Dlog, my dream log

Morning Shorts

2011-12-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

Between 7am and 9:30am I had a bunch of little dreams. I only recall little bits of them.

1. I was on a sloping mountain road, biking down the side of a mountain, from near the top of it. Some guy was there, some other people were with me. I had to stop to do something, the guy caught up with us, and I chatted with the guy for a minute. While I was talking with him, I realized I could fly, so I sort of started to take off.

2. I was watching a scene taking place on the bridge of Star Trek Deep Space 9. The crew was the crew of The Next Generation though, and Worf was wearing a purple suit, with a white shirt, black bow tie, and big, hipster, black-rimmed glasses. Dr. Who (10th Doctor) ran through the room and sat down at a computer. Rickie was with him.

3. I was in my house (pretty close approximation of the house I currently live in). It was a grey day outside, like early fall, however inside, there was copious, warm sunlight pouring in through the Southwest facing windows as if it was early summer. A number of people were there with me, though through the course of the dream the people and the number of people changed quite a bit. A large raven with rich blue feathers (and some black feathers) hopped into the house. We tried to track it and chase it out of the house, and succeeded in trapping it in my bedroom. It sat up on a little storage loft over my closet and hung out for a while while we thought about how to get it back outside. Some strange little goopy man, about the length of my hand dropped from the ceiling on the opposite corner of the room. He was spidery and cookie-doughy all at once, and I was glad he scurried out of the house quickly. I went over to that part of the room and saw that it had formed out of some raw cookie dough that I had accidentally sprayed on the ceiling there months ago. There were some little strings of fishing wire that hung down from the ceiling and from them, two or three chocolate chip cookies were hanging, having formed when the sunlight melted and cooked the dough that had over-wintered on the ceiling. I was relieved to see that no other goopy men had formed.

A couple friends and I managed to circle the raven and the raven hopped down the stairs out of my room and towards the front door. I was trying to figure out how I would get a pillowcase over the raven to bag it so I could make sure it went outside, when the raven grew a long neck and turned into a bald-necked but otherwise similarly dark blue and black feathered turkey.

Houseguest, Globalization

2011-09-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

1. A friend who had been going to come visit but whose ride fell through (in real life), actually showed up. He hung out with R and they worked at some computer screens on their music. It turned out he'd just been joking when he said he didn't have a ride.

2. I was taking a university course in something social-sciencey. I had to write a paper about something to do with globalization, and I was really excited to finally write about the use of dragon-benches. These, of course, were specially designed benches you could use to sit next to your dragon while it was lying down. My professor didn't think that this was a great topic, so I decided to write about how it related to the difference in the global spread of milk and corn tortilla chips.

Guest Dreamer: BGL

2011-07-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

It involved me and a couple of mom friends of mine, and finding ourselves (and our babies) involved in some sort of "game" with some rowdy bandits, where in order to get your car back from them (for they had grabbed the car keys right out of the car) to get your keys back, you had to win them back. In order to do that, you had to grab some keys at random out of a hat, and then figure out which car they were for, before anyone else did. It was out in a field or the woods or something, and there were about 100 cars all parked at random. It was like "Fast and Furious" where there were all these ghetto gangsters, and their sexy ladies... also kind of like a car show, only the cars were not of "car show quality".

I looked at the keys that I had grabbed and they had a little emblem on them (of some imaginary make of car) and then I looked around before they blew the whistle to start, and saw a car with the same emblem on it, parked near to me and my mom friends and our babies. When the whistle blew, I ran right to it, put the key in the ignition and started the car, before anyone else even got to the other cars. Apparently, that car belonged to one of the ghetto gangster bandit leaders, and he thought I had cheated somehow in figuring out the right key to the right car, and was all angry... the other ghetto gangster bandit leader was fair however, and held his compadre back from attacking me... and was impressed that I knew how to figure out this task... and he let us have our car back and leave.

3.5 Dreams

2011-06-05T21:34:00.000-07:00

.5) As I was falling asleep (in a friend's guest bed), I was transported to being in my car in an alternate reality, where I had opted to drive home instead of spend the night here. It was precisely as it would have been: dark, on the highway, sleepy. I shook myself back awake and ordered myself to stop that nonsense.

1) I was a time traveler and had gone to the late 80's. I spotted Kurt Cobain from behind (though he looked nothing like the real Kurt - this one had long, dark brown, curly locks past his shoulders.) I took a photo with my smart phone to show to friends when I returned to my time, to prove that I had traveled in time.

Kurt and my phone were the only distinct objects in this dream. Past Kurt, and all around, everything else was bright white, or tinged with a golden aura.

2) I was in a department store, in a home furnishing section, where they were selling off all of their merchandise and displays in a store-close-out sale. In a big dreary room, there were scattered bed displays, with mattresses made atop structures made of dark brown boards. Lots of salespeople were hawking these mattresses, and when a mattress had sold, they would try to sell off the boards that made the stand.

The floor was carpeted with a thin, low quality, dark beige/tan carpet. Behind most beds, there was a tall fake-wall head-board to give the illusion of a bedroom setting. The salesmen were fat, the bedding was light in colour, and there were a number of shoppers around, though it was fairly quiet.

3) I watched this dream more than I lived it. We were in Nepal or India at a Buddhist monastery. The head of the temple there was a woman, who was the 20th incarnation of a lama. I heard her title, said like Amida or Amitabha, though when I looked at a computer screen to read it, it looked more like Admihna.

She looked at her hands and held a mysterious package, mailed, and poorly marked. She opened it, and a white ring of powder was revealed. She collapsed. A number of monks ran over. One picked her up, and then water poured out of his face and arms and he collapsed. Another monk touched him, and the same happened. This repeated two more times, until four monks and the lama lay together on the paving stones, as if sitting huddled together, cradling each other's heads.

TV Watching

2011-02-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

In my dream, I had a dream about Saved By The Bell. I wasn't participating in the show, but I wasn't just watching either. My perspective was as a person in the room.

Teenaged Antonio Banderas had a guest spot on the show, and he and the regular cast were in a small room with a mini two-row riser stand for a choir. They were just coming into the room, as if between class periods and getting ready for this new class. They mingled about, talking. Antonio flipped his hair around.

Then I "woke up" and tried to tell a friend about how Teenaged Antonio Banderas was in my dream. I thought about typing it up on blogger, but first I had other things I had to do... like prop a half-door in the frame of the bathroom door.

Trees

2011-02-10T19:46:00.000-08:00

I was with my in-laws in the backyard of a house. The yard was large, green lawn stretching for acres, but the immediate half acre of the backyard was edged with giant deciduous trees. The trees had few branches, primarily upwards stretching, rather than outwards, and had no leaves. They didn't seem unhealthy, just leafless as in winter. The sky was light grey, clouded over.

We were just standing there, when a tree at the far right corner of the yard crashed to the ground towards the end of the yard we were in (though in a straight line, parallel with the edge of the yard, not diagonally, towards us). It didn't quite reach the house-end of the yard. Then, one by one, each of the trees lining the back edge of the yard crashed down towards the front/house end. They crashed with enormous force, and branches cracked and shot up into the air. None came close to hitting us or the house.

Accra

2010-11-26T11:01:00.001-08:00

I had joined a study abroad trip to Accra, Ghana, and it was our first day in the city. The study abroad group was to be there for 3 months. The other people in the group were off at a day of talks and introductions, but I had sneaked out to explore the town. It was a cloudy day, and pleasantly warm - both temperature and color-scheme-wise.

The town was a mix of architecture, with narrow brick and stone buildings squished together to line the streets. I was walking down a tan cobblestone road, and turned a corner to come to a river-front street where a number of buildings were coated with a thick layer of sand, stuck on adding a foot to 3 feet of thickness to the front features of the houses and shops it coated. I took out my camera to photograph this beautiful sight, but while I fumbled with my camera settings, a shop owner came out and opened and shut a large security panel until it knocked all the sand away from his building and the neighboring ones. The sand disappeared into the ether as it was knocked away.

I walked a few meters down the street, and up a few stairs to the next street to get another view of the buildings, still intending to take a photo. A large woman walked around the corner, and walked down the street towards me. She seemed like she didn't want to be photographed, so I tried to adjust my camera more. I may or may not have gotten a good shot of the storefronts and little cars parked along this block.

I turned around, and continued walking in my original direction towards the river. The river was actually an inlet filled with sea-water, and a floating wooden-slat bridge spanned across to the part of the city where my group was staying. Approaching the bridge, I passed by a large group of identical-looking, short, pudgy men with somewhat Italian features doing a variety of exercises. They were blocking the road in parts, hanging from bars, and doing a strange head-focused push-up on their backs. But they made way for me as I passed.

I started across the floating bridge, and about half-way across I noticed some dark tan mammal with a few small darker brown and black spots swimming to my right, near the bridge. I paused to look at it, thinking it might be a kangaroo, but I couldn't tell as it's face was in the water. It raised it's head and it looked more like a long-nosed anteater. I walked along some more and the bridge sunk into the water about a foot, so I was up to my knees in the water. It was warm, and easy to move, though I had to stop for a minute while a baby orca swam across my path, momentarily pushing the bridge a bit deeper.

When I got to the other side of the bridge, I noticed that a large clear garbage bag I had been carrying was now full of water and two eel-like creatures. I didn't intend to keep/catch/eat them, and I poured them back out towards the water, though they dumped out onto the sidewalk and got stuck at a little 6 inch breakwater keeping the sidewalk dry from low waves. They didn't flop around, so I was a little concerned that they were dead.

Then I was in a narrow hallway with some of the people from my study abroad group. Some of the students in the group were complaining about how boring the day was, and how they were reconsidering coming here, and I thought they were ridiculous.

Saturday Night Horrorshow

2010-09-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

My friend and I were breaking into a weird little strip-mall coffee shop and some pan-dimensional bad guys/police were trying to track me and my friend down but they couldn't really quite see us unless we were casting a shadow between them and a light source (though, to us, the world and them were all normal-visible).

At some point during this, we were in a very bright hallway, with bright-colored wallpaper, and I had an exterior view of myself as a darkened-shadow being that they could see. Later, at the coffee-shop and in its parking lot, it was the middle of the night, and everything was in dark blues and greys. The police guys had a large, dark blue van, and at one point I hid behind it from them, and my feet were almost seen, till I moved behind one of the wheels. It was nerve-wracking.

We eluded them, and they left. It was about daybreak and we went off to a third person's car which was sort of parked-in, in this strange little city parking lot that was very mossy around the pavement. The car was a small white hatchback, and we had to back it out down this very high, steep curb, to an alley/driveway area. I was concerned that the car would bottom out, but I was able to do this very quickly without issue. But then heading out of the driveway to the street, in front of us, there were 4 or 5 identical Japanese girls in white dresses, dark sunglasses, and pink hair bows.

These girls had their stuff in the road, so we stopped just before them and gestured at them through the windshield for them to move their stuff. They responded "Oh, thank you, most people would have just driven over us." Then they gestured that I should open my window and I shook my head no, and told them to move their stuff again. But they insisted again and again, so I cracked my window, and of course, the lead girl started reaching in and trying to strangle me with her ghost-vampire hands. I pushed her back, trying to cram her back out the window and trying to put the window back up but I didn't have enough hands to do all of this. I looked back through the car, and saw out the rear window that the car was now a sedan-style, taxi-yellow car, and some of the other monster girls had opened the trunk, and were cramming something into it. I couldn't quite get the idea across to my passenger in the front seat that she should help me get the window closed, and I worried about what was being put into the trunk -- if we could get away, what would we be bringing with us?

Snippet Just Remembered

2010-09-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

In addition to the party dream from last night (see last post), I also had another dream that I just recalled little bits of:

My bedroom was fairly long and narrow, and arranged like a hotel room, with two double beds. I thought about how it would be ok, if not ideal, for having house guests. I went out into the livingroom, and after a bit, I noticed that R had decorated for christmas. There were a number of small trees and some bows of greenery and some lights around the room. It was a bit haphazard, and not ideal, but ok.

Cocktail Party

2010-09-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

I was at a friend's house - a lovely 3 or 4 story, dark wood sided, mountain house, built in the side of a hill. The back of the house had balconies, and floor to ceiling windows, looking out on a view across a large mountain lake, pitch black, but shiny in the moonlight. On the other side of the lake, there were mountains. The inside of the house was dimly lit in spots, in a fairly dark, but not cold way. I could see well enough. The carpets were a taupe color, and the walls white. Some flat banisters were made of a warm wood panel.

One mountain, directly across from the house, was a ski resort. At the base of the mountain, you could see tiny people walking around near the docks of the lake, partying, boating, going to restaurants and bars in the ski village. There was one large ski run that led down the mountain to the village, a wide, swath of brightly lit white snow, with skiers gliding down it. As I watched the scene, I noticed that the size of the people on the ski slope was much bigger than those, closer to me in the village and on the docks. The inverse perspective made me think of religious paintings from medieval Europe, and I thought there might be a trick of physics that made the world work that way. As I was watching some of the skiers grew bigger, and the village was hidden under the snow and skis as the skiers started to ski towards the house I was in, across a disappearing lake.

I wandered away from the window, and found a second beer. I mingled, wandered around the house a bit, recycled my beer, and then decided to look for something else to drink. I didn't want to get too drunk, so I decided to have tonic water on the rocks, so as to appear to be drinking a gin and tonic. I searched around for a fresh bottle of tonic water, and found a good one, poured a glass, and drank some. It tasted good. The glass was a bit too small though. I looked for a clean glass at the sink and in the cupboards, and could find only glasses that were especially small, like the one I had, or clunky white mugs. I finally found a small, but nicer and slightly bigger glass with slightly sloping sides, and tiny orange elephants in a little pattern all around it. I looked in the fridge and found a hand-sized, pyramid-shaped bottle of Bombay Sapphire, and decided I would add some to my tonic water after all. [The kitchen was mostly whites and greys - the walls and fridges being white, the counter a light grey, the floor a darker, but still light grey, and the sink being a typical metal sink.]

I came back to the counter, and my glass was missing. A woman, now standing between me and the fridge (to my right, just on the other side of the sink) had it and was washing it to use for a drink of her own. I told her that I had worked hard to find that glass, and that I had still been using it. She let me have it back and I refilled it with tonic. I sipped off a bit of my tonic water, and poured in some gin. Then I looked into another freezer, to my left, for an ice cube or two.

