Rot and kingfisher disease

Chilling out, sitting on the shore of a small island, not very beachy, not built up, not too woodsy either. At least Prifs and Brittany B from college are there. A younger guy I hadn't met was with us too.

We asked him what his major was in college, and he said it was something technically useless that gave him a wide range of useless knowledge, like "The leading causes of death in humans are rot and kingfisher disease."

Since we asked, he explained that "kingfisher crabs" cause the disease, and they live in the forest. I mentioned that, though I had never seen a kingfisher crab in the forest, I had caught crayfish out of a creek once [yes, that happened in real life].

Also, I had caught some fish earlier way down the coast to our right (actually on a very close separate island, where apparently our academy-like monolithic dorms were located).

I'm so mad at you, you could live for everyone in June.

I was in the back seat of a car; a wife and husband in their forties were in front, the wife driving. Someone else was in the back, to my left.

For some reason, the husband was brandishing a revolver, pointing it at the wife to compel her to drive somewhere. Stranger, though, was that he held the gun up around the same height as his neck and angled it down towards her. I advised lowering it so that people outside wouldn't see what was going on, but he continued holding it up.

The wife, frustrated, said: "I'm so mad at you, you could live for everyone in June."

"Try August!" I said. Somehow I think she was wishing all the summer heat upon him.

Blew their minds with a song about bears

There was a battle-of-the-bands type contest going on between a rock band of Metallica-grade self-importance, and us (me and Kevin S and maybe Ray).

The Metallickesque band had just made an earnest, rocky song, and it was our turn to create a song to challenge it. We ended up copping the song structure from their song and changing it into an inane lounge song.

Kevin S wrote the words, and as we played the song for the other band, in like a backstage hangout room, written lyrics magically unfurled on one side of my field of vision, as though it were on TV.

The other band was dumbfounded as we played. I worked out some kind of chord/bass progression on the left (chordy) side of an accordion (though the sound coming out sounded like a perc/rotary organ).

It was in B flat. The words were kind of like:
1 Prose. x . . . . . . . 3b 3b 3b 2 1 Rock music history, Who-knows. x . . . . . . . It's such a mystery. Bears. [Something about bears..] Bears. [etc.]

Of course I probably did some random post-awakening edits while trying to piece it back together, but it was to that effect.

House party, boozed and bruised car, awkward ninja girl

A bunch of folks were partying in the left-side (i.e. port side) driveway of the house I lived in. I was sitting in the driver seat of my car, with the car facing the side of the house next door, only a few feet away. It was nighttime.

Among the party guests was someone I identified with Zach W, who was standing between the hood of my car and the side wall of the next door house. There was loud electronic dance music playing, and he was fiddling with a stage lighting device, which was strobing and brightly shining various colors.

Even though a strip of the lights were placed on the hood in front of me, and facing me, something managed to block it from shining straight in my eyes.

There was a 24-pack of beer on the floor in front of the passenger seat, more than half of which had been emptied out/consumed. I reached and grabbed another, mentioning to Ray (who was standing outside the driver side window) that we had to finish all the beer before we could go driving anywhere. (Ray seemed skeptical.)

Later, after having spent some time inside the house, I came back out, and found (as I had already heard from others) that my car had been badly trashed (vandalized perhaps, or abused by partygoers). I looked at the rear bumper, seeing that it had been replaced by a really cheap looking, mint-green bumper that was all the wrong dimensions, and wasn't well attached, either.

I walked around the port side of the house and into the back yard, which had a tall (10+ feet) wooden fence along the back, with perhaps a small street behind it. It was mid- to late afternoon now.

As I walked into the back yard, out of nowhere a young woman comes flying over the fence and lands upright, just in front of me. She's wearing a white, decorated t-shirt or the like, and has reddish, dirty blond, somewhat poofy long hair.

Despite her grand entrance (which might have really been intended to have gone unnoticed), we don't really say much to each other, but I think she looks familiar and ask if we met once before, a while back, around this same place.

She says it's unlikely we've met before, because she lives "at Milwaukee, WI near Largo" (or something weird like that, maybe referring to a street or a metro stop in the DC area).

Spying on the castle-mansion, foiled by pitbulls

I was perhaps a spy or something, and had walked up an outdoor walkway in the woods to the outside entrance to the top (third?) story of a castle/mansion of grand proportions (maybe football-field sized).

The door was open, looking into a roomy stone hallway. Before I could really step in, a pair of pretty evil-looking brown pitbull-like dogs came up to me and began to menace.

On and off, they went from baring their teeth and looking ready to pounce, to zoning out and looking nonchalant. I decided, though, that I better not take chances, so I strolled back down into the woods. The dogs followed me for a ways, still switching between evil and docile.

