd both used said product, and comparing results.

Then I was trying to remember where I had put the stuff. Then I remembered it was on my nightstand. It was a nondescript tube of Crest toothpaste, with the big red stripe going down the length of it. But, in big white lettering in the top right corner, it said "For Women".

Tiny homeroom, assembly smokers, and first class

2012-01-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was at a high school on the first day of classes. I had spent a little time in my homeroom, which looked like a bite-sized science classroom. There was just room for the teacher's desk and two large, black-painted tables around which maybe 10-12 total kids could sit. The classroom was a step up from the hallway, and there wasn't really a front door, or, for that matter, a fourth wall.

From homeroom, I went to an assembly, which for some reason I showed up pretty late to. The auditorium was all white. It was as wide as a movie theater, but from where I stepped in (on the left side of the middle level), the stadium-style seating stretched very far up and down. At the very bottom was a stage. I started making my way up a stairway towards the top/back row.

As I walked up the stairs, I passed two or three people who were standing on the steps. The girl in front was, just then, telling some anecdote or testimonial to the entire crowd, as part of the assembly. Her Biff-style boyfriend standing behind her was trying to light a cigarette, so I kind of pointed at him and went "Ah-ah..!" as I walked past. Other people nearby noticed too and told him to stop.

As I reached the top tier of seats, I noticed Caitie R sitting in an aisle seat to my right, smoking a cigarette. I lifted my hand up (turns out I'm wearing white velvet gloves) and tried to put it out with my knuckle. But I guess it didn't work (and Caitie didn't seem all that bothered).

I reached the very back row, which was practically empty, and sat next to Jeremy C. The assembly was just wrapping up, and he asked me if I was interested in getting a bite to eat. I said yes, but then I realized I had classes to get to during all four schedule slots that day.

THEN I realized that I didn't know what any of my classes were, or what rooms to go to. Plus I had already forgotten where my homeroom was. Jeremy walked with me as I went looking for my homeroom. Luckily, it was the second room I passed in the first hallway I checked.

My homeroom teacher was there. She looked like my algebra teacher, Mrs. Williams, but was a lot less sardonic. It turned out that she could bring up my entire schedule on her computer and print out a neatly formatted card on a blue sheet of paper. She handed it to me, and then we got into some conversation (I remember her saying something about "when she decided to get married"...), but as much as I wanted to hear what she had to say, I was trying to politely get moving so I wouldn't be late for my first class.

I looked on my schedule card and saw how the classrooms were listed. They had a classroom name, and then the "cross street" they were on (really, they weren't streets, they were hallways). My first class was called something along the lines of "EMOND" and the cross street was something like "Georgia Avenue". It was only a couple hallways up from my homeroom.

EMOND ended up being another hallway behind a doorway, perpendicular to the cross street. It was a tall, wide, L-shaped hallway, sort of an internal entranceway to the classroom itself, which was kind of a band/orchestra room. As I approached the bend of the L, Vanessa came walking the other way, wearing an outfit featuring a knee-length skirt and tights (not unusual), all a faded navy blue color. I was surprised to see her there (and uncertain why she was walking out), and I kind of pointed at her and went, "You!" But she seemed not to notice I was there; she was looking spacey and a little melancholy, and continued walking past me.

I rounded the corner, and without so much of a transition, I was at the orchestra room. A crowd of maybe 12 or 15 people, mostly girls, were standing, facing away from me, singing something informally as a chorus, but I don't recall what it was. I walked up to join in, then I woke up.

Smanblue. Another (almost) lucid dream.

2011-12-22T00:02:00.000-05:00

I was walking around some kind of a huge, open convention center/department store with Calbert and Jared G. As we walked through an open lane, I was mentioning something to Calbert about what I was dreaming about earlier, and even mentioned something about "this dream".

Of course, at this point, I went, "duh", and started paying very close attention to what was going on around me. I knew that previously when I had realized I was dreaming, my pulse would start racing and I would have a very hard time staying asleep. This time, however, I felt somewhat calmer.

Still, I was trying to come to terms with my surroundings, so that I would have a basis for what was in the dream before trying to consciously mess with it. I glanced all around... I remember seeing extremely tall shelves, like you would see in a BJ's or Sam's Club, but even taller; but the walls and ceiling were white, like a department store.

I caught sight of a box that Calbert was holding, and written on it was the word "smanblue". I repeated it to myself, loudly, a few times, desperately trying to stay attached to my surroundings. "Smanblue. Smaaan...bluue... SMANBLUE!!"

Then I woke up. I think. No sleep paralysis this time.

Another lost song :\

2011-12-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

I had a dream where I spent what felt like several minutes composing, singing, and mixing three or four measures of a new song, which sounded pretty catchy, although the lyrics seemed a little trite. The drums and vocals were snappy. Wasn't a sound that I typically try to create. I think Greg was listening along with me. Then I woke up.

And two seconds later (before I even had a chance to try running the song back through my head), I already had an Air Supply song stuck in my head, effectively dispelling my recollection. Blergh.

Pete Hornberger steps into traffic

2011-12-22T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was riding in a car with a few people in the late evening in drizzling rain, in a city — seemed like Washington DC at first, but probably was New York City. We were stopped at a red light, with the road sloped down behind us. To our right, the cross street had a narrow concrete median (on the right side of the road), and standing on the median was Pete Hornberger from 30 Rock.

He was holding a smallish white sign with something written on it, and was peering out towards the oncoming traffic (he was facing our direction). He shouted a few times, apparently towards somebody off in the distance to our left. He kept taking a few steps out into the road and looking off in the distance, and then coming back to the median because of the oncoming cars.

I didn't understand what he was trying to do, and told my friend so, and she mentioned that he might actually be shooting a scene for the show right now. That actually made sense to me, so I stopped worrying about it.

Loss of a ghost

2011-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

I and a girl friend of mine had just walked into a small, messy library that was part of a larger building — a mansion, I think. From the door in front of us, opposite the way we had come in, the ghost of a girl in her twenties walked in and greeted us cheerfully. We'd met her before on several occasions and were friends with her. She came over and talked to us, catching up, and started reading a few magazines with us on the floor.

For some reason, though, my thought process had changed recently and I had reached an unsavory conclusion about the nature of ghosts. I wanted to, yet felt pretty scared to, test my conclusion. But I ended up going through with it...

I asked her to read some of the magazine's text aloud while I was looking away. It came out as gibberish. I asked her to recount a conversation we'd had a few minutes ago, or something we had talked about when we had met previously, but she couldn't think of anything.

I had realized that ghosts didn't have the full human version of sentience/consciousness, but rather they depended heavily on the input of the people they interacted with, and my tests seemed to confirm it.

I became very emotional. I lay down on the floor beside her and put my left arm around her and hugged her as tight as I could. I loved her for all our past interactions, knew that she had been a pleasant influence in my life, and yet I had to cope now with the realization that she wasn't exactly a real person. I had to accept that, whoever I thought she was in real life, there was little to be shown for it in her current form. I didn't want to let go of the lie.

But someone decided to destroy her anyway. She suddenly had a chain attached to her and was being pulled past me and off to the right. I looked and saw a villainous woman there among the bookshelves who seized the ghost and took her out another doorway and around a corner. She stabbed the ghost with some kind of implement, and bright light leaked out from the stab wound until... you know, like, the ethereal plane burst out in a supernatural explosion, and the ghost was gone. As the breeze from the explosion blew past me, I screamed in despair.

Chilling fox and waving bear

2011-12-17T00:01:00.000-05:00

I had just woken up (not actually, but in the dream), and was lying in bed. My bed was in the basement, but it was near a small ground-level window, out of which I could look at the back yard. I saw mom and dad in the back yard, along with the dogs. But I also saw a red fox there. Surprisingly, it wasn't doing much of anything. It wasn't scared of the people and dogs there, it wasn't trying to attack anything or run away. It just kind of stood around.

I grabbed my point-and-shoot camera, which was in my bed with me already, zoomed in on the fox, and took a couple pictures and a short video, expecting the fox to run away at any moment. But the fox never did go anywhere. It was just chilling.

Next dream: in the back yard of our current house, near the far back gate of our tall wood picket fence. My dad was sitting in a lawn chair, facing away from the fence, and next to him was a news anchor — Brian Williams, I think — interviewing him.

I walked up towards them, and suddenly I caught sight of a large brown bear in the woods behind the fence. I waved to it, and it got up on its hind legs and waved back, with a vacant expression on its face, then started ambling towards us. I told Dad and Brian Williams to get moving, and we fled towards the front of the house. Every once in a while, the bear would get back up on its hind legs and wave again, then continue ambling over towards us.

We got out to the front yard, and headed inside the house (which now more resembled our Cantilever house in Lake Ridge).

Voldemort and the big, nasty...

2011-12-17T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was being chased by Voldemort in a circle around a very crowded, slopy, cobblestoned village block in the late evening. He was quite intent on killing me. The only way I was able to keep ahead of him and out of his reach was to repeatedly teleport myself to slightly different spots ahead of me while running. However, I wasn't very skilled at teleportation, so, in order to cast the teleport spell, I had to actually describe to myself, out loud, where I wanted to teleport to (like, "the spot over there next to the general store" or "just to the left of that group of people"). So I was just barely quick enough to stay out of his reach.

We went in a circles around the village block a few times, when finally I managed to teleport myself such that, when Voldemort appeared behind me again, there was a very nasty, large, bright orange arachnid beast behind him, who apparently had it out for Voldemort, and was capable of killing him physically without using magic.

Voldemort was so busy chasing me that he didn't even have time to react before the arachnid killed him. Score.

Eh? A beard? AND a mustache??

2011-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was outside in a small treed park near a house. A few friends and I were hanging out, idly bouncing and floating with fairy wings. A real, fairy-sized fairy with blond hair, with whom we seemed to be acquainted, came by and was wondering out loud how we were staying aloft — apparently she was only capable of flying in short bursts, more like assisted jumping rather than hovering.

She set out to discover if it really was as easy as we made it look. She bounced one or two feet in the air and fluttered her wings with all the power she could muster, and doing so she managed to hover in one place for a few seconds before dropping down again. If we had known in advance the adverse effect this would have on her, we would have warned her in advance...

She came to a rest lying sideways on a large green leaf, and we were astonished to see that she had aged greatly, but in a very strange way. Besides being exhausted, she looked fairly normal, her hair was still blond — and yet, she now had a pointy grey beard and a mustache. She herself was also incredulous. "Eh? A beard? AND a mustache??"

Woodbridge High & Woodbridge Middle up for auction

2011-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

So it turned out that Woodbridge High School was being put up for auction, and I went there (around dusk) with Greg and Grandma M. Almost as soon as we arrived, though, we learned that Woodbridge Middle School was also being put up for auction this same night. We went over to watch the auction at WMS. WMS didn't look at all like it really looks — for one, it had a church built into the middle of the front side of the building, with a largely black congregation. Many members of the congregation were standing outside watching. The building was fairly modern, maybe 80's-90's red brick architecture; the church portion wasn't distinct from the building, except there was an embedded tower with stained glass going all the way up it, which stuck out above the roof line a little ways.

(This is what Woodbridge Middle School totally didn't look like in the dream.)

The area where we were standing was kind of a long, raised concrete patio/walkway, and in front of us was a short wrought-iron fence (acting mostly as a railing) separating the raised patio from a lower patio that led up to the school building. From our perspective, facing towards WMS, there was another small two- or three-story brick building with a walk-around veranda on the second floor.

There was the crowd up where we were, mostly people watching the auction, and then the crowd on the lower patio in front of us, mostly participating in the auction. As the bidding started, the first person to bid was Oprah, who was facing the audience as she registered her bid. Soon after, a Muslim man in middle-eastern(-ish) garb, who was perched on the outside corner of the second story veranda of the building to our left, raised his hand slightly, registering a bid. Then two other men, standing on the patio below, continued the bidding.

For whatever reason, there wasn't anything indicating how much each person was bidding, only that each bid registered in turn was higher than the previous bid. (Seems like a bad way to run an auction, unless there's rules stating how much the price increases with each bid.)

Please, no "sloppy disks"

2011-11-27T00:02:00.000-05:00

I made my way to a university in Labor, Delaware (not a real place), which, on the map, was in the southwest corner of Delaware. I was going to be taking summer courses there — looked like it was going to be computer science. I had brought an old laptop of mine (ASUS brand).

I got into a classroom where maybe 30 students had gathered for orientation, with everyone sitting around on the floor with their backpacks and laptops. I realized my laptop had gone missing. Not only that, but everyone else had laptops lying around, all identical ASUS laptops, but much newer than mine. I asked around a little, but nobody had seen my laptop.

The teacher, a wiry middle-aged man with slightly graying hair, was giving some basic guidelines about the program. One thing I heard him talking about — while I was searching for my laptop — was that nobody should use, and I quote, "sloppy disks" in this program. He explained that he called them "sloppy disks" because, first of all, it wasn't just floppy disks, but things like SD cards, jump drives, etc.; and because he thought it would overcomplicate our computer programming if we had to deal with storage media that could change drive letters. (It seemed unrealistic to me that you would willfully avoid such a commonplace issue.)

