garote | Entries tagged with dreams

My brain really messes with me sometimes. I had a long complicated dream this morning, all of which was weird, but the end of which was especially screwy:

I was a kid, about 16 years old. I emerged from some kind of teleportation device in the living room of the family home. Previously I had just been outside another house, several miles away, and seen a huge redwood tree fall over. It might have hit a building nearby but I wasn’t sure.

I walked from the living room to the kitchen. My sister was there, and she followed me. Outside we found my brother. He was standing in the grass between the road and the house, looking into the distance. I followed his gaze and saw a big column of smoke a few miles away. Looks like the tree had hit something after all, and started a fire.

Between us and the smoke was thick forest, of mixed trees. Redwoods and pines and oak trees all growing among each other. Unlike my sister and brother, I could fly. I took off at a run and launched myself into the air. I could only go about eight feet above the ground, but it was enough to speed me towards the smoke. I followed the road at first, but it turned away so I went into the forest, and then passed over a shallow lake. At the far side of the lake was a thick group of oak trees, all covered with moths, to the point where I saw more moth wings than leaves. All the moths had their wings folded like they were Monarch butterflies resting mid-migration.

I took this in, then saw smoke drifting around the trees. Looking down I saw tiny points of firelight on the ground, as though the fire was spreading like some kind of underground organism, sending little shoots upward to emerge from the leaf litter like mushrooms. Each little fragment of fire glowed and moved like a flower, and just grew bigger without actually spreading to the leaves around it. Well weird.

Turning around in mid-air I looked back across the lake, and saw little points of fire emerging from the shore, moving around the edge of the lake and towards the road, and my house beyond. I could hear my brother and sister in the distance, yelling and running around. They were stomping on the tiny fires, trying to drive them back from the house. I couldn’t save these moth-covered trees but perhaps I could help save the house. I flew back over the lake.

When I got to the house, it was getting dark. Little bits of fire were smoldering all over the ground, which was wet as though it has just rained. I couldn’t find my brother or sister, but I could hear them both shouting nearby in the forest. I half-ran, half-glided in their direction. The forest canopy closed overhead. The ground was very uneven. Huge decayed stumps poked out of the ground, some with holes in them, filled with leaf litter or open like animal dens, leading down. I passed clusters of massive fiddlehead ferns. There were still points of firelight on the ground, but fewer now. I could hear my bother and sister shouting ahead of me. Then I paused, and listened closer, and realized their voices weren’t coming from ahead... They were coming from below.

And they were oddly distorted and wordless, as though it wasn’t them, but some kind of creature making sounds to mimic them. All of a sudden I realized something in the forest, or perhaps the forest itself, was trying to kill me. It wanted me to crawl into one of these holes and get trapped.

"Where are you?" I shouted, hoping that my actual brother or sister would respond. I turned back in the direction I thought I’d come, towards the house, but there seemed to be more low branches. I couldn’t fly so I slogged across the ground, through increasingly thick leaf litter. The ground was very uneven and messed with my sense of direction. "Where are you?" I shouted again.

That’s when I heard them both again. Their voices were strangely echoing, and they spoke in unison:

"We’re behind you."

I knew it was a trick. The forest was trying to make me spin around and lose my sense of direction. I struggled through the branches, but there were even more branches beyond them. I was getting more tangled. At the corners of my eyes I could see an indistinct light, growing. It didn’t illuminate anything around me. I just seemed to be interfering with my own ability to see the branches I was trying to move. Some kind of faerie-light? A will-o-the-wisp coming towards me? I had no idea. I heard my not-brother and not-sister again: "We're behind you..."

I stopped struggling. I was done for. Whatever was after me had won. The light at the edges of my vision grew and grew, and the forest receded into darkness.

Abruptly I realized I was awake, and looking at the darkness of the inside of my face mask. The mask had been displaced, and what I’d thought was faerie-light in the dream was actually daylight leaking in around the edges.

Now, there are a lot of questions I could ask about that, but the biggest one I have is: Why, brain? Why take an already weird dream and turn it into a freaking horror movie?

Fellow Dork:	"Metal command buffer 'out of memory' policy."
Me:	Let me guess. That's a scroll labeled "Policy" that catches fire as soon as you unroll it, a la Nethack?
Fellow Dork:	It's a cursed scroll of "confuse programmer."
Me:	Of course. And reading a blessed one makes you mess up a bunch of commits, confusing others. There should be a shop in Nethack for scrolls like this. "Hello Sir, welcome to Asidonhopo's QA emporium!" (You enter an 8x10 room filled with scrolls labeled "Bug Report".)
Fellow Dork:	Right. And then every interaction - picking things up, dropping, trying to pay, trying to fight, trying to leave - doesn't work. You can still chat to the shopkeeper, but he just spews stuff like "Did you try turning it off and back on?"
Me:	Well, you can always attack Asidonhopo, yes?
Fellow Dork:	"Your fist waves ineffectually in the air."
Me:	Dammit! ... Okay, I zap wand of polymorph at the scrolls!
Fellow Dork:	They transform into Death, and/or War, and/or Pestilence, and/or Famine.
Me:	#pray
Fellow Dork:	<deity> just laughs
Me:	Hmmm... I throw a cockatrice egg at Asidonhopo!
Fellow Dork:	Asidonhopo catches the egg in mid-air and eats it. "Yum!" he says, while rubbing his tummy.
Me:	#quit
Fellow Dork:	"Nice Try." Really the only thing you can do after entering this hellhole is to "kill -9 nethack".
Me:	Error: Connection refused. "You do have another terminal open already, right? Right??" "Dammit now the whole university mainframe needs a power cut. Nice going. Never go into that shop!"
Fellow Dork:	It's the Room Where Everything Is Broken.

Actually I had a dream like this recently. I'm pretty sure it's because I've been applying for jobs. It's like the adult software engineer version of "that school dream" we're all familiar with.

You know the one: You're wandering the halls, naked, looking for a classroom where a final exam is already halfway done, and when you find it and sit down the whole document is made of gibberish and diagrams you can't fathom...

In this version, I'm sitting at a desk, which is placed in the middle of a living room, and my family members are all crowded into the room talking and eating and playing music, so I can't concentrate at all. There's a big box next to the desk full of computer gear, sent to me by a prospective employer, and I've set some of the equipment up on the desk and am trying to complete a coding challenge.

The hardware is unfamiliar, and operating system is glitchy, all the keyboard shortcuts are different, and the sample code in the editor is in a language that looks like a cross between two other languages, which makes interpreting it almost impossible. Somewhere in the layers of buttons and tabs is a document explaining what the coding task actually is, but I can't find it, no matter how much I click around, and in the background is a voice, trying to get my attention and ask if I need more time, because the interviewer is connected to the machine remotely and can see every fumbling move I make on the machine in real-time.

The box by the desk has other stuff in it too. Filing boxes, wire baskets full of paper, and a whole lot of ragged-looking clothes. It looks like a box you'd see at an estate sale. It looks suspiciously like the posessions of another developer -- one they hastily fired and frog-marched out of the building, before sweeping all of their stuff into a box and mailing it directly to me.

Or, you know, maybe the developer is dead, and this is my inheritance. If I'm hired, I'm supposed to set the rest of this stuff up, and put on the old developer's clothes.

... And thus, the curse is transferred to me.

You ever have a job like that?

Courtesy of Dall-E, here's an example of one of the diagrams from my nightmare coding challenge:

I was standing in the lobby of a bank. Some clerks were working in glass booths farther ahead of me and my two companions. In front of us was a long counter with a few bends in it, covered with papers and stationery and small devices used by bank clerks.

My first companion was a man older than me, in his late 50's, with tousled white hair and stubble on his pale chin. He was staring apprehensively at my second companion, a boy about 16 years old. They boy was on the other side of the counter, next to a machine that was built into the countertop. The machine was gunmetal gray and had a cluster of big clumsy buttons on it, as well as a small display. It looked like an ATM, but it was on the side of the counter where the clerks stood, as if they were the only ones allowed to use it. The boy was attaching a wide, flat plastic device onto the top of this ATM. It looked like the lid of a square pot, and it covered up the buttons and the display. As soon as he had it in place, the device started whirring, as machinery on the underside began to mechanically punch the buttons on the ATM.

It was a device invented by the older man, and I realized that it was his attempt to "hack" the banking system. It was literally a brute-force hack: His device needed to be held in place, so it could push the buttons and read the display faster than any human, overwhelming the computer inside the ATM. If the boy held it in place long enough without arousing the suspicion of the clerks, the man would become a billionaire in only a few minutes.