I wandered back out into the dining/living room area where most of the party-goers were. I knew that this was P's house, and I saw my friend D, but didn't recognize anyone else at the party [though I didn't really think about that]. I wandered up a flight of stairs, and found an open level, with a den setup, with black couches, but otherwise fitting into the overall taupe, white, and warm wood colors of the rest of the house. Two large men were in there, chatting and laughing. The other side of this floor was mostly taken up by a bathroom, that I only just barely noticed the door to. I wandered up another floor, and found the bedroom level. I wandered across the room, and felt a soft rug under my apparently bare feet. I looked down and saw that it was a sibling of the rug in my own livingroom [in real life]. I wondered about this for a moment, turned around to see a friend had followed me into the room, and woke up promptly.

Bits remembered

2010-07-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

I had Kodachrome film that needed developing.

I was pan-frying flat bread on a stove. I was putting flour into a large, flat, black bowl, divided down the center into almost a yinyang shape. one half had a light brown mix of a non-wheat flour and spices. the other half was empty. I took a spice-shaker full of white flour, and started filling the left, empty side. As I did this I noticed that there were maggots in the flour container. At first, they looked motionless, but then one started wriggling. It stretched out and found one of the holes in the top of the spice shaker, and started stretching through that. It was horrifying.

Guest Blogger: R's Honeymoon

2010-04-18T23:13:00.000-07:00

A--- and I were on our honeymoon in Malaysia. We were at an Australian-themed but decidedly British/Irish fish&chips pub, made over with thatching and wooden beams, surrounded by a yawning turquoise lagoon rimmed by bold tropical foliage. We weaved in and out of the open-air pub, trodding elevated slats over swarming tropical fish. We were hungry and thirsty but entirely put-off by the incongruencies offered by this establishment and its entirely European clientele. We walked and walked and finally discovered a bathroom. A--- went in.

As I waited, I watched a trio of Teutonic muscle-men ogling a quarter machine outside the toilet. The machine was at eye level and contained two screened cells that slid open when you added a quarter. The most muscly of the trio had inserted his payment and eagerly slid the screens aside to reveal two bronzed sculptures within: a pair of bikini-clad butt-cheeks on the left, and a pair bikini-clad boobs on the right. Both were over-sized. The man was growing excited as he and his cohorts joked in Dutch or Danish or German. A--- emerged from the bathroom just in time for this spectacle to culminate in the muscle-bound leader's making a spectacle of his giant and malformed arm-meat. As he flexed he asked her "Hey, baby, want some of this ice?"

We quickly absconded, laughing, probably as much at his misuse of the slang term for diamonds as at his absurdly bulbous physique. As we walked back through the winding paths of wooden beams we noticed a gathering crowd, knee-deep in the surrounding lagoon. The crowd grew until there were hundreds of tourists standing in formation in the water. Suddenly a baladi (the cliched belly-dancing rhythm) broke out and the hordes of pasty white people in swimsuits began an ecstatic group dance. They would slap the surface of the water in unison to the beat, then gyrate around, wildly shaking their asses. This went on for some time. A--- and I waded around the edge of the reedy blue-green beach watching in awe, unable to peel our eyes from the spectacle.

Sat/Sunday

2010-04-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

I was having a birthday party. It started at a restaurant, or a bar, and a good group showed up. We moved on to an ice cream parlor, which was also a nice bar. While standing in line to order ice cream sundaes and drinks, two people -- a couple I used to babysit for about four years ago -- bumped into us in line. The woman was looking good, but the man had lost a lot of weight and most of his hair. They had been invited to my birthday celebration and were in town for the weekend, but had declined. It was by chance that we'd run into each other here, and they were apologetic for not attending my party, but chose to join our group then.

After ordering, we found a large table in the back of the place. It was in a large dark alcove, with dim, warm lighting from some modern, minimalist hanging lamps. Our table was a large, hollow square, allowing the twenty or so of us to all sit around and see each other, and talk easily. It was a high table and we sat on tall bar stools, or stood. We made a pile of our coats along the wall and in the corner, behind where I was sitting. I had some great friends there, though I couldn't place all of them quite correctly. There was a good looking man with shoulder length dark brown hair and dense, short stubble all over his face, who I thought I knew from U Chicago, but another good friend, D, a professor at UO congratulated him on having just gotten tenure at a university in Texas. I realized that I had seen the announcement about that, and knew his name from that, Eric [not a waking-life person], but was still pretty sure I had known him in Chicago, but that the timing seemed too quick for him to have gotten tenure. We were all happy for him nonetheless. The other good professor friend, D, then walked over and told me about how he'd written a pivotal recommendation letter for the guy, which had helped him gain tenure. This made it seem more like Eric had been hired, than gotten tenure, but I went with what people were congratulating him for.

We all had large ice cream sundaes and a number of fancy cocktails. A number of people said good night and went home, while others lay down on the floor to sleep it off. I wandered around, noticing that many people had left their coats in the pile. I recognized a few including C's and my own. I paced about thinking about what to do with the coats - to take them home with me so they didn't get lost, or to leave them there.

[I woke up briefly]

A number of things happened in my next dream that I don't recall, but I ended up in the household of a single Chinese woman and her seven year old son. Except for a few written things in the apartment, none of this dream was in English, though I wouldn't claim it was really in Mandarin either.

They were being haunted by their deceased three year old son/brother. It was time for the seven year old to be asleep, and he was sleeping on a mat in the little room I was sitting in with his mother, but then he got up, gathered his mat and blankets in his arms, almost sleepwalking, and trudged past us to a ladder that went up into a sleeping loft. Carrying his things, and not saying a world, despite his mother asking him what he was doing, he climbed the ladder-stairs to the loft and went off to his end on the right to lay down again. Neither he nor his mother went up there much, as the left side was the old room of the three year old boy, was mostly untouched, becoming a shrine, and had a haunted air about it. His mother called after him again, and he didn't reply, but we could see him moving about, trying to get to sleep.

His mother was in a bit of a state of despair, and picked up a strange dark red carved head, which was similar to a fat-Buddha statue, except that it was just the head. She asked it, wailing, what to do about both of her sons, and what was going on with the haunting. She laid it down on the clothed table, where its shrine was, and it started moving on its own. The mouth open, and a long red tongue licked out. It started speaking, and its speech blended into the movie on the small tv next to it on the table. We watched the movie, which was, of course, not in English, but I could follow along pretty well. [Though I don't remember the plot now.] After a bit, the mother asked another question of the Buddha head, about how her son had died.

I was transported into a viewer state, watching a room, in which the boy and his father were watching tv. The boy had something wrong with his hips, and had to wear braces on his legs, and wasn't allowed to move around much. The father was enforcing this, having the boy sit with him while he watched tv and drank too much beer. The boy had to go to the bathroom, so the father paused the program, and told him to go. The boy walked over to the tiny bathroom, and closed the door. He looked into the toilet, and realized that instead of a toilet, there was a large (bigger than the toilet) hole, like you might see in a submarine, with a ladder to climb down. He didn't want to pee down into this submarine below, and he was curious, so he climbed down to explore. Of course, this hole led into a parallel world, so he had disappeared after this moment.

Friday/Sat. Night

2010-04-04T10:06:00.001-07:00

I was at a party and had to go to the bathroom. I went into a smallish, somewhat dark home bathroom, closing and locking the door behind me. For a moment, I almost panicked, realizing, not exactly that I was dreaming, but at least that I was having a bathroom dream, which often turn for the worse when the bathrooms are haunted or filthy or there's no decent toilet to use. But then I realized that I had been able to lock the door. This would keep out any unpleasantness!

The toilet in this little bathroom looked a bit dirty, but there was another, large, brightly lit room just off of it, so I flushed that toilet, and moved into the next room. It was a big, white-tiled room, with a strange, but fine toilet in the middle of it. I looked around the room briefly, seeing at the far end of it, my husband standing, looking back at me. He disappeared then, and the bathroom was all mine. I jump-flew around a bit, used the toilet, and woke up. It was invigorating.

[This was just the very end of a much longer dream, but this is all I could really recall upon waking.]

Guest Blogger: B. goes skiing

2010-03-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

I've been having plenty of dreams, but I haven't gotten around to typing any up lately. So, here is another guest blogger and her dream:

There was a man named Ben, racing around a frozen lake on cross country skis. On his back he carried a baby in a papoose. There were a lot of people and we were all trying to circumnavigate the lake before the ice melted. The man with the papoose offered me a pull line and said he would pull me around the lake, but the ice gave way and we went into the water. When we made it to the shore, I realized that the baby in the papoose was also named Ben and it was Ben from Lost!

Apocalypse [about 2 hours from] now

2010-02-04T17:38:00.000-08:00

I'm on a public bus, but it's a bit rickety, like one you might find in the movies from the 80's set in South America, full of chickens and racing down narrow dirt roads with cliffs dropping off to either side, bouncing and jolting, making you think that it would crash or plunge to its destruction at any moment. Except, there aren't any chickens and the cliffs aren't well defined. The land is various shades of dark brown and green. There are few trees, no bushes, possibly some buildings off in the distance in any given direction. But for the most part, it's all hills in my view, which is aimed close to the ground. The sky is a not-too-dark gray.

It's racing along a narrow dirt road nonetheless, up and down hills, like a rollercoaster. Sideways death is less of a problem in my mind, than the fact that it's bouncing up and down, and might crash into the ground in front of us due to the hills being so steep. We have somewhere to be.

We get there. I'm in a large, modern in a mid-century, expensive, California hills style house. The rooms are big, and things are in light tones of beige, tan, sand, gray, and so on. Windows line the outer walls of the large rooms, looking out onto a regular seeming world of gray and green hills.

People are bustling around the house. All of the air in the world is going to be gone in two hours and we have to pack up our belongings, horde our food stores, and get to a building that is designed to be airtight. The building, seen only in our minds, and miles away, behind me when I think of it (not west, east, south, or north) looks like a dark black dome structure -- your typical Mars settlement from uninventive science fiction movies. It's made of hundreds of bolted together metal sheets, and has sparing, dark-tinted windows to compensate for the lack of a filtering atmosphere.

I'm packing up my stuff... a few mementos I don't want to lose, clothes, bedding, and other basics. I keep thinking that I need to pack more food, but I get distracted by Playmobil toys. I grab a bunch, thinking that people will probably be bringing kids to the dome, but forgetting toys in the rush to grab essentials. I realize that I haven't packed any toiletries, and grab some of those. I'm near the kitchen and thinking of canned goods. I worry about how much more time there is, but there are still two hours.

Someone sees something out the window, and I go to look. Down a level, in a courtyard between this part of the house and another (looking in the direction of the dome from the house) a scraggily haired, skinny man, dressed in filthy clothes - a t-shirt and ripped jeans is propositioning families running by. In exchange for marrying their youthful daughter, he'll protect them through the Apocalypse. But in truth, he's a cannibal.

I go back to packing my stuff, thinking about how to get to the dome quickly.

Guest Blogger: Katie and the Angry Koala

2009-12-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

After a long hiatus, I have invited a guest blogger to help revitalize the dlog. Readers, I give you Katie:

Why are nap dreams always the oddest and most vivid? This morning's nap dream (yes, I've already taken a nap this morning) involved abandoned children's play equipment, a pack of my friends, and an angry koala.

I revisited a dream I've had before- the stetting is a road along a babbling brook collecting output from spewing pipes from factories, near a dam, and continuing along the road, we find a forested area with a playground. In today's dream, my friends and I traveled down the road in the winter, and the playground felt abandoned and creepy.. unstable and very very tall.

We all climbed on it, and reached almost to the tree leaves when we heard the deadly snarl below. I said something lame like "oh my god, look out!" and we tried to climb higher as this snarling vicious koala bear started climbing towards us. Then it seemed to realize that it had us trapped, and backed down. So we edged down a bit too.. but then it started climbing up again. This pattern continued for a while, and I asked if anyone had a gun or something. Exasperated that no one did, I said "not even YOU, Audrey?"
Audrey has never mentioned weaponry to me, or killing animals, but she is an engineer and all around problem-solver.

Throughout the time on the playground, there was a definite feeling that we were unsafe to begin with- that the play equipment was just not up to today's safety standards.

Then I woke up.

Kitten Bath

2009-05-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

I had two new kittens, cute and furry and plump, but not much bigger than my hands. One was mostly black and grey and the other was orange. I overfed the black and grey one and he puked milk into the bowl I had him in. He lay down and rolled around in the milk puke.

I drew a bath of very hot water and looked around for the kittens to bathe them. I realized that the black kitten was already in the tub, swimming around in the water, only just able to keep his nose out of the water as the tub was so full. He seemed quite happy despite this and how hot the water was, so I called the orange kitten over.

She peered into the tub, and then hopped on in and started swimming around too. I was shocked that I didn't have to fight them to get them into the tub of water.

The Tooth Temple and Luxembourg

2009-04-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Tooth Temple
I was brushing my teeth, looking in the mirror, when I noticed that I had an additional top row of teeth 'above' my other teeth. It was set in a separate layer of gums, and was somewhat hidden from view unless I tilted my head back a ways to see it in the mirror. The teeth didn't go all the way around like a full row of teeth, but there were none missing. On each side of my mouth there were 3 molars, and near the front there were an additional three. The gums were a beautiful dark red, and the teeth were discreetly adorned with gold flecks and gems. The whole effect was an appearance of being a cosmic temple. It was beautiful, but disconcerting, as I continued to brush my teeth.

Luxembourg
I was running around a city during the day time. The sky was whitish-blue, it was sunny, and the buildings were primarily sand coloured. I helped a woman (a friend) find parking, and we parked in front of a large sand coloured building. The parking was metered. I was distracted by a friend walking towards us up a street (around the corner from where we were) who had waved as we drove by. I went to talk to him, but the woman beconned me back as a meter-maid was coming to give tickets. I dug out coins from my wallet, while she reparked to make it look like we were not just 're-feeding' the meter.

