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 I looked at the rear bumper, seeing that it had been replaced by a really cheap looking, mint-green bumper that was all the wrong dimensions, and wasn't well attached, either.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).

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.

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. ?

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.

Jeremy screws with my laptop

Jeremy C and I were sitting around in something resembling the parlor of my aunt Mildred's house. I had left my laptop unattended there, and I hadn't set a password lock on it. Jeremy decided (out loud) that he was going to be sneaky and create a password for it.

He started messing around with it, and shortly I grabbed it back from him. Even though he only had it for a few seconds, it looked like he had done something to the OS. When I looked in the bottom left corner, it had a little official text logo saying "Windows 2.3" (though the interface was still visually similar to Windows 95-Windows 7).

Friendly biker and snakes of unusual size

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.

The playground and the lodge — places from our childhoods

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.

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.

The science of wordless spellcasting

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.]

The foot and the doll

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

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.

Ringo and the big band at the mansion

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.

Pricey video tapes at Staples

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.

A stop at the Johns' place

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Middle school annexed my bedroom

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.