In one of those acts of expositional remembering that is typical in dreams, I recalled that the boy was the man's son, and the man was a celebrated inventor and scientist. But something was wrong with the story unfolding before me, because I'd always thought the man got rich because his inventions were remarkably popular and useful, not because he used them to steal massive amounts of money from a bank.

While I pondered this, one of the clerks emerged from behind a glass-walled office, holding a binder. She glanced at the boy with the machine, which was punching putting furiously and making a sound like a manual typewriter in the hands of an excited novelist. It looked like the clerk was in the middle of some task, but her stride was faltering a bit, and unless the boy did something she would be distracted and stop. He abruptly yanked the machine off the top of the ATM, and it went silent. Hopefully it could resume whatever tricky business it was doing if he put it back in place later.

The clerk didn't say anything, but she stopped walking, still clutching the binder, and stared at the ATM as if she couldn't decide what she saw. The boy tried to look nonchalant, holding the flat device down below the counter. The father's eyes bugged out but he didn't speak. I waited to see what would happen next. Perhaps we should cut our losses and run out of the bank?

The clerk didn't raise any alarm, but two security guards appeared anyway, walking slowly towards either end of the long counter. If they got too close they would box the boy in. I muttered to the boy: "Everything okay, Chris?" The scientist father slapped his face in disbelief. Why had I used the boy's real name? The guards could have overheard.

"Aw dang," I thought. "Yeah, that was dumb."

Before the guards could pounce, we all decided to run for it. The boy dropped the device and jumped over the counter, and the three of us bolted out the glass doors.

We were outside on a crowded walkway. A glass paneled roof arched overhead. It was an indoor mall. Everyone was headed in the same direction, but in small groups at their own pace, rather than with the smooth motion of a unified crowd. I walked in the crowd for 100 feet or so and sat down on a bench. I was wearing a baseball cap, which I pulled down low over my eyes. Somehow I thought this would be enough to fool any bank guards that came after me.

I sat there contemplating my next move, and realized I could still see the people walking past me. There was a family with a young child. Some teenagers. Et cetera. I could make out details in their clothing and read their expressions, even though my hat was over my eyes, which were closed, and I had the palm of my hand over my hat so I could pretend I was taking a nap. How was this happening?

"I'm not seeing with my eyes," I thought. "I'm sensing this, not seeing it. The only way this could be happening is if I'm dreaming. Perhaps I am dreaming... But if I start to act like I'm dreaming - like I know what's going on - what will happen? And what will happen to my companions?"

I thought for a while longer, then stood up from the bench. Walking out into the crowd, I somehow located the scientist father from the derailed bank heist. He had the same crazed expression as before. I stopped him by grabbing both his shoulders, fixed him with my most emphatic stare, and said this:

"Listen to me. This is very important. I am sensing things without seeing them. That means I am dreaming. That means this whole world around us is a dream. And that means, when I wake up, everything will be destroyed in an instant. Including you."

As I said the word 'dream', I heard a faint ringing sound, as if someone struck a tiny bell just once, and the reverberations permeated the universe. The man and the crowd behind him - the entire scene - vibrated slightly. Then the sound and vibration faded, and all was as before.

"You need to find a way out. You're a brilliant inventor, so if anyone can do it, you can. Find some way for us all to get out. I don't know how much time you have, because as I move around, everything I get too far away from gets churned up. But you need to go out there."

I pointed over his shoulder, away from the direction the crowd was moving.

"... Because out there you will find resources. Out there are weird, powerful, terrible things that you might be able to use. And if you can't use them, well... Your time is limited, and at least you'll see them. You'll see amazing things. Now go. HURRY! GO!!"

I was shouting by the time I was done with him. He took me seriously - which I thought was bizarre, but fortunate - and he about-faced and began pushing upstream through the crowd. Meanwhile I turned the other way and kept walking.

Now what was I supposed to do? This was a dream and I knew it, but I had no idea when I would wake up. I had some time to kill. I walked with the crowd for a while. We were outdoors now, in a park. The flow of people eased, into a wide, flat courtyard made of bricks. It was a pleasant day and fluffy clouds drifted overhead as people milled around me in groups, talking.

I wandered up to a group of four women, in their late twenties or early thirties. Their clothing had an edge of old-school goth to it, in a playful style but not overdone. One of them was wearing a witch hat. Another had buckles on her shoes. One of them had a vest over a pinstripe shirt. She said to the others: "Actually, it's not the shirt or the vest. I'm just like that. I'm serious. Check it out!"

She opened her vest, then grabbed the hem of her shirt and pulled it up. On the front of her chest where one might expect to see two breasts, there was instead one large breast, right in the center, shaped to look wider by the under-wiring of a hefty lace brassiere.

The other women made appreciative noises. "Oooh!" "Cool!"

"Whoah, it's a bra for making one boob look like two!" I thought, staring in astonishment. "It's doing what sports bras do, but in reverse! It's ... It's a reverse-uniboob!"

My thoughts spun out. I felt an absurdly intense confusion. Women were wearing reverse-uniboob bras. How many women? What was the ratio? Was there a conspiracy in the fashion world to keep the true extent of uniboob a secret? Did sports bras have that problem on purpose, to sow uncertainty in the population? My god, this meant that instead of an average of one boob for each person on Earth, we could be looking at something like, two for every three. What if this ISN'T a dream?

In a panic, I woke up.

So, this morning, for about 25 minutes as I was waking up but still had my eyes closed, I began to narrate to myself the opening pages of a Douglas Adams inspired scifi story.

I have no idea why this happened. I think it started because I was pondering the importance in novels of opening the story with a good hook - something that doesn't require a lot of explaining but is immediately interesting - so the reader feels compelled to keep reading while the larger narrative is established.

It was effortless at first. The words flowed easily. As the minutes went by it began to develop pauses as my mind struggled for the right phrase, or the next idea.

It's been way too long since this morning and there's no way I could reproduce the exact words, which is a shame, because it was delightful. Terry Pratchett really was right: The best time to work on the outline of a new novel is when you just wake up in the morning. "I think my mind is on time-share to a better author overnight," is how he put it.

Here is a recreation of what I came up with for the hook at the beginning of a story, and no doubt it's going to come out far more stilted than what I had this morning, but I feel like I have to try anyway.

-;-;-

The giant nose had been there for at least 20 years. There was no one left in management who could remember why it was created, and there was no one left in the science wing who could remember how. The only paperwork that remained was a terse instruction manual in a three-ring binder: "Swap fresh blood every 30 days, and replace the air filter every six months," it said, with a few more pages of diagrams and part numbers.

The maintenance was not difficult, but it was tedious, so naturally it fell to a grad student. Jacob inherited it from the student he was replacing. "Oh, hey, there's something else you need to take care of," she'd said vaguely, as she entered the elevator that would bring her up to the lobby for the last time, and when she turned around her expression was a bit too neutral. "... The nose. It's yours now. There's a manual and a key on your desk."

The doors slid shut just before Jacob could form the first question.

It was about as tall the average lab employee. It reclined slightly on its wheeled platform. The back side was a flat plane of gray rubber, as though it had been sliced off the head of a demigod with one confident swing. Half a dozen tubes and some wires came out of the gray rubber and ran to a cabinet bolted to a corner of the platform, which in turn was plugged into an electrical socket and a water pipe on the wall of the cramped storage room where it had been stashed, like some ugly but necessary kitchen appliance. Lacking any other sensory apparatus, the nose did not seem to mind being stored in the dark, and the non-disclosure agreements that each grad student signed made it difficult to explain the origin of their trauma to counselors afterwards, once they unlocked the door for the first time and flicked on the lights. Occasionally the lab had to scramble to replace a curious janitor.

Jacob had mastered the initial shock, and this was his third time replacing the blood supply. His mind was already starting to drift elsewhere as he closed the cabinet door and rolled up the old bag in his gloved hands. He had some robots running samples in the main lab and the data was looking interesting. Sandra was a good boss, but she was laser-focused on her project and when Jacob came to her with a head full of questions about the nose on his second day, she didn't even look up from her spreadsheet and shook her head irritably. "Don't think about it too hard. It's there, it's weird, and all we need to do is keep it alive."

He was standing in the doorway, left arm out to shut off the lights, when he heard the platform shudder behind him. He turned around.

The thing had never made any sound before except for the gentle whirring of a few pumps. Had the noise come from the cabinet? After so many years, was some part failing inside the mechanism? He considered just shutting the door anyway, but then imagined coming back in a month to find the machine stopped, and a terrible smell, and some gross puddle forming under the platform. Sandra would be furious, and he would be known forever as "the grad student who killed the nose."