Later, and later in the afternoon according to the sky, I was wandering around the city. I, though it wasn't really me, had a secret identity as a non-super super-hero, complete with an identity-obscuring costume. I put a bag at a security checkpoint at a parking garage - a black backpack with my wallet in it - and went up the stairs to get a view of the city. The parking garage was about 3-5 flights tall and made of cement, and open, with decent views. I looked out over the city, and learned that there were terrorists running around and planning trouble.

I ran down the stairs, and tried to get my backpack, but it was missing. I met up with a group of friends, snuck by the increasing security forces, and went to the center of town. We passed the University of Chicago, which happened to be in a giant, grey square building adorned with intricate masonry - very Babylonian in its architecture. It was the largest, oldest, fanciest building in this town, which also held the Eiffel Tour, and was apparently Luxembourg. The Eiffel Tour was across a courtyard from the UofC, and we ran up its stairs.

There was a horde of scared people midway up the stairs who were trying to figure out how to avoid the terrorists. We sent them back down to the city streets and continued climbing. We reached the top, and looked out on the city. It was night, and a fireworks display was starting across the whole skyline, erupting from every building, for the holiday. It was beautiful. I looked down on Babylon-University of Chicago and turned to Robin and asked him why we didn't travel more when I was at the UofC, seeing as we were in the heart of Europe and it would have been cheap.

Guest Dreamer Appearance !

2009-04-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

Dreams from the mind of my husband:

1. I had to go to this really crappy all you can eat buffet that was in my home town (fictitiously). I was sitting next to these med students, I think. They may have been Jon and Talia's friends from Mass, maybe? Anyways, it was very crowded, but eventually i got to go through the line, bumping into all these poor kids from Carson. I basically loaded up a plate full of all kinds of non-so-savory foods, (blintzes served by a yokel using chopsticks instead of tongs. Actually, they were Swedish pancakes, but he called them blintzes). As soon as I sat down to eat, I woke up.

I woke up very hungry, btw

2. In this other dream, I was a reporter or scholar or something and went to the PRC. I was way up in the north, and investigating the "36 walls movement." It was basically a populous initiative to tear down all but the 36 most scenic sections of the great wall of china. It was like watching a cgi reenactment, though. I had a bird's eye view of the great wall, and watched sections collapse or stay standing as someone narrated the proposal to me.

I was to promote agriculture and solidarity among the people living just north of the wall. It was legit and supported by the government. They were keeping the scenic portions. The rest were just decadent. It also had something to do with this woman artist who would paint watercolors of women's basketball practices. That was a let down, since I had been watching walls fall and stuff, and then I had to go into this stuffy gym and watch a lesbian paint cheesy paintings of sweaty women playing basketball.

3. I had this other dream where I was at this house that was supposed to be my parents house, but the architecture was all wrong. It was more like Ryan Ragsdale's parents house at Seaside, but way larger. I went out side in the middle of the night, maybe looking for Mr. Boy, maybe not. I went out to this old apple tree, which you may not remember... it was out at the side of the yard, facing the garage. (it got root rot and fell over when I was an early teen but didn't die, so you would have never seen it the way I did in my dream, which was standing up and larger than it had been in life)

It was pitch dark out, but somehow, I saw this keyhole on the tree. It looked familiar for some reason, so I tried a bunch of my keys on it. (These were my actual keys, the ones I carry around in my pocket now.) I was just about to give up on the last one I tried, which was our house key, I think, but then I got it to turn. It turned, but didn't seem to do anything, so I started to walk away from the tree, but in a circular fashion, so that I could see the back of the tree. There was a little explosion, and this two foot tall cupboard door blew open at the bottom of the back side of the tree. There was this little cubby whole in the back of the tree... like a cupboard storage area.

It had been rigged with a little bit of dynamite as a booby trap, evidently. It was full of all this random stuff, but what first caught my eye were all of these $1 coins. They were of all sorts of times, from Sacagaweas to various different times of silver ones. I started collecting them all up, and was somehow thinking that this was all my dad's stuff. There were maybe a bunch of weird postcards and stuff like that. But then I found a checkbook, and I didn't recognize the names in it, so it had obviously been stolen. I'm trying to remember the other stuff in the space, but I can't recall it.

I think that the explanation my brain came up with was that it was a hiding spot for some robbers, who liked coins since they were harder to trace. From there, I started to watch this pretty inept pair of robbers preparing for a hold up. It was out at the coast somewhere, and they were going to go stick up a drug store or grocery store or somewhere stupid like that. They both had shotguns, and were driving it this really old piece of shit car... maybe an old dodge or something like Ryan S's old car, but way, way worse and all rusted. The key ignition didn't work at all, so one of they had to basically hot-wire the car to start it, which he wasn't good at and it took him a long time to do. They knew they had to keep the car running during the heist, but then they both planned to go into the store to rob it. I was thinking that that was a very stupid plan, and that their POS car would stall or someone would come along and turn it off in the middle of their robbery, and they wouldn't be able to make their get-away. That's all I remember about that dream.

The part with the tree was interesting to dream at least, as it had that uncanny "finding new parts of a familiar house" feeling, but the part about the robbers was pretty dumb to dream.

Hors d'oeuvres Buffet

2008-12-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

I was in a fancy hotel, with high ceilings, white walls and pillars, and large open windows that created an open-air feel. The most famous orchestra in the world had been invited to play as background during a luncheon buffet.

I walked in and felt conspicuous. But the orchestra promptly left, and the luncheoners moved up into an outside balcony area. Three rows of elaborate buffet tables were left, holding half-devoured platters of exotic fruits, chocolates and pastries. I and a friend scrounged.

A green strawberry was slightly overripe and mushy, but its kiwi-like flavour came through.

[I spent more time wandering around the building, through sun-lit stairwells, but that part is fuzzy now.]

Bio-electric Flashlights and the Royal Swim

2008-11-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

I was sleeping in a bed and awoke to the radio, knowing that I had won a competition of sorts, having been chosen to join the others at the Swim.

I went to the Swim, held in a large outdoor pool, just after twilight. Everyone else there were famous, perhaps royalty, and we all stood in a crowd on the cement near the deep end. Jack Nicholson was swimming in the pool, diving to different depths wearing a snorkel. A health-advisor/coach/lifeguard talked to him when he came up to the surface. "It's been confirmed. Diving in deep water negatively effects your bloodpressure, strains your clogged arteries, and significantly raises your chance of heart attack." We now all knew to swim only near the surface.

A few of us jumped into the water and were given a 1 foot pole that (connected by usb) snapped into a carved out section of a 6 foot pole that ended at a cone with a light in it that shone out when powered by the small pole. The small pole was a type of living creature that provided electricity to the flashlight function. I was concerned about being electrocuted while plugging this in while in the water, but I was reassured that it was perfectly safe and waterproof.

It was. Dozens more people joined us in the pool, and we all swam down the length of the pool to the shallow end. We stood in the shallow end with our bio-electric torches and scanned the landscape. A tall and attractive swimmer beckoned that we go up a hill to our left. We followed his direction, storming the hill.

As we climbed the hill, we slowed and enjoyed the walk. The hill housed a luxury spa. We passed a hot tub full of people and continued along on what had become a nice winding path. At the top of the hill, there was nothing much to do, but just over the crest there was something going on that attracted us. Some people slid on their feet down a little dirt hill that was being gardened. A gardener frantically protected their large cabage growing near the bottom. I contemplated sliding down the hill too, but the two women who slid down before me took separate paths and smoothed out the whole area. I had bare feet, and didn't want to slide too quickly, so I walked around the side of the tiny hill-garden via another little path.

Renter's Insurance

2008-10-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

I was wandering around town when I heard that Michael A. had been talking about me. I don't think it was anything bad, but I decided to go pay him a visit. It would be a very convenient visit because I had to renew my renter's insurance, and he was a new junior-agent at my insurance company's sales office in a little strip mall. I drove over in my Toyota Corolla [a car I had over 4 years ago] and went in.

There were 4 insurance agents, 3 of them were older-middle-aged fat white men, and the 4th was Michael. Their desks all faced an open space in the middle of the room, two along each side wall. Michael was in the one closest to me on my right. An older woman who was a bit crazy sat down in front of him first, but he didn't have the right computer program for her needs, so she crossed the little open space to sit down in front of the senior sales agent at the front left desk.

I sat down to talk with Michael and asked him about my insurance policy. He said that his computer didn't have the ability to look it up, so if I didn't have my paperwork with me, I could either talk with one of the other men, or I should go get it from home. I decided it would take just as long to wait for the other men to be done with their clients, so I went out to my car to make sure I had my house keys, and then started walking towards home. Michael came with me for the walk.

We walked up the dead-end street as it started to climb a tree covered hill. Then we were in a building that was very dorm like. Other people had their doors cracked to their rooms and we got a few glimpses into them. In one there was a large young woman with long wavy blonde hair in a bathing suit, rolling around on the floor. I knew it was about 6:30am but Michael said it was about 9am. He said that he needed to deploy with his unit soon.

Zombie Office

2008-10-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

I was being given a new office at work, in the Anthro Dept.'s building. It was in a huge open room, like an old art studio or gym, that was a L-shape (though each of the 2 sections of the L were equal in size.

The top half of the L was my office, and people were bringing in my furniture while I helped direct where it would go. At the bottom end of the room, was a door to the hall, off to the left of that end, was the bottom half of the L and at the top end of my room was a grand fireplace with a wall-length mantle made of a rich dark wood and deep enough to sit on with one's knees folded up.

I had a couch, some rugs, the usual desk and chair set up, a rock-band's selection of instruments (drum kit, guitars, keyboards, etc.) and other things that I was trying to arrange. The person whose office was in the bottom section of the L came into the room and I discovered that they were a professor with whom I was friends. We were happy to be office mates.

Time passed and it was getting late. My furniture was not arranged yet, and I realized that I really only had a strip of the room I was arranging. 4 long blue and gray stripes marked the floor where different people were to have their long, mildly narrow offices. My furniture fit, but I wasn't happy with how it was arranged.

Time passed again, and it was dark. Somehow seeing outside, I noticed a mob of people carrying make-shift weapons of sticks and chains. They were possibly zombies, possibly zombie hunters, and possibly a pretend zombie flash mob. I and a friend who was in my office with me climbed up onto the fireplace mantle, and hid in the dark in the corner. We decided to pretend to be zombies when the mob came into the office.

They came in, and spotted us quickly. They were humans, but we apparently were real zombies now, because I and my friend started biting their flesh and they started turning into zombies. One girl in particular, fell dead at my feet and her flesh went pasty white, her hand started falling off at the wrist, and then she came back to the undead. She was to be my companion for all time, and her friend who watched her turn into a zombie was horrified but still frozen in disbelief. She wouldn't shoot her new zombie friend in the brains, even though the zombie-girl begged her to do it.

I thought it was very un-zombie of her to still be able to talk.

Christmas Visiting

2008-10-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

I was at my future in-law's house for some holiday, possibly Christmas. I was trying to get information from them about something, but then I found out that my future grandmother-in-law was in a hospital and very ill. My in-laws got upset and bustled around the house trying to get their things together so they could go visit her. They took a while though, and when they went outside into the dark of the night, they didn't go straight for their car. Then, they were in their car, but not driving to visit her. They hadn't left, but they pulled back into the property in the car and all piled out. I asked why they weren't going to visit her already, and they were confused. They started getting ready to go again, but then other relatives started arriving with piles of baked goods. I took that to indicate that my future grandmother-in-law had passed away. My future mother-in-law was upset. I received the guests and the baked goods looked tempting.

I wandered around the house away from the mourners. Many of my friends were in town to visit for the holidays too, and they were staying here as well. Two of my friends in a long distance relationship that's on the rocks met up. They didn't see that I was in the loft, when they started making out. I dropped to the ground so they wouldn't see me if they looked up. They disappeared into a back room and closed the door. I got up and arranged some of the couches and chairs to make more bed-space for my other visiting friends.

Rental House

2008-09-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

I first noticed that the wall between my room and my roommate's was crumbling away near the ceiling. There were stress lines and buckled areas down to the floor and crumbling at the floor as well though. I left my room and noticed other parts of the house walls that were crumbling. I ran around outside to see if I could see if something large had fallen onto the house. I looked for my roommates, one of them was having sex with his door open. I walked away quickly because he's gross. The other roommate wasn't to be found. I contemplated calling the landlord, but there were artists making mobiles and hanging them in the new holes in the walls and I had to get them to clear those up first. Also Todd had a wall-mounted garden of illegal plants only barely hidden behind a blanket - not in a crumbling-wall hole though. Many of my friends were here now, hanging out in a living room. Two kittens were playing on the floor.

At some point I was outside with Ben D. and I realized I'd never used the awesome stone patio table and chairs to eat dinner outside.

[Much more detail occurred, but it faded quickly when a stupid woman rang the doorbell and talked me out of remembering my dream details. Interestingly, she was from the county and here to measure the property for assessment.]

Invasion Adventure

2008-07-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Seattle was attacked; a large building, many blocks in circumference erupted into balls of flame. I watched it from above, as a tv-less news feed. Terrorists were blamed.

I was in Portland and nervousness was in the air. A local volcano, probably Mt. Hood, erupted, shooting black smoke up in a solid chimney column, miles into the sky. All the water was contaminated, and we only could drink what we already had in containers. I and a few friends had water bottles with some water in them, and a pair of my goggles held a small amount of rain water. We were determined to conserve it. We lived in a forest with large trees and wide rivers, large, college-campus buildings sprinkled here and there. In 3 days, the river water might be ok to drink again, but we started to question the news feeds as barbaric northerners invaded on horseback.

Some friends and I determined to head out into the wilderness to find a better land in which to live, but as we considered maps and our options, the world started to look much more wild and uninhabited than we had previously thought it was. The barbarians from the north had traveled a long distance to come here, and the land in between was mostly lawless forests. The world we had known - a modern, overpopulated, dense one of cities and highways - did not seem to exist as the news feeds had taught us to believe.

We followed a river across our land, and when the barbarians rode close to us, we found a giant, ancient, natural-rock bridge to hide under. They looked past us and rode on.

Word came that there was pizza available in one of our building's cafes. It had been found safe, not looted and not touched by the volcanic eruption, cooked, and was now being given out - one slice per person - if you stood in line. We joined the line, and I stood just in front of Eric H. There were seven or eight people ahead of me, and I was mildly concerned that the pizza would run out, but it seemed like there was enough. I noticed that Eric was holding a plastic plate and a fork, and then I noticed that everyone in line but me were as well. Eric said that it wouldn't matter, and I agreed.

