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.

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.

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.

Videoass!

"I... am... Videoass!"

- Crowd of 15-25 people

"Cat or Callisto?"

"Cat or Callisto?"

Standing in line to fight "Callisto" - a human-sized beast. Looked like a shaved cat with less pointy ears.

A half-Asian girl in front of me kicks his ass, and we move to harder difficulty.

Callisto can smack; scream in your face which stuns and hurts you; or breathe on you making you giddy for a few seconds. (I did experience the giddiness in my dream. Felt... giddy.)