He walked back into the room and stood looking at it. If it were an ordinary size, it would have been handsome. Dark-skinned, symmetrical, not too hairy. As it was, the hairs dangling out from the nostrils looked strangely thin and long. Biological things don't always scale up smoothly. What else had to be different, biologically speaking, inside a nose that was a hundred times bigger than usual? How would he even begin to diagnose some problem in this thing? The manual was useless. He didn't even know who was authorized to talk about it.

He leaned back on the wall, and sighed. He wanted to fold his arms but he was still wearing the gloves. "What are you even here for?" he said out loud.

Muscles flexed on either side of the nose, and its massive nostrils suddenly flared outward, then relaxed again. The platform shuddered with the movement. Jacob flung his hands out involuntarily to grab the wall. He was suddenly very aware that the organ was between him and the door. Wanting to stay as far away as possible, he began to slide along the wall around the room. A few seconds later his heart almost flew up out of his mouth when the cabinet emitted one loud beep, like a vintage laundry machine signaling the end of a run.

I was playing a character in a sci-fi story. It sounds odd to declare it like that, but dreams have a way of giving you knowledge directly, including knowledge that doesn't make sense. I was still myself, but I was also an actor performing a role, making a story happen.

I was leader of a group of Americans trying to colonize a planet. We had settled in a wide valley, and we were constructing big habitats made out of metal and cement, with geothermal piping for heat and energy. It was vaguely brutalist and not very inviting, but it was sustainable. Hardware and materials were scattered along the rough avenues.

Today we were on a scouting expedition. I was leading a handful of explorers beyond the valley and towards another one, where we had detected a mysterious energy surge. In a ravine passing between the valleys we discovered a glowing diamond-shaped wall, suspended between the rocky slopes on either side of the ravine and blocking our path. When we drew close it surged forward and engulfed us, and then it appeared again behind us at the near end of the ravine. We walked forward, emerging into the unknown valley, and found a lightly forested landscape of rolling hills and plateaus. Ahead of us we heard human voices, singing.

Threading through the trees, we found a group of about a dozen people, all wearing sweeping, billowing robes, like a cross between priests and dancers. Each person's robe was a different pastel color. They greeted us warmly and some of them began calling for us to join their side in "the battle", which was about to start.

The ground sloped upward, and we kept walking. We saw more people, all wearing robes. They were talking and laughing, and doing stretches like they were limbering up for a dance. They started walking up the hill in the same direction, condensing into groups of about 20 people, making rough rings.

My crew and I reached the top of the slope and the trees gave way to a plateau, where we beheld a giant structure like the stands of a stadium, built on a cement platform with rough-hewn logs in cross-braced patterns. I looked closer and saw it wasn't exactly like stands, because there were open areas inside it, and people in robes were clustered inside the structure as well as above.

My crew and I spread out in a line, gaping at these not-quite-stands, and the press of people walking around and through us got confusing. I saw the groups of 20 unfold parachute-sized hunks of billowing colored cloth, and pull them over each other, forming these airy dome shapes over their heads. Similar domes of cloth appeared all around the stands. Peering beyond them I saw an open area covered with grass, like a football pitch, and past that another giant structure, also covered with people wearing colorful clothing. Was that the opposing team?

On some unknown signal, a handful of individuals began shouting orders and pointing, in a rhythmic sing-song way, like they were choreographed but too familiar with the routine to bother with being precise. Some of the groups began edging out onto the field, with their big cloth domes billowing over them. Other people began to dance in lines, forming caterpillar shapes, threading slowly between the domes. More people dropped down on their knees and started crawling on the ground, making elaborate arm motions so their robes danced around them. Dozens of rhythmic chants filled the air, overlapping. I walked to the edge of the pitch and stood in the thick of this, amazed.

The crowd in the stands on the other side was doing the same thing. As I watched, groups from both sides met in the middle of the field, and meshed with each other in some incomprehensible unit-to-unit dance. I could not tell what the rules were, but saw that some dancers got marked as "out" and returned to their side of the field, where they would take a break for a few minutes - perhaps have a snack, or talk casually - and then join one of the units that was about to re-enter the field.

Feeling dazed by the spectacle, I walked back towards the stands I'd passed on the way up, and caught one dancer by the shoulder, stopping her as she walked towards a group. She had epicanthal folds on the inside of her eyes, like someone from Mongolia or Tibet. I asked her what was going on.

All she said was "This is how we fight wars now."

Then she smiled and joined her group, which began to arrange itself in a circle.

I tried to reconcile this. There were colonists already here on the planet? And they'd established this amazing society? We should join it right away! Why were we wasting time building all that new industrial stuff, when we could ask these obviously enlightened people for help?

I walked my way back around the giant stands and saw some low buildings nearby. They looked old and worn, and had ivy snaking over them. I noticed a large stone, like a monument, at the base of one building and walked over to inspect it.

It was one smooth lump, shot through with bands of some bronze metal. Very pretty and natural-looking. It had characters stamped on it, in a futuristic version of Chinese with the strokes all at right-angles. I can't remember exactly what it said, but the meaning it conveyed was:

"COMMEMORATING THE 500TH YEAR OF CHINESE SETTLEMENT"

That was a bit of a shock. Was this entire civilization from China? If they were "at war", who was the opposing side?

I had an idea where to find the answer. I turned around and jogged out, past the stands, past the field, and around the other set of stands, threading through masses of people. There were some more low buildings. There was another monument.

It said, "IN HONOR OF THE 500TH YEAR OF RUSSIAN SETTLEMENT"

It all clicked: My crew had been transported 500 years into the future when we encountered that diamond-shaped well, and the American settlement we were from had been erased from history, leaving only the Russians and the Chinese.

This presented me with a dilemma: Even if I could go back and rescue our settlement, should I? These two civilizations appeared to have a pretty good thing going. 500 years of conflicts resolved by pageantry and dance... How do you beat that?

I wandered around a bit, thinking. I realized I had no idea what really happened to the American settlement - my settlement - and I couldn't bear not knowing. I decided to find a way back.

I made my way down the hill where I'd come. Down here was a smaller settlement, one I'd missed before. It was a tiny, bedraggled American settlement. Not mine -- mine was over in the other valley. Some other leader was in charge here.

We'd met before. I remembered now. She'd welcomed me into the settlement as a fellow American, and I'd agreed to help out with the work. But it turns out she'd been lying. She told me there weren't any other colonies on this planet. She also said it was still my version of "present day" -- another lie. She'd been limping this colony along for 500 years, and it was still a ragtag mess.

I needed to get back to my own time, and crew, and fix this. But I needed information, to be prepared for this future. I decided to sneak into the headquarters of this American colony and grab what I could, then make my escape.

I rigged up a breathing mask, and then snuck into the headquarters, which was built into a long, narrow cave carved into a hillside. There were people working at benches and consoles but they ignored me. When I got near the back of the cave, I put on the breathing mask and opened up a pipe in the wall, which would mess up the atmosphere inside and temporarily put everyone to sleep. While gas hissed out around me, I unplugged and then ripped apart a big computer that was under a desk. It contained a hard drive array. It was heavy, but I could carry it with one hand. I knew it had all the data logs for the colonists' observations over the years. This would help me make decisions back in my own time.

On the way out I encountered the leader. Dark skin, long curly black hair, blue jumpsuit with a golden badge on it. She yelled at me to stop.

"Why are you doing this?" she said.

"This can't be our future!" I said. "I'm going back! This all has to change!"

She chased after me but slowly collapsed onto the floor as the gas took hold.

Colony guards were rushing toward me outside. I activated a jet pack, which was not strong enough to lift me straight up, but could greatly increase my speed going forward. I bounded across the landscape. The guards fell behind. My feeling of desperation and pursuit was melting the dream from the inside out. Things got weird. Well ... weirder.

Ahead of me was a city, made of enormous buildings, all in different historical styles. A Japanese fortress, a Victorian mansion, a glass skyscraper, a cathedral. The buildings were too big to steer around. I was flying through the air in a long arc, still holding the drive array. I needed to get past these buildings but I was going too fast. I tucked myself into a ball around the drive, shielding it, and hit the side of a building, rolling along it and flying out into the air again. Another building loomed ahead, with a sloping tile roof. More rolling. The next building was stone, and I was going to hit it face-on. It would hurt but I thought I might survive. I braced for impact and the wall surged towards me...

I woke up. Dang, I've been reading too much science fiction lately.

I was a woman with powerful psychic abilities. As a teenager I'd had a best friend. She was lively and fun, and we shared many adventures, but then we drifted apart.