The playground and the lodge — places from our childhoods

2011-11-27T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was with a girl with whom I'd been friends for some time. We decided (perhaps on a whim) that we would go visit the places where we grew up.

First we went to a playground in Massachusetts (presumably near where I used to live, though the playground didn't look like something I'd seen before). The playground was terraced in a weird way, so that where we currently were was a little mulch-covered play area cut into the side of a small hill. Two sides of the cutaway were gray concrete walls with ladders for climbing up to the hillside. The ladders were little more than small metal handles (kind of like squared-off croquet wickets embedded in the concrete). I started climbing up the wall on the right side, while a little boy behind me near the other wall made annoying discouraging comments, which I ignored.

Then we decided to go to where my friend lived when she was little. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me up to this point, but I wasn't 100% sure where she was from. I believed she was born outside the US, and she looked east-Asian, and I was tempted to guess she was Korean, but she told me she was Japanese. So we went to Japan (somehow — perhaps we "traveled by map") — I recall a cut scene of coming onto the damp, forested shore of a small hill of an island which seemed to be representing Japan in my head, during the dim early morning of an overcast day.

We visited her family's (or extended family's) house, which was a beautiful, open, wide wooden lodge in the woods. A few people were at home hanging out or making dinner or something.

Café Tacvba's highway gas stop

2011-11-26T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was driving back from somewhere in southern Virginia on the highway, and I needed to stop for gas. The rest stop that I pulled off at was rather strange. On one edge of the parking lot was a small curbed-off field where several people were lounging and relaxing. There were a few signs there, facing towards the parking lot...

Well, first off, I somehow knew that this facility belonged to the band Café Tacvba, and throughout the dream I had a couple songs by them playing in the background. So something inside me expected to see Spanish writing on all the signs. But as I stared at the signs, I realized they were actually written in some kind of informal Esperanto. Many words that I would have expected to end in -o (i.e. nouns) ended instead with an accented syllable ending in a consonant. But the clincher was that one sign on the right end of the field actually simply had the word "Esperanto" on it. (This sign was in the middle of a few vertically stacked signs — the others may have been gasoline prices.) I think there must have been at least one sign asking for donations to whatever cause Café Tacvba was sponsoring here.

I went inside a restroom. I noticed that inside the restroom there were a couple small gas pumps, but I couldn't imagine how someone would fit a car in here. A sign near the pumps mentioned that you could only buy up to 2 gallons of gas there. I guessed that maybe people could drag their motorbikes in here...

Anyway, I found the normal gas pumps outside and across the parking lot to the right.

Leaping boy at Incredible Universe

2011-11-25T18:26:00.000-05:00

Several years ago, I had a dream where I was driving along a small highway (I may have had a passenger), and to my left, I could see a large store that looked to me a lot like the old Incredible Universe building near Potomac Mills in Woodbridge:

The parking lot was empty, like the store was closed that day. And just as I was driving past, I could see what looked like a teenage boy standing on the railing of the balcony. And then he lunged out feet-first down towards the parking lot below.

It wasn't clear what his motivation was, or whether he could be seriously injured doing that, but I was so shocked seeing it that my heart just about leaped into my throat. It took a lot of concentration to focus on driving... I'm sure it wasn't long after that I woke up, though I may have pulled off the road or something...

Dude! Jet trails!

2011-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

In a restaurant with a group of friends (guys and girls). One friend comes in from outside the restaurant, saying "Dude! Jet trails!" It seemed like he really wanted someone to take pictures. A couple of us (including Greg) come out to see what is going on. Outside the restaurant was an interesting little area. Despite being outdoors it was almost completely surrounded by urban-relic type walls and most of a ceiling, so that there wasn't much way to see beyond the enclosed area. But in front of us, where most of the people crowded around were staring, was a long opening revealing something of an alley or passageway with another wall behind it.

I heard a droning noise, figuring it must be the plane my friend was talking about. I trained my camera on the only possible place we would see anything (the passageway), and a few seconds later, it looked like two planes, one chasing the other, passed through from right to left. I was taking as many pictures as I could (multiple exposure setting) but I only caught a glimpse of part of the pursuing plane. It was a lustrous muddy greenish brown color. Someone mentioned that it must be a "commando unit", which got them pretty excited.

We waited, and a little while later the droning came back and so did that second plane, passing through the passageway again. I didn't catch much more on the camera the second time — I was having a hard time positioning the shot through the viewscreen. But very soon after, a motorcycle came through the alley and stopped right in front of us. A military guy jumped off the bike, threw (or launched) something that looked like a grenade towards the crowd, said something cryptic, and said we had "two minutes".

My group ran back into the restaurant to say what had happened. I was going to show my pictures, when I noticed that: a) the latest batch of pictures came out in sepia for some reason, and b) even though Greg and I agreed that the military guy had come in on a motorcycle, the pictures on the camera showed him getting out of his airplane (which was smallish, and had propellers in interesting places).

We got ready to evacuate down to the basement of the restaurant where hopefully the explosion wouldn't hurt us. But we had some leftover pizza in boxes on the table from some other occasion, which we had been dragging around with us (it was mixed slices of pizza from two or three different places). I grabbed a slice of onion-studded pizza and we went off toward the basement. Unfortunately there was a bit of a line. Before we even got to the basement door, we heard voices from various places around (even some still outside) counting down... 3... 2... 1... But there was no explosion.

After giving a few more seconds for good measure, the crowd started coming back outside again. Now the military guy was standing by a bus, telling everyone to board. Two guys (the equivalent of Fred and George Weasley) were tossing rocks at the explosive, and it did actually ... barely.. explode. It went off with a low thud. I thought I saw the military guy chuckle a little.

On top of the bus, surrounded by low guard rails, were a bunch of horses (actually, I think they were Przewalski's Horses). I had a feeling we would be needing those horses wherever we were being taken. I also still felt suspicious of the military guy, and wanted to make sure he wasn't trying to get us all killed (again). So as I passed by the right side of the bus, I quickly peeked underneath and check for bombs attached the bottom of the bus. Instead, I saw a family of very vicious looking dogs. They didn't attack me, thankfully. I thought to myself something like, "Note to self: Circumprescription counterproductive. Stick to the club house."

As we were about to get on the bus, a friend of mine noted that the crowd was being organized into groups and people needed to take positions. He thought I should consider "first bass" or "second bass". I was pretty sure we already had a first bass guy, and I didn't think I was yet talented enough with bass to take that position.

Flickbox™ music box

2011-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was on what appeared to be a Homecoming trip with Priss and Colin. Priss had been driving us around and we had now returned to wherever we are staying. It seems too fancy and homelike to be a hotel, but I can't quite figure out what it was supposed to be.

Colin and I were sharing a room, and he was just coming out of the shower (in the bathroom attached to the bedroom). I was sitting on or up against the footboard of the bed (actually, my back was up against a very thick column, wider than my body), near the bathroom door, and glancing away for good measure, in case Colin were to come out naked. When he stepped into the bedroom, he jerked back in surprise, but he was wearing a towel.

I then found a wooden box in the room, maybe the size of a breadbox, made of light blond, unpolished wood, and unadorned except for four or five lengthwise rows of nails embedded in the top. If you flick one of the nails, it somehow causes the box to resonate the sound of a voice singing a syllable of a word from a song, plus one piece of percussion -- as if the part of the box below that nail were shaped in such a perfect way as to reshape the sound of the flick into this complex sound.

I started with the last row, in which the words were accompanied by a closed hi-hat cymbal. The song it was playing sounded like a version of Mad Tom of Bedlam sung by Jolie Holland. I went and started at the first row, flicking each nail in the right rhythm, and listening to the song.

This box had to be really old, I thought, and the sounds coming from it were produced in some super-complex organic process without the benefit digital recording and reproduction. I wonder if this art had been lost to time. In any case, I'm keeping this.

An unexpected pregnancy and a mark of doom

2011-11-10T00:01:00.000-05:00

I was hanging out with Andrew M, and he was recounting to me how he had just found out he had gotten pregnant (... somehow) from a woman he made love to in his living room. Which was all well and good, but then it turns out he also got in the way between two old women who were trying to shoot each other with pistols (which didn't exactly shoot bullets, but gave the target only a short time -- perhaps days -- to live). They were running around the back yard of a suburban single family home, sniping from behind corners and such. Anyway, Andrew got hit by one of them.

So I was hanging out with him at a restaurant, and we were talking about that stuff. We were hovering around near some tables in a covered outdoor seating area. A group of girls was getting up to leave and we went to sit at that table, but then one of them looked like she was trying to figure something out. She looked down at a piece of paper (folded together into half of a polyhedron shape), and one facet of the shape had "Reserved" written on it. In fact, one such paper polyhedron was sitting on each table, with things written on each side. Unfortunately for us, it turned out that since the paper was sitting such that the "Reserved" side was perpendicular to the table, it meant that someone else had reserved the table.

But then, I think we already had the table next to it, and it wasn't reserved. Weren't we just sitting there? Oh well, now I'm confused.

Bungee horses

2011-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00

I was with a group of people in the woods, near a medium-sized pond or reservoir. Next to the water was a framework tower, maybe three or four stories high. Two people from our group were playing a weird sport where they each were mounted on a horse, and around each horse's midsection was tied a bungee cord. Both horses, with the guys on them, were dangling from the tower over the water, slowly bouncing up and down (it was a rather springy cord) and swaying back and forth. The idea was to knock your opponent off his horse, and the two came close to each other a few times and scuffled. I can't say I recall either one falling in the water.

The science of wordless spellcasting

2011-11-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

I'm Harry Potter. I wake up in my bed, in the bedroom of a pretty normal looking modern Muggle-style house. The opposite wall, across the room and parallel to my bed, had built-in bookshelves from the ceiling down to about 3 feet off the floor. Below each column of bookshelves were three drawers.

In the previous dream, just before I woke up, a friend of mine had used the spell "fermata" to close the front door of a house we were getting ready to go into. I decided to test the opposite spell, the spell for opening things, "abierto" (I have no idea if either of these are real spells in the Harry Potter universe). I point my wand at a drawer and speak, "abierto". I mess around with my pronunciation, at first rolling my "r", then switching to a British (RP) "r". Then I start stretching out the pronunciation slowly. That's when I notice something weird.

I decide to experiment. I point my wand at the drawer, thinking the word "abierto" in my head, while starting to say "aaaah" out loud. In anticipation, the drawer begins to open. I push it shut. Interesting. Now I point my wand, think the word "automatic", and start to say "aaaah" again. This time nothing happens. Iiiiinteresting. I test it a few more times, then rush downstairs to tell Hermione.

Downstairs in the house, there are a lot of other kids (presumably other students) milling around. I walk into the small kitchen, where Hermione is making herself breakfast alone. I excitedly tell her to guess what I found out. She says "Hmmm... could it have something to do with..." (I forget what she referred to, but it wasn't remotely related.) I shook my head, smiling. Then I explained to her what I had found out, with "aaah" and "abierto" versus "aaah" and "automatic". You didn't need to say the whole spell, you just had to be focused on the right spell and begin speaking the spell.

"Woww, cool!" said Hermione, meaning I had told her something she didn't already know. And I was happy that she was excited.

[Note: This has everything to do with me currently reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.]

Eating "stears" in the Philippines

2011-11-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

I went to the Philippines, by boat. (Several other people did too.) I was looking at a map, trying to figure out where I would actually make landfall. I picked the central west coast of an island (which was shaped kind of like a mirror image of Japan's Honshu island), after passing by the northwestern tip of the island where many of the other travelers were going. I arrived, swimming the last short leg of the journey to the dock. I was then in the house of a host family, sitting at their medium-sized round wooden kitchen table.

There were at least two people there. There was a "motherly" type, and a "brotherly" type. I was eating some food -- particularly, fruits that looked kind of like eggplants, or elongated mangoes without a pit. I used a large knife whose sharp edge curved towards the front end, and rather than ending in a point, the front end was broad, sharp, and slightly angled. To cut the fruit open, I stabbed the broad end of the knife straight into the middle of the fruit (lengthwise) and sliced it in half.

The brother asked me if I wanted any pizza, and I said "yes". I wasn't exactly sure when the pizza would be served (either in a few minutes, or tomorrow morning). In any case, another woman had appeared, and she was another traveler like me, possibly my leader/commander. She said I should really be eating the "stears" (pronounced "stares"/"stairs") for nutrition. The "stears" were like the other fruits, but bigger/longer with orange skin. Actually, the other fruits may have been another variety of "stears".

I think the reason I know how to spell "stears" is that I saw a flash of a news show on the small TV in the corner of the kitchen where they were talking about them, with a picture and caption.

A British gathering of bands

2011-10-31T00:02:00.000-04:00

There was some kind of British talent-show TV special, in a large, dark auditorium with lots of theater-style seating and a big stage. The host was calling up random people from the audience and asking for their five favorite bands. One audience member rattled off five, and was surprised to see that a couple bands who were sitting near the front row of the audience (as the camera panned onto them) started getting up to go on stage as the audience applauded.

