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.

Thunderscream

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

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.

Loss of a ghost

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.

Voldemort and the big, nasty...

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.

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.

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

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.

Talking windows spoil breakfast

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.

Return of the evil saxophone

Evil saxophone returned. I was standing in a train car on an Amtrak-style train, near the door to the next train. The general atmosphere of the train was.. dark gray. My back was to the wall, with the door to my left. I was pondering something or other, and it suddenly registered with me that there had been the faint sound of a saxophone in the background. As I focused, it got louder, seeming to be coming from the other side of the door. The tune was going "glory glory hallelujah". I suddenly went rushing away through the air, in kind a wavery, snakelike swirling motion, or like the swirl of a balloon letting its air out, towards the other end of the car.

Awoke with sleep paralysis, which I tolerated for 15-20 seconds before trying to budge out.

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.

It's a circle, it's a circle

"And it's not really us anymore... It's a circle, it's a circle."

- Woman who sounds really, really worried

You who would believe this...

"You who would believe this, believe this. We are all dead."

- Person who sounds pretty worried

They seize me when I'm sleeping...

"They seize me when I'm sleeping,
They toast when I'm awake..."

- Anonymous

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or something)

Some kind of weird alternate plot for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I play a black guy with medium-high roundish hair -- I know this because I finally found a mirror in an elevator later on. Anyway, I guess I just got back from college for summer and I'm visiting with friends and stuff. A little earlier, I'm on an airplane (with stadium theatre seating?) and an old lady with some relation to me is causing a little ruckus for whatever reason. Eventually she becomes unpopular and people start clapping in rhythm as this one guy pushes her out of the room. I was still at that time pondering whether to clap along but wasn't sure who it would have encouraged.

And then I'm walking down the street, and I'm having some outer inner monologue talking about how attractive this certain woman I know is while I'm walking by. She, acting a little offended, tries to give me a soft round-house kick to the rear but I catch her leg and put it back down, and continue on. She's apparently a little impressed. We're clearly destined to be together. Onward to a laid-back restaurant where I talk with some of my friends. They're a little less impressed about something or other but I order up a round of marijuana cigarettes and this cheers them up.

Next day I'm walking down the street again and I see a random door open on a brick building and go in. I don't know what I'm looking for but I wander around. I cut through an elevator with a mirror in it, see myself, smirk, and walk out the side of the elevator into another room. I continue to wander around for a bit, find something (gosh, I don't remember what), and I go back outside. The sky is getting darker but not the same way it gets dark when night falls or an eclipse starts. A wise man next to me mentions that the darkness will start resolving into squarish shapes eventually. Perhaps these are the Vogons, come to clear a path for a hyperspace lane.

Attacked by the black coil at school

I'm school-aged... maybe late elementary or middle school. Walking by maybe a bus stop, a few kids are waiting there, I take note of a sign, white with red letters, something something "but skating is allowed" or something like that. I continue on to a tar path through the woods to the right. I'm walking with my horse on the way to the school. As we approach the school I notice we're being tailed by a male horse that might have a romantic interest with my horse. I bring my horse into the school building near the front and leave her there and begin to walk away.. the other horse approaches, and I'm trying to decide whether to try to separate them...

Very long long auditorium (there are actually four of these in corners of the building). As I leave, I'm assaulted by some black long coiled wiry... thing... which came from a custodian's closet.. which enters my body. I'm on the ground, with quite an enlargement of the belly. Kids, attempting to save me, jump repeatedly on my stomach. Eventually it works, and the thing goes away.