I was in a labyrinth, wandering from room to room. I entered a dark room about twice the size of a tennis court. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all featureless gray concrete. Strung across the middle of the room at chest height was a single strand of twisted barbed wire. It divided the room into two dark halves, along its longest dimension.

I was on one side of the wire. I could see it stretching into the gloom. As I walked along it, I understood that the wire divided this world from some other one. The land of the dead, perhaps, or a dulled-out reflection of this world ... I didn't know.

I was most of the way across the room when, out of the blackness beyond the other side of the wire, my old friend loomed towards me. It had been twenty years since we last met. Her face was aged but recognizable. She bore an expression that was mostly blank, but tinged at the corners of the eyes and lips with a layer of despair just beneath.

In the barest whisper, mostly just mouthing the words, she said, "Help me."

I knew that since she was on the other side of the wire, something terrible had happened to her in the past, either all at once, or slowly, and now she was trapped in that other world. Her emotions, her memories, her will to live -- all were drained to the barest flicker. She was barely alive at all, and if she remained on that side, she would never truly live again.

Staring into her eyes, just a few feet away in the gloom, I knew I had to try something. I drew close until I was only a few inches from the sharp points of the wire.

"I'm going to try and help you," I told her.

She nodded, slowly.

"But you need to be ready."

I knew that, like myself, the apparition before me was my friend's spirit, but not her actual body. Her spirit was trapped here and it was only luck that I found her while my spirit wandered through. To bring her across the wire I was going to have to use power that would be dangerously intense. It might reach through to her physical body beyond the spirit world and give her a seizure, or even a heart attack.

"You need to make sure that your body is not near anything sharp, or in a high place. Can you do that?"

She nodded again.

"Okay."

I tilted my head forward. I closed my eyes, though even with them closed the image of the wire was clear in my mind. I pushed out with my mental energy. The wire trembled. Ripples ran along it. Then it began to bend away from me, flexing into the space on the other side of the room. More of the space in the room was on my side now -- in my world.

I concentrated very hard, pushing the wire. As I pushed I began to float through the air, moving alongside the wire, back the way I'd been walking. As I moved, the more distant parts of the wire began to un-bend, drifting back into place. I was frustrated to notice that I was moving away from my friend. I could make more space on this side of the wire but not where she was. I was failing.

There was one more thing I could try. Turning my head to face my friend, I dropped my concentration on the wire and instead sent a blast of will towards her. As loud as I could - which was a deafening explosion of sound - I shouted the words "WAKE UP!!"

The wire snapped back into place, shoving me with it, dividing the room exactly in half once again.
I ran up its length until I saw my friend again. She was awake, and alert. There was color in her cheeks. Her eyes were moving. She saw me and recognized me. But my heart wrenched in my chest: She was only inches from the wire, but still on the wrong side.

I ran over to her. She reached her arms out, extending them over the wire. I ran into her arms. The wire jammed between our bodies. I didn't care. I dropped my head onto her shoulder, with my arms below the wire and around her back. She circled my head with her elbows.

I cried into her shoulder, with massive, aching sobs, soaking her shirt with tears. "I'm sorry!" I bawled. "I'm so sorry. I can't bring you across!" I cried and repeated this for a while, burying the sound in her shirt. She hugged me tightly.

"I could try again," I said, sniffling. "But even if I try as hard as possible, the most I can do is pull you over to this side for one day. Then... You'll fall asleep... And the wire will reach out, and drag you back!!"

I sobbed some more. After a while my friend unwound her arms from my head. I looked up into her face. Her eyes were wet with tears. She was smiling. It was an expression of tragic resignation, mixed with forgiveness.

Slowly, she drifted backwards, out of my embrace, her arms still open, half-reaching towards me. Her expression did not change as she vanished into the gloom, lost in the silent darkness on the other side of the wire.

I woke up.

Despite going to bed at 1:00am, I woke up again at 11:30am, after a series of visceral nightmares. First I dreamed that I was infected by a brain parasite. Yes, it was that kind of night.

It was one of those awful existential dreams where it skews your perception of waking life. I was in the control room of a giant spaceship. My friend and I were confronting the captain, because she was acting strangely -- as though everything was fine, even though the ship was being torn apart slowly, a piece at a time, by sinister aliens.

The captain swore the ship was intact. "Look," she said, gesturing to a giant digital map on the wall. "No damage anywhere!" The map was an explosion of red lights and alert symbols. It was a miracle the life support was still operating, but the aliens were crafty that way. They would seal off and remove every useful piece of the ship, slowly confining the crew to a smaller space, leaving the life support for last. Just when we realized what they'd done, the ship would implode around us like an eggshell.

While the captain was turned, I noticed some kind of organic growth sticking out of her neck, like the tail of a lobster. I stepped forward and smacked at it, and it ripped off and stuck to the wall nearby. Instantly it began to squirm, then extruded little insect legs and began scampering up the wall, then across the ceiling. When it was over the captain it began to descend on a line of silk, like a spider, trying to get back onto her head.

"What the hell is that thing!" screamed the captain, ducking away.

My friend threw her clipboard at it. The creature fell to the floor, with the clipboard on top of it. I stepped forward and stomped on the clipboard, and a fatty mess of paste and insect parts squirted out beneath it, but the creature was still moving. It spawned even more legs - thicker ones - and when I stepped back it hissed out from under the clipboard and began to climb the side of my pants.

"Get it off! Get this thing off me!!" I screamed, scrabbling for it as it moved up the center of my back. Then it reached my neck. I felt something pierce my spine.

And I woke up. It was four in the morning. Dark and raining quietly outside.

The trick with these dreams - and I've had more than enough of them to get wise by now - is to calmly but assertively remind yourself that your brain has been fed a constant stream of great science fiction over your lifetime and has become quite clever, and the logical conclusion here is not that your waking life is a delusion created by a brain parasite (or an angry ghost, or a sadistic god, or whatever was in the dream) but that your brain is crunching through some serious emotional and mental business, and the dream is a really amazing byproduct of that -- and should be appreciated as a really great piece of fiction; go you; good job! How interesting. Let's remember that for later. Now, back to sleep...

Then I dreamed that most of my teeth had been shattered in some accident and I was trying to tuck them back into place. Every time I looked in my mouth, more of them were broken. I kept spitting out fragments and trying to collect them in my hand. With some delicate work, all my back teeth could fit comfortably in place and I could close my mouth to keep them there. "I hope I can get to the dentist first thing in the morning," I thought. "Maybe if I can hold them in place like this for now, it will make the job of re-attaching them easier..."

I woke up from that one at 6:30am. I was on my back, and the sleep apnea jaw insert was pulling at my upper teeth uncomfortably. I considered this a good outcome, because without the jaw insert, I would have been choking slowly to death on my back for the last half hour or so, and instead of a disturbing dream that I could feel some clinical distance from, I would have had an outright heart-hammering nightmare and possibly hallucinations as well. As I said a few years ago ... However bad any regular nightmare is, it cannot even approach the horror of the ones created by sleep apnea.

I turned on my side, let my mind wander for a bit, and fell asleep again.

When I woke up at 11:30 it was from a dream that was worse than the other two, but I was in a hurry to get out of bed, so I didn't do the brief mental baggage-collecting that would have preserved it. Just as well.

After a shower and some work correspondence, I tucked the extra large bathrobe into the car and drove to the UPS store to return it. Then I swung back by the house to pick up my hat and camera, so I could take pictures in the park by the old office. The people building the new website wanted backgrounds they could insert behind new people, even the out-of-state workers, and when COVID hit we abruptly stopped doing headshots in the office park because everyone was strictly shelter-in-place.

That errand went poorly because of the lighting, and because I brought the wrong lens, but the cafe was open so I bought some hot chocolate and set up my work chair in a pool of sunlight by the building. Might as well work in a pleasant spot. I got well into some code cleanup, and would have happily worked there for five hours, but after two hours the sunlight went behind the building and the temperature dropped like a rock. All I could do was gather my stuff and drive back to the house.

COVID-19 has deprived me of every coffee shop and sheltered park that I used to work from. I had at least a dozen places on my regular rotation, and many more that I'd visit occasionally. They're all shut down. It's removed one of my major reasons for living in the city. I fully understand the feelings of all the people who have pulled up stakes and left this area, whether they can work remotely or not, because they've been paying hundreds of dollars extra in rent for nothing. I'm lucky that my rent is stable at least.