The last stretch out of the woods was a neatly delimited steep slope, covered in fallen leaves, with a railing all the way up the left side. As I climbed the slope, holding onto the railing, I noticed that the entire railing was covered with a very thick layer of whipped cream.

Apartment life in post-apocalyptia

In post-apocalyptia, I and a few friends (one male and one female, I think), had just returned to our apartment. We were arguing about what to do with our paper money (probably because it wasn't currently worth anything). The guy was trying to show how we could use the paper money to make our rides more aerodynamic.

(Our rides were little battery-powered boxes on wheels, perhaps two feet cubed, barely big enough for our butts to rest on. He unlatched the top of his, and was folding the edge of a multi-dollar bill and slipping it in and over the battery to demonstrate what he meant.)

We then did some mental exercise, imagining what to do in case of a zombie attack. In our imagination, a woman was walking down a sidewalk while fending off a not-so-clever male zombie who had been bitten in the arm.

Our apartment building was surprisingly well-maintained, and well lit by daylight, though completely empty of furniture. It looked like a building that had just barely finished being constructed before the apocalypse.

I was sitting in the hallway outside our apartment, with a young girl (maybe 10 years old) sitting next to me. Our neighbors, a young Spanish-speaking couple (and possibly a child), walked by us in the hallway on their way out somewhere.

The wife chatted a little with us in pseudo-Spanish about the zombie; I was mentioning how the zombie had been bitten in the arm but I couldn't quite work out the phrasing. She said something like "ha estado [verb]ado en el armada". The world "voller" was in there somewhere too.

The girl next to me was looking up words on a handheld digital dictionary device, but wasn't sure if she was spelling them right. I was a little suspicious of "armada" meaning "arm". We couldn't work out what "voller" was.

At some point, the girl changed (imperceptibly) into Joan D (adult), and we were eating oreos. She was mentioning how it was interesting that the words "dedo" in Spanish and "doigt" in French (both meaning "finger") looked so similar. So I said, oh, yeah, well, "digitus" -- pointing out that another word for "finger" in English was "digit", and all three words came from Latin.

Joan looked astonished, and told me what a rush she felt when she figured out stuff like that. :D And then we ate more oreos.

(But I wanted to save a few oreos for Ray, who apparently had furnished them for us.)

Christmas party on an aircraft carrier

I was with a large, somewhat familiar crowd on the top deck of a cargo ship or small aircraft carrier, presumably on the water far from land. People had gathered there for a Christmas celebration.

One smallish propeller plane had just landed on deck, and the airplane's crew was coming out and joining the crowd. They hailed from the Netherlands, and there were about 12 of them, mostly middle-aged men. They had some weird tradition where they had large ropes (such as would be used to secure a boat to a dock, or slightly narrower than that) hanging all over them, so that they could still move about but they hobbled in weird ways, leaning to one side, hunched over, or crabwalking.

The crowd cheered as they came off the plane one by one and walked over -- reminiscent of a sports team's introduction at an important game. Nancy M was amongst the crew, too.

My part of the crowd started moving off toward a covered area on the deck, where tables had been set up. On my way over, I noticed someone who looked a lot like Sarah O from high school, except she looked taller, and was wearing a deep purple dress; and the irises of her eyes were the same deep purple as her dress. Quite striking.

I sat at a table with four other guys, the two at the opposite end seemed familiar but I don't remember who they were; in the middle was a guy who reminded me of Moe W. Music was playing: Happy Xmas (War Is Over). Where they were singing "A very merry Christmas", everyone raised their... goblets?, and said "Happy Christmas!" And when they sang "and a happy new year", everyone toasted again right away, saying "Happy New Year!"

I clinked goblets with the two guys closest to me, then we started passing our cups around the table to clink with people we couldn't reach.

Batman and the aliens

I was Batman. I had just been playing around with Robin and the Batplane (like, leaving him on the ladder below while flying, hee hee). Now I was on my way to meet with aliens who I'd traded with in the past for technology and toys.

However, today, the entire police force in Gotham had gathered intelligence on the aliens' various locations throughout the city. At this very moment, tens of aliens across the city were being confronted by police.

So I started flying the Batplane north, scanning my map for a good location, saw a big stadium or field across the border in Canada, and signaled for the aliens to meet me there. They would all beam over there simultaneously, leaving the police scratching their heads with no trace to work from.