Apparently the host anticipated most of the audience's preferred band choices and invited them to the show beforehand. At least one of the bands the audience member named, however, was not present, and the host told his assistant to make sure "N19" (or something like that — the band's name) got here quickly.

Then, on a big projection screen up on stage, the host started narrating a presentation. It looked kind of poorly done. There were a number of large thumbnail images on a white background (in an interface that looked like Windows) representing bands that had been selected to play. They cycled through each of the thumbnails, playing a clip from a popular song of theirs.

Two or three of the bands' voices sounded distinctly like Beatles vocals, which surprised me. (I'm annoyed that, with all that music, I can't remember how any of it went.) The last band looked like it was actually a side project of George Harrison's, and the song clip they played was sort of a chill electronica remix of "Let It Down"; the thumbnail looked like an outside view of a cave entrance.

Dream song's frustratingly false familiarity

2011-10-31T00:01:00.000-04:00

One dream I had was, in its entirety, set to a song which was very vivid and interesting as it played. It sounded like country-influenced indie music... Maybe like Jenny Lewis. The general scene of the dream was outdoors in a western desert-arid place, outside a building whose purpose I'm not quite sure of. Might have been a restaurant or tavern or travel center. As the song played, the "camera" of the dream moved around different parts of the outside of the building, as if it were a music video.

Annoyingly, as the music was playing, something in my mind was telling me, "Ah, this song. I've heard this before. It's definitely not anything completely novel which you should be trying to commit to memory." So, when I woke up halfway through the song, I was utterly unable to recall how it went.

I tell Mark-Erren...

2011-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

"I tell Mark-Erren. She tells Mario."

- Anonymous (woman)

(I think it's funny that I know how to spell weird names and words from dreams, without really second-guessing myself. Must be that the knowledge of the name's spelling is an integral part of the dream.)

Pizza place computer care

2011-10-29T00:03:00.000-04:00

At a carry-out pizza place (for some reason), Neil and I were trying to help Greg get his computer working. We were doing something with the hard drive (either backing it up or replacing it), and I noted that since Greg was using Windows 95, the hard drive would be the M: drive in "My Computer".

We had also brought small boxes with toys in them (my intuition tells me they may have been both LEGO and Star Wars-themed). At one point, in the busy, cramped front area of this pizza place, one of the female employees handed one of the boxes to me, as if someone else had told her to give it to me, even though I already knew it was there and that I owned it.

Meanwhile, Greg's computer was no longer there. Not sure where it went.

Technical difficulties with the cookie bike

2011-10-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

I had a high-tech red motorcycle, and I drove it from Lake Ridge to Dale City by way of Smoketown Road. Then, I was making my way back, again on Smoketown Road, somewhere on the stretch between Minnieville and Cavalier. I had to weave between a few bicyclists on the road, and then suddenly I realized that the only reason my motorcycle was still moving was because I was pedaling it. The engine had gone dead.

I stopped and tried to fiddle with the controls. I looked at my high-tech dashboard and decided to give the operating system a reboot (it looked like a compact version of Windows 7). However, when I pressed the hard button on the dashboard to shut down the OS, it went into hibernate instead, so that wasn't going to work. Then I thought maybe I was out of fuel, so I looked at the fuel gauge, but its digital readout showed that I had almost half a tank left.

Somehow, I got back closer to home (maybe Wainscott), and my mom was outside trying to help me troubleshoot. I recalled that we were using a special fuel — basically, gingerbread cookies, though we called them something else which I can't remember. My mom had some more with her, and she took a bite of one, and I could see from her expression that it tasted kind of weird. Maybe the cookies changed over time and they had lost their efficacy.

The foot and the doll

2011-10-29T00:01:00.000-04:00

I was in a house (perhaps we had just recently moved in — there was more to this dream before this point that I can't remember), in my first-story bedroom. I noticed something really bizarre below the window — just along the edge of the wall, sticking out of the floor, was what appeared to be a human male foot, bottom-side up. I was both vaguely disturbed and fascinated.

I decided to pull up the rug and see what the foot was attached to. Instead of it being a human (body), it turned out that there was a weird female doll lying there in the floor, about 3 feet tall, made out of beige-painted metal, with joints and hinges very obvious, wearing perhaps a Victorian-era off-white dress. I brought it to the kitchen where my mom and dad were. My mom recognized the doll, but didn't really want to be associated with it. Apparently she had stashed it away there in the bedroom.

The crispy ceiling

2011-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

Harry Potter 6 was just about to come out in theaters, but the plot had nothing to do with the real movie. The protagonist was some other boy Harry's age. Can't remember much more than that. I was thinking about the movie while lying in bed (possibly a top bunk or loft bed) in a bedroom whose ceiling resembled that of the upstairs bedroom (on the right) at my grandma's house in New York — the ceiling was tiled, and it slanted down at a 45° angle on the side above my bed. The lights were off and there was only dim ambient light in the room.

While lying there in bed, I was poking at the diagonal ceiling with my foot. The first time I poked it, it made a satisfyingly crispy sound as the fiberboard tiles cracked slightly. I noticed at this time that much of the rest of the ceiling further away was in disrepair, with many of the tiles mostly destroyed. Being slightly OCD, I kept poking at the ceiling with my foot for a little while.

Dandelissimo

2011-10-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

A friend and I were about to drive to New York City for vacation. As we're making our way onto the highway (my friend was driving), I check on my smartphone to see what different kinds of radio stations there were in NYC -- particularly, I was comparing the availability of stations with opposing political views. On the highway (raised 20-30 feet above ground level), the scenery to both sides of us is very colorful. My best guess is that there were lots of dark pink azaleas growing along the side of the highway (I suppose they would have been intentionally planted, since this was a raised road). We were passing through or alongside a city, too, with small skyscrapers near us on our right.

We are passed by a pickup truck that has a MASSIVE dandelion (gone to seed) standing upright in the back bed. It must have been fixed in place somehow. It was a good 8-10 feet tall. My friend was wondering out loud whether it was a real dandelion. I commented that, since it was going to be losing those seeds soon, we could come back to this stretch of the highway in a year or so and see if it's overrun with these dandelions.

Eventually we arrived at our hotel in NYC.

Peculiar air show in the city

2011-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

Sitting at the right side window seat (mid-back) of a bus, which is stopped somewhere in the middle of a big city. The other passengers and I are surprised to see what looks like an air show a mile or two away: aircraft (and even what looked like spacecraft — one reminded me of a bigger version of SpaceShipOne) were soaring up and out from behind tall buildings, then quickly arching back down to disappear behind them again.

The sheer volume of different aircraft, the uniqueness of their designs, and their size (they seemed much too big, like, almost as big as the buildings they were flying behind)... Something seemed strange about it, though I couldn't put my finger on it at first. Finally, our bus pulled up to a convention center, and there were a few people standing outside who had organized this event. They explained to us that all the aircraft we had seen were actually inflatable! To me, that was actually really impressive.

Ringo and the big band at the mansion

2011-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

I was hanging out in a small, cozy living room (I think maybe it had the dark brown shag carpet that we used to have) with a guy and girl I knew, watching TV on an old set (maybe the wood-paneled Zenith TV we used to own). On TV was a rare recording (in black and white) of an early Beatles performance in England. The setting looked like maybe one end of a ballroom or other function hall in a mansion. Ringo was standing with a microphone, singing an uncharacteristically soulful song (also, maybe sort of slow and big-band-like). I didn't actually spot the rest of the Beatles, but I assumed they were behind him somewhere. However, on all sides of Ringo were at least six or seven other backup musicians.

To Ringo's left (right from the viewer's perspective) was a guy playing a full drum set. At one point in the song, he did a fancy drum fill where he started in the seated position, then hopped up and walked off the front-right corner of the stage area and off the screen, hitting three or four cymbals on stands as he walked. Another guy who was playing hand percussion behind Ringo stepped over to the drum set and hit a couple things to finish off the part.

Meanwhile, I was wondering to myself if I could find a download for this on the Internet. I wasn't sure what search terms to use, though. The location had flashed up at the beginning of the performance, but all I could remember was that it had the letters "ea" in it somewhere, which didn't narrow it down much.

"Mason mama"

2011-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

I came to a facility in the wilderness where I was supposed to train in survival skills. I followed a course that had me sneaking quietly around, behind, and through small fir trees in this sparsely wooded property. Apparently a primary goal was to not alert wildlife to my presence.

I finished up and headed out. I saw a woman from another special agency just arriving to take the course as I left. My exit route took me to a long indoor bridge with glass sides for looking out. It dipped towards the middle like a rope bridge. Looking out, I saw only a vast body of water and I recalled that the facility had been on a small remote island.

At the same time, I started thinking of the song "Take Me Home, Country Roads", and thought of Jenny Lewis singing it. I started to sing it like her. It seemed that the song was being dedicated to my wife, who lived on another, more populated island, yet had never really gone to the sea or left the island (thus, "stranger to blue water"). The line "mountain mama" was changed to "Mason mama" (Mason being pronounced "mass-un"), Mason being the name of her hometown.

(In my mental map, the facility island was in the southwest corner, the island/group of islands with Mason was towards south-center, and halfway up the map to the north started a landmass that covered most of the north half of the map, and may have been "West Virginia".)

Pricey video tapes at Staples

2011-10-25T00:01:00.000-04:00

I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom (kind of a cross between a house and a dorm bedroom), rummaging through stuff, when I decided I needed to backup the data on my computer. I couldn't find any writable DVDs sitting around, so I headed over to Staples (or something like it, sort of a wholesale-warehouse kind of deal) to buy some. When I got to the section I was looking for, at the front end of one aisle, I didn't immediately see any DVDs, but I was surprised to see VHS cassettes for sale -- not only new, blank ones, but also old ones with stuff recorded on them. What really shocked me was that there were a few individual VHS tapes on shelves at the end of the aisle with hand-written labels and prices below them. A few of them ranged in price from $699-$799 or so. They seemed to be recordings of old cartoons -- one may have featured Daffy Duck.

Hugging at Hogwarts

2011-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

At a school/academy with a bunch of classmates. We are almost to our classroom, in a semi-covered courtyard reminiscent of a place in Hogwarts (a small open central grassy area with covered corridors surrounding it). A couple classmates are teasing me about this girl that I like (also present) who likes me too. She was cute (in a wholesome sort of way), somewhat short, shy, and golden blonde. I couldn't decide who she reminds me of in real life, but she seemed very familiar to my waking mind.

Because of my classmates' prodding, rather than being ashamed for no reason, and despite no official relationship between us, I walked over to her and gave her a hug from behind and started talking to her. Worked out pretty well.

MythBusters, rockets, and "urn-ale" climbing

2011-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Standing on a long dock/boardwalk over a small lake, watching Jamie and Adam from MythBusters shooting some sort of handheld rocket launchers (the rockets launched whereby being somewhat light and unthreatening). At first, it is more like a filmed scene -- indeed, I watch the two of them launch rockets in reverse -- the rockets find their way back to the launchers, and then the vertical smoke trail finds its way back to the rockets. Then I see them do it again. Adam's little rocket lands in the water behind him, just off the side of the dock. Jamie's lands very close to his own feet. Adam quips that this may be the first episode where they experiment on their own blood.

Seems filming has stopped now, we've walked off a little to the right, and Adam is talking to me and a friend about the background to that episode. Jamie had the idea of setting up a small monorail along the dock to which the rocket launchers would have been attached. One of Adam's assistants (not from the real show) mentioned how it would have been difficult to set up the monorail without buckling the dock because of the shape of the planks. Adam said they had actually worked out a solution to that, by fitting mounts below the railing that were the same size as the planks. In any case, the monorail idea had been scrapped. Adam also mentioned offhand that the show's photographers took way too many pictures, that there were so many photos from the show that would never see the light of day.

Then we headed off further down the dock towards land. Hopping. I hopped down the slope of the dock onto land, then started hopping towards our destination, over a pile of junk or two, and slowly uphill, with my friend (and possibly the MythBusters crew) following behind me. For some reason, the song "Civilization" by the Andrews Sisters and Danny Kaye (featured in Fallout 3) was running through my head. Possibly because of the line "They hurry like savages to get aboard an iron train" -- thinking of the monorail idea.

The ground was grassy and was pretty wet. As we got further up the hill, the wet ground changed to snowy ground. Then we reached a part of the slope that was too steep to hop (or walk) up. My friend (I think a girl, but not particularly feminine, just sort of a pal) and I started grabbing tufts of snow-covered grass with our bare hands and slowly lifting ourselves up the slope, bit by bit. We were laughing and having a grand time. I was surprised every time I grabbed the grass and it managed to support my weight and not break in my hand. My friend said this was great "urn-ale" climbing. I told her this was the first "urn-ale" mountain I'd ever climbed. We continued to climb and grin and laugh.

In the background now, the music had changed to something Celtic-sounding: It was fast-paced, 6/4 time. Every beat had a high-octave major chord on piano keeping time, and there was a pennywhistle which started on a major third, and every half measure it flourished to a different note.