Back at the house I continued the work for a while, but was distracted by an interesting online discussion about sex separation in sporting leagues. Always something brewing in that politics channel. Fun place. I paused to eat some leftovers, then took the cat on a brief walk. The cold scared her back inside. It was late in the day when I returned to the code, but I managed to check in a complete feature. It wasn't the feature I set out to work on in the morning. Dammit; I'll need to keep my focus better tomorrow.

Bathtime was pleasant. Some nice music, a few LED candles, a little narration into the voice recognition app -- that's how this journal entry exists. Next up: Another night of dreams. It will be windy and rainy. What will the noises conjure as I sleep?

I dreamed that I was a woman aged about 25, looking and sounding like a younger version of Erika, and there was another woman with me who was my friend. We were wandering together through a pastoral landscape, dotted with farms and houses. It was sunny, almost over-lit, and there was no wind.

I found a large, slightly misshapen watermelon, and picked it up. "Watch this," I said to my friend, and heaved it through a nearby window. The window broke into long shards and the watermelon landed on the porch, unharmed.

I stepped through the window and picked it up again, then threw it down hard on the driveway. It broke apart. The inside was beyond ripe - the usual red mixed with a deep plum color - and I could see big chunks of sugar and juice. I picked up a section and so did my friend. "Delicious!" we both said, though after a minute or so of chewing, the pulp lost all its flavor and tasted mealy.

"I know what this is," I thought. "I'm actually tasting the sleep apnea insert that's in my mouth right now."

My friend turned to me and shook her head. "Man, your mind is weird," she said.

We were wandering in a small town. A scattering of very old houses and very modern buildings, threaded into a redwood forest along a tangle of roads. Sometimes the trees would disperse into fields of tall grass. The modern buildings were all shiny windows and sharp angles, like Silicon Valley research labs. I figured the old houses were kept in their rough state deliberately by some architect, to provide a counterpoint. People were walking around, on paths or on the road, usually in small groups. Students? Employees?

As we explored I came to the realization that this village and all the people in it were inside my mind. I had created them for our entertainment. But something was odd about the relationships: The people in the town liked my friend more than me. My friend had a superpower -- she could bend time so that she could move very fast. As I traveled by bus across the land, I saw her zipping from place to place on foot, talking to the groups of people. She was ingratiating herself to them by giving them gifts and compliments. I had never bothered to do that. To me, the people were just there to set the scene, and it didn't matter what they thought of me.

Eventually I got sick of seeing my friend do this. I stepped out of the bus and yelled "STOP!" Everyone in the area stopped talking and walking and stood still, but I could tell they did it reluctantly. I could hear some of the people muttering to each other about how mean and unfair I was, making them hold still for no reason. I was annoyed at their attitude and furious at my friend for turning them against me. My friend had vanished somewhere, but that was fine because I wanted to be alone in my mind and think.

But the people would not stop muttering and wobbling as they stood in place. In a raised voice, not too loud because I knew everyone would hear me no matter how I pitched it, I said: "I need you all to shut up and get out of my sight right now, and if any of you don't, I will make you disappear completely."

The threat was, I would delete them from existence. And it worked. Instantly I was alone in the village. All the buildings were dark and it was twilight, with no stars. I began to walk along a road, under a canopy of trees. What was I going to do about my friend, and her manipulations? Was she even around any more? I was certain I hadn't created her.

As I pondered this, I decided it was a bit too dark. I lifted my face to the sky and shouted "LIGHT!!!"

Light blasted forth from everywhere and flooded my eyes. "Maybe I overdid that," I thought. Unfortunately I shouted so loud that I woke myself up, with the word still echoing in my head.

I was driving the car through a road in the woods. Small buildings began to appear on either side, between the tall redwood trees. The road snaked around them. I realized I'd driven onto a college campus. Students were walking around, and I slowed down to be courteous.

The car rolled into a large flat area, like a parking lot. The tree canopy was still thick, far overhead, making the sunlight indirect and dappled. Curious, I parked the car in a space and got out to look around. A long line of students went into one building. They were registering for classes. The semester was just getting started.

I walked up a cement ramp - too narrow for cars - and into a row of classrooms. The middle classroom was only accessible through doors leading to the classrooms on the ends, which was confusing to a lot of students. Everyone was wandering around uncertainly, carrying books.

The middle classroom had low bookshelves dividing the space up, with a grid of desks layered into it. Only a handful of students were sitting, and others were passing in and out constantly, trying to decide if this was the right room. The instructor - a man in a white lab coat, with frizzy hair and round glasses - was relying on me to speak quietly to new students and get them oriented while he continued with the lecture. Every now and then he would say something in a garbled language that only advanced students could decipher, and I would helpfully translate for the newcomers.

I got up from my desk and walked around a row of bookshelves, and there was Jennifer. She was the first girl I'd had a crush on at school, back at Vine Hill Elementary in Scotts Valley. She'd been about 12 years old when I met her. In here, she was much older. She had the same tousled blond haircut, but her face and limbs had grown and developed sharper edges. I guessed she was around 30. This was odd because the last time I saw her was in Middle School, when she'd been 15. Obviously my mind was taking a wild guess at how she looked now, and even that didn't make sense because she should be in her forties.

I said: "Whaaaat. Whaaaat!" at her, in an incredulous tone. I frankly could not believe we'd run into each other. I figured she'd recognize me and be just as disoriented.

She turned and saw me, and her expression went from shock to a kind of guarded skepticism. She said: "Okay, that's weird. But I know exactly what you're going to ask me. And the answer to your first question is 'no', and the answer to your second question is also 'no'. I have three kids."

I grinned at her. The last time she saw me, I had been a tongue-tied 14-year-old moron, deeply infatuated with her for inscrutable reasons, and completely unable to have a proper conversation with a girl. She was assuming I was the same, and that the first thing I'd do is ask her if she was single, and then ask if she'd date me. I was interested in neither.

"Hey, whoah, whoah, whatever you say," I said, still grinning. "I'm just amazed at the coincidence and happy to see you! That's all!"

"Huh," she said, clearly unconvinced.

I noticed she was carrying an armload of books and a notepad. "Hey, if you need any questions answered or help with orientation, just let me know," I said.

"Okay," she said, but her expression didn't change. Abruptly I decided that I didn't even care enough to try and placate her. If she had some kind of chip on her shoulder that would prevent us from being friends, I was content to leave it in place. I felt like laughing out loud at how big of a deal she thought she still was to me, after almost 30 years. I held my laughter back to avoid confusing her or making a scene.

"See you later," she said, and then looked over my shoulder to someone else. "Come on, let's go."

I turned and saw a man, about 30 years old, skinny with curly brown hair, squinting intently at a row of books. "This must totally be her husband," I thought. "Funny, that. I didn't get my gay-dar working until I was in college, so I was working retroactively, but I always had this theory she was gay. Guess I was wrong." To the man I said: "Let me know if there's a particular book you're looking for, and I can help."

He smiled at me. "Thanks!" he said, then scurried around the bookshelf to catch up with Jennifer.

The instructor droned on. I decided to go outside for a walk.

Some time later, I was sitting crosslegged in a large auditorium. The ambient lighting was low and very dim. A movie was being projected on the far wall, making an image some 30 feet high. The walls were cement, which added an annoying reverb to the soundtrack. The carpet was thin and hard, but I had a few blankets with me to soften it.

Students were arrayed all around me, sitting or laying on the floor, in small groups. Closer to the front of the giant room were low tables and chairs, also filled with students. People would occasionally wander in from outside and settle down to watch the movie. Sometimes others would get up and leave.

A woman walked into the building from the door behind me, and threaded through the people on the floor. She sat down just behind me, over my right shoulder. I turned my head away from the film just long enough to note that she was a stranger. "I guess this is just the clearest spot on the floor," I thought, and turned back.

The woman leaned back on her hands, and stretched her legs out, making an exaggerated sigh of pleasure. She moved her left leg to the side as she stretched, so her calf just brushed my folded knee. I could tell it was deliberate. She sighed again, and bent her knee slightly, then straightened it again, rubbing the side of her leg against mine.

I reached out with my right arm, casually, and picked up her leg around the heel, and set it in my lap. Then I began to stroke the muscles in her calf. If she was going to be this familiar with me, I was going to play along. "Besides," I thought. "This is a nice leg."

She sighed deep enough that it almost turned into a groan, then pushed forward with her hands, so she scooted up next to me. From there she brought her right leg around and almost climbed into my lap, leaning her forehead on my shoulder. Her hair was dark and straight. She was wearing some kind of short dress.

She raised her head up so her mouth was near my ear, and hissed, in a rough, urgent whisper:

"I need him to see this."