Aliens kindly request split-screen TV

Aliens had just recently made first contact with Earth. An ambassador of theirs (who looks like a human guy to me) meets me in a little downtown, which (in hindsight) seemed oddly isolated from any nearby urban area, like a single curving street of modern two- or three-story brick storefronts surrounded by grass and hills and highway.

He walks me towards a store window, mentioning that now that we'd made contact, we would definitely have to change our TV broadcasts to be split screen (one above the other), with subtitles in both languages.

He simulated such a split screen broadcast on a TV in the store window, using whatever had been playing before (a balding Italian-looking sophisticate sitting in a red velvety room, talking towards someone off camera). The subtitles on top were English, and the ones on bottom certainly appeared to be Italian, not Alienese.

He then ushered me into his sensible sedan, and we drove back the way we came, then around to the right onto a downhill entrance ramp to the highway. (I also noticed a high bridge nearby crossing over the highway.)

However, traffic was backed up, so he cut off the road onto the grass and snuck down towards the highway. I keenly noticed that the ride wasn't bumpy whatsoever. Amazing suspension on this car. Alien technology, I suppose. We somehow drove up over a guard rail and onto the highway.

(Another example of how I rarely seem to experience tactile "bumping" sensations in dreams; though, as it turns out, I do sometimes feel textures, so tactile sense isn't completely missing.)

Crater village, Utica, and lucid superhopping

I can't remember how it started, but I had an explanatory monologue going about legal distinctions in the word "island", showing a bunch of places on the globe that were called "island", but were actually craters or other land depressions.

The view soared over a vast semi-wilderness in a dry western area (brush and scrub, not many trees, lots of open sandy dirt). The land was pock-marked with depressions with sandstone walls, apparently formed by ancient water erosion; each was big enough for maybe 3-6 houses, and each little pocket was vaguely connected to the rest to form a network/town.

I went down into one of these depressions, where there were three or four houses. The rightmost house had a fancy exterior, so I decided to take some pictures. With my camera, I took three or four pictures starting from the left house and panning over to the right one, to make a panoramic picture out of later.

I then walked over to the pretty house, around to its right side, and found a staircase leading up along the side of the house. I walked up and ended up in a covered balcony/veranda area. From there I walked inside the house, noticing that there weren't any particular doors or locks preventing me from doing so.

I wondered if maybe a police officer lived here, reasoning that his very presence would justify an unsecured house. I cautiously continued through the house, going downstairs, but never did run into anyone.

Around now, the house had transformed into the first floor of Aunt Mildred's house in Utica. I wandered back towards the kitchen. Around this point I started to feel an anomalous sensation, and had an inkling that I was more in control of the dream than usual.

This influenced my behavior now; I was wondering whether to go upstairs or downstairs. I glanced up the stairs from the kitchen on the right, and noticed Greg's cat Jori walking down; but despite this distraction, I made up my mind to go down the stairs on the left, because I wanted to test walking into a space I couldn't remember well (i.e. the basement).

Almost immediately after getting down the stairs and turning left, what would have been the basement became the empty lobby of a city building; I was facing the exit, located on the outer corner, all glass doors and windows.

I walked out onto the sidewalk, then straight toward a grassy area with a tallish deciduous tree in the corner near the street. When I had approached the tree, I decided to try seeing how high I could hop (to test whether I was able to control the dream). First hop, I didn't quite reach the lowest branches. Next hop I did, and then I hopped a few more times, at least once hopping higher than the whole tree. Strangely, even on the high hops, I seemed to fall quite a bit faster than gravity should allow (maybe close to landing on the same time scale as a normal human hop), and when I landed on the ground, I felt no impact.

(I started to have the repeating phrase "Ich kann huggenen buschen [something something]" running through my head.)

As I walked to the right, toward a large bush, I started to pay attention to my breathing (which presumably was my actual, non-dream breathing). I started to think I don't really need to be breathing hard, or at all, if this is a dream (and other elements of reality, such as impact force, were missing anyhow).

I also tried to quiet my inner monologue, which was, as usual, quite saturated. But as soon as I did, I started to wake up.

So, this was the longest I've ever dreamed lucidly, and the most stable I've felt in light of realizing I was dreaming. However, it was interesting that there were things missing relative to reality: no people, no tactile sensations, not much going on auditorily, except my inner monologue. Upon successfully warping reality (by jumping really high), gravity did not act normally; not sure what the basis was for that -- lack of experience? video games? Drawing attention to, or altering, my breathing and inner monologue seemed to have triggered the exit. Will have to be more careful next time.