Randomly shopping while my neighborhood turns into NYC

2011-10-15T00:02:00.000-04:00

I had gone across the street to Old Bridge Festival shopping center, to the far left where Blockbuster and Jerry's were, and walked into a random store to poke around. Most of the stuff in the store was toys and knick-knacks. On my way out, I saw a bunch of male and female action figures on a low shelf to my right, all of them topless. The female ones were particularly artificially well-endowed, and had been turned away from the aisle, presumably so as not to offend decent shoppers.

I went out to my car, but I had to wait there awkwardly as two black women were getting out of a vehicle next to my driver's side door. They were just kind of standing there talking, but I didn't want to be rude. I noticed a couple pairs of sunglasses had somehow fallen out of the passenger side of my car, so I grabbed those while waiting.

I finally got back in my car and started up the hill to cross Old Bridge Road back to Cricket Lane. When I got close enough to see over the ridge, however, the other side of Old Bridge Rd was a steep dropoff and past that was a sprawling city with many old skyscrapers (in my mind, it was New York City). I couldn't go directly to Cricket Lane -- instead I had to take an access entry to Old Bridge Rd, just 30 feet or so to the left of the Cricket Ln intersection. It looked impossible, because I had to cross two lanes to get into the turn lane and there were always cars stopped at the light blocking my way.

Finding a film location at the wild west hotel

2011-10-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

Ray and I were at some hotel with a vaguely wild-west theme to it. Ray's erstwhile girlfriend Britt was there for a little while too, with us at the hotel's swimming pool, but headed out after a bit.

A woman working for some movie production company was with us then, and we were apparently at the hotel to help with preparation for filming. She had been asked to find three adjacent unoccupied rooms and break the side walls between them to make it easier to film there. Ray and I went searching through every room at the hotel (there were about three floors with maybe eight rooms per floor). While we did find empty rooms here and there, we also ended up barging into many occupied rooms. One room I recall opening the door and seeing someone asleep in bed and closed the door before they woke up.

In any case, there was nowhere in the hotel that had three adjacent unoccupied rooms. The woman from the film company decided to settle on reserving three separate rooms.

Ray and I went back down to the bottom level and out to some small tables by the street. As it turned out, Ray had two girlfriends at this time, Britt (seen previously), and a girl who showed up now to sit with us. She was a petite, thin redhead named Katey. She mentioned to me casually, but quite earnestly, that nothing could ever happen to make her dislike Ray.

Sith encounter on the orc farm

2011-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

In some kind of cross between WoW and Star Wars, I was walking through some semi-arid farming territory once owned by humans, but now taken over by orcs. I walked up close to a medium-size crop field where an orc on a ridiculously small (like, clown car sized) harvester was rolling through and gathering up spinach.

To the side of this field, I encountered three sith figures wearing cloaks with hoods, standing side by side and sort of blocking my way. It was clear that I had come to talk to them. The middle one was Palpatine, the one on the right may have been Anakin Skywalker, but I can't remember. I didn't realize it at first, but the one on the left (who I stared at for a few seconds because I could swear there was a little face carved into his big, dark chin) turned out to be Darth Maul.

In any case, this encounter turned out to be mostly for show, as one of the two on the outside suddenly drew his lightsaber and immediately killed Palpatine.

Dexterously defeating the demon dame

2011-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Earth was being attacked by some other planet, but more specifically, I was about to be attacked by a demon woman. I was up in kind of a loft room at the top of a ladder (plain room, with drywall and not much in the way of furnishings). The demon woman was a normal humanoid shape, but covered completely with grease paint, and had a row of horns resembling the crown of the Statue of Liberty, but sticking straight up out of her head. She was climbing up the ladder into the room.

We then set about fighting. Apparently I had the upper hand, and as she got weaker, she became more obviously naked and started changing colors. I had some kind of stick and prodded once or twice at her naked (bluish) body, which displeased her. Eventually, with no power left, she ended up looking human, with long golden blond hair. I held her to the ground, face down, and used a knife to cut a two inch wide lock of her hair. I used the lock of hair to tie back the rest of her hair in a ponytail. Then I woke up.

Teddy bear in the parking lot, philosophizing with Mos Def

2011-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

I (female) and another young woman are hanging out in a parking lot in the midday sun, with a dark brown teddy bear, about a foot tall. Apparently the teddy bear harbors the consciousness of a friend of ours, and we are treating it affectionately. It is sitting on the ground, and some dust/cobwebs had been blown onto it by the wind, and we sweetly brush it clean.

Also with us in the parking lot, sitting at the wheel of a delivery-style truck, though not currently driving, is another friend of ours who resembles Mos Def. We're having a philosophical conversation, in which he is giving us general relationship advice and trying to open our minds. He notes that you can never be sure what is going to really do it for you, knock you for a loop, or some such, until just after you have done the deed, or some such.

He proceeds to bring up rap as another example, saying that, although I might only rarely listen to rap, there could be that one perfect rap number out there that would prove to be irresistible, unforgettable, perfect, as long as you're receptive to it when the occasion arises. That's paraphrasing, unfortunately, because the way he delivered his thoughts on the matter was supremely eloquent, and I was hanging onto every word as he spoke.

Escape with the apes, and taking a chunk out of a punk

2011-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

I (female), one way or another, ended up being held in a skyscraper by an evil corporation or militia; also being held there were associates of mine, several chimp-like people who moved sort of like large humanoid muppets. They were smart enough to carry on rational conversations (in sort of goofy muppet-like voices) but they were completely befuddled when it came to technology. We made our escape, and later I was hanging out with them in someplace resembling a mix of a swanked out office building and an Ewok tree village. A couple of the chimp people were sitting in front of a computer (right in front of the railing at the top of a quite wide, shallow, circular ramp that led to the next floor down), shaking/cocking their heads in confusion in sort of an endearing way.

After our escape, I was outside in a semi-urban area (maybe just outside of the skyscraper we had escaped from), and I had just reached the edge of another property, an open area near a dumpster, chain link fence, and tar bike path, not far from the road. A punk on a bike (one who had tried to harass me from his bike earlier in the dream, before the skyscraper) showed up on the path and started trying to bug me. I walked along the bike path, with him keeping up, until we reached a lightly forested area that the bike path continued through. He was starting to swing at me with what appeared to be claws like Wolverine's. I looked at my own right hand as I put out my own claws of the same type, though a little thinner and rounder than Wolverine's. I hacked back at the biker punk and got a good slice in across his right cheek before I woke up.

Forest-office-Charlie-Maura-drum squares

2011-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

I was working at a desk, except the office visible in front of me seemed to be more of a forest than an office (not that it seemed odd at the time). To my right, sitting on my desk, was a small, vertical mirror on a stand, and every 10-20 seconds or so I would take a moist cloth and wipe it down. Lee W came by my desk and got me to admit that it was a little obsessive to wipe the mirror so often.

I explained to Lee that something was bothering me about the coworker to my right (who was apparently Charlie Sheen), though I couldn't quite put my finger on it, so I kept glancing over at him, and then wiping the mirror to make it look like that was why I was looking to the right.

Meanwhile, another male coworker came by and Lee held out a very tall styrofoam cup and said to the coworker, "Could you get me a mug?" At first the coworker wasn't sure if Lee wanted him to go bring him a mug, but then he figured out Lee wanted to get his styrofoam cup refilled with coffee (from what looked more like a soda fountain than a coffee brewer).

To my left was another coworker, who happened to be Maura. The details evade me at this point, but somehow there was a drum beat playing (with brushes), sort of a swing rhythm, and, of all things, the snare beat had a brush coming down on top of each of our heads. We weren't particularly bothered, as it was apparently part of usual work.

By the way, in visualizing this dream, the office seemed more like a vertically stacked 9x9 square (reminiscent of Hollywood Squares, but in an office/forest setting), with me at the bottom center, Charlie to the right, Maura to the left, the other coworker possibly in the square above me. And for the most part people were facing out of the square towards the viewer.

My unrare umbrella, and singing George with Jen

2011-10-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

I was on a (school?) bus taking a field trip with a bunch of folks. I was one or two rows back from the front, in the aisle seat on the left side of the bus. At one point, I noticed that my umbrella (the Crystal City multicolored one) was getting away from me and I reached over to get it, but after grabbing it I realized that it was someone else's umbrella. Indeed, as I looked down at my feet, I saw that both I and the person next to me had identical Crystal City umbrellas stashed below the seat in front of us, which surprised me. I figured it would be rare for others to have that umbrella.

At another point a couple of us (at least me and Jen H, sitting in the seat in front of me, or rather, standing and turned around to face me) broke out into the song While My Guitar Gently Weeps -- Jen hummed the bass line while I sang the words. A little ways into the song, the band at the back of the bus (including at least a full drum set and some guitar) joined in, and we (near the front of the bus) were excited and impressed.

Father Chuck Rogers and conc jumping

2011-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

At a large, open, mall-like building called Metro Center (not that I saw any evidence of a subway), which, from the outside, had a very interesting shape. I would say it was curvy, made mostly from off-white concrete, and its profile somewhat resembled the shape of Iowa. More interestingly, an edge along the sides and roof (the outline of the building, from my perspective) had a moving track around it, like an escalator railing, and attached to the track were curvy futuristic chairs which held a single person and had them traveling (facing backwards) up the side and over the roof, tilting somewhat awkwardly up and down as the curve changed.

Inside the building, I passed by a guy who was sort of a mix of Mister Rogers, Chuck Norris, and a church pastor. He had a perfect memory for everyone he had met, and as he walked through the crowded concourse, he greeted most everyone he passed, including me.

Later, as I was headed back the other direction, trying to get somewhere, I saw him again, and I figured he might have spotted me too, but I felt like I didn't have time to say hello again, so I hurried off (perhaps not running, but certainly walking fast) towards my destination, and put quite some distance between us. But apparently, Father Chuck Rogers cannot be denied interaction, and he made like a doberman, charged after me and caught up so he could say hi.

Later, outside the "Metro Center" in daylight, I walked over to a flat, grassy, sidewalky park area. A few random men and women were there on one stretch of grass, practicing conc jumping (like in Team Fortress Classic). I decided to join in, and we were practicing choreographing our jumps with lines sung from the song I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire by the Ink Spots (featured in the game Fallout 3). Specifically, I watched as one of the women tried to time a jump to the word "fire". Her concussion grenade went off at about the right time, but she slightly mistimed her jump, so she was only lifted three or four feet in the air.

All in the name of the Bone Dog's life

2011-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

"Áll in the náme of the Bóne Dóg's lìfe."

- Sparky (in a nasally gangsterish voice), jokingly, mid-conversation with Ray and Priss, who laugh a bit in response

(Accents intended to illustrate intonation.)

Mostly harmless skin epidemic at band practice

2011-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

Dave, Vanessa, and I went to Lou B's place, but instead of it being a townhouse, it was a penthouse apartment in a tall building. The four of us started playing "Flirting With Disaster" or something similar to it. I decided it would be a fun opportunity to experiment with my bass line a little bit. By the fifth or sixth measure, however, Lou was troubled by something and stopped us playing. He said he needed to get another person over to sit and listen, because right now we were missing a "top control" (i.e. someone to supervise and make judgement calls on the song performance).

I noticed that Dave had a blotch on his skin that reminded me of something I had noticed on my dad recently. I asked him about it and he said he wasn't sure what it was. He pointed out that I had something similar. I looked at the top of my right wrist, and indeed, I had a huge blotch, shaped somewhat like a simplified rendition of a neuron, and almost the size of my entire hand. Near the middle was a scab, which I had also seen on Dave's blotch. It turned out that Vanessa had similar blotches too. I speculated that there was something going round, and guessed that if everyone was getting it, it probably wasn't a big deal.

Lou, meanwhile, was commenting how the door to the roof (straight out to the roof, no stairs up, since apparently, the roof was the same floor as this apartment) used to be a window until he had it changed.

Then, for some reason, I went down to street level and was trying to call a plumber to go look at Lou's apartment. I saw a plumbing van parked across the street and called the number on it. They asked for the address and I gave them the building's street number, but trailed off trying to remember the suite number. They said they were busy but they forwarded me to a different plumbing company so they could take the job.

Two (or three) towers

2011-09-29T00:01:00.000-04:00

I had lost track of a girl I was with earlier (with medium length dyed redhead hair). I was walking through a sparsely wooded park (reminiscent of Rock Creek Park in DC) in autumn, along with some friend of mine. Off to the side, in the distance, but not too far off, I spotted two massive light gray towers, sort of castle style with battlements, but maybe the size of the steam stacks at a nuclear power plant. These two towers belonged to a complex, and a third tower, a little bit separated from the other two, was also present. I decided to take a picture, but even at this distance, I could only fit the two towers closer together into the picture.

I believe I later went over to that complex, and possibly found the girl from earlier in the lobby there. But I can't quite remember.

A stop at the Johns' place

2011-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

After concluding some NCIS-related business, I walked away from a nondescript one-story warehousish building, through a parking lot towards the road. Something about the events at hand had reminded me of a version of Become A Robot by They Might Be Giants and I decided I would go talk to the two Johns (from that band) about it. I crossed the side street and on the next block over from the warehouse was a small property where the Johns lived (or maybe worked) in a small lodge.