I couldn't concentrate on the movie any more, but I didn't want to turn my head either, because the woman would definitely try to kiss me as soon as I did. I liked the physical contact, but I was very aware that her motives were totally unknown, and kissing felt too intimate.

"He's outside parking the car," she hissed.

She moved both legs off my lap and then crawled forward over my body, until she was in front of me, facing away. She threw one knee out a bit wider, lowering her ass. Then she reached over her shoulder and pulled the cloth of her dress upward between her shoulder blades, hiking it up onto her back. Her bare ass gleamed in the low light.

"Come on, f@%$& do it," she said, looking back at me. "F@%$& right now. I hate him so much. He's got to see."

I leaned forward onto my hands, bringing my face inches from her, and inhaled deeply. "Huh," I thought. "She's in good shape - about 25 years old I'd guess - and also completely out of her mind."

I went through the scenario briefly in my head. "Say I get freaky with her. She's bound to make a lot of noise. That'll upset everyone here, and then some guy is going to walk in. If the guy is as crazy as this woman is, there's going to be a fight. That's no fun. Actually, now that I really think about it, I'm not even tempted by this. This woman is way more disturbing than exciting."

I got my knees under me, then reached forward with one arm and grabbed one of the woman's asscheeks. She moaned and bent her arms, lowering her face to the floor. With the other arm I reached back and grabbed one of my blankets, then threw it over her whole body. Then I used the first arm to shove her to one side, tangling her in the blanket, and stood up.

"No, he has to see!" she said from inside the blanket, as she thrashed her way out of it.

"Good luck with that, lady," I thought, and walked out of the building.

As soon as I woke up I made a bunch of scrambled notes. It's not very often my dreaming self is this sarcastic.

The first section is muddled. Something about flying into a giant bank, in disguise. The bank was a huge square cavern, filled with slowly rotating gold coins, each the size of a car, floating in a grid pattern. I had a shopping bag with an Apple logo on it, which I dropped down into the ranks of coins. Was it sabotage, or was I just trying to make a deposit?

The walls shook. Tragic music swelled. All the gold coins began to crumble into dust. Whoops! The item in the bag was some kind of magic artifact from my ancestors. Looks like it didn't react well to banking.

I shrugged my shoulders admist the thundering chaos, poofed into an insect, and flew out the way I came. A short bank teller in coattails nearly caught me with a butterfly net, but I dodged. Outside the huge doors of the bank I landed on the outstretched palms of my friend, and he walked away with me. Mischief managed or something.

Now I was with a group of kids, all high-school age. We were starring in a movie version of some epic book. It was the middle of the movie where we go on a journey, across various fantastic realms. Time for the effects budget to really get cashed in.

Each realm had different architecture and geography. This one was flooded by the ocean, with domed buildings and lots of sharp cliffs. I was pretty sure it was based entirely on that "Thames" logo that ran in front of some British cartoons in the 80's, where the buildings rise up from the riverbank and trumpet music plays. There was no time to actually explore the realms in this movie; maybe later in a sequel. We trudged on, pulling out into a line, so the camera could catch us all in profile.

We approached a giant tower seemingly hanging in space over a mountain range. It was divided into two sections, creating a vertical gap of air between the massive halves. The gap was a quarter of a mile wide. Clouds on either side bent upwards to avoid passing over the gap. There was a structure hanging in the space below the tower and above the mountains, also divided in half, massive and made of shiny metal. It looked like two parentheses pointing outwards.

As we all stood gaping at this, I noticed a sign planted nearby. The sign had a painted white arrow on it pointing helpfully up towards the sky tower. Next to that it said: "Proposed new division between the realms."

"Jesus, they couldn't just do that in dialog?" I muttered to myself.

Now we were walking up the inside of a tower. It was tilted at an angle, as if halfway through the act of falling over, and it was gently turning on its axis, just slow enough for us to walk along the interior walls, which were lined with stair-steps in a spiral, moving up the inside of the tower. It was a sort of inside-out corkscrew of stairs and I thought it was pretty cool. I took out my phone and tried to take a video of the steps as they rotated, but the focus wasn't cooperating. I got everything framed and focused just as we reached the top of the stairs and arrived at a tilted platform.

Some crude, un-official looking stairs had been carved into the rock wall ahead of me, continuing upward, so I followed those, but the steps got softer and shallower until they vanished, and the ceiling got too low to continue. It reminded me of being in a dirt basement underneath a house. I slid back down the stairs on my butt and joined my nephew James, why was trying to open a door on another wall.

I was in a circular meeting hall with several friends. Thick tables were arranged at the walls, set with cutlery, making an outer ring where people could eat and converse. In the middle was a sunken area, making a circular ledge just high enough for people to sit on facing inward. I was seated there, facing a large man standing in the middle. He was entirely red - red skin and a red leather coat - and had sharp looking horns bursting up from either side of his head. He looked a lot like Hellboy. He was an emissary from the adjacent realm, threatening us with war.

"So how does the divide work?" I asked, in a tone with a hint of mocking.

"It works by preventing anything physical from crossing it," he rumbled back.

"Right, so the way it works is, you have no idea. It just does." I shot back nastily.

Hellboy-dude looked annoyed.

"You know, planets are round," I said. "And walls don’t go up forever. Fly up far enough into space and you can just go over the dang wall."

Hellboy grunted and began describing his giant war machines, and the huge engineering project his realm was engaged in, building roads to move his war machines all around and defend the skies from below. He was trying to change the subject, and conceal the stupidity of this whole realms concept.

It was a good try, I thought. I knew these books never held up to scrutiny in their grand metaphorical features. I was on a roll though. "All you'd need to do is drop a few rocks down from orbit onto that road, and blast massive craters in it. Hey, actually can't you just apparate things? Teleport them or whatever? Just teleport the rocks up there, and let the planet rotate them over the wall," I said. I made an arc with my arm. "Fssssnhh, boom! Fuck your roads!"

One of my friends leaned in to my ear. "You can't just apparate objects," he said.

"Yeah but you can carry them. So have someone teleport up there carrying a rock, drop it, and teleport back. Hold your breath or something. Wear a fishbowl. Duh."

There was a general muttering around me. Hellboy-boy looked exasperated. He stepped aside, as big doors opened at the other side of the hall. Some people began pushing a big marble statue into the center of the room on a wheeled platform, along a trench cut into the floor connecting the center with the doors.

"Besides," said another man, "we can’t apparate any more. Not since You-Know-Who. He started the apparate keys back up again while he was alive but they stopped again when he died."

"... I don't think that's canon," I said. "Are you telling me that all those people who were going to the Tri-Wizard Tournament, or football games or whatever, were teleporting there using magic enabled by Whats-His-Face?"

More muttering, but no coherent reply. Hellboy-guy stared at his cloven feet.

The statue arrived in the middle of the room and stopped. It was Voldemort. The bone-white statue had glowing red eyes that darted around the room. Obviously the real Voldemort was hiding inside the statue and would burst out of it at a dramatic moment, sowing chaos. "Oh the drama," I thought. "Why is this even in here?"

His eyes locked onto me.

I stood up, took a deep breath, and bellowed: "STOP STARING AT ME."

The whole room shook, rattling the tableware. The pictures fell from the wall. I bared my teeth, and long red spikes of fire extruded from my eyeballs towards the statue. I hissed at it, sounding a bit like an upset goose, which was rather anticlimactic.

The statue broke eye contact with me and began looking elsewhere around the room, avoiding my face. I sat down, satisfied.

"That’s right," I reminded myself. "I am as powerful as a god in this universe. No wait, I am god in this universe."

" ... How boring," I thought. And woke up.

While exploring the town in the woods, I found an enormous Victorian mansion. The front door was open so I wandered in. The rooms were small, laid out in a confusing jumble with narrow hallways and steps connecting them, and incredibly cluttered with glass lamps, end tables, overstuffed chairs, tapestries, throw rugs, and tiny pieces of sculpture. Someone had been living here a very long time.

( I sat down on the steps leading into the kitchen... )

I had a dream that I was exploring some hip area of Berkeley and looking for a place to get lunch, when Trent Reznor and his band showed up, in a steam-powered motorcar. He motioned for me to get on the car, then threw it in reverse and backed up the crowded street, swerving onto the sidewalk a bunch of times to avoid pedestrians.

He stopped at the top of a hill, next to a tiny, dirty looking Mexican restaurant.
Then me and him and the other musicians all got food on paper plates and sat in the grass.
I was like “I know I’m a guest and all, and this is probably Trent’s favorite restaurant, but damn this burrito looks gross.”

