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.

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.)

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).

Pete Hornberger steps into traffic

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.

Leaping boy at Incredible Universe

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...

Flickbox™ music box

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.

Dandelissimo

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.

Randomly shopping while my neighborhood turns into NYC

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.

Elected to Senate... I think

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.

Movie set / Limousine Ride / O Store

A semi-urban setting, near a major street by a large retail store. There seems to be a movie being filmed, and the scene had many emergency vehicles racing towards the area near the store. A little bit surprisingly, I don't really remember the emergency vehicles making any siren noise.

I made my way on foot along the street away from the store, and eventually met up with a man in a suit (and maybe sunglasses), for whom I guess I was somewhat of an informal agent. We talked a little bit about the situation, and I agreed to go back over there with him and another man, who may have been another regular agent, or maybe his personal assistant or bodyguard. In any case, he was the driver of the limo that we took to go back.

As we drove along the road, I noticed we were about to go over a series of speedbumps that more resembled the concrete curb-style stoppers at the front of a parking space (not painted, shaped like a trapezoidal prism). We went over the first one, but I was surprised to not feel any kind of bump (are dreams capable of generating this sensation?).

As we approached the store, I referred to it as "The O Store" -- apparently referring to Overstock. It had a concrete facade on the lower half, and the upper half was a showy teal backdrop with a whitish logo on it, along with some squarish decorating touches (dark, sort of lustrous, arranged in vertical lines petering out as they went down, or clusters of these lines in a squarish grid pattern).

At this point, it seemed less like the event was being filmed for a movie, and more like something real was going down, although I didn't find out what.

Evil saxophone: the saga begins

Creepiest dream... At one point I felt I had woken up and jogged uncontrollably into Greg's bedroom, hitting the wall inside the doorway and jarring him awake. He had incidentally been sleeping with his head at his footboard.

Later I found myself trying to fall asleep in the back of an SUV (head at the right end of the vehicle) driven by dad. After a few moments I heard what sounded like a school band practicing in a passing truck, but it quickly resolved to a single saxophone, heard only through my left ear, playing a variation on "I've Been Working On The Railroad" (1 ↓5 1 ↓5 1 3 5 3 ...) in the same key as Shoehorn With Teeth (note: sort of a half-sharp D). As I felt this sounded unnatural, I abruptly "woke up", staring in the darkness towards the head of my bed, while lying with my head at the footboard. In intervals of perhaps half a second, the view in front of me was repeatedly turning and rushing away, as if I were falling backwards. All this time, the saxophone continued to repeat the first two measures through my left ear. Finally regaining proper control, I finally woke up after 3 or 4 seconds, still feeling very paranoid that I might still be dreaming.

Dorm guitar party, sunset hill tablet reading, neighborhood road trip

I'm near my dorm room (having come from the stairs?) and someone tells me to take my guitar, cause we're heading to the attic of another dorm/building (not, as one girl suggested, the secondary or alternate dorm.) I bring my amp, too.

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Sunset: Dry grassy hill descending from a dorm to the road; not straight smooth hill but had "snake lines" running through it causing slight mounds and height variations. Written on a flat vertical edge at the end of the hill near the road are tablet-like readings which I am looking at. At one point I am changing locations to read more tablets; I sit so that my feet dangle over the edge, facing the road. To my right I see standing on the hill (with another person) Queca from high school Spanish class.

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Road trip? Don't want to be racist - something about a white spare tire. We drive in the van and remotely control the 4Runner to drive in front of us. Due to swerving a cop lectures alongside us on "Valleywood Drive". Finally leaves. We speed up as we approach "Cavalier Drive" -- now clearly a sandy/dirt path w/ large conifers on either side. We head (to the right) to some building. We speed up because the song is changing. We get out of the van and begin singing "I Get Around". I stop at the left to fix a sandal while beginning to sing. Many girls are there, in summer clothes. I catch up w/ the other singers, continuing to sing. Something about chestnuts....

MELBLANC

End of dream - driving up Cricket Lane, seeing the back of a pink coupe with "MELBLANC" on the license plate, through the rear view mirror -- yes, the plate text was backwards. Then, on a bike at the top of Cricket - Randy W is going somewhere to get an autograph from someone.

Driving + distress

Driving home on the highway from somewhere with my family.. they say to stay in the left lane, our turn is up in 2-8 miles... I see the turn we're headed into but it seems too soon... I almost swerve out but they say it's the right one.. we continue on, ... later we're in the HOV lane... a truck is driving entirely the wrong direction and up ahead and around is a large car pileup... we miss it and continue on.

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Bus 91 - Ms. Logan driving... leaving school by an alternate bus route on top of the bus tunnel... she pulls some crazy stunt trying for a short-cut... drives off the edge onto road below... minimal shakeage... turns out she injured someone landing... she's kinda freaked but keeps driving... I tell her it looked okay, tell her to concentrate on driving and not to worry.

Quantum Leap, blue tail lights, Medley Times, and hat poems

There was a black guy, traveling times through bodies such as Andrew K's (kind of like Quantum Leap)... During the plot of this, we discovered there were light blue orbs attaching into people (oh my) from some unknown source, but eventually decided it was no big deal.

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I was stopped by cop on the road. He explained that some of my tail lights kept turning blue; I saw what he meant and was confused. [Hem, this was before the proliferation of LED tail lights.]

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Historical newspaper of some sort - Medley Times?

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In Mrs. Montanari's English class. We were learning about "hat poems", among other things - short poems, one rhyme, seemed to give some short advice or experience. There was a longer poem at the end: "Color brought us to the brink of chaos"?

Driving the bus to school

I was driving a bus into (middle or high?) school, which is where Ray's house should actually be, across Mohican Road from the middle school. The first right turn off Mohican was the bus entrance. Had to unlock the entrance with a key.

Weird bowling, and a police ride back to the city

Near Los Angeles, or something "like" it — outside of the city, off the highway — dry land (grass & brush, not desert).

Ended up in a bowling building with 4 or 5 others. The ball was white, hard, not quite round, and light; there may have been bats for the balls. Someone almost hit me in the head with it straight on. I decided to leave, back to highway with no ride.

I was standing near a help sign with a flashing signal, like a school speed limit sign with flashing lights. A police car came, picked me up. There was a glass window between the front and back, with microphone communication.

The cop asked where I'd come from, and I explained about the complex. Cop said I really shouldn't use the signal for that, I explained it was a long way back to the city and all dry land until there — no water outside city limits.

Drove me back to city center, dropped me off. Thanked the officer and got out.