When I entered, the Johns, sitting down at a table, recognized me immediately and welcomed me warmly, asking how I was feeling. They seemed less like buddies and more like father figures to me.

Strange drum set

2011-09-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

I was attending some concert (can't recall whether or not I played in the first act). When the second act came on, I noticed that there wasn't much to it, a very minimal setup, and, notably, no percussion. I offered to play drums and walked out into the hallways (sort of like a school building's hallways) and found my drum set in the hall. I sat down to look at it and tinker a bit. First, I noticed that there were no crash or ride cymbals, and the hi-hats' cymbals had been replaced by thick, gray cafeteria trays, which, while they made a metallic sound when I hit them, were much too quiet. I then noticed that my normal hi-hats were also present, on a second stand behind that.

Heart vs. Heart, and a "brisk" visit to the library

2011-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

I was down in some utility area, in a longish cramped hallway, one whole side of which was little alcove after alcove. In the first alcove, I saw a technician hooking a guy up with a curious device. It was a thick cable with a connector at the end -- the connector was round, like a midi connector, but it was the size of one's fist and had maybe thirty prongs in it. The technician somehow plugged it straight into the guy's heart. The point was that the other end was connected to someone else's heart, and depending on who was more prepared, more focused, had more control over their body, their heart's beating would disrupt the other person's heart, causing them to die.

The original guy who was getting hooked up was apparently a master at this, and he went from alcove to alcove, hooking up and "winning" each round. I declined an opportunity to try it out. Anyway, dad and I needed to stop by the library on the way to work and return the third Twilight book, which I had read 3/4 of the way through but had lost the will to finish it.

We got to the library (very much like Potomac Branch), walked through the parking lot and went inside. Halfway to the circulation desk, I noticed (and so did some others, I'm guessing) that I wasn't wearing any clothes. I considered the situation. Obviously it hadn't bothered me up to that point, but I thought I might get kicked out of the library for violating their policies. However, nobody else complained, so I carried on, dropped off the book, and walked out.

Chairman Mao, the gryphon thief

2011-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Greg and I went to rescue our gryphon from Chairman Mao's palace where it was being held. Mao had also stolen a life-size ornamental replica gryphon and we were going to try to get that back too. We managed to find our gryphon in a very large, tall, ornamented room, and set him loose, but it wasn't strong enough to fly us out. So, without that convenient escape mechanism, we decided to put off stealing back the replica gryphon (which we believed was somewhere on the top floor, while we were still at ground level now). We sent the gryphon flying back to camp, and followed after it, running. We all made it back to camp, which was across the street, without incident.

Fixing the train track, with some powerful help

2011-09-24T00:01:00.000-04:00

I was out in the (English?) countryside, and I needed to make some repairs to a railroad track. The portion that needed fixing was a bridge inside a tight, darkish tunnel. First, I grabbed a couple bolts and washers out from the damaged portion. Then, we (whoever was in charge, and I) decided to adjust the slope of the bridge, because the part where it met up with solid ground had a bit of a lip to it. So the person in charge (for all intents and purposes, the hand of God, because I don't know who else would be doing this) was tilting the bridge from the end behind me, and it was rising and falling, and I got ready to pull it tight when it lined up with the ground. I did, and then I got to work screwing the bolts back in. However, now one-way car traffic was making its way to and through the tunnel (which was now maybe two lanes wide), so I had to keep looking up and making sure I wasn't going to get run over.

Spies need SIM cards

2011-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

I was in an inner courtyard of a school/academy at dusk (drab architecture, all beige and gray and bricky, different terraced levels), spying on some guy. I was getting ready to report back to my chief when I remembered that I needed to steal a SIM card for my cell phone first. I went inside and found an open dorm room and grabbed the SIM card out of their modem.

Later, I ran into another guy I knew (probably another secret agent) and two of our friends, and we went to another dorm room so he could get a SIM card too. The dorm room's door was wide open and nobody was there, so we made ourselves at home, lounging on the bed/floor. He got his SIM card from the computer's modem, then was using the computer to print out some multi-page document. While we were doing this, the girl whose dorm room it was came in (and she had a friend or two waiting outside too). My friend explained that he really had to get this document printed, it was an emergency. She acquiesced, and we got ready to leave. We mentioned to her, on the way out, in passing, that, if, you know, there was anything wrong with her computer, like, the IT people could probably help her out. (Because we stole her SIM card. Probably wouldn't get much Internet anymore.)

The Greenland compound

2011-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

I had entered some kind of compound (on the coast of, say, Greenland?), with mostly drab, gray, concrete architecture, and was walking indoors, from building to building. Nobody was around. I looked out a big window at one point and saw that the coast was quite nearby, but several stories below. It occurred to me that there should be penguins out there somewhere (okay, so maybe this wasn't Greenland), and I continued walking through different parts of the compound, staying mostly along the edge nearest the coast, trying to figure out how to get down and outside.

A few times I came across "dead ends", where the level I was on had nowhere else to go, but there was a railing and a wide open overlook to see the lower level below; there were signs indicating that I could go down, but the only way down was literally to go over the railing and figure out how to slide down the smooth concrete wall without dying. The last one of these "dead ends" I got to, I seriously considered going down, since there was a spot where I could wedge myself between two walls that were closer together than my armspan. But I think I ended up walking back some other way.

After a quick stop at a nearby restroom (in which, surprisingly, there was actually another guy in one of the stalls -- first person I'd noticed so far), I cut back around to an area where I'd been before. Now it reminded me of the entrance to a public building or school; the first thing as I entered the room was a series of steps and landings, which stretched from wall to wall (maybe 10-15 yards wide) and had three or four railings separating it into sections; it only went up maybe 6-8 feet, and then there were more hallways and rooms.

I started searching around some more, and then as I was getting ready to leave this part of the compound, a bunch of people started coming in and up the first set of stairs. I tried to push my way through them, and got most of the way to the bottom, but then I changed my mind and started going back up in the crowd. As I got to the top again and was headed towards the main hallway, someone behind me started asking "Kevin" a question. At first, I figured they weren't talking to me, since I didn't immediately recognize the voice, and I didn't really expect to meet anyone here that I knew. But I figured I'd turn around and check anyway. It turned out to be Kelly P, who was walking with Caitie R and another girl. Kelly's hair was very slightly braided on the sides, which looked nice. She was asking me if I remembered what Tywanda C or "Derrick Arins" (or was it Darin whom I met at LSA 2011?) looked like. I told her I would probably recognize Tywanda if I saw her, but I didn't know who Derrick was.

I continued walking. Kelly and the other girl went off to some class they were taking, and Caitie had somehow ended up in front of me, at the end of the hallway, at the gift shop that was there. Lots of merchandise was sitting out on a long table outside the gift shop's entrance. I walked by Caitie, but we didn't really interact (I don't suppose we have anything to talk about). I looked at some of the trinkets on the table. One really caught my eye. It was like a medium-sized glass bead, heart-shaped, with a solid white bottom, and a black dot right in the middle of the bottom layer. It reminded me of Hello Kitty when I looked at it. But the really interesting thing was that the glass was somehow structured to refract the light in a weird way. When I moved my head one way, the dot in the middle seemed to move slightly in the opposite direction. I swirled my head around, looking at it as the dot swirled around the other way.

Then I went inside the gift shop, but I didn't really see anything that impressive inside. I cut out the side door. I ended up going to a huge room, again with gray concrete walls, ceiling, floor. The ceiling here was probably 3 or 4 stories high. I went and lay down in a bed in the back corner of the room and the lights went off. There were tons of other people in the room as well, all lying in beds, going to sleep for the night. Since I had been here before, I thought I would show off a little trick. I reached my right tennis shoe (my shoes were black) and pushed a little button that was part of the rubber sole, and the bottom of my shoe became like a flashlight. I directed the beam onto the ceiling, where there was tons of graffiti, except it was more like bathroom stall graffiti, all black and legible in plain text. Some of it had quite elegant handwriting, actually. The impressive part was that most of the writing was large enough to read from the ground, so a capital letter might be as tall as I was (or taller). I don't recall what any of it said.

Bringing 90210 to Texas to win the girl... I guess...

2011-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

So, I lived in Beverly Hills (90210, as we refer to it), and I think I go to college there. I was hanging out with my friend, and we were messing around with our hazardous gas evacuation procedure (something probably triggered by watching NCIS when Abby's lab had cyanide gas in it...). He tells me to stay behind the closed door where you can still see through the little window in the door, press myself up against it, and hold out my ID badge. So I did, then when I came out, I was like, "Did it look like Stargate?" At least I thought that's what we were going for.

We went back to do it again, but this time, the door had become the (wrought iron) gate of my friend's mansion, and his fiancee came up, asking if I was somehow implying that their marriage was doomed to failure. I wasn't exactly sure how she reached that conclusion, but it looked like they wanted me to leave. Behind my friend and his fiancee, on the other side of the gate, I briefly saw this girl with long black hair and (face? still working on who she reminded me of), who I must have known at least somewhat. My recollection was that she was sort of a bitch, in the broad sense of the term, but that I liked her for some reason.

Later, I had taken my posse from college and we had all gone to Texas to catch up with that girl. We walked into a local food establishment, and went into a back room where not many people were actually eating, and many people weren't even sitting at tables. Several were simply standing up against the side wall near a back door. It was winter, so everyone was wearing boots. Sure enough, the girl from earlier was there (for convenience, let's call her Monica), except that she had dyed her black hair to a dirty blonde. She was one of the ones leaning against the side wall, hanging out. One of the girls next to her was the sister of another friend of mine (we were trying to recall what his name was later... Dave? Wayne?). His sister lived (or went to school?) in New Zealand but was going to school (or visiting? or studying abroad?) here in Texas. She also lived in eastern Colorado? The details were getting kind of confusing. There was another girl leaning against the wall too, near Monica. I didn't know her name but thought she was exceptionally cute.

So, the posse (of however many people) has all come into the room, some of them standing on the stairs that turn up to the second floor. People ask where we all came from, and someone in the posse says, very deliberately, as if he has to try to remember each number as he's saying it, we're from "9.. 0.. 2.. 1.. 0." Monica asks what we're all doing here. I hesitate, and one of the guys from the posse gives me a look of encouragement. I tell Monica, "I came here..." I hesitate some more, already regretting what I'm going to say next, because Wayne's sister and the other girl both seem like such great opportunities -- I look them over again, and continue: "... for you." Monica looks surprised, but soon turns out to be impressed, and agrees to go out with me. My feelings are muddled. She mumbles something about breaking it off with someone else, but I figure that's a minor detail.

She asks me if I want to go with her to another place, or, on second thought, what about bowling? I agree that bowling would be cool. She heads out into the front room and I go with her, but as we reach another side exit, I realize that I am no longer wearing my boots. I must have taken them off while we were talking. I go back to the back room and find them, and start putting them on. I'm really annoyed by how long it takes to put the first boot on, having to retighten the laces before I can tie them. Plus it's a little cold and the laces are a little wet, so that's tricky for my fingers too. Then I go to put the right boot on. I stick my foot in, and realize that it feels too soft, and then notice that it's totally not my right boot at all. My boots are mostly leather brown, while this boot has some blue nylon cushioning near the ankle. So, I walk around the back area, looking for someone who has the other boot with blue cushioning, figuring they probably have my right boot. I do find someone who has the wrong boot, and they hand me what they think is my boot, but it's a little bigger than mine, and has a different logo on it.

I get more annoyed, and walk back towards the front area, and as I'm passing into the front, I look back down and see that my correct right boot is on my foot now, which is a relief. I chat a little bit with a couple closer friends from the posse. One of them mentions that if we want, we can take some items of Wayne's sister's from Wayne's mansion, because she doesn't want to move all that stuff back to New Zealand. That's about the end of that dream.

Submarine invaded by the Joker's sea-crew

2011-09-15T00:02:00.000-04:00

In a bit of a face-off between two sea-crews. Possibly there were two submarines, one which belonged to me, and another that belonged to "the bad guys". "The bad guys" managed to board our vessel, and we were strategically moving around, trying not to get shot by them. Among "the bad guys" were the Joker (from Batman), and his boss (can't recall his identity; some regular human looking jerk). Everyone was running around, up and down stairs, around corners (this was rather wide-open architecture, as submarines go; not very subby at all, really, actually, also quite well lit). By chance, I ran into the Joker, primed my shotgun, and knocked him off. Fortuitously, his boss came up right behind him and I shot him down too. I called out to the rest of the invading crew and told them that there was no reason I should have to shoot anyone else. They became docile.

English bus driver in Japan; restoring the school's sign

2011-09-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

Mom, Dad, and I were riding a bus towards my new workplace, in semi-urban Japan. I asked the bus driver where our stop should be, and she turned back and told me to hang on a second. The bus driver was a gray-haired Englishwoman, probably in her 60's, and she was in the middle of a conversation with someone to her right, near the front exit (come to think of it, the driver was on the left side of the bus, American style, which doesn't make sense for Japan). I was wondering if she would respond to me in Japanese if I talked to her in Japanese, so I thought about how to start the conversation. "Sumimasen" just didn't seem like the right way to get her attention, but I couldn't think of anything else.