Food and Drink

2008-05-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

I was driving around Portland with friends. A man was driving the car, Robin was a front-seat passenger, I was riding bitch, and to my right were Ryan and Alyssa. The backseat was just wide enough (and had enough seatbelts) to allow for 5 passengers, and the front, while meant for two, had a third seat in the middle that could be used if we needed it. We were waiting on our friends who would take the other two left side back seats.

We went to a corner store that was a bit like an old-timey general store. They had a fantastic selection of nice booze.

Later, I was driving around with my dad (he was driving and I was riding shot-gun) and we were on our way to a party with my friends. We had to stop by the corner store, so I directed him to it. He took an odd shortcut that just avoided going around one corner with a high curb, by going over the property on that curb.

We went into the store, and had some trouble locating the booze at first, but then we found it in the back of the store. On top of the low shelves that held the fancy little bottles (like maple syrup bottles) of fancy booze, there were a few little plates that were designed for oven-baking your pancakes. They seemed very clever, and I considered buying a few. Two of them had free samples in them of just cooked little pancakes. They were fancy flavors, and I cut them up and my dad and I tasted tested both of them (the whole pancakes). I worried a little that we'd been greedy, but then a woman who worked in the shop came to the back of the store with her arms full of 3 fancy pancake concoctions she had just made and entreated us to eat them.

Two of the pancakes were fairly normal, but quite large, and possibly filled with fruit or chocolate. The third was crepe-like, except in a quesadilla way. The thin pancakes were lying flat, one on the bottom, then topped with some pudding and strange grain stalks (like miniature cattails (the plant)) that radiated out from the center with the fuzzy bits coming out the edges, and then topped with another crepe. I cut a wedge of it, and picked it up, having to roll it a bit so it wouldn't make a mess. I took a few bites, having to readjust my hold each time. The pancake and pudding portion was tasty, and the grain-stalks didn't taste like much. They were a bit difficult to eat though, like very thin asparagus that had gone a bit past ripe to a wood-like state.

I discovered that I had eaten all of the pancake and pudding and only had some cattail-like stalks left in my hands. I felt obliged to eat them out of politeness, but I was looking at them and pulling tufts of hair from the tips. I showed the shop-woman it and she smiled at me. I kept eating, as she asked if it tasted alright repeatedly.

Later I was in a big room with friends, including people I haven't talked to in years. Plenty happened there, and computers and video games were involved... but I don't recall the details.

Death comes 4 times [From a few nights ago]

2008-05-19T20:30:00.000-07:00

3 times already my life had been close to over. [But that's fuzzy now]

I was in a large, dark room. I fell on my back and dark green glass shattered over my belly. I had to get it off, or it would kill me, but my cat came towards me to cuddle. It would have meant death for both of us, so I pushed him away. He curled up like a potato bug, but kept trying to come closer. I called for Robin and he came and grabbed away our cat.

[I woke up with a loud whimper.]

Denying God Again

2008-05-19T20:21:00.001-07:00

I was being chased by many people, from many directions, all for the same purpose. They wanted to capture me. But this stemmed from fuzzy parts of earlier occurrences in my dream. I evaded them for the moment, and was wandering up a residential street in a city similar to Portland.

Small craftsman houses lined the streets. There were nice sidewalks, small trees, wide, carfree streets, and it was a cloudy gray day.

Ahead of me, the street went up a steep hill. I started to walk up it, and the houses and street changed into the interior of a large room. The floor was flat, but the ceiling angled up parallel to the angle at which the street had climbed. At the lower end, where I was, the ceiling almost touched the floor. A piece of purple yarn was strung along the wall, about a foot below the ceiling line, making the same angled climb up to a ledge where another level of the building was. I took hold of the yarn, and started to climb up it towards the next ledge.

As I climbed the purple yarn, I realized that humanity needed to colonize space to ensure its survival. And as I reached the end of the yarn, and found that there was not a chocolate and colored sprinkles cake donut capping the end of the line, I became sure of the fact that no gods exist.

Oppression of Women

2008-05-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

I was in my new house/apartment in the kitchen. It was a old-craftsman style kitchen, with a nice window over the deep white sink. The room was fairly dark and full of olive greens, maroons and dark blues. Over the sink, however, enough sunlight came in to give good lighting. First I watched a woman in a headscarf wash dishes. She wasn't supposed to know how to read, but she had figured it out over the past year, and now was able to read the writing-design on the dishes as she washed them off. The dishes were modern glass-art pieces, blown glass orange bowls with white arabic writing in a line down the middle, and such. As she cleaned them off she was able to read what they said, and realized that they were funny sexual jokes for the men to enjoy at the dinner table while the women (who weren't supposed to be able to read) wouldn't notice.

Then I was washing dishes of a regular sort. We had a dishwasher off to the right of the sink, and drying racks on the counters on both sides. The dishwasher was supposed to only be for special uses, and had strange settings, so I was hand scrubbing most of the items. At the bottom of the sink there was a white plastic cutting board that had been used for cutting up raw meat. I considered that maybe it should go through the dishwasher, and I considered how my friend Roz would use some bleach on it. But by then I had already scrubbed it with my dishcloth so I rinsed it well and set it to dry in the drying rack on the left of the sink.

Then my distant cousins and aunts and uncles arrived. It was December, and while I had thought that this was about when I should be mailing off wedding invitations, they had come to have the rehearsal dinner already. I didn't know who a lot of them were, but there was a banquet hall set up with lots of tables and one large round one in the center for the closest relatives, so I figured I would find out by who sat where. My uncle looked at my feet and I was wearing my new-ish interviewing shoes. At some point I tried on some casual and crazy dress and joked that it could be my wedding dress. I didn't understand how all these people knew to come and show up when I hadn't sent any invitations.

So many dreams, so little memory.

2008-05-08T13:26:00.001-07:00

[I had easily 7-8 vivid dreams last night, but only snippets of one remain.]

I was driving around in a very fancy, new, deep vibrant blue, electric sports car. Later I was riding around on a similarly colored, and similarly fancy bicycle. Later I was in my new rental house, which was huge and fancy. We had a large swimming pool in the backyard. I had a lot of friends over. I had a lot of plans to do things.

Traveling Night

2008-05-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

1. I was in a large station, similar to the big train station in Chicago (Union Station), but it was a spaceport. I was chosen to be part of a team of 9 people who were going on a one-way trip to deep space. Earth was not presently doomed, but we were intended to be part of a mission to get people off of the planet so that if Earth died or was destroyed there would be humans elsewhere.

We were allowed to bring four suitcases or items, but each item had size limits: two suitcases about 2x3ft, and then two larger items. One of the men going on the trip had a large silver motorcycle that he intended to ride in space. It was kind of awesome.

I spent much of the time running around trying to make sure I was packing the things I really wanted. At one point I exited the building, and had to show a passport to re-enter. I had someone else's passport, but her photo was so blurry, dark and zoomed in on her face that I could pass as her. I did worry about later though, when I would have my own passport and go by the same border guards.

2. I was going to go on a flight to the East Coast with my friend Roman. After we got there, we would have connecting flights to different places, but we had planned our plane tickets to fly together for the first leg of the commute. We were trying to get to the airport, but public transit was not cooperating. Bus #1, an automated bus (with no driver) drove up to our stop and we got on. The bus was full of dirty bums and spilled food. We sat near the front, and a man started talking to us. I just nodded along, but Roman got more involved in the discussion. The man was mean and gross. He harassed us about some leftovers we were carrying from dinner. We decided to get off that bus and catch the next bus that would come along (many different bus lines would take us to the right place) but the mean bum followed us off the bus and tried to make sure we stayed on the bus with him. I resisted getting back on the bus, but Roman went so I followed.

3. Not traveling, but part of another dream:
I saw 3 non-furry caterpillars writhing on the floor. They were disgusting and I considered squishing them, but instead I got a tissue and picked two of them up and tossed them far away outside of the building into some nice grass. I didn't want to pick up the last one, because it was so gross to touch, but I did, and tossed it out too.

Thursday Night

2008-05-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

I was in a house and I found a rectangular orange rug. It was about 4ft.x6ft. and looked sort of like this:

Actually, it looked like this:

2008-04-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

This is the ballroom at Fontainbleu.
(But the room in my dream was more white like the previously pictured ballroom in Chenonceaux.)

3 dreams

2008-04-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

None of these are fully remembered at this point...

1. I got the job. I was at the library I interviewed at, and all the other people who worked there celebrated with me.

2. I was with a team of archaeologists excavating some egyptian pyramids in a mayan jungle. We went into a room in the structure that had been fully excavated and there was a little pyramid inside. The room was about 15 ft x 15ft and the little pyramid was about 8 ft x 8 ft, set up on a few steps and towards the back wall. The archaeologists lifted a thick shell off of the little pyramid to reveal a smaller purple pyramid within, which had an eye near the top and a mouth about halfway up it. It opened the eye and started talking to us. It had a female voice and talked a lot. It told us about how long it had been hibernating and how lonely it had gotten and how no one had visited it in thousands of years. We got a bit annoyed at its constant talking.

Later I talked to some other humanoid aliens. Later I left the planet on a spaceship fashioned after the one from Futurama into an animated-looking outer space.

3. I was on a bridge like the land bridge at Reed before the salmon ladder was installed. Up towards the "cross-canyon" side there was a large white marble temple in which some gods lived. They showed themselves as little girls, but they were eaters of souls. Some celebrities were being led towards the temple, and I tried to keep them from going in. They were old, but it wasn't yet their time to die. Two of them were led into the temple by the girl-gods, but one woman with silvery-white shoulder length hair allowed me to take her away from there. A group of us went away towards another building a bit past the other end of the bridge.

As we moved away from the temple, a hoard of beast-men grew and started to chase us. We took up arms if we had them to fight. We ran into the building into a long room with a series of square nooks off of it, much like a modern version of a ballroom in a medieval castle in France that I saw in the summer of 1996.

Almost exactly like this (if those little recessed window areas were deep):We got into this room, and the hoard followed. We battled, taking old rusty axes and spears off of the walls, and peeling metal bars back from the windows. I bent some of the window irons back and placed them in line with a boar-man's head and called to my friend to shove him. He was skewered neatly through the face and neck without a sound.

It was crowded and hard to take good swings at our foes and our weapons were too old and rusty to do much damage without momentum behind them to swing through. A guy who might have been on my side started shoving a 3 foot wide axe blade at me, and I could only defend against it and not attack. But then, it was announced throughout the hall that the battle was resolved and we could stop fighting.

Boating and Desserts

2008-04-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

[Definitely inspired by the book I'm reading right now.]

I was on a dark, glassy lake, in a small boat. I was with a few other women, maybe 2. We landed at a house into which the lake flowed. Getting out of the boat, into this somewhat open air dining room, we found a table heaped with desserts. The deep dark blue of the lake and the dark brown wood of the room's walls were echoed in the desserts: chocolate cakes, and dark trifles made with vanilla cake and raspberries, but swimming in thick blueberry juice and topped with heaps of whipped cream with shaved chocolate.

I leaned over the table to serve myself and got whipped cream all over my gray sweater. I moved to another part of the table and repeated this mess making process.

I paused in trying to get dessert, and my sweater was clean. I and one of the other women looked at little models of an innovative type of sailboat with curved spars. We considered having one. If we had taken the model, it would have turned into a full-scale ship.

Shopping, hovering, going away

2008-04-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

I was in a large department store with Robin and my mom. It was a classy an expensive place, with high ceilings and dark wood walls with lots of details carved into them. There was a sale on though and we were there to get some shirts for my brother, A., for his birthday. We walked past some women's jackets, and I fell behind my mom and Robin to try on a brown rain coat. The material was a bit strange, like a vinyl fake snake-skin, but it seemed like it would be waterproof at least. When I put it on though, it was longer than it had looked on the hanger, and it billowed out in a weird way over my purse - which was hanging near my butt. I put it back on the rack and caught up with R+M.

We went to the back of the store, where there was a room that was about 20 feet long and 12 feet wide. It had dark green carpets and lighter wood walls than the rest of the store. Halfway down the length of the room on the left were two large step-platforms with three mannequins arranged on them. Across from these was a giant set of three mirrors arranged in the usual dressing room fashion so as to let customers see their outfit from all sides. We walked past these to a few wall-racks of shirts. Most of the shirts were gone as this was the tail end of the sale, but there was still a decent selection in my brother's size. My mom kept being attracted to rugby shirts with a lot of goldenrod and maroon in the stripes though, and R and I kept having to dissuade her, saying that my brother would not like them.

I moved back towards the entrance, glanced in the mirrors and at the mannequins, and then turned around to watch them picking shirts again. Something in the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I looked to the right, into the mirror, and saw a tall, slender blond woman in light blue jeans standing in the mirror, a little behind me and to my right - just out of my peripheral vision. I turned around to see who this was - she was clearly not a mannequin - and no one was there. I got R to come check it out, and he was disinterested. I looked at the mannequins, none of which were like that woman, and then didn't think about it any more.

I left the room, and found myself in another part of the store where there were mechanized steam-punk-esque mannequin people.

[Somewhere in this, though not clearly before or after this, I was at a house party.] Robin was there, as were two other men I was friends with and who were acting flirty with me. Robin was amused at their flirting, and I wasn't really responding to it, so not much happened. A fourth man may or may not have been involved with this part of the party. (And of course, there were plenty of other guests.)

After the party, I was at home [though nothing like anywhere I've ever really lived] and I felt a need to take a shower. I pulled back the curtain and saw that in the white shower, there were stains, as if someone had spilled wine all over the wall and parts of the floor. I considered asking Robin about it, but it wasn't that big of a mess, so I detached the showerhead from the wall (and was somewhat surprised that a regular showerhead could do that) and sprayed the wall and basin of the tub down to clean away the dark red spots.