I tried a bite anyway and yeah it was way too oily and had pieces of toast in it for some reason and it fell apart in my hands.

So I got up and walked back down the hill, and there was Jeremy Hatch, hanging out in the doorway of another restaurant scatting to himself, like, “A-boop zoop zoopy de beep ba-bap do-wap”
So I had lunch with him instead :)

Hashtag: snacks before bed
Hashtag: goth lunch
Hashtag: Mexi-industrial complex

(That’s how hashtags work, right?)

I'm floating in silent darkness. There is a curved wall around me, slowly constricting more and more. I can't tell if my eyes are closed or open.

I lose all sense of my body. The wall closes in. Directly in front of me, I see a light. It blinks slowly like the beacon on a radio tower.

My consciousness flickers. My mind feels ... scrambled somehow, like I can't string thoughts together. The feeling passes. The wall flies outward.

"I've just been passed through a firewall," I think to myself.

My body is back. It's daylight, and I'm standing on a patch of green, trimmed lawn. I look around and see it's a large rectangle, about 20 by 40 meters. Three sides of the rectangle end in a low picket fence. The fourth ends in a flat wall of granite, about 5 meters high. Beyond the fence I see a landscape that seems curiously jumbled. Steep rolling hills of grass run all the way to the horizon. Scattered all over the hills are slabs of granite and marble cut into columns and geometric shapes the size of houses. The horizon feels too close, like the planet is too small. The hills in the distance look blurry, as though the air is distorting them. I sense that it's not even a real landscape, but some kind of procedurally generated optical illusion designed to make the rectangular lawn feel less like a cage, and if I tried to step over the fence I would hit a wall -- or perhaps fall away into nothingness.

There is an alcove carved into the side of the granite wall, with a desk and two chairs inside. "Some kind of reception area?" I think. Next to that is a rectangular hole, the size of a doorway. "I'm not allowed in there," I think. "That's for staff only."

I turn away from the wall and am surprised to see another person standing nearby. It's an older woman I don't recognize. She's standing still, with a blank expression on her face. I watch for a moment and she doesn't move.

I walk around the lawn, exploring a bit. As I do, the details of the procedural terrain change behind the fence. The columns and other granite shapes acquire pastel colors one at a time -- bright metallic pink, bright metallic blue, and so on. The more I look at parts of the landscape, the more detail appears there, as though the illusion takes effort to produce and the entity or machine producing it is lazy.

I wander along the fence and find a few objects in the grass. Sadly I can't remember what they were.

When I turn back to the wall, I see men moving in and out of the hallway, consulting with each other, observing the woman on the lawn. They're dressed like doctors. There are additional subjects standing around as well. "What is this place for?" I think. "Am I even supposed to be here? Or perhaps I'm just not supposed to be conscious of this?"

I keep walking around, and discover other things sitting in the grass. I hadn't seen them before. I find an old electronic address printer, hooked up to an old audio recorder with a huge magnetic tape in it, being used for backup. I kneel down and open the lid of the address machine, and see some impressions left by keys, allowing me to read the last few things typed with it. Some geometric designs, some sequences of letters with a vaguely medical feel to them like diagnostic codes, and a mailing address. It's a woman's name I think - no one I've heard of - and the address is unfamiliar. "This is information I shouldn't be seeing," I think. I try to memorize it for later, but fail.

I walk forward a bit more and find a small, squat desk. Polished tan wood, grainy. In the cubbyhole under the top I find a large wind-up watch, like the kind my father used to wear. I take it out and walk away carrying it, but I only get a few steps and the front of the watch pops off in my hand. I look down and a few tiny metal rods and springs and washers are scattered on the grass.

I bend down and carefully gather then up in my hand. "I need something to put these parts in, and some way to wash them," I think. I walk a dozen more steps, and there on the grass is a plastic bin, with a lid. I drop the parts in the bin. A moment later, the bin begins to fill with water from some unknown source, like a conjuring trick. "That's convenient," I think, and pick up the bin.

But the bin won't stop filling with water. I hold the lid down, but it overflows, spraying water out the sides. The water is running out across the grass, soaking it. I feel wind blowing against my body. Up to now, the weather had been absolutely calm here. I feel a bit alarmed.

I back up a little bit, trying to understand what's going on, and get close to a man in a white lab coat who is sitting on the grass talking with someone else. He swings his head around with a very frightened look on his face, then relaxes and says "Oh, it's only you," and calls me by name. Apparently the staff here think I'm harmless, and are concentrating on other people for now.

The wind picks up even more, whistling past us, lashing at the puddles of water around me and spreading them out. "This wind really needs to die down," I think. A second later it stops, all at once, as though a giant fan has abruptly switched off.

"Whoah, that was odd," I think. "Can I control this environment?"

I concentrate again, and make the wind pick up to its previous speed, blowing the water around. Then I make the wind die. Then I will the plastic bin to stop producing water. It ceases instantly. "Interesting..."

I forget all about the watch and the bin, and walk towards the reception area set into the wall. There are two people sitting behind the desk. They look vaguely Hispanic, and are talking to each other while they mess with the paperwork spread across the desk. Paying them no mind, I brazenly walk into the doorway cut into the wall, and stride up the hallway beyond. I concentrate to make a gale-force wind that will distract the people in the alcove, but the most I can manage is a stiff breeze. Not what I wanted, but enough to make them grab for their paperwork, which is enough to keep them from noticing me.

The hallway opens up into a much larger office area, with a number of cubicles, and windows beyond showing an office complex. People are everywhere, moving with purpose. Most of them are wearing lab coats. An old man with messy gray hair and a lab cost is standing near me behind a counter, talking animatedly with a muscular, tanned man in a police uniform and a hat. They are trying to decide what to do with a couple of uncooperative subjects.

The doctor notices me, and recognizes me. He knows I'm not supposed to be back here but he doesn't seem concerned. I walk up to him and he pauses his conversation with the cop.

"Why am I here?" I ask him. "And how long am I going to be here for?"

He holds up one hand. "Don't worry," he says, in a placating tone, "You'll be out soon."

"Could you be more specific?" I say, irritated.

"A couple of days," he says, and shrugs. "About one day."

On a counter between me and the doctor is a clipboard sitting in a paper tray. It has a large column of numbers, and some thick black lines next to each number, like a blank inventory form. At the top of the list, hastily written in large orange letters, is my name. Next to that is a description of why I am here -- at least, that's what I assume it is, but the writing is messy and I can't parse it.

I squint at the writing, and the doctor with the gray hair sees me looking, notices the clipboard, and hastily grabs it and holds it down behind the counter.

I turn to him and say, "Don't lie to me."

"Shit," he mutters. "You saw that, didn't you?"

"Come on," I say. "Just tell me how long this is all going to take."

The officer catches my eye and says "You'll be here about half an hour."

The doctor stows the clipboard and walks around the counter. "Come with me," he says.

I follow him back out of the hallway towards the rectangular lawn. There is a polished table set against the wall. The doctor hops up and sits casually on the edge of the table. I sit next to him, like we're two friends on a lunch break.

"I'm going to explain this whole thing to you," he says.

"How am I supposed to believe you when I know you've lied to me already?" I retort angrily.

"Just hear me out," he says.

He talks for a while. All I remember is that his description sounds unbelievable, and quite weird. The whole conversation has been smudged out of my memory.

As he is talking, I watch the lawn, and I observe my older sister being led out of the hallway by one of the police officers. He leads her to a thick-walled building about the size of a garden shed, with an opening on the side. Beyond the opening I see a flight of stairs going down into the lawn, which they both descend.

Just before my sister takes the first step down, she turns to me and mouths the words "HELP ME".

I look around again. Instead of a courtyard, I am in a large conference room, with several tables of different sizes and a herd of empty swivel chairs. Large bay windows show other rooms beyond, with flat office carpeting, including the thick-walled room, which is integrated with the rest of the walls in the building. A sliding glass door separates the conference room from the room leading to the stairway where my sister has gone.

The doctor and I are still sitting on the glass table. As he talks, I concentrate, and make the sliding door open from 5 meters away. Then I make the door close again. "I'm getting better at this," I think. "I need to practice."

I turn to the doctor and say, "It is normal for me to be able to move things with my mind here?"

He looks surprised and says, "No."

The glass door opens again and a large crowd of people in office attire pour into the room, picking out swivel chairs and gathering around the tables. Most of them are wearing suits. It's a high-ranking meeting. The swivel chairs run out, and one of the men hops up on the table next to me and the doctor. The doctor doesn't seem to care that we are crashing this meeting. I surmise it's an unwritten rule that the activity of doctors and patients is always of highest importance, and should never be interfered with. The employees in the meeting room seem used to this, and are more curious about me than annoyed.