We got off the bus at a covered, semi-outdoor pedestrian mall. The first thing that we noticed was that all the people standing and walking around were not Japanese. Some looked more central Asian, some Indian, some European. Didn't ever quite figure out why that was.

Somehow I had gotten a large rusty-red rectangular sign off the bus and took it to the local school it belonged to. The school had a two-story brick façade maybe 10 yards from the road. The outside of the school wasn't in very good shape (but then, neither was the sign). There was a brick sign-holding structure right next to the road, perpendicular to it so that each side of the sign could be seen when driving past in opposite directions. I don't recall exactly, but I guess the sign had white neon lettering that said something about the school (in fact, I recall the sign saying two different things, one possibly being a memory of what it used to say). The opposite side had white neon lettering in cursive that said "Go! Go! Go!" and then a little subtitle below that.

Running late for the concert; watching, playing...

2011-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Finishing up dinner at home with the family, I was getting ready to head out to a late show in the city where Frau Eva (Dave, Vanessa, and Ben) were playing. They were supposed to start around 9:30, but as music shows always start late, I was planning to leave just a little before 9:30. However, when I looked at my watch, it was 9:40 already before I had left. I decided to give Ben a call, but couldn't get through.

In a related dream, I was actually at their show, in a smallish dream venue that I think I've seen before (i.e. in other dreams). But weirdly, my point of view was mixed between watching the show and identifying with myself, who was also on stage, as part of the band, playing some stuff. Lou Black was playing too. I can't recall exactly what kind of tunes we played.

The bathroom aquarium access terminal

2011-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

So I'm in this bathroom, which is more or less the same layout as the upstairs hallway bathroom at the Cantilever house, but slightly roomier. But the bathroom is linked to an aquarium-like facility a few floors below (I'm picturing a big, tall, open first floor of a skyscraper, with fancy shale floors and an artificial river flowing through the middle).

The bathroom mirror has sort of a computer interface to it, where I can select a species of fish and then I can examine it. So, after selecting a species, I flush the toilet, and up it comes, into the toilet bowl. It's a medium sized gray fish, maybe half the length of my forearm. I go back to the mirror and select another species, then flush the toilet again. The original fish goes away (presumably back to the aquarium). Nothing new takes its place, though.

But when I flush the toilet again, two slightly smaller gray fish appear in the toilet bowl. These ones like to jump, and one of them ends up on the floor, so I decide to transfer them to the bathtub. I have to use a towel to grab them since they're slippery. Even after I get them in the tub, one of them jumps out on the floor again. I put it back in and close the shower door.

They're still trying to get out, and when I look closely at one of them, resting on the lip of the tub up against the door, I notice that its fins are at the ends of really short proto-arms and legs, with just barely noticeable knees/elbows. I go back to the mirror interface, intending to look up coelacanths so I could compare their structure, but I guess I woke up.

Slinky the fox

2011-09-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

A couple people in our household have started adopting new pets. Somehow I come into the possession of a rather friendly fox. I can hold him and he doesn't struggle or bite or anything. After one weird name that doesn't stick, I decide to name him Slinky. We'll see how well he gets along with Max and Molly (and the other pet someone else adopted but I can't remember what it was).

Murder mystery? Well, nobody died.

2011-09-11T00:01:00.000-04:00

Possibly the opening to a murder mystery. In an old house in a semi-urban area (maybe like Utica) where several people are staying, a stocky middle-aged woman, who had been sharing a room with another woman, had been having a conversation with the other woman, and then they got ready for bed. Then the phone rang downstairs and the middle-aged woman went down to answer it. I (during this phone conversation I was more or less a "fly on the wall") hear her receiving news about some kind of diamonds she will be receiving, worth a lot of money.

Less than five seconds after hanging up the phone, she very suddenly collapses to the ground, unconscious or dead. I grab the phone and dial 911. The female operator asks for the phone number I'm calling from, but I don't know it. I start to fumble around near the phone to see if I can find it. The operator threatens to hang up when suddenly the middle-aged woman comes to. I wonder if she'd gotten any brain damage from whatever happened. I pull the phone away from my ear and ask her what the phone number is for this house. The operator, thinking I'm still talking to her, sasses me. Then I woke up.

Star Wars tower battle — then, composing the battle music

2011-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

In the Star Wars universe, we are in some sort of final battle sequence. (It's unclear whether this is an immersive video game or possibly a movie shoot.) The battle is on foot, in the area in and surrounding this gigantic castle-like tower, whose depth stretches down for what looks like hundreds or thousands of feet. At first, most of the fighting takes place on the "ground" level, which must be little more than a platform in the open air for all that depth below it. I'm taking down storm troopers left and right with my blaster, actually banking my beam off walls to hit them.

At one point, a guy rolls by in a souped-up motor scooter; apparently he was a minor cast member from the X-wing fighters that destroyed the first Death Star. This reminded me that this might be a movie shoot.

The battle starts to escalate. People begin entering the tower, or falling below the platform and using long grappling hooks to hang on or get inside. The only structural detail I see inside the tower is a very spacious stairwell that begins at the outside edge near the bottom of the tower and spirals slowly up for an unknown distance. (Even at the bottom of the tower, the ground below is still not visible.)

Somewhere on the outside of all this, I and a band are jamming/composing music to go with this final fight scene. Unfortunately I can't recall a single note of it. Seems like I swapped instruments with the "new guy" just as we got to the solo or bridge. Can't even remember who was playing what instrument though.

Scenic train ride to the east

2011-09-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

Preparing to take a train back east with a bunch of townspeople. Everyone made sure to collect all their belongings and bring them to the train. For me, this included my bike, bike rack, bike lock, bedclothes, hoodie, half-eaten granola bar, backpack, suitcase, etc.

The train conductor noted that our one guard in town was the only guy with a gun and so anyone who wanted to board the train better be on the guard's good side. The guard was flattered and half-chuckled. I was standing near the guard when that was said, so I gave him a little salute.

The train set out -- source was maybe somewhere around Colorado or Wyoming; the route would take us directly east via the Black Hills of South Dakota. Looking out the window, we saw plenty of interesting scenery (and surprisingly little wilderness). The first thing I noted were the giant dandelions which I had first seen in real life in Colorado. At that time, I had only seen the seed stage, but in the dream, I saw some of the flowers too, and they did bear some vague resemblance to dandelions; bigger, less vibrant yellow, more droopy -- but maybe they were dying off.

I got hungry and dug into my suitcase, finding a peanut butter and jelly sandwich whose two halves were, in some ineffable way, shaped like two chicken fingers. Ate it.

Next, we passed through a hilly area, where these very small clouds were floating, quite close to us, and not far from the ground, ranging from eye level to maybe 50 feet up. There were a lot of them, and as close as they were, they zoomed by as quickly as the train zoomed along. I spotted a fleeting space between a group of clouds that looked like China, and I mentioned it. Mom mentioned she saw one that looked like Ireland, but when I looked up to see it, it had already passed. I went and got my Nikon camera to take pictures of the clouds, but by the time I was ready, they had all passed.

My camera had a little glitch, and I had to remove the battery and put it back in to get it running again. It wasn't a simple operation, as there were a few buttons (all of which appeared to be power buttons) to be pressed and a bottom panel that slid up out of the way. When I touched the battery it was kinda hot.. Anyway, I got the camera on again and fiddled with it, when suddenly a magnificent towery-castly-cathedraly thingy whizzed by on the left (with other, less impressive development on either side of it...). I was on the right side of the train so I wouldn't be able to get a very good shot. But I decided to go for it, so, with camera in hand, I leaned backwards and to the side and hit the button. I didn't hear a click, so I figured it hadn't worked, but when I looked at the review screen, I had taken a surprisingly nice picture of the lower half of it.

I wondered how it had worked if the shutter hadn't clicked. I turned it around and took a close picture of my eye, but that time the shutter worked. I was confused. Mentioned it to Greg and Neil, sitting in the seats behind me.

Middle school annexed my bedroom

2011-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

I was in my bedroom (this time, resembling the guest room upstairs in Haymarket, which used to be my bedroom, but I had the impression that the rest of the house more resembled a bigger version of the Cantilever house). I was recalling how the middle school used to use the house for school space, including making my bedroom part of the lunch space, and then eventually it was also a classroom. For some reason, it hadn't bothered me at all at the time, maybe because the room was always in good shape when I went to use it (and I guess I was in school too, though maybe not middle school, so I wasn't around when it was in use). It was my impression that they didn't really rearrange the room when they used it, so many people must have sat on the bed.

Singing in the "humour" room

2011-09-08T00:01:00.000-04:00

At somewhat of a resort/retreat. It seems like basically a normal house but has many sections to it. Late in the dream, we go outside and around the corner to a section labeled "humour" (the lettering is peeling off the wall). Once inside again, we are in a little room with carpet and a table at the "head" of the room. At the table were a few people, including someone who seemed like Patrick B. He was singing along with music into a microphone, and others were supposed to be singing along as well. Everyone else knelt/sat on the carpet.

Sitting near me were Lia M, possibly Meghan M, Karen Q, and others. Lia was writing a greeting card (maybe to Meghan or another close friend. It looked like she was working out particular years when her friend's birthday fell on a Saturday, and writing out what event they would go to on each one. (At least one or a few were Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts.) After one or two lines, she skipped ahead to 2100 or so, and then again on to well into the 2200's, implying not only that she thought they would both live that long, but that their friendship would endure that long. (I had a side dream where I was consulting a calendar app, trying to figure out really how often a given day of the year would fall on a Saturday. Obviously a space of 100 years is wrong. I scroll through years and watch for patterns, but I keep getting screwed up by leap years.)

A new song came on. It was "Esa Noche" by Café Tacvba. I realized what it was right away, saying "Hey, it's Esta Noche!" And then when I heard the words I corrected myself (esta->esa). Meanwhile, I had noticed a little (well, a little bigger than a softball) depression in the carpet. After some poking, it revealed a storage area under the floor, about two or three feet down, with the same carpet as the room above. Still, the hole was only the same diameter that the depression had been. I showed Karen as well, and had her try to figure out what items were down there.

As "Esa Noche" was ending, I realized it was a live version. The music was finishing, and one of the band members starting shouting something to the audience in perfect English.

Talking to Priss about twelve-string Beatles songs

2011-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

Priss and I were walking along the sidewalk along some main road. We were going downhill towards a traffic light and then banking around to the left. While we walked, we were listening to music. I was pointing out which Beatles songs made use of a twelve-string electric guitar. The two prime examples I remember from the dream were "You Can't Do That" and "I Call Your Name"; I thought I named a third song, but I forget which one.

Passing Dave on the way to the mini-mall

2011-09-07T00:03:00.000-04:00

On my way into DC to visit some entertainment attraction, I am waiting at a traffic light (same light as in the previous dream) when I see one of the cars coming the other way has Dave K driving it. I give him a little "call me" hand gesture and he stares at me and does the same thing. I wonder if he is sentient. I'll see if I hear from him.

I continue towards this studio-sponsored mini-mall or some such. I'm driving there on a motorcycle, but somehow still being extremely quiet and, in spots, inching through crowds of people and sliding past them whisperingly. (The engine does make noise, but not very loud, and it's completely quiet when I'm not accelerating.)

When I get to the venue, I wander around, first downstairs, then upstairs, looking for something to do. A bunch of stuff is Jurassic Park themed, despite how old the franchise is. It turns out that today is Sunday and none of the attractions are even open. How lame.

Pop folk boater friends apologize for milky clothes

2011-09-07T00:02:00.000-04:00

I find myself piloting a very small yacht through an icy pass that goes right by/under a major intersection (i.e. the traffic light in the next dream). I see a bunch of clothes sitting on the boat, and they're all wet (and milky?). My friends, two members of some famous 60's pop folk band or another, had written an apology note for the clothes and offered to turn themselves in if I wanted to press charges. I wrote back saying I obviously wasn't thinking of pressing charges.

I started pondering about the prison system in the area. I think if they did go to prison, it would be on the coast of Lake Superior, probably. Seemed like during this season the Great Lakes are mostly oil, but soon they would be changing to milk. That would be unbearable.

German friend teaches me to levitate

2011-09-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

In some kind of game world (basically a suburban/semi-urban setting with parks and stuff), my German friend (not a real person) is demonstrating how to levitate. I'm watching what he does. He starts out by crossing his legs slightly (while standing up, mind you), and then some other fancy stuff and voilà. It takes me a minute, but I finally seem to have it figured out. I cross my legs a little, then spam the space bar, while continuing to move around with the direction keys. I go back to my home base and show my friend there.

Elected to Senate... I think

2011-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

I've been sitting in on a lot of Senate sessions recently. I've noticed there is at least one seat that is always empty. Finally someone decides to have an emergency vote for a new Senator to take that seat. Out of pure whynottitude, I volunteer as a candidate, and before you know it, they've voted me in, even though nobody particularly knows who I am.