Bike ride through a crowd to the park

I went for a bike ride up towards the park near our house. There's usually not many people on the tar bike path that runs alongside the main road, but on this ride, traffic on the road was completely stopped, and a lot of people (college age and adults) were just sitting around on the path, some with bikes on the ground near them. Most were facing towards me as I came up the path, and though it looked like some important (planned or unplanned) event was going on, and some people looked eager to inform me about it, I just kept biking through and past them.

Later, I was coming out of the park, this time in my car. I was coming out of a parking lot towards a traffic signal to my left, and preparing to make a left turn. The traffic signal was a wire with two side-by-side single lights.

As I left the parking lot, the lights turned yellow, but I decided to dash out. Just before I crossed under the lights, the one on the left turned red. I was a little worried there might be oncoming traffic. Needless to say, I was a little startled when my alarm went off at that exact instant.

Estate + ferry: shortcut out of DC

I was riding in a car driven by a woman I knew well, who was maybe my mother's age. We were on our way out of the city, which identified with DC in my mind, though a bit different.

There was a huge river running through the middle of the city, for one thing. But I'll get to that. We had figured out that the best route to take was to drive south and enter an impressive, yet compact, estate. We drove our car from the back gate, into a courtyard filled with gardens, green copper statues on stone pedestals, and a circular center with maybe a sundial or fountain in the middle.

We stopped for a moment in the circle, and I turned and took a picture out the window of some small copper statues, perhaps cherubs or children. I looked at the picture on my camera's screen, and for some reason, the focus was messed up. There were three statues, the closest one on the right, the other two behind it and slightly to the left. I had tried to focus on the middle one, but the focus ended up showing up intermittently in different parts of the picture.

We turned right from the circle and continued through a small tunnel towards the front exit from the estate. As we were coming out, some of the estate's actual residents (at least one dark-haired guy) were walking up the covered front steps (kind of like a valet area), and looked at us, as if trying to remember if we were guests staying there or what. We glanced awkwardly at them and continued out.

Basically the only thing accessible from the front exit of the estate was a ferry that crossed the very wide river that ran through the city (though here the shores of the river looked pretty mountainous/woodsy and not built up at all).

Big Morning (빅 모닝)

I don't remember all of what was going on in the wider scene, but I was looking at a CD cover for a Moody Blues album while in the middle of a conversation with either Greg or Dad. The album title was written in English, but below that, the band name was phonetically transcribed from English into the Korean alphabet. Except what was written there was "빅 모닝" -- "Big Morning". Apparently they used a different band name in Korea.

The picture on the album cover was, I think, a cityscape photo, taken from the opposite side of a river bisecting the city. I think it was near sunset.

Batman gets "The Spots"

Batman, having rescued a woman from some (forgotten) event at the top of a high-rise (maybe the same building from the previous dream), uses his grappling hook to descend the building. He reenters into the apartment of a shadowy masked villain. He sits at his table, with Batman sitting at the end across from him. Suddenly, he does something that causes Batman to be infected with "The Spots", a disease which causes dots on the skin, resembling small moles, along with mental disorientation. Another guy standing off to the left (identity unknown) is also infected.

Batman returns to his own apartment (somewhere on the upper half of the same high-rise). Meanwhile, Robin is traveling the streets of the city, and starts to notice that many (or most) of the people driving cars are starting to have lots of accidents. Apparently, The Spots has spread quickly through the population. Robin goes to Batman's apartment, where he discovers that Batman has already recovered. Robin hasn't been infected. They figure out that an electromagnetic field projected around the upper half of the building (presumably a device used by Batman for protection or privacy) makes it impossible for The Spots to take root.

Skyscraper penthouse visit

For what I think is the second time, I had a dream about a really really tall skyscraper, the top stories of which are a place that is familiar to me and which I visit from time to time. In this dream, I think Greg (and maybe Neil) are already hanging out in the penthouse area. My usual route is to take an elevator up to maybe five stories below the top, then climbing/going up stairs for a story or two, then taking a private elevator to the top.

However, this particular time, I was accompanying a few other people whom I didn't know well who were trying to get to the roof. I took them into an auxiliary elevator on the side of the building which went straight to the roof. It was dark out. The roof was pretty spacious, with some variation in elevation, some ramps. The penthouse was placed somewhat atop the roof level (the roof being more like a courtyard or patio), so that you could walk straight in without going downstairs.

Trivia quiz, historical garage

Someone asked me (as a trivia question) what important world event happened on September 3, 1900 (or maybe it was December 1, 1900). I figured it might have been the end of a big war.

For some reason, as we were talking, I was picturing a huge, open but covered garage, the kind that's more for public display than for storage (there weren't doors, just big archways, open on most or all of the walls), apparently period appropriate to 1900. There was a guy standing next to a very very old car.