[Somehow this was over and I was elsewhere.] I was in a park with Sonja going for a stroll. A man walked up to us wearing a very nice outfit that was somewhat reminiscent of the 10th Dr. Who's long brown coat and suit - except this man, Martin, was wearing a tweed trenchcoat, and his suit underneath was more leather than wool. I recognized him vaguely - maybe he was the fourth man from the party. He greeted me and started walking with us. He mentioned that as we walked he was going to start shifting the world around us and take me to his - our - family. I asked him to wait a few minutes to let me go back to my apartment first. He said their was no time to wait. I pointed out however, as we walked with Sonja down crowded streets, that if he started shifting worlds now, he would drag others - at least Sonja - along with us. He conceded the point and so we continued walking down the hill of the street we were on.

At the end of the street, I realized that I was probably dreaming, so I tested it by trying to hover across the street. It worked, and Martin made some sort of quiet exclamation. I turned back to him and told him that I knew I was dreaming, but he dismissed this by saying that it didn't really matter in this instance. I found him rather attractive, and we walked arm in arm, so I leaned on his shoulder in a familiar way as we walked. He seemed receptive, but then I realized that he was probably my cousin and said "oh shit, you're probably my cousin." And he said, "no, your brother actually." [Note: not the same brother as I was getting a shirt for earlier! A different brother.] "Oh," I said.

Whether we shifted worlds or went into some building is unclear to me, but soon we were in a room full of other people, the unknown relatives that Martin was taking me to meet. They turned to me, and were about to start talking.

Stair Race

2008-04-07T14:47:00.001-07:00

Alex B. and I were in Mary Gates Hall. It was break time for class and we were going to get some coffee. We walked down the stairs to the coffee cart together and I challenged him to a race. We started racing down the stairs. He disappeared but I kept running fast. The stairs became smaller and more treacherous to run on the farther I went, but I kept running

Manhattan Inheritance

2008-04-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

I was a woman in my early forties, sophisticated and wealthy. My parents had passed away and I was coming into my inheritance - making me considerably wealthier. The object of my attention in my inheritance was a large building in Manhattan that had been the family city-mansion in my childhood, but which had been locked up and sealed off for decades. I went to unseal the mansion, knowing that it had been sealed for a reason, but not believing that anything was truly wrong with the place. I had only been eight or so when it was sealed away behind heavy locks and thick iron gates.

The building was about ten stories high judging from its exterior. It was narrow and wedged between two large gray concrete high-rises. Made of black glass and metal, it was dark and shiny, and looked both modern and yet old and neglected at the same time. The building was set back from the street with an open concrete courtyard in front of it, but locked behind the first layer of wrought-iron fences.

The day was dark and gray when I unlocked the first gate. I walked quickly and easily across the concrete yard to the next layer of gates. I used a large key on the gate, and pulled it open, and then opened the main doors to the building. They opened easily enough, but with the feel of releasing a vacuum seal.

The building was large and dark inside, lit dimly and warmly as if by candlelight, though the rooms were were so lowly lit that most of the walls and furnishings appeared black or dark gray. A tall, slender woman in Victorian clothing and large round glasses, with her hair in a bun approached me. She knew me, and tried to welcome me in a warm manner, but was oddly distant. She and two other people were in the building. One of the others was an older man, and the third may have been a middle aged man but he wasn't around much. Both wore upper class Victorian clothes. As I went about exploring the house, odd things started happening and it became apparent that the three house minders were ghosts. It also became clear that they were welcoming, but in a way that indicated that they would like me to stay with them in the mansion for forever.

I had a daughter and a husband who followed me into the mansion. We had been hoping to live there, but it was becoming clear that we had to escape and reseal the place. My daughter was the same age I had been when my family left the mansion. I sent them running ahead of me, while I had to fight off and evade the ghosts. I believe I made it out.

Stalkers

2008-03-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

I was in the public library, on my last day of my internship as a reference librarian. There was some construction going on; new desks being put in for the librarians, walls being taken down and rebuilt in slightly different locations and so on. Our temporary reference desk was a line of tables that we were sitting at. We messed around with their arrangement a bit. For a while there was a long couch a few meters behind them, but we decided to move it so that patrons wouldn't be behind us like that. The room was sunny in a bright white, indirect-sun way and all the furnishings, the building, and the carpet were different tans and light browns.

I chatted with a few librarians, some of them were new and didn't know me. They assumed that I didn't know anything because I was a new student, which annoyed me because I had been working there for months and was almost done with school. A few patrons came through the library with their questions and issues.

Then, a man in brown clothes, in his thirties or so, and with coppery colored hair strolled into the library carrying a large copper meteorite somewhat covered with a white crust. He came up to our reference tables and slammed it down causing some of the white crust to break off as a powdery dust and fly into the air around us. Some of it got into my eye before I moved away. I jumped back covered my eyes and mouth and tried to get the powder out of my eye by pulling at my eyelid. Some of the librarians tried to jump up and stop him but he ran off (taking the meteorite) and disappeared past the construction crew.

I knew the powder in my eye was intended to knock me out, so I was lucky to have only taken a little of the attack. The man with the meteorite had intended to abduct me, but things hadn't gone as planned.

[A fair amount of the dream at this point is kind of fuzzy to me.]

Somehow I made it to an apartment, where I lived with some people who may have been friends or relatives, and there might have been one person who was in the form of a female human but was secretly an elephant.

We knew that this man, and others like him were going to continue to come after us, so we were packing up the things we needed and getting ready to go on the run. I was packing a backpack, and emptying my purse into it along with other things. I found a large amount of loose money - mostly ones and tens - and was trying to scoop it up without taking all the junk around it in my purse. The money was very dense and heavy.

I was in the center of the apartment, in a small brightly lit room with no furniture.
In front of where I was kneeling and packing my bag was a sliding door that lead out onto a balcony and a bright white day. To my right was a door to some other part of the apartment, and behind me was the front door of our unit. We were sure that the man was almost there, so were were hurrying to get out.

He arrived before we could leave, so we ran to hide in the apartment. I and one other person wanted to distract him from everyone else in the apartment so that they wouldn't get dragged into the drama. He started chasing someone else though, so we ran through a number of rooms and doors to a room off of another room with a private bathroom in it. As we did so, we tried to go faster than he could and hide, but still make enough noise to draw him away from the others. I went into that bathroom. It was a light blue color, darker than the other parts of the apartment because it only had one small window with textured privacy glass. This provided a fair amount of light, but colder tones than the rest of the apartment. The window was above a stand-up shower box. The shower was not unusual, except there was a horizontal beam that stretched across the top of it diagonally about 3 feet below the ceiling.

As I was running away from the man with the meteorite, I knew that I would probably have the extra adrenaline I needed to jump up and grab the beam so I did. I then struggled a bit to pull myself up to be on top of the beam, but I eventually managed to do so.

[At this point, things shifted so I didn't get caught or go out the window... not sure what happened.]

I was outside with a group of friends in the evening. We wanted to go get a late night snack and they didn't know the town. One of them was a tall Ukrainian man who had no sense of urgency. We had been hanging out somewhere party-like prior to this, but I don't recall that part anymore. We had left a large brick building - which was probably the library - out the back door, and I was taking them the long way past the construction so that we would stay in the unpopulated area, away from where the man with the meteorite would be looking for us. My group kept trying to turn up streets that went too close to the construction, but I kept getting them to stay to my route. They wouldn't go fast though, and even when they did just follow me without sidetracks, the neighborhood blocks would stretch out and take forever to walk down.

We were found, but this time not by the man with the meteorite, rather, by a powerful woman in a long light blue gown and with long blond hair - a companion of that man. She was behind us, in the middle of an empty intersection at the end of the block we had been trying to walk up all night. The sky was getting light, and she could see us well. She raised her arms up to the sky to cast a spell on us and catch us. We stood frozen, trying to figure out how to escape her. The street grew a little longer, she was further away, but still in a danger range, but I escaped by waking up.

[Not wanting to forget this dream, I immediately started thinking about it, but I got worried that that woman would be able to track me by my thoughts about her, so I didn't think about it too much, and therefore lost those little bits noted above.]

I hate alarm clock dreams!

2008-03-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

I turned off about 20 alarm clocks, but that horrible song kept playing. My mother offered me a few more potential offenders and I turned them off too. No luck till I woke up and struggled to move my arms to stop that awful song.

Volcano

2008-03-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

I was in a waiting room, a lounge done all in white with sun streaming in through tall windows along the far wall. I was sitting at a table, or perhaps a bar, and the room was comfortably full of other people. Two older men were near me at the bar.

I opened my backpack and pulled out some nice Canadian Scotch. I took out a small beer mug shaped shot glass, and poured a drink. I offered it to the men. We talked about fine Scotches, they suggested maybe it was actually Laphroiag, and I thought about this. I suggested that it might be that, or it might be some other kind. None of us took more than a sip.

My father entered the room, which turned out to be in an airport. He was here to pick me up. We left the room and ended up at a theme park in Oregon. I tried to enter the park, but I got waylaid. I ended up an hour south of the park at a friend's wedding site. The wedding ceremony and reception were going to happen up near the theme park, but some pre-ceremony events were going to occur here.

I ran into a lot of friends, and we hung out and the pre-event events took place. I wandered around, and it started to grow dark. In the twilight the venue appeared to be dark green grassy hills with a built in amphitheater and a deep brown, modern wooden building. The sky was a dark blue-gray. We discussed the need to go up to the ceremony venue, and I futzed with my dress.

My dress was a black, 80s-inspired affair that either didn't fit me (it being too big in the hips) or that was ill-designed with epaulets... who puts epaulets on a dress? There was some fabric-decoration on the shoulders in either a electric blue, or hot pink (depending on each time I looked in the mirror at it).

I had been lending the dress to some other woman earlier in the evening, and I think it fit her better, but it was too late to get a new dress for the ceremony and reception, so I just arranged it as well as I could. A few of us piled into a car.

It took a few tries to get to the venue. First the road was blocked, then maybe something else happened. But eventually we got there. It was light out again, but late in the afternoon. The wedding party disappeared, and I was at the theme park, finally able to enter it this time. My dad, his wife and I got onto a transportation device that was also a fun ride. It was taking us to a cabin where we would be staying for a while. The park was located in the mountains, and the transportation ride was a train of little white cars that zipped people up and down hills, with many optional stops along the way. Sometimes the cars operated individually along the tracks and sometimes they hooked up and sped along like a train. Each car moved along the tracks without regard for other cars on the tracks - none of the cars got in the way of each other, despite differing speeds, and optional stops on the single track.

On the crest of a hill however, my car stopped and I got out and stood on the grassy mountainside. I looked out over a valley towards a large range of mountains and saw one in the middle of my view that started steaming. A plume of thick gray smoke started pouring out of it, first in a thin stream then thicker and thicker until it was easily a mile wide billowing up and them flowing back down. It was a volcano and it was erupting violently. I turned around to other people climbing out of their little white cars and yelled that it was a volcano. It was a bit difficult to say, as I kept almost saying earthquake. But I got their attention and they looked up to see it and started reacting with a mix of fear, panic and calm amazement.

I watched the eruption and saw people being blown off the far mountains in the violence of the eruption, tumbling down the closer hillsides or flying through the air in a mix of smoke and rocks. My father's car had gone on towards the cabin so I figured he would be safe there, his wife's car had gone back towards the park's entrance, and I figured she could escape safely. I hopped into a car to go towards the entrance. But when I reached the entrance I realized that I should probably go to the cabin. I found my father's wife and sent her in a car towards the cabin, and then started making my own way. There were no more cars, so I would have to hike miles to get there. I started walking up some stairs towards the exit of the train station to start my hike. Up the first flight of white stairs, I encountered two people in a tandem boxcar racing bicycle device. One was a woman who was able bodied, but the man in the car couldn't walk, and so they were traveling this way, also trying to escape to safety.

They were in my way to go up a steep ramp to the exit, and they were struggling to get up it. I pushed their vehicle to help them up onto the flat surface above. I chatted with them, and they determined that the man could escape on his own via one route, while the woman and I would travel faster together by foot. We headed out.

Symmetrical Inversion, or Claude Levi-Strauss controls my dreams...

2008-03-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

I was minding my own business when I was transported to a parallel Earth. I encountered the non-me, a guy, who I thought was pretty cute, living in a house that was rather similar in shape and size to the house I lived in when I was in high school. The furniture was better located in the rooms however, and overall, the house was better decorated.

The guy was in high school, as was I, but we were also both my current age. Nothing was odd about this. He lived in one of the basement rooms - although, a different basement room than I had lived in in high school - and one that hadn't really existed in my version of the house. He and I were instant best friends and he housed me, a refugee from my Earth. I helped him with complex tasks, mostly quests that he had to undertake to finish school. We avoided letting his mother or brother find me.

I had only been there for about 24 hours before I awoke, but I hadn't slept yet in that world and I was becoming exhausted. I thought to myself that other people had worked harder and stayed awake longer than I, and surely I could last a few more hours without sleep. I thought about my horse riding abilities, and hoped I could stay on.

Driving out the snakes

2008-03-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

Or rather, one long tan snake, a similarly colored, evil dog-weasel, and one cute little puppy, who we let back into the house after noticing that he was cute, not evil.

Many Dreams and One Real Experience from last night and this morning

2008-03-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

READERS!: Guess which one of these entries actually happened to me in waking life and win fame!

Mist
I was walking up a street on a misty day. Out of the mist, a man with a dog on a leash came running at me. They passed without trouble and I kept walking. I crossed a street and out of the mist a car accelerated at me. I speed up and walked on.

Bowling Alley
Robin, Cindy, Cindy's boyfriend and I were at a bowling alley, but away from the lanes on a dance floor. Cindy was naked from just above her bellybutton up. We were all dancing, and I complimented Cindy on her nice body and skin and how bold she was to be naked, here, in the bowling alley. She left with her boyfriend and I left with Robin. Robin and I headed off to Portland.

Films
Robin and I went to Portland and were hanging out in a large rec-room with our friends. A bunch of people were there, but besides us, only Ryan and Alyssa were recognizable. We had driven down, leaving Portland early, but we still arrived far earlier than we expected to. It was only 11am, and it seemed that far too little time had passed between when we left and when we arrived.

We had a bunch of random old films and were having a showing of them. I loaded one up into a projector but it wouldn't play correctly; the projection of it was not working. I tried another film and it worked. We watched it, and then Ryan and Alyssa showed a movie they had on VHS. They set it up on an old, boxy big screen tv. It was a foreign film with a song about Dragon Poo. The song kept using the word Eet. It turned out that Eet meant Dragon Poo, and they had found the name Eet, for their band, from this film, years ago.

