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. ?

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.

Eh? A beard? AND a mustache??

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

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

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

An unexpected pregnancy and a mark of doom

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

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

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

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.

Talking to Priss about twelve-string Beatles songs

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

German friend teaches me to levitate

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

Electrical zaps in the courtyard

In an intervening dream, possibly taking place after the welcome center, I am walking/climbing/wandering a grassy area filled with various row houses and apartments, with decks and back stair complexes and the like. I climb up to the near top (third?) level of a set of back stairs and suddenly on the other end of the courtyard below, near another staircase/set of houses, electricity strikes diagonally downward/inward from two perpendicular directions towards a single spot on the ground, ending in a ball of electricity maybe the size of a beach ball which disappears when the bolts do. It makes surprisingly little noise. This recurs a few times. Somebody's voice is explaining the phenomenon to me, but he is not there with me. I explore some more.

Williamsburg neighborhood mall house hunting

Walking around an upscale suburban neighborhood in Williamsburg, looking for a house to move into. A few of the facades are kind of impressive, whitish painted brick, three or so levels with irregular outcroppings, lots of windows. Most of the other places are less impressive, and indeed it seems like many of the places are no bigger than small shops in an indoor mall. In fact, I feel like parts of this street are indoors. I noticed that one house was for sale for a little over $600,000. I thought I could probably afford that, over time.

The house at the cul-de-sac also had the white painted brick thing going, but had a flatter, more traditional look. In the second (third?) floor window, a woman was sitting in a chair and happened to be looking out the window as I was looking up.

As I came to the bottom floor of this house, it turned out that this was a separate establishment, not directly connected to the house. It was under the house -- a small, cramped clothing shop, with many racks of clothes on hangers, and a door in the back leading somewhere further, which I did not investigate.

Later, I also ended up at the top of an escalator, basically at the roof level of the house. This was a much bigger, open space, but still indoors, again with many individual racks (a lot of them circular-style) of clothes hanging up. Many people were browsing the racks. Alongside the top of the escalator was a long railing, such as at a mall, overlooking the ground (cul-de-sac) below.

I figured I would write down the address of the house to look it up later. I think it was 180808 or something like that. Didn't recall getting a street name.