I asked if it had anything to do with Napoleon. Then I thought very hard about how old Napoleon would have to be for that to work. (Note: Even Napoleon III died in 1873.)

Paramilitary abduction and stuff

In a suburban area, on the grass near a sidewalk, I had been tied up and left by a group of two or three women (don't remember why). A small band of paramilitary-looking folks walked up and escorted me to a house across the street.

The house was laid out so that the first floor foyer stepped out to an atrium of sorts, where the first floor had balconies that walked around and overlooked a room on the floor below. In the lower room, a group of six or seven women and men were sitting on couches, being interrogated by a few more military folks.

It looked like they had brought me there to help put the people being interrogated at ease. I'm not sure what about me, in particular, would do that. I was a black man, so that was apparently enough to make the one black woman down on the right relax and smile when our gaze met.

And then there was the blonde white woman, directly below me. She was lying on her back with her feet up, somehow reaching the edge of the balcony in front of me. We started playing footsie. Or toesie, really.

I then turned my attention to an inspector who was standing to my left (and noticed, at this point, that while my right hand was tied to my right side, my left arm was completely free). The inspector was reading his notes on a pad of paper. I glanced over his notes and saw that they were in Quikscript. When I asked him about it, though, he pointed out that it was all Chinese characters. But then he turned the page and everything on that page was in Quikscript.

He wrote a few things for my benefit to demonstrate how to write. One of the words he wrote was "stairway" or something like that, which somehow ended up being written almost in a circular fashion (I don't know if he was being fancy or if his version of Quikscript required it). At some point, the inspector was actually Brian C from high school.

Andrew K came by pushing a cart of books (apparently this first floor was sort of a library). He looked very cheerful and said hi, and we talked a little. All I can remember from our group conversation is something about how the incoming generation (of students?) was really gung-ho about the crazy stuff that we did (as a club, I guess), which we would have expected to be offputting to the uninitiated. In reference to this, the flat screen TV on the wall behind us was playing a South Park clip that had people talking about.. showers. ?

Bedroom storm and big money

I found that there had been a storm in my bedroom (which may have been in an attic). Paper money was torn up and strewn around -- I noticed that a 2-dollar bill had been ripped in half, but only found one half of it behind my headboard. Then, next to it, I noticed half of a 1,000-dollar bill which I had forgotten I even had.

I found the other half, checked out the design -- Washington was in the upper left corner, someone else in the bottom right... anyway, the faces (and their associated dollar values) multiplied to 1,000. The portrait in the middle had a deep blue lustrous background.

I wondered if I could still spend the 1,000-dollar bill, if I taped it back together. Then I thought it would probably be better to deposit it at an ATM. I noticed, in the upper right, a very long series of numbers (probably at least 100 digits) that I suppose uniquely identified the bill.

I took some sort of action to deposit the money, and the ATM (or my computer, whatever I was using) replied that I would need to create 23 (or so) new "partitions" in my account to handle the new influx of money.

Weird pole vaulting on TV

I came downstairs to a room resembling the back room at my Grandma M's house. Three or four people, including maybe Greg and Dad, were sitting around, watching a weird athletic competition on TV.

Two guys were competing on a pole vault-like event. There were multiple rounds, and right now the scores were pretty close. The guy getting ready to go (muscular with light brown skin) had a slight edge, and if he pulled off this jump, he would almost certainly win.

The pole itself was weird looking. It was chrome instead of white, and a foot or two from the ends of it, U-shaped bars jutted out, two or three feet long, extending toward the ground when held horizontally.

As he approached the jump, he made some kind of misstep, and ended up having to jump below the bar (the one you're supposed to jump over in pole vaulting). However, the rules of this event were such that, if you jumped under the beam (presumably without knocking it down), you could run down the track after that, and earn points based on speed.

But making the jump always gives more points than taking off running. So it looked like we still weren't sure who was going to win.

How many times was I invited to this party?

I was at a house party, in a house with many, many rooms. I think I had gone out somewhere and come back. I noticed (or perhaps remembered) now that there were at least two identical copies of myself hanging out in different rooms at the party.

I seemed to recall that the copies had been created only a short time ago, and that the copies are so exact that there's no distinguishable difference between us -- though I believe we are all wearing different colored shirts (I think mine was red).

I glanced into one room, saw a copy of me sitting on the floor with several other friends, talking and having a good time. I was okay with that, and moved on down the hallway.

At some point around then I felt like I was having a memory lapse, and I began to wonder again exactly which copy I was -- to be exact, I was under the impression that I was the "original", but then I thought I could vaguely remember some experience to the contrary. It bugged me a little, but not too much.