Quick Reader Poll

2008-02-27T15:04:00.001-08:00

1. If you found yourself in a lucid dream, what things would you do/try to do? (and if you lucid dream regularly, what types of things do you do in them?)
2. How often do you lucid dream?
3. What tips you off that you are dreaming?
4. Do you ever recognize that you are dreaming, but not completely, or forget the fact soon after?

Please reply by commenting!

My answers:
1. I usually go flying. Sometimes I try to talk to the other people in my dreams to get them to divulge secrets and important information. On a rare occasion I try to find a hot guy.

2. A few times a month, sometimes more sometimes less.

3. Lighting issues or a feeling that I might be dreaming that I check out by scratching my arms and finding that they feel rather numb. Sometimes, noticing that I'm getting mired in doing little tasks that take forever will tip me off and I'll make an effort to go do other things.

4. Yes, one time I even questioned if I was dreaming, decided that I was not, and cursed myself when I woke up later. Often I'll recognize that I'm dreaming and take more control of what I am up to, but not really think about the fact that I'm dreaming otherwise. Lately, it's become a more natural state of being, rather than being a big deal. Just like I don't walk around typically thinking "I'm awake, these are the types of things I can do" but rather, I recognize that I'm awake, or check if I'm awake occasionally (to help with lucid dream recognition), but I don't walk around for the rest of my day thinking about that. I just go about going about things.

Ice Pond

2008-02-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

I was in a place similar to my college campus. I was walking upstairs in the main administration building - an early 1900's brick building like those on Ivy League campuses. The building was maybe 6 flights tall and the top 3 flights held a fancy cutting-edge (for the late 1940s) swimming pool and ice rink. Each floor had it's own giant pool with warm water and a water slide that connected the pools for swimmers.

I walked up to the top floor, and into the pool room. My clothes changed from winter gear to a one-piece swimsuit. I met with Eli and his friend Mark who were already swimming. They were getting ready to take the slide down to a lower level. I looked out over the pool. Because it was the top flight, it was open to the sky. At this (the east) end it was a warm swimming pool, but out at the far west end it was frozen over on top and people were skating. There were pine trees and doug firs, and a nice coating of snow over the land.

I swam for a little bit, but then Eli and Mark found a leak on the edge of the pool where it was very shallow, before the floor slanted down in a beach-like manner to a swimming depth. It was near the entrance to the slide. Water was draining into it at a fast rate, but the pool kept refilling. We alerted some of the people who took care of the pool. They asked me to walk out to the leak and see how strong it was. It created strong suction. They decided that it was going to take a major repair job. They turned off the refill function so the pool would drain to below the level of the leak.

As the pool drained, its heaters also shut down, so that the ice of the frozen part of the pool/pond spread out over most of the pool, only stopping about 20 feet out from the pool's slanting entrance. The trees and snow appeared along the pool, on the other side. The pool's entrance and the wall of the building stayed the same on our side of the pool. Three little girls, about 9 or 10 years old, came skating closer. I wondered how strong the ice was since it had just formed over previously warm water. I also wondered how the warm pool and ice skating pond had functioned together previously. I decided to go elsewhere. I walked through the room to the other door off the building's hall (no where near as far west as the icy pond stretched) but when I went to exit, there was a small red dragon sleeping belly-up in the doorway. I didn't want to bother it, so I backtracked to the door I had originally entered through. Something in the hall almost distracted me from where I was going, and I briefly noted that I was dreaming. This alerted me to not getting distracted by things so that I could have more adventures rather than getting bogged down in some odd dream details.

I went straight across the hall to a new stairway (I had entered the building via the stairway at the other end of the hall where the dragon was in the way, but I had entered the room through the door at this end). This stairway was a bit more narrow than the first (which was about 4 people wide) maybe 2 people wide, made of old marble, except the banisters which were dark wood, and the walls were a milky yellow. The stairs went half a floor, to a landing and then switchbacked, and another half a floor to the next level down, the whole way. I skipped down the stairs just past the first switchback and then stopped. I decided that since I was dreaming I shouldn't waste my time walking down stairs and instead I should go back to the window/balcony entrance at the landing and jump out and fly somewhere. I went back up the few stairs and started opening the door, but my alarm clock woke me up.

Surely unrelated to going to the E.R. last night...

2008-02-17T15:52:00.000-08:00

I was in a hospital with a cold. But I wanted to call it a word that started with an f. I knew it was not the flu or a fever. I'm not sure what I was calling it. I was directed towards a bed to lay down on. There were a lot of beds, tall, hospital ones, lined up in the brightly lit room like in a crampt barracks. I wandered over to the bed I was assigned to, but there was a group of people sitting on it and on the bed to its left. They were chatting, and oblivious to the fact that I wanted to lay down. A nurse told them to move on, and they did. I got into bed.

As soon as I had laid down a strange woman and her male assistant approached me. She asked me my name, and I told her. She asked if I had another name for D12. I didn't know what she was talking about, but I wanted to know where she was going with this, so I lied. I told her that I might, but that I couldn't tell her right now. She seemed to take this well enough, and told me to come with her. She took me to another room, a large one with a very high ceiling, and different sections, somewhat like a fancy modern office space with cubicles designed specially for team-building.

She was in a raised area, with a low glass and white-metal fence type barrier around it. Her lackey was on the 3 stairs up to it, and I was standing on the floor. She tried to hypnotize me to do something when she gave me a verbal que. I resisted the hypnosis, and so it didn't work, but on the second time she gave the que, I followed her directions so that she thought that it had. I was supposed to make a gesture and then remark about my hair, so I made the gesture and then remarked, "My hair needs to be washed."

Another barely remembered clip

2008-02-16T20:52:00.001-08:00

I was in bed, Robin had gotten up to make breakfast. I did some side-ways sit-ups on both sides. The bedroom was a lot bigger and nicer than my real one.

A little clip, barely remembered from last night

2008-02-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

I was watching a man who had been captured by soldiers. The soldiers were dressed in a semi-futuristic barbarian look with hints of roman times. There were a lot of tans and browns. It was a misty day. I knew the man was going to escape shortly. I knew that the soldiers were going to be attacked and in the confusion he would get away.

They were getting ready to march, and to keep the man from being able to run away while traveling, they were loading him down with supplies to carry. They gave him a large pack to carry over his left shoulder, some rope, two canteens and a futuristic flashlight to throw over his right shoulder and a bag of food to fill up his right hand. He was supposed to hold onto a rope with his right hand, and he was surrounded by soldiers. Each item the soldiers gave him to load him down made me happier as I knew they would be useful to him after he escaped.

Olives

2008-02-12T08:45:00.001-08:00

I was compiling an eating/grocery shopping guide for new residents of my city. I focused on olives. I decided that I would recommend two stores where the best olives could be purchased. My highest recommendations were going to go to two olive types. Both were packaged in pouches and were drier olives in a small amount of oil (rather than in jars of brine). One type was a small and shriveled, but plump and delicious green olives. I was in one of the stores, playing with a pouch of them - poking and prodding them in their clear plastic package to show off how good they were. The other type was at the other store and were a drier, saltier black olive in a silver-colored pouch, just like a type that Alex once brought back from Greece.

Lucid Dream

2008-02-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

I and two or three other women (my friends) were walking quickly down a moderately lit street at night. We were cheerful and in a hurry to get somewhere. I decided I could go faster if I hovered, so I started to do so. My friends lagged behind so I called back to them to tell them how to hover. I told them to bend their arms, and lean back onto their elbows and push off of the air. They did so and we continued on.

We reached a large, fancy theater and I went in. In the lobby I noticed that everyone there was well dressed. I looked down at my clothes, which were a large layered set of casual cotton dresses. They were bright blues and reds, and not particularly flattering. I decided that I could make them change, so I focused on them becoming a fancy dress. It didn't happen, so I decided that if I took off a few layers I'd find a better dress below. I tried this and got down to the bottom dress layer. I considered taking parts of it off and being mostly nude. I didn't mind the idea, but I still wasn't sure it would be fancy enough.

I decided to let it go, let my dress form itself, and I looked up, into the main room of the building where the stage and audience were. When I looked down, I had a flowing, but shapeless shiny silver gown on. I nodded at the usher, stepped into the main room, and looked down to my right. There was a bin of fancy silk scarves. I chose a golden-yellow one with light green designs on it and wrapped it around my waist to give the dress a nice shape and accent. Wearing this, I walked down to the front of the audience. When I arrived there, a few people, most notably a woman who looked to be in her late 30s and was quite beautiful, gestured
for me to take my place at a podium on the floor in front of the stage. I looked out at the audience and I might have said something. I looked back at the beautiful woman, and she encouraged me to do something. I told her that I knew I was dreaming, and she chuckled and nodded in a knowing and approving manner.

Hippy Bus

2008-02-08T23:58:00.000-08:00

My friend Johny had a old converted school bus that he had outfitted as a camper/party bus. The inside was simple and functional, the outside was painted colorfully, though in drab colors. The main color was a dusty-aqua-marine blue and there were splashes of other colors like salmon and green all over. His painting technique seemed to have been to toss buckets of paint at the bus.

He asked me if I would like to join him and his 2-3 friends on a bus tour to places, and I thought that sounded good. I went to pack up a bag, threw some things in, and then got on the bus. We drove around Portland for a while and stopped for a late-night meal.

Crazy night of 1001 dreams

2008-02-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

The Snoctopus

A wine company had been using an illegal filler which happened to contain eggs of monster-snakes. As the wine sat in its bottles, traveling to the stores and then consumer's homes, the eggs hatched and little snakes would swim around till someone noticed them. A whistle blower alerted the feds, and action was taken to stop this. She went onto a popular t.v. show - a cross between Judge Judy and the Jerry Springer show - to speak to the public.

She sat at the front of the audience, facing the stage, next to a giant cylindrical tank filled with salt water and a 15 ft snake-monster. As she was being interviewed by a Jerry Springer type man, the snake started to move. It turned and writhed and morphed into a giant octopus full of evil. It flapped its tentacles violently and then shot up into the air. A scream filled the room, as the crowd started to panic. But the whistle-blowing woman lept up into the air to meet the octopus 20 feet up, and wrestled it back into its tank. For a moment, everyone thought the octopus had taken her down to her death, but then she jumped out of the tank. For unknown reasons, everyone assumed the snoctopus was now safe in its tank.

Earthquake

Robin and I were sitting in our living room making our earthquake survival kits. We were planning what to pack, how to load our bikes for leaving the city, and how much water to take. At first we were worried that we'd have to carry too much water weight, but then I remembered my store of iodine tablets. I found them and put them in our pile.

Dancers

We, about 100 women, were in a large gymnasium practicing dancing. We sat down in folding chairs at one end of the room, and one by one, women got up to perform a dance. It was all modern-dance, with tumbling and nakedness. 3 women did their individual dances, and then a group of 4 women took the stage, covered in white flour and wearing elaborate makeup in a Japanese white makeup style. They did a slow dance rolling around on the floor and striking strange poses that made parts of their bodies seem to disappear into the floor. Their heads expanded into giant masks with anime features, still primarily a deathly white. They sang a song in a chirping bird language. I looked out at where the rest of the audience had been, and the seats were mostly empty. I wondered where all the other women had gone. The rest of the women started dancing back into the room in a loose line, wearing elaborate costumes and dresses.

Baby

I was playing with a baby. It produced a lot of boogers. They were crusty.

Finger Biting

My classmate Marion was bothering me, so I bit the tip of her left index finger. I broke the skin with one tooth. She said something to distract me and then bit me back, on my left hand. I wondered if she had any diseases.

Last Night

2008-02-03T19:22:00.000-08:00

I was in a church, either mormon or lutheran, which, while very different denominations, are fairly interchangeable to me as far as my beliefs go. I am sitting about halfway back in the pews, when I start to feel a need to leave. There is a demon at the pulpit, and he's going to get us. I run from the church.

[[Lots of other things happened over quite a while, but I don't recall the details well enough to try explaining it.]]

The other section of the dream that I recall, was in a large bathroom. I was with two friends, and we needed to pee. We wandered into a bathroom, which was open in a mall, much like how mall stores are open to the mall hallways. There were no stalls, and all the toilets were novelty designs. Some were just cute, but functioned generally normally. Others sat multiple people. Everything was brightly lit, cute and full of animal-cartoons, as if the bathroom was designed by Sanrio. The bathroom was not at all scary or bothersome, but it was hard to find a toilet that offered any sort of privacy or full functionality.

Teenage Miriam and her Caribbean Vacation (dreamed 2/2/08, set in about 1996)

2008-02-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

I was on vacation with my family and while it was now, it was about 12 years ago. My brother was in his late teens, I was about 15 or 16, my mom and dad were in their early 50s or maybe even younger. They were divorced, but we were taking a vacation together. My dad's new woman hadn't come, but my cats had. My 3 year old cats who weren't alive over a decade ago. We had just arrived on some island in the Caribbean. Maybe one of the Florida Keys or maybe the Cayman Islands. People spoke English and there was a small, happy, hippy town feel.

We had rented a big house. There was a main floor and a basement, both large and sprawling. Many bedrooms and big rooms for lounging, cooking, etc. I did not see any bathrooms, which was probably a good thing. I let the cats out of their carrier and they went wandering around the house. I wandered around on my own, looking to see what bedroom I would have. A local was in the house with us explaining some things to my parents, and he mentioned that we should be careful about keeping the screens closed because there were lots of weird spiders, insects and animals that could get in. I found the room that was going to be my room, and it was ok, but not spectacular. It was decorated with a feel of my mother's furniture.

I saw the room that would be my brothers, with a large bed in it, but otherwise about the same as my own, and then I wandered out into the hall again, and saw a room with a very short, but otherwise queen-sized bed. My mom was going to have this room, and my dad was going to have an identical one just down the hall from it. But I remembered that we had some other guest with us, who would probably need that other room, so I briefly wondered if any of them would share a room.