I go home that night and check Wikipedia to see if it says that I'm a Senator, but I can't find anything mentioned. The next morning I drive in and look for a parking spot near the congress building (didn't particularly look like the Capitol). I can't really find any non-reserved parking. Some guy comes up and asks who I am and I tell him I'm that new Senator, but he's drawing a blank. I wonder if my memory was faulty and I had really been elected a state senator, and decide I should drive over to the state's assembly building and check.

Pizza runs at the schooly-mally place

2011-09-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

Another dream involved several people trying to do pizza runs inside some huge school/mall-like building. The first time through, as everyone was getting towards the end of their runs, several things had gone wrong, and some people didn't have their goods to be delivered. I somehow went back to the beginning (i.e. back in time) and assisted various deliverers in getting their stuff. Two blonde girls in yellow fast-foodish uniforms were waiting outside a closed classroom door, but were afraid to knock and ask whether the teacher had the pizzas ready to be collected. So I barged in and asked the teacher, who was in the middle of a lesson. She said the pizzas weren't ready yet. Oops. Closed the door, gave the girls a shrug, went on to another classroom.

This classroom's teacher (reminded me of Nora England) was waiting on somebody to deliver the pizza to her classroom. Just after I inquired about it, a grungy-looking delivery guy came in with a box of sicilian-cut pizza. For some reason, he was writing down the teacher's name on a check while simultaneously slicing and dishing up pieces. Because his hands were busy, he could only write two little scratchy lines on the check where the name should be. The teacher remarked how the pizza was cut so neatly, it was the best she had ever seen. The delivery guy was using a knife and putting a huge amount of force down to make very straight, very deep cuts between the slices.

Hotel room with the band

2011-09-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Dave, Vanessa, Jordyn, and I are traveling for a music tour. We got a hotel room with two queen beds. Dave and Vanessa opted to sleep together in one bed. I was not shy about expressing my enthusiasm for sharing the other bed with Jordyn. She was already lying there, face down, on the right side, and I dove onto the bed right next to her, patting her chummily on the lower back/side.

Classroom sitcom at the academy

2011-09-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

I, Julie M, and another girl (whom I know fairly well in the dream, and who I believe is my flatmate; she is tall, and white) are together in some kind of advanced study academy during our undergrad years. There are several other people in the classroom too, but I guess the three of us are closer friends. Someone had the brilliant idea to turn our classroom into a sitcom, and I'm walking over to class from my apartment (which is actually on the same floor of the same building; the building's internal architecture is vaguely reminiscent of Woodbridge SHS), getting ready to explain to them that I know absolutely nothing about acting.

Sophie B. Hawkins's woodland home

2011-09-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

I visited Sophie B. Hawkins's woodland home with a couple other people. Her house was two stories, very open, seeming to be the hollowed-out upright trunk of a gigantic tree. Some music began playing, and for a second I thought it was her song "As I Lay Me Down", but it turned out to be her cover of "Oh What a Night" by The Four Seasons. It started out with her on vocals, and I started singing along immediately in my best falsetto. Her lyrics had changed the gender of the object ("you know I didn't even know his name"). However, when it got to "Oh I, I got a funny feeling", it sounded just like the Four Seasons version, and then it was clearly a male vocal when it got to "hypnotizing, mesmerizing me, she was everything I dreamed she'd be". So I guess this was a duet, or even a collaboration with the original band.

As the song was going, I was wandering the house. I noticed a piano right near the front door. Plenty of clutter on the first floor. Very woody. Open layout. Went upstairs, also pretty open. You could still look over and see downstairs from the edge near the stairs. I walked into a sizeable library/study with one very large polished wooden table in the middle and bookshelves all along the walls. Sophie and the other two had walked up another short flight of stairs (second floor was sort of split-level), but I could see them clearly, as the two rooms had only table-height walls on the sides that faced each other.

Then some song started playing which I assumed to be a Smashing Pumpkins song, judging from the style of the intro, but I was unable to confirm it because I woke up.

Trying to interview tragedy-stricken firefighters

2011-09-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

Something bad happened to local firefighters (let's say this is in DC, since that's as close as I can figure). I went down to a place where firefighters would sit on the corner next to one of the columns of a building and, when there was a conflagration, the firetruck would pick them up there. I noticed a new memorial plaque etched into the column. I decided I would try to interview some of the firemen, so I waited at the column for a firetruck to come by. One did, on its way back to the fire station (only a few blocks to the left), but it didn't stop for me at the corner. I started walking down towards the station, but I also started to rethink my newly conceived career in journalism.

Yoko Ono, the newly drafted bicycle racer

2011-09-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

Yoko Ono was kidnapped from someplace in England by a rich, powerful Jewish sect who owned their own island. Sue Gromm (? news reporter, not a real person) managed to make secret contact with Yoko and got an interview with her. Apparently they had Yoko doing bike races on the island, possibly sitting in secretly for other competitors? (Cue the high-angle camera shot, from the air, of all the bikers racing on a track.) Anyway, the captors found out about Sue and cut communications.

Chez Travolta?

2011-09-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

I and 20-30 others all came as a group to a fancy restaurant owned by somebody famous. (We saw John Travolta eating at one of the booths, so we were trying to remember if he was the owner.)

This lighter-skinned black lady, part of our group, with bushy hair that stuck out maybe two feet on either side (but with little height to it), was wandering around, trying to decide where to sit. She seemed extremely antisocial, because every time she got close to interacting with someone, she would look away all funny and move off in a sort of prance. She ended up sitting at the booth next down from mine, with her back to me. Eventually another woman came to join her, but as soon as she sat down, the antisocial lady popped up out of the booth, looking away and prancing around some more.

The dish I got was some sort of Turkish curry chicken dish. Someone down in the far corner had ordered the same thing, but spicier, so I was momentarily confused when the waitress walked past me calling out the name of the dish. Then I got mine.

Dad's reunion with The Monkees

2011-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

Dad, in order to protest "the war" in the 70's, joined The Monkees. In the Wikipedia article, he is mentioned together with some other guy who was also only a minor member of the six-man band. I was naturally surprised that dad had managed to keep this from us for all these years.

All six of them, along with some family, were sitting around outdoors in chairs, which were arranged in an L-shaped pattern around/under a large oakish tree, at some kind of banquet event. I went and loaded up on stuff out of the buffet.

Odds-and-ends shop, "queer" sized clothes and weird instruments

2011-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Stopped into a store that carried all kinds of odds and ends.. There were clothes, crafted jewelry, lip balms, etc. After a while in the store I realized there was also a section with musical instruments. Most of the items were second hand, especially the musical instrument section. There were signs near the door stating that they carried "queer" sizes for some of their clothing, with certain larger dimensions. The only clothes I noticed with that designation were some shoddy looking sweaters.

I wandered the store for a while, ducked out, realized I had nothing better to do (plus I think my curiosity was piqued by the sign about "queer" sizes), and came back in. The guy and girl at the front desk (free spirit artsy types, probably in their twenties or thirties) cheered when they saw me again, as if I had been their best customer of all time, despite that I had never bought anything. I guess they were glad to see a familiar face from 30 seconds ago.

After some more poking, I finally caught sight of the musical instruments. Most of them were guitarish, with a few bowed instruments interspersed. There were one or two other people poking around the area too. The first "guitar" I picked up was more like a bass guitar (left-handed), dull brown colored, but the strings were really odd. The largest string looked like it was made of bamboo, around a centimeter thick at its widest point, and tapering to perhaps half of that towards one end. Plucking it produced no real respectable sound. The next string was much thinner, more like a typical bass guitar string's width, and I couldn't tell what material it was. It sounded a bit higher, but without much of a sustained note. There were three more strings, all a little thinner than the second, but identical to each other in thickness and pitch. And all equally dull. As I put that instrument back down on the chair where I had picked it up (balanced precariously against the curved, arched back of the wooden chair), I noticed a sign that said to be "conservative" in touching the instruments.

So I looked at, but didn't touch, a bunch of other guitarish instruments. Finally, one of the women who worked there came out of nowhere and handed me a Les Paul, hoping I would play a little. It was totally out of tune, so I tuned it up by ear (twice, because the changes in string tension on the first run knocked the lower strings back out of tune; people commented on this as they looked on). I was particularly taciturn this whole time, mumbling something or other when I had the guitar tuned. A mild crowd was starting to gather.

Just as I was waking up, I had decided I would play Tombstones, by Dave Klinger.

Hiding from The Man in semi-apocalyptia

2011-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

The world was semi-apocalyptic, and this dream was set in a western, arid area. I (female) was trying to avoid some military force (possibly a remnant of the national army) that was sweeping through the area. I found a spot where an opaque chain link fence was wrapped around in such a way as to create an inconspicuous pocket the size of a small room where I could hide. Unfortunately, there was another guy who showed up there, kind of a simpleton, and I was getting kind of annoyed standing around there dealing with him.

It then occurred to me that there was a McDonald's not too far away (semi-apocalyptic -> fast food chains still exist), a little ways up the hill (with short natural red rock walls to either side) from where I was. I went there and found it to be suitable for use as a fortified hideout. A few other people were there too. We figured we could hide out there comfortably for quite a while.

Some cash for my (very good) friend in jail

2011-06-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

Someone I know was in some kind of courtroom trial for something that either she didn't do or wasn't normally a punishable offense. The courtroom seemed more like a church with pews. Long story short, she was put in jail, but the sentence was more lenient than the plaintiffs had wanted.

The jail had a strange system going on... Somehow it was okay for my friend to come out to my car (at night, even) and talk to me, but inmates were not allowed to obtain cash for some reason - however, it was apparently normal for inmates to circumvent that rule. As for us, I transferred some bills to her via french kiss before heading home.

Fancy tech elevators, hopping into the yard, swimming with a drift

2011-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

I guess I was going through some kind of multi-part technology demonstration. At the beginning of each part there was a sort of spiral elevator thing - a small circular spinning compartment with a green ceiling and grated floor, slowly descending while spinning, along a vertical spiral track. I nimbly hopped out of one of the elevators while it was still moving and ended up outside at dusk, in the side yard of a house. I had to hop over some large trash cans and wade through some holly bushes to get out into the open, where the people who had taken the elevator were coming out the front door of the house and down the porch stairs.

The last elevator, in which we noticed all the writing was in Korean, led to a large swimming pool. We went in (apparently here I was with my dad and Neil and possibly Greg). I decided to practice my overwater swimming technique. I usually have a hard time hitting a groove and breathing correctly, but this time I was doing great, except I couldn't see in front of me because of turning my head side to side, so I ended up drifting left.

A building to design, a play to stage, a coat questioned, a rib cracking

2011-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

I helped in the internal construction of a building in several stages. In the first stage, it seemed like I was using an ultra-realistic 3D computer design tool. But basically, I was actually there in the building. First, I helped make sure a tall wall with repetitive structures on its face was uniform in color. I made sure the bottom floor was consistent as well. I noticed an irreparable flaw on one spot of the floor, and saw it was in the shape of a heart icon, so I laid in a design inside the shallow hole and left it like that. In the building, people were getting ready to stage a play about "Mary", apparently a figure from Greek or Asia Minor or Persian mythology/history. She had two children who were both half animal. Her son was half lion, and her daughter was half rabbit. When I actually saw the kids, they appeared to shapeshift slightly towards the animal form when they felt like it, but never seemed to be totally animal, but when they were in their human form, the only strange thing about them was their coloration (the lion son was pretty yellowish). Oh, apparently, the half rabbit daughter was going to be played by Angelina Jolie somehow. Maybe only the later adult version.

On the bottom floor of the building, next to where I had put in the heart design, was a chamber that seemed to also be a gas station. My car was parked there, along with some others. A big black guy was looking into my car, looking kind of concerned and confused. I unlocked my car, and he asked whether the wool coat inside was mine (because he also had one like that). I remarked that it was a pretty common type of coat. He asked if I had my name written on it anywhere, and I said I probably didn't, but when I checked the collar tag, it was written there.

Someone at the "gas station" asked me if I was part of the "____ Project" (I forget the first word), which was really just a little sign I had put up associated with the heart shape in the floor. I told him it was really just a one-off thing and nothing was really going on with it.

In the same dream, when I came home on a couple occasions, I lived next door to a weird, hobbly old guy, sort of a cryptkeeper type, named Mr. Treflenn. He always took a while to make it around the corner on his way to his house, and I usually ducked inside my place to avoid an awkward long interaction with him as he walked up towards his porch. Then I would come out and talk with him a little about the building project or other stuff.

The second time he came home and I was there, my mom noticed there was a single rib bone in his driveway, and just before he came around the corner, the bone started cracking violently. We ducked back inside. When he finally got to his driveway, I went to ask him about the bone. He was there with a younger, but still somewhat strange, woman, seemed like they were a couple. He told me the bone was a bad sign of some kind but didn't get too specific about it. I followed them onto the porch and towards the front door. On the porch I saw a cat I recognized, and gave her a pet and a few scratches. Reminded me of Ray's cat, Baxter.