I wandered back to the front room and saw two girls, about 11 or 12 years old petting my cats. They had opened the front screen door, and my cats were starting to edge out to the shaded front porch (which was made of a rich, dark wood, cut in thick planks, and well crafted. The same wood was used to make the floor, a waist-height wall/rail, and a solid roof that slanted down over it to keep the strong sun off.) I didn't mind them for a minute because I felt something tickle my foot. I looked in my slipper and saw that there was a yellowish-clear little spider in it I got the slipper off with the spider still in it, and our local guide came and helped me catch it and get rid of it. (After this I saw a few other spiders and worm-like bugs that occupied a bit of my time each, but weren't too bad. I did become a bit paranoid about them and I wished I had brought good hiking boots instead of my tevas.) I went back to where the girls were playing with my cats. They were out on the porch now, and I told them that they were welcome to pet and play with the cats but that the cats weren't really allowed to leave the house because they didn't have collars. I asked them if there was a place that I could purchase collars and they suggested a place just down the street (which was mostly dirt, with a little gravel). There were a bunch of locals outside hanging out.

I took my cats back into the house and found a that I could close some doors to keep them in the daylight basement until I could get them collars. I went back outside and went for a walk. I met a cute local boy and brought him back to the house. I was showing him around and kind of looking for a good place to make out with him (remember I felt like I was about 15 here). Someone found us wandering around and he excused himself and said he'd see me later.

[[I really woke up here, but then I went back to sleep and was in the same setting.]]

I got dressed for the beach and walked there to take a swim. I was in shallow water on a beach made out of one large, porous rock, which made a large cliff that rose up on either side and then was carved out by the sea into a smallish, round cove. The tide was out, but coming in, so the water I was in was only a foot deep at most. I lay down in it and started alligator-walking out, exploring the rock underneath, and starting to swim as the water got deeper. The cove opened out to the sea a bit, and I saw a group of about a dozen men in their 60s and 70s swimming in. One in the middle was Jack Nicholson, but as he grew closer to me, he turned into my father in his early 40s. We said hello as he went towards the beach with the group, and I swam out towards the ocean, but then he grazed his head on a rock. In his bald spot there was a little knick, but the sea water made the blood flow as if it was a slightly bigger cut. A trickle of blood went from his head down around his right eye. He was fine, but he needed a bandaid and I told him he should have it looked when he got back to shore.

Chatting with T.

2008-01-31T07:02:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in a living room of a large, Chicago-style apartment. I was sitting in a beanbag armchair, and diagonally across the sun-drenched room from me was T., sitting on a couch. We discussed the dearth of good grocery stores in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. I mentioned one that was just outside of the University of Chicago's safety bubble, and he pish-poshed my idea of where it was safe to walk around. He insisted that one could go well past 60th, all the way to 165th street without any real safety concerns. I complained about how I had wanted to buy a grocery-carrying cart for the past 5 years, and really needed one for about 3 of those years. Then I told him about how I found the Food 4 Less in the bad neighborhood once, and how E. and I had gotten a bit lost on the way and a gang of teens on a corner looked menacing to us, but we'd been in a car.

My mother came into the room and T.'s luggage became more apparent. She said that it was time for him to go to the airport and he started to get up. She joked that he could just toss his luggage out the window and collect it below rather than carry it down the apartment stairs. He jokingly gestured like he would, and she got worried. He laughed it off and they left.

I "woke up" in my apartment and talked with Lacey about dreams we'd been having. She showed me a photo slide-show on her computer of pictures she'd compiled to show her dreams rather than type them up. The scene was similar to in my previous dream, but the apartment was different, more of a Portland style place. There were also additional people there, including R.

I left her company and went to my coffee table in my rather dark living room to collect my computer to type up my dream. It had been left open and unplugged overnight, though it had gone to sleep, so it still had battery power. More bothersome was that it was bigger than my laptop should be - taller in the screen.

Note: Then I really woke up. This waking up in the dream sequence lacked any sense of creepiness that waking up in dreams and then waking up in life can sometimes have.

Not a Dream

2008-01-30T22:34:00.000-08:00

I changed the colors of my dlog to approximate the colors that my dlog was in my dream a few posts ago. Blogger wouldn't let me get the exact colors, but it's closer than it was before.

A week ago or so... Nose Interior

2008-01-23T22:19:00.001-08:00

I was looking in a mirror, up my nose. It functioned like a mini telescoping camera used in surgeries. Upon looking into my nose I saw the familiar outer cavities. I looked up one nostril, which had a small amount of snot it in, and looked back to the top of that hole. There was a clean, fleshy area with a honeycomb*-like valve to another cavity. I looked through that valve into the cavity and found that it was also connected to the other nostril via another honeycomb valve. At the top of this cavity (which was clean and fleshy also), there was another honeycomb valve to another cavity. I believe that it was the final cavity before entering the throat. Viewing this made me think about stuffed up noses and I believed that I was now aware of how they happened.

*Like the cereal (or real honeycomb but mostly like the cereal in appearance) except that it was pink, fleshy, and pulsing like a heart beating.

More Hovering

2008-01-23T22:11:00.000-08:00

(Much more happened prior to this, but I waited too long to type this up)

I walked down a driveway into a large mall parking lot. Cars were lined up along the switch-backing drive slowly making their way into the lot. Green shrubs filled the space on the sides of the drive. It was a gray day, the greenery was dark, the road and lot were the dark gray of pavement, the mall was a grayish beige, and on the right.

To get past the cars faster, I lifted up my legs, put my weight on my elbows and hovered down to the mall. I thought to myself, "I guess there are times that I can hover when I'm awake," as I did so.

I reached the mall and went inside. There was a small lobby area with two stores that opened off of it. One was a bridal shop full of typical bridal dresses. The other was supposed to be a Nordstrom's Rack. I walked past the dress shop into the Rack and found it full of giant rugs. They were super cheap, but I didn't really know where I would put one in my home so I didn't buy any.

Clearly, my New Year's resolution was to write here daily...

2008-01-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

And I've had some exciting adventure dreams... but nothing that lasted enough upon waking to be worth writing up. Last night however, I had a dream that I recall. It was super-exciting. Yeah...

I'm in a suburban house, of the housing-development variety - white walls, beige carpet, big bathrooms, etc. It's not brand new though, so it has a vague sense of character. It seems to be a recurring dream-house, as upon waking I realized that the floor-plan was identical to that of a house in a dream a few months ago. This is pretty rare for house insides, most of the time houses in my dreams are slight variations on other houses, but not virtually identical.

The main feature of this floor plan was the placement of two main-floor bathrooms. (And by main-floor, I don't mean to imply that there were other levels in this house, I don't believe there were. There may have been a third bathroom off a master bedroom however, though I never saw it. Behind the living room there was a hallway which went left to the main bathroom, right to the spare bathroom, and nowhere else.

Wandering down the short hall to the main bathroom, I found that someone's skiing gear was hanging in the shower. The biggest item was a large backpack, and a draining Camelback insert. An invisible entity informed me that I was working in this house, for the horrible family I used to work for in waking life. And, my job now included cleaning the bathrooms. Something showed me around the other bathroom, which had 2 or 3 stalls and a sink + mirror set up, and back to the main bathroom with the tub/shower a regular toilette and a large counter with a sink in front of a mirror. The far corner wall probably had windows in it (over the toilet) as the room's illumination originated there. The whole house had a light grayish tone, as if lit by indirect morning sunlight.

I started puttering around to ascertain what type of cleaning the bathrooms needed, but besides the stuff hanging out to dry in the shower, it was very neat and tidy.

2 shorts

2007-12-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

I gave a subscription of Smithsonian magazine to my friend Roz. She was thrilled. The first issue she received had two paper covers, rather than the normal one paper cover to protect it in the mail.

I wrote an entry in my dlog. The background color was a bit more purple than blue.

No, I actually haven't seen any vampire movies lately... and yes I waited far too long after I woke up to type this up

2007-12-27T23:58:00.000-08:00

Vampires were all over the place and a few people and I were trying to escape them. We ran around in a building a few times. There was a little girl who was about 5 years old who was with us. We used her for bait at one point, but she wasn't hurt despite 2 huge bites to her torso. Once, while running from a group of vampires, I tried to open a door, and it started revealing a very thick wall. I decided against going that way, knowing that those doorways in my dreams always lead to boring mires, places where I get stuck doing silly things and from which I rarely return to the meat of my dreams. I did not however, consider the fact that I was dreaming.

At one point while outside, I climbed up a sturdy, but shabbily built wood structure to escape the reach of a hoard of vampires, and while I was up there for a minute, I had the thought that it might not be so bad to become a vampire so I jumped down into the crowd, but there was a non-vampire wild dog there that almost got me - it would have just killed me (and not turned me into a vampire) so I had to scramble away so that the dog couldn't get me before the vampires could and then somehow I avoided being caught by the vampires. I think the vampires set on the dog to turn it into a vampire-dog... they were definitely doing this for my benefit too. I got the impression, that much like zombies, they had no real interest in the dog.

After I avoided the vampires I wandered down a hallway and ran into a mean vampire. He showed me that they had caught and turned the little girl. I was a bit angry with him, but not overly so.

Nose Raisin 12/23-12/24

2007-12-24T16:09:00.000-08:00

My right nostril was clogged. I snot-rocketed it into my hand (because I'm kinda gross like that...) and caught a large, plump, black raisin. It wasn't wet, but it was plump and moist inside like one that had been soaked in hot water for a while. I looked around to see if anyone was watching and flicked it to the ground.

Donuts 12/22-12/23

2007-12-24T16:08:00.000-08:00

Boxes and boxes and trays and trays of donuts. That's it.

2 Women in Pink

2007-12-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

2 women followed me around for hours in my dream, despite having nothing to do with any of the other events in my dream. The were both wearing pink sweaters, and were older than me. The older of the two didn't do much other than stay next to the younger one. I went lots of places and did many things, but if I turned around, or peered into corners I would see that they were still following me. I would smile at them to show that I saw them there, and the younger of the two would smile back. They didn't seem threatening, but they were definitely stalking me.

The only time they didn't just follow me was when I wandered into a bathroom. The bathroom was a narrow hall, with stalls on the left side as you walked in. The floor slanted downwards and as the user walked in, looking for a stall to use, they also proceeded down into an underground building via this slanting hallway. The first stretch of hall was about 10 toilet stalls long, then it turned to the right with a flat section about 3 stalls long. It switched back to the right again for a longer ramp section, perhaps 20 stalls long and then switched back again to continue down into the depths of the earth for an undetermined distance. The first 13 stalls were filthy, so I walked right by them to the first full switchback. When I went into the very narrow stall (both of my shoulders brushed the walls) I turned around to close the door. At this point I saw the women coming around the first turn. They saw me, and the toilets (which were pretty damn gross) and turned around and went back outside. They were waiting near the exit when I left.

Another note about Amore Messiah

2007-12-18T10:07:00.000-08:00

The stars in the giant black room are the only night sky I've ever looked up to see in a dream. Also, they were by far the highest up thing I've looked up to see in a dream. The only other "upward capping" I've looked at are indoors ceilings in low-ceilinged rooms and broad hallways.

Amore Messiah

2007-12-18T06:57:00.000-08:00

I was on a quest. I had run around the world finding phone booth shaped boxes that held special powers of travel (somewhat like the Dr.'s Tardis, but weaker). I had found 14 of 15 boxes and was now seeking the final one. My world was hilly and forested, though in some places the trees lined up and turned into living bookshelves, creating a library.

The final box was hidden within a distant star. I and my companion traveled to a powerful being's lair, a giant hanger-sized room of pitch black night, with all the stars in the universe spread across the ceiling. In this room we could sort through the stars to find the box. The being who lived there did not mind our presence, but did not want to mingle with us. We found a vaguely illuminated trunk filled with thin books at the far end of the room. Within one of the books was the clue to which star to pick. I pulled out the books one by one, piling them into my lap and my companion stated whether it was the correct one. In this manner we sorted through billions of stars in a few minutes.

I had found the 15th box and we had control over them, but an evil threatened us and the universe. There were four of us leading my side and a swarm of corporate drones working for the other. A conference of CEOs was being held in a cafeteria at the end of the world and we were too close to it. We sneaked past them, and out into a glade on the edge of the forests and tree-libraries. One of my companions had 15 little shortbread cookies, the size of backgammon pieces, and he gave each of us a few. We had to eat them one by one, and revisit each of the boxes to activate them and then we would be stronger than the drones. I went to the closest box (which now looked like a microwave), opened the door and ate one. The biscuit melted in my mouth and I thought the words "Amore Messiah".

I ran around to another box located up in a bamboo watch tower. The words continued to echo in my head. I had one biscuit left and I knew that my companions had visited all of their locations. I ate the biscuit, knowing that its being eaten would not negatively effect its being activated when I reached the box. I ran through a library forest and met up with my companions. I couldn't see the final box, but it was near enough. We stood in a square, about 2 meters from each other, with other followers gathering around. The four of us started jumping slowly, hovering in mid-air and dropping back down in a delayed manner. We would jump up and then lean back in the air in an arch and then sink back down to land on our feet. The chanting of "Amore Messiah" filled the air.

Note: This is one of my only dreams, ever, in which a saying in the dream is both remembered and at all understandable upon waking. Even more impressive to me is that I had this dream in the middle of the night, awoke, and then went back to a dreamless sleep for hours before awaking again still holding the memory of this dream.

Experiment

2007-12-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

A science teacher decides that my class should try out some sensory deprivation experiments. There are 3, each for 3 people in the class to try, and the one I choose to do involves spending 3 days in a metal sphere, in the dark with 2 of my classmates. We can bring a bag of things to keep ourselves entertained, but our main mission is to lay inside on the platform-seat that goes around the entire inside's edge and experience the sphere. After 3 days we will have started to use up the oxygen in the sphere, so the next part of the experiment is to see if we can get to the end of a long corridor off of the sphere (an airlock), decompress, and then get out of the sphere.

I'm not sure what the other 2 options were anymore, but at some point I did know that one of them was very similar, but perhaps in a bunker either under the sea, or in the ground, or in space... though I'm not positive. Somehow it seemed a little more risky than the one I decided to do. It also was the 2nd experiment to run, so I would have had to wait 3 days before I could do it.

I and two other women packed up our bags and were escorted by the class to the sphere. We got a tour of it with the class before everyone else left and sealed us in. One of the two girls had a disposable, green camera, and I wished for a minute that I could go grab my camera. But then I thought to myself, "what am I going to take pictures of, the dark?" We all wore bathing suits, and I snuck a little piece of clear tape in with me on my finger.

The days went by quickly. Someone brought a board game - it looked like a cross between Scrabble, Monopoly, and Parcheesi - but we never felt like playing it. Instead, I used its box as a sneaky place to store my piece of tape. It marked where I was. We all lay down and drifted off into trance-like dreams. Over the course of a few days we would individually wake up and see each other lying there. After a few minutes we would lay back down. After a while I started to think that it was probably time for us to try to get out, but my spheremates were enjoying the experience too much. I didn't worry about it and continued to lay there.

Then a bunch of our other classmates started coming in and visiting us. They brought little streaks of light with them, making the sphere a tiny bit brighter. I couldn't understand how they were getting in without ruining the seal of the airlock, but it seems that the airlock must have just been functioning properly unlike my thinking abilities in my dream.

They didn't try to bring us out, but we started discussing when to leave. I thought that we should leave very early in the morning so that the decompression chamber wouldn't be closed for the night, but the paparazzi would still be asleep.

Wandering Around

2007-12-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

I'm with a group of friends, wandering around Seattle. One of them is an older man, who has lost all his teeth. He did his own dentistry though, and now has functional teeth made out of a toy of primary-colored plastic strips with crudely serrated edges. He has layered them about 5 strips wide so that he has a good biting surface. They look bright and happy, and they seem to work - he just ate a burger.

We go around the city looking at the exteriors of apartment buildings. It's gray and drizzling rain wherever we look, but it doesn't rain on us. We go into a huge apartment complex that has an open courtyard. The first floor is mostly used as a covered, outdoor parking lot. Every parking spot has a different sign, indicating how much time (60-90 minutes on average) one can park there, or how much gas one has to park there (usually about 5 gallons). There is a little filling station where you can buy gas for $5.95/gallon. One of my friends who is a taxi driver comments on that. He thinks it's expensive, but he has some logic to make it sound like he'll make lots more money and that he should work longer days. Instead of 60 hours, he now plans to work about 80 hours per weekend, maybe even 90. I don't quite understand how he won't spend all his earnings on gas, but he's a smart guy, so I figure there's some taxi driving money-making stuff I just don't understand.

We start looking inside the building. The first apartment we look into is very brightly painted in about 5 different purples and reds and yellows, and maybe a blue. It has no furniture and is a very long, empty room. Someone walks down to the end of the room where there are sounds of a dining hall in an adjacent hallway. I look into a room near the front door and there are about 8 people around a cafeteria table eating. They are all men, I don't know if they really had any food in front of them.

We go back out into the car-park and find a stairwell. We start climbing up the stairs, which are narrow, have no railing, and require us to go single-file. At each switchback, one of us (in order, and rotating through our group) has to take a turn doing some dangerous manoeuvre to flip around some clothe that's hanging our way to keep us from all falling off the stairs.

This morning

2007-12-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

1. I'm in my living room and I hear some chittering noises, so I look out my front window. It's snowing and while the snow is coming down slowly, the flakes are big and it's sticking. Two little gray-squirrels (who happen to be a little brownish) chase each other across my sidewalk and pause about 2 feet from each other. The one in back picks up some snow, balls it up, and throws it at the one in front. He's hit in the head. I do a double take, but what I just saw is reaffirmed when the back squirrel does it again.

2. I'm on a bus to school and I'm running a little late. I'm not too worried though, as I am on the bus and it's not that far that I need to go. But then, somehow, I've switched to the bus going in the wrong direction. I pull the cord and get off at the next stop. I go across the street and wait at the correct bus stop. A bus pulls up but it's not the 49, it's the 44. I know that goes to my school, but the bus looks old and bound for a long trip, so I don't want to risk it. I wait a few more seconds and then I need to go to the bathroom. I go find one, and put down a lot of stuff that I seem to be carrying. I "use" the bathroom (I don't think I really did anything in the stall though). Then I struggle to pick up and arrange all my stuff again. I realize that I have to sort through some other stuff and I go to a dorm room that I've been sharing with Becca. She's got a flight to catch and our clothes are all together as we've been sharing them. I flip through a pile of shirts and make sure she doesn't forget all of hers.

Swimming through alternate realities

2007-12-07T09:25:00.000-08:00

I'm at a large swimming pool, full of people, but I only really notice one of them. He's in a black shorts-style bathing suit, which matches my black bikini. He's in the pool, and I dive past him and swim a bit. I turn around and talk to him from across the pool. We swim a bit more and then I "awake". I'm in my bed, Robin's in the shower getting ready for the day. I'm about to get up and make some coffee for us, but I lie there for a minute thinking about the swimming I did the previous day, and about how I'm going to go swimming again this afternoon. I am super excited to go swimming again. And then, this evening I'm going to follow that up with a trip to the Banya (a Russian bathhouse... a reputable one!).

Then I really wake up, and Robin wakes up with about 7 minutes to get out the door. I make no coffee, but I lay in bed. I'm not going swimming because I don't have a pool that I like. I'm a bit annoyed, but I'm probably really going to the Banya tonight.

Hovering

2007-11-28T22:37:00.000-08:00

I have a skill in dreams that I never before thought about much in waking life. I can brace my elbows (on nothing) and hover around, just off the ground. My feet can brush the pavement, or I can be a little higher up. I can do this up to about a full story or so off the ground. I can also just do this in place and swing my legs around. It's different from flying, which I can also do when I remember to do it. Hovering happens in a healthy majority of my dreams as I walk around. It's faster and lazier than walking, and it's a nice sensation of coasting and smoothness. It almost always begins when I'm on a sidewalk, mostly when I'm waiting at a crosswalk.

My last dream this morning before I finally got out of bed involved hovering. It was a brightly lit, white-sky day and I was walking down the sidewalk, street on my right, approaching the intersection. Two men were ahead, one in the street on the right, one on the perpendicular bit of sidewalk I was approaching. When I got to the crosswalk, I leaned onto my elbows and started hovering. I paused to have a brief interaction with the men, we talked about something. I hovered out into the crosswalk, then up and to the right, into the middle of the intersection, except that I lifted up to about 10 feet up in the air above the men's heads... maybe 16 feet up total. We talked some more, though I don't know about what, and I lowered back down. I went to the man in the street, and I woke up.

I continued to think about this dream for a while, until I realized that hovering was a dream skill. That is, I knew I could do it in dreams, but my brain was confusing dream memories and waking memories and suggesting to me that I had, in the past, used this skill in real life. It took me most of the day of thinking to put the memories in the correct compartment. Not that I ever really believed I could hover, but it was truly an uncanny flipping of my vision of reality for a good portion of my day as I worked to process this. I think most of the problem was in the fact that I've never taken much time when waking to think about hovering, but I've done it so much in my dreams that it seems fairly normal.

Nov. 13/14

2007-11-14T14:49:00.000-08:00

I'm at a nice, dimly lit restaurant, but I'm not really there, I'm just watching. Frasier and Miles Crane (of Frasier the t.v. show) are at a table chatting. One of my friends sits down at the table next to them, and I actually enter the scene and sit with her. George Clooney sits down at our table. He is wearing a casual suit and an eye patch. A few more of my friends arrive, as does another George Clooney. This one is wearing a sweater and has no eye patch. We all chat for a while.

Recurring themes/settings

2007-11-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

Outside: Always either bright and cloudy, or a well-lit night. The sky is almost always a solid white or varying shades of deep/dark blues without any stars or clouds. Nighttime in cities means late at night with ample street-lighting. Occasionally a dream will start at twilight and progress into a darker night. Nighttime outside of cities brings indirect light from undetermined sources. It never rains on me. If it rains, I don't get wet.

Inside: During the day, indirectly sunlit. In large buildings, usually bright florescent lighting, well dispersed like at SPL's central branch in the stacks. During the night, light ranges from the same level of dark colors, but ample lighting as outside, to very dimly lit rooms. Dimly lit rooms are creepy. Light switches don't work, but sometimes I can will more light into a room. Once I threw a gorgeous pattern of light onto a ceiling that resembled the light and shadow patterns one might get from an intricate lamp or chandelier. Haunted houses have different lighting in every area.

Bathrooms: Never functional. Often giant, open rooms full of hundreds of different toilets, each with their own problems. Sometimes just a few stalls without toilets. Filth, overflowing water, dim lighting, mustard yellows, and hauntedness abounds. I used to get trapped in these, but more often now I find someone to lead me out of them, or just do a quick pass-through on my own.

Mirrors: Always functional, sometimes more than functional, never doorways, but occasionally threaten vortexes.

Cities: Almost always the same city, but different neighborhoods. Buses rarely show up if I'm at a bus stop, but sometimes I'm on a bus. Cars rarely exist. People on motorcycles sometimes give me a ride to somewhere new. Once I was in "France" and that city was distinctly different architecturally - colors were different too - a darker gray sky, and the buildings were sand-colored rather than black and metal. Very few people on the streets, though I sometimes have an entourage.

People from real life: Often manifest as two distinct people. Upon waking, it will take me a while to realize that they were both the same person, just different manifestations. Once recently, this tipped me off that I was dreaming, when two very similar manifestations of a friend entered an elevator with me.

Elevators: Rarely function properly, often take me to the wrong floor, or I get stuck in them; often end dreams. I prefer the stairs.

Stairs: Often emergency-exit style stairwells. If I'm running, I can hold the banister and fly around turns. This is fun, and speeds me up. In old mansions, there are always at least 2 stairwells. At least one of them will be falling apart in places, and at least one will be particularly more haunted than the others, but often more solid.

Wish fulfillment

2007-11-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

Nov. 9, 4 am-ish: A former coworker of mine who has a lot of credit card debt runs into me. She is rich! A few months ago she left her business card on the front desk of a doctor's office and they put her info into the payroll database. She's been getting checks from them at an irregular frequency in varying, but large, amounts. She shows me her latest for $8,978.56. I ask if she's been able to pay off her debt, and she says yes, plus she's saved over $60k now. I joke, "you could pay off most of my debt!" and she replies, "Sure, how much do you want? I have more coming."

Early 2006?

2007-11-09T01:04:00.000-08:00

It's a bright sunny day and I'm in my apartment in Portland. I've just walked out of my bedroom to the bathroom to do my morning mirror-stare. I look in the mirror and notice that things don't work quite right in it. Scariness potential abounds and I know better than to stay there. I'm slow and stuck, I have to grab the door frame and pull myself through with all my might. Once I'm out in the hall things are sunny again though.

I walk out into my living room and greet my cats. I see a stick and twig broom that Robin's aunt gave me a few years prior and I decide to go flying. I pick it up, take a seat, and Soma hops on. I encourage Robespierre to join us, but he refuses. He intends to stay with my physical form. I persuade him to just try the broom, but he weighs it down. He and Soma both get back off, and I go on without them.

I fly out my front door, across the parking lot, and out over the street, staying on the second-floor level at which I started. It is still bright and sunny, despite the sky being all white. Half a block from home, I fly above two men walking down the middle of the street. One is tall, skinny and blue, and the other is not tall, but not short, red and round. Otherwise, they are average people. I pause to ask them a suggestion of where to go, and they point north, down a cross-street, saying that there are some really good looking men in a town just a few blocks that way. I take their advice.

Earliest recurring dream

2007-11-09T00:35:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure when this started, but probably very early and before more fleshed out dreams started to stay with me. It occurs most often while I am falling asleep, rather than in deep sleep. It happened the most when I was 8 or 9.

Early version: Sepia tones. Inside a vertical rectangle little particles drift about lazily, with a lot of space between them. They might bump, but are not crowded. All of a sudden it gets busy and crowded with millions of little particles crowding up the rectangle.

This would make me wake up suddenly, filled with terror. It often took a long time for me to be willing to close my eyes again.

Later versions: Sometimes incorporated into fuller dreams, once set on an airplane, where people were calm and in their seats, then cluttering the aisles and moving frantically in turbulence. When in fuller dreams the cycle can often repeat multiple times without waking me up. It is also far less scary, though still unsettling.

Variations: When I was 7-10 years old, while falling asleep, I would have half-dreams where my bed would float up the wall till it started to turn to float across the ceiling. At this point, gravity would take hold and I would tumble out of the floating bed into my awake bed. I would wake up with a start, but no terror.

From 9-12 or so, I was able to control the floating sensation sometimes, so that my bed was a teeter-totter of sorts, though this was in a mostly awake state.

Nov. 8/9, 2007

2007-11-09T00:27:00.000-08:00

I'm in a house, which is strange, but not quite haunted. I am with people, and there are other people there as well. Someone/thing is not exactly after me, but I'm avoiding them. Something is in the basement 22 floors below the main level, and I walk through the yellow kitchen into a gray stairwell to go towards it. My group of people gets waylaid one by one on the way through the house and kitchen, so that I am alone by the time I enter the stairwell. I consider going on, but decide to wait for them to catch up. Alternatingly, I peek through the barely cracked door back to the kitchen, and down the stairs. I wait.

My earliest dream memory

2007-11-09T00:08:00.000-08:00

Early 1985, I am 4 years old: I'm outside my house, on the right side of it if you were looking from the street. There's an outhouse there, which shouldn't be there, and my 7 year old brother is sitting on the toilet. I know this because the outhouse is built out of screen doors. My dad holds my left hand as we wait for my brother, but a clown interrupts. I don't like clowns, and I really don't like this one. He grabs my right hand and reaches into the outhouse and grabs my brother's left pulling us away from my house and my dad, pulling us to the circus. My brother's pants are around his ankles, but his shirt is long.

We're at the circus, which is a gray, cement-block-walled auditorium, much longer than it is wide. We're on a stage which takes up most of one short wall. Folding metal chairs provide audience seating, but for now it's just clowns milling about. I'm in a gray jumpsuit and being forced to ride a large men's bicycle and my brother is in a gray leotard and pink tutu and has been pushed out onto the tightrope. A crowd arrives and fills the seats. My parents are in the front row, center seats, and I call out to them to save us, but they don't recognize me.

1st blog ever

2007-11-08T23:51:00.000-08:00

My title is a bit of a lie. I've blogged a little on tribe and facebook, but this is my first dedicated to blogging blog. And it even has a bit of at theme. I've decided to record my dreams here. I may stray into other things though... we'll see.