The skirted boots

2011-06-20T00:01:00.000-04:00

At some one-story department store, my dad and I and a few others were hanging out, getting ready to leave, but we were waiting for someone to come back to us. Out of boredom, we suggested to the guy with us that he should go search his living space for the hardest boots he owns (apparently he lived upstairs, above or near the store). So he wandered off to do that. We started walking past the section where the store had all its boots, which was near where we had been standing. One interesting pair of boots, fitted to mannequin legs (which only extended up the shin), looked almost like a whole lower half of the body wearing a teal skirt, but they were really some kind of single-leg covers that started right around the knee and draped partly down over the boots.

Cavern + ancient ruins

2011-06-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

We were exploring a huge cavern with a tour guide. At first, it was all natural cavern stuff, but as we got further in, we started to see the ruins of Greco-Roman style columns and related structures. As the tour guide showed us one spot, which was mostly natural rock, he showed how, if you climbed a few feet up, you could see more ruins. In fact, a square window in the back wall, which had previously been sealed with rock or cement, was somehow now open, and from the perspective a few feet up, I could see through the window and down into another huge chamber that continued downhill for quite a ways. I could see tons more columns and other ruins, all colorful with paint that I wasn't used to seeing on old, weatherworn ruins.

Apartment sing-along + listening to Jordyn's other other band

2011-06-19T00:02:00.000-04:00

At a gathering at someone's apartment, sitting around a long table... Someone started quoting (or actually singing) a line from Aerosmith's "Living on the Edge", and right after that line comes a part with a chorus of "ahhh"s in the background, so naturally I jumped on it and started ahhhing, and was pleasantly surprised when one or two other people did the same thing (since we all picked the same harmony line, I immediately jumped down to the lower harmony).

Maybe at the same party or maybe a similar dream, I had a laptop at the table and a burned CD with people's music (including some of mine), mostly rough demos, on it. Among the tracks were a few of Jordyn drumming along with a female singer/guitarist(?) whom I hadn't heard of before. The drumming seemed a little off somehow, but it was almost the same in both tracks, as if it were intentional.

Forgetting stuff and missing the plane

2011-06-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

I was going to catch a plane, but I kept managing to forget a few important items back at my place (seemed like it was a third story apartment or dorm room in a large building, with one or two roommates). I kept getting outside and down the street, or even all the way to the departure place and realizing I'd forgotten something. So I would rush back to my place, which wasn't terribly far away, but after twice or three times of this, it appeared that I had missed the departure time.

Gibbs, the unwilling accomplice

2011-06-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Agent Gibbs from NCIS was somehow caught up with these people who were forcing him to go into a little room where people were chained up and whip them with a chain. When he is back with his crew, he subtly (for some reason) drops a hint at what is going on by accidentally dropping a few bits of the whipping chain he was using. At first his fellow agents are reluctant to believe what the evidence is telling them, but eventually they (and I) find the place and break it up.

Jack the epidemiolinguist

2011-06-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

Jack M had written up the name of some obscure disease on the blackboard, except he had parsed it out into several words in a column. He asked what language the words were from and I said they looked Spanish... No, wait. Portuguese. Then he noted that when Casey Anthony (currently on trial for murder) was asked to read those individual words aloud, she tried to pronounce them as if they were English, indicating that she is a monoglot.

Musical upstairses

2011-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

I kept going upstairs in different houses (or maybe different upstairs sections of the same house), and, correspondingly, would be listening to a different song. Among them were a Flogging Molly song and an Ace of Base song (Don't Turn Around, I think). With the Ace of Base one, I was also looking through my closet at some weird clothes - a vest of some kind, dark bluish green, some item of clothing was Sonic the Hedgehog themed...

Icy hot Ethiopia

2011-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

I and a few others (I forget who, exactly... Neil? Rachel? Crystal?) were getting ready to set out the next day for a little spot on the Ethiopian border which had apparently been continuously inhabited by humans since forever. The people there looked kind of like Boa Sr of the Bo tribe.

The spot was situated along a small river, on otherwise reddish-rocky, barren looking land. It sat between two sheer rock walls, perpendicular to the river, at least 30 or 40 feet high, and the land at the base of the walls sunk down.

For some weird geological reason, the temperature in that spot could range from normal summer day temperatures (70-80°F) to sudden, short-lasting drops into the -40°F range. In our preparations, we had to make sure we had clothes to cover most of our skin, but didn't chafe, since too much friction or movement when exposed to that temperature could cause serious skin and joint damage.

Andrew sings Café Tacvba

2011-06-16T00:03:00.000-04:00

Andrew was trying to sell tickets to something and I didn't feel interested. But for a second he sang something in Spanish that sounded like El Baile y El Salón by Café Tacvba, and after a minute I suddenly remembered him doing that and was like, "Wait a minute, sell me a ticket." So to pay him $6, I gave him two fives. He kept inspecting one of them, for some reason unsure of its authenticity, and talking about how fives were becoming more popular lately.

Bread shopping with Greg

2011-06-16T00:02:00.000-04:00

At the refrigerated section of the grocery store with brother Greg, we're looking for a loaf of bread, among other things. Greg decides to try something new, and after some looking and label reading, we eventually settle on a brand and type. But somehow, every bagged loaf on the shelf for that type of bread has a hole in the top front left, that looked like it was ripped by hand, so we decided to give that type a miss.

Not visiting the royal family of Japan

2011-06-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

Earlier, I went to visit the royal family of Japan. Their hall was a big, fairly square setup, with normal house height ceilings. Aesthetic seemed kind of Greek. Lots of marble. There was a name on one of the walls, I think it was the royal princess's name. One of the words was Inouye, the other was something like ??kibuki.I recalled having visited the princess before a while ago and we seemed to get along okay, but I was shy about running into anyone this time, since they probably wouldn't know who I am anyway. I just kind of walked around the perimeter of the hall.

In an elevator, trying to get to the fifth floor, with a sort of familiar Asian dude there with me, like we'd met before but didn't really know each other. He was headed to a different floor, apparently above 5. The button light turned off as we passed 5, but the elevator didn't stop. We both thought it was weird. I pressed the button again, to catch it on the way back down. Again, it skipped 5 and went down to the first floor. I decided to get off and take the stairs. But, getting off, I was in an eating area, sort of open, food courtish, with a TGIFish atmosphere. I saw Dave K and Ben and a third guy standing leaning over a high table and they saw me and I decided to go over for a bit. (I was under the impression that this building & floor were the same general area where the royal hall was, not too far off from it.)

Talking windows spoil breakfast

2011-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

A girl finds out the house next door is possessed by several spirits. They talk through the windows of the house, animatronic like. One was a German military officer, another was an American military officer. Others talk some too but don't introduce themselves. They order some food for delivery or something. The girl sleeps there overnight. She has some weird inflatable nylon doll, as big as she is. Upon waking up, she finds it has deflated. She complains to her parents (? they're kind of old) next door and tries to reinflate it (the bottom is just like a bag end that ties closed, but she finds it has holes elsewhere.

While eating breakfast with her parents (?) and one other, younger woman (not sure what anyone's connection to each other is), the older lady and her husband begin to be poltergeisted by the spirits of the house next door. They take the woman's (gray) hair and start blowing it up and out, and spinning it in circles like fan blades. She initially doesn't react, but then she tries to go outside. She steps out into extreme wind. The father (?), now scared, tries to secure the girl, but cannot reach her. The wind blowing inside makes it difficult to move, and he seems to keep suddenly teleporting to different positions in the room when it seems like he's getting close. The end is kind of gruesome.

It was very digestious!

2011-04-01T00:01:00.000-04:00

Greg, Neil, and I are in maybe the family room of a house, and I am looking in a large plastic bin under the coffee table, while Greg and Neil are sitting on the couch facing over the table. I see several digital cameras, and I almost think I see the one that died from falling in the Potomac River, but it turns out to be an older (and functioning) one. I check out a few others. Neil has my Nikon DSLR, and is taking various pictures (now we appear to be outside in a parkish area, with iron-fenced off areas and a street). He aims the camera at me, and I close my eyes and start walking towards him. Eventually, we end up just past where Neil was standing, now apparently the third story of a church (with very open architecture, perhaps semi-cathedralesque). We are standing at the top of a staircase, with a balcony overlooking the first floor below. I am humming something and I realize there is an acoustic sweet spot at one particular deep note, and I keep humming up to it (and some big guy on the second-story landing below is doing it too).

I walk down to the second-story landing and I have a clear view of the first floor, which is set up for a wedding. The floor is all tiled black and white like a checkered flag, and at the head of the room there is a rounded, slightly raised platform. And standing there on the platform by herself, in full wedding gown and veil, is Q's assistant, who is apparently getting married to Wolverine (or Ray now?). [Note: for Q's assistant and Wolverine's previous encounter, see the previous dream.] This seems to be the wedding rehearsal. Several people I recognize are standing off to the sides, getting ready to sing something. I recognize at least Heather D and Katie K, both off to the left side. As the song procedes, (in the key of E, although now I can't really remember how it goes), the words seem to slip from whatever they are supposed to be into commentary about the things that happened that day, very movie-musical-like. Katie K looks up to the landing and sings something to her dad about how they all went to the Cheese Shop (a tasty sandwich place in Colonial Williamsburg) earlier. The song switches into a "bridge" of sorts, sung by the dad:

(key of E major, melody notes descending)(A) (B)C# C# C# B A G# F#It was ve-ry di-ges-tious(A) (B)C# C# C# B A G# F#Al-so (ve-ry) di-ves-tive(rhythm of words:)X...x...x...x...X...x...x...x... | | | | | | |

And at that point I woke up.

Q the kidnapper, Wolverine the rescuer?

2011-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Q (who had apparently been stripped of his powers temporarily) had kidnapped four or five crew members (or someone?). He was showing "us" over Internet (or something) the screen on his computer as he was manipulating an image of the kidnapped people. He was square-selecting each of their faces, copying them, then going to paste them in a separate image, except each time he went to paste the faces, random objects appeared instead of the faces. We eventually surmised that he was using a multi-slot clipboard and messing with us, but that perhaps the random objects pasted in place of their faces signified something about where we would find the kidnapped people.

Later, Wolverine has gone to intercept a smallish (FedEx-shaped) truck which Q is driving (possibly in NYC), to see if he has the kidnapees there. At first, he stands on the back bumper as Q drives around the city, up hills, through a tunnel, etc. Q finally spots him, and rather than be shaken off the truck, Wolverine goes inside the back storage area. There, Q's assistant, a beautiful young dark-haired white (slightly Asian) woman, sees Wolverine through a side window in the storage area and tells Q what is happening. She goes inside, and Wolverine threatens violence in a few different ways before finally deciding that she isn't interested in fighting (he even tries punching her once, at which point she temporarily transforms into something that looks like a svelte version of the Thing from Fantastic Four, then reverts. Wolverine at this point "reverts" back to a paler, less muscular form, saying "In case I die." -- apparently he wants to be in this form as a corpse, for identification or sentimental reasons. Q starts beating the back door with a hatchet.

- Some background on Q's assistant: Back when Q was at his "home" in the "continuum" -- which, my brothers and I comment, is fully consistent with the way it looked in "the movie" -- the home seemed to be made almost completely out of thin, sheer, empty silky/clothy "puffs", maybe 3'x6' each and each one colored a different pastel color, stitched together in rows to make walls, floors, and ceilings, such that you could see all the way through the house from above into the water below -- the house was over a lake on the edge of the land. Anyway, back when Q was at "home", his wife had some kind of illness and was on the verge of dying. Q, for whatever reason, created the assistant, who was "unobjectionably likeable" (or some such) by all. Q follows his wife home to show her (his wife is going home on a motorcycle).

[forgotten events omitted here]

Somehow, Wolverine and Q's assistant have gotten away, and float ashore on the beach of an ocean coastline at an unknown location. [Note: They get married in the next dream.]

Dad's lost (and rediscovered) Valentine's Day cake

2011-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00

At the Cantilever house, I am in the study, reading or hearing on the radio about holiday traditions and thinking to myself that it would be easier to stay in the United States where tradition is less strict than in Europe (Germany, for example). Meanwhile, Dad had just discovered a cake that he had made for Mom for Valentine's Day 1992, which had gotten lost behind junk in the closet and never given or consumed.

The cake was frosted roughly with a thick, uneven pastel yellow color frosting. On top of the cake was a rust red frosted helicopter, somewhat crude and thin, but large enough that its tail hung off the cake. Next to the cake was an even larger jumbo jet, also covered with frosting. All were sitting on a large grey lego platform.Dad, amazed at his discovery, wanted us to see it, since he was proud of his creation, yet embarrassed that it had gotten lost and never presented. I muttered to myself about hating Valentine's Day and not really caring to see it, but I got up and went into the family room where he was to see it anyway.

Dad asked if I wanted some pizza (there were about eight boxes on the kitchen table, and Neil was unloading some himself).

Prior to that, in the study, I was on the computer playing some mp3s for myself and Greg. Some were ones I had composed and others were random ones that I had recently downloaded. At least one was a song by a female singer-songwriter which I was now second guessing why I had downloaded it in the first place. I was listening carefully to one of the ones I had made and was realizing how derivative it was of another song I knew well. The flow of the melody for the section I was listening to was almost identical (even in the same key), but the chords behind it were different.