"I still don't feel like I can trust you," I say to the doctor. I turn to the crowd at the largest table. "Can anyone else here explain to me why I am here, and what this place is?"

The man next to the doctor leans out, with a grin on his face, and addresses me. "Hey, maybe you're dead and this is hell," he says.

"No, that's not right," I say with an impatient sneer, leaning across the doctor to stare at him, "because if this was hell it wouldn't be so boring!"

The rest of the suits erupt into laughter. The guy nods as if to say "fair point," and leans back.

Another man at the head of the big table says he is going to start the meeting on schedule, and the group begins to talk. Again, their conversation is only a smudge in my memory. I can tell they said things, but I have no idea what.

Instead of trying to listen, I make the sliding door open again with my mind, then make some papers fly up in the air, then make a row of hanging lamps spin around on their chains, trying to advance my telekinesis to larger objects. People in the room start to notice the chaos and realize something seriously weird is going on. The last straw is when I notice the current speaker is a snappily dressed woman about three feet tall, making some point to the rest of the group, and as she speaks I levitate her up out of her chair and send her drifting around the room in slow orbits, then set her back down. The meeting ends early and everyone gets up and hastily exits.

Beyond the open doors, I see my sister come back up the stairway, trailed by the same cop. I catch her eye and say "what's up?"

She shakes her head dismissively and says, "It's gone now. No worries. It's gone." In a few seconds she vanishes up the granite hallway.

"I'm going to see what's down those stairs," I think. "Maybe that will help me understand what's going on."

I hop down from the table and run over to the stairs. The doctor is gone. The stairs end in a long carpeted hallway that zigs and zags, then splits into two hallways. Doors appear on either side, most of them closed, the windows in them dark. With my mind, I will myself to be inconspicuous. I imagine myself dressed as a doctor, with an ID badge. A few nurses walk by me. One looks a little baffled by my presence but doesn't question it.

A large man stopps me. He is dressed in some kind of ceremonial African hunting gear, and holding a spear. He has large rings stacked loosely around his wrists and ankles. The most startling thing about him though is the shape of his head: It bulges upward and back, just above his eyeline, as though his skull is a giant kidney bean. He is tanned and hairless. He speaks to me in a deep voice, his face set as though he recognizes me and wants to know how I've been, but the language he speaks sounds like complete gibberish to me.

I speak gibberish back at him, in a conversational tone, willing him to understand that I am fine but trying to get on my way. It works. He nods and turns to go. As I watch him walk away, a group of three robots walk past him; old-school robots with square metal limbs, walking stiffly. I realize they too are inmates, like the man; like me. The robots have a steampunk motif, with bright blue heads shaped like upside-down teapots. "I wonder what their story is," I think.

"Oh well. One mystery at a time, eh?" I shrug and continue down the hallway.

Ten more steps on the carpet and ... I wake up.

I dreamed I was a member of a gang of violent anarchist punks. We had a disturbing lifestyle:

We would pick a house in a suburban area at random, then storm into it all at once. If anyone was inside we would take kill them, then spend the next few days completely destroying the house, with whatever large tools or objects we could find on-site.

I spent most of the dream swinging a very heavy axe at the walls, digging huge furrows in the plaster, punching out sheetrock, severing wires and insulation. As I went from room to room I saw my fellow gang members doing the same thing.

Eventually I wandered into a living room lit by a row of bay windows. Yellow slanted sunbeams fell on dusty brown carpet, strewn with shattered objects and soiled laundry and mud and lint. A bunch of people were sitting in a ragged line around a table, upon which stood a woman.

The woman was one of my crew, a punk wearing denim and chrome rivets, with a short bleached haircut. She was in the middle of saying something sarcastic to the audience, who were a bunch of outsiders and victims from previous home invasions, all feeling Stockholm syndrome and wanting to join our gang, or barring that, just please this commanding and amazingly dressed woman. As she was saying her phrase I recognized it as a quote from The Goon Show, or perhaps some other equally obscure media, and I completed the last few words of the phrase out loud with her.

This was apparently such an impressive display of parallel thinking that it stunned us both into silence. The woman looked at me, I turned to look at her, and I said "okay, fine," as though I was surrendering to the situation and our sudden connection. I dropped my hammer - no longer an axe - onto the floor where it made a resonating thud as though it weighed 80 pounds. I stepped up onto the table. We faced each other and began kissing passionately, in front of the assembled group. They were too confused to interrupt. Plus it definitely wasn't the most taboo thing they'd seen recently because our gang had probably murdered all their friends.

Just as it was getting really intense, I woke up.

I dreamed that I was wandering in a dark redwood forest, and I came upon a house. There was a family living inside - a mother and two daughters.

There was also a young man there, who wasn’t related to the family. He was living in the basement.

The mother approached me and said that they wanted to get rid of the man, because he was being very aggressive to the youngest daughter. Threatening to sexually assault and murder her. They told him to leave but he wouldn’t come out of the basement.

She said they were all afraid of him because he was turning into some kind of monster.

So I went over to the basement door, and just as I was about to open it, the young man opened it. He had on a big black trenchcoat that covered everything except his head, which was pale and very round.

He pushed past me and started looming over the youngest daughter, threatening her with a knife.

I went over to the wall and picked up a fireplace poker, then ran at the guy and stabbed him through the stomach, pinning him to the wall. But the trenchcoat deflated like there was nothing in it, and his head detached from the coat and floated towards me like a balloon.

I grabbed it out of the air and realized it was made of rubber. Inside were a bunch of tiny vials of powder, like a collection of spices. I ran to the bathroom with the head, tore it open, and emptied the vials into the toilet one by one. He was trying to cast some kind of spell on the household, but I ruined it by flushing away the reagents.

When I ran back to the living room, the man was there again, wearing another trenchcoat. He was standing close to the daughter and appeared to be pleading or bargaining with her. There was no threat in his posture. I don’t remember any of the words.

I tore the fireplace poker out of the wall and brandished it at him. He picked up a metal bar that was leaning nearby and held it as though we were going to have a swordfight. His form was terrible. The expression on his face was more like curiosity than anger. So I made a pretend-swing at him, very slow. Then another. He mirrored my movements. He thought I was teaching him how to swordfight.

I noticed that his arms and hands were misshapen, and covered with cuts. His head was lumpy too, like he was a mutant, or suffering from some weird disease. I felt sorry for him. I decided I didn't want to fight him, but just then the other daughter came running into the room and stabbed him in the chest with a huge knife.

He collapsed on the floor and died. Then the mother and her daughters gathered around his body and dragged it outside into the woods, leaving it by the side of the road.

After that I stood around talking to the mother. I can't remember the exact conversation, but I remember asking her where the guy had come from, and she said he was from the house a little ways down the road.

Then she said something like, "now we'll have to find a replacement," and looked at me with a big toothy grin.

That was when I realized that the young man had not been haunting their basement. He had been imprisoned there. The family had grown tired of experimenting on him and abusing him - twisting his mind and body - and they used me to kill him off.

The mother took a step towards me and raised her hands up in the air as if she was going to cast a curse. I realized I was still holding the fireplace poker, and I swing it down directly on her head. CRACK!

It punctured a hole in the top of her skull, and blood came pouring out. When I tore the poker free, a chunk of her hair was tangled around it. Her arms were still raised. She laughed crazily. I swung the poker again - CRACK! And again. She stumbled in her advance. I hit her one more time and the poker got stuck. So I let go of it, turned around, and ran up the road.

I ran so fast I began floating up into the air, into the trees. Behind me the woman tore the poker away from her skull, then turned around and began walking back to her house, laughing the entire time. Her daughters stood there watching, their faces expressionless, as though this was no more eventful than a visit from the postman.

"See you soon!" she shrieked back at me.

Then between her and me I saw a transparent, skeletal figure come rising up out of the ground. It stretched like a funhouse mirror, and shot up into the trees above me.

Then I realized that since I was floating in the air, perhaps I was no longer in my own body. Perhaps this was the beginning of some curse or spell. Perhaps things were about to get a lot worse. "What if this keeps going," I thought, "and gets so bad that I actually die in my sleep, and get stuck here in these woods forever?"

I thought to myself "NO" and, BANG, my eyes shot open and I was instantly fully awake. The end.

So in the middle of my dream last night, I was entering this house. Tasteful upper-middle-class suburban place with lots of furniture in it.
I was going through the front door, intent on doing something, and my way was blocked... By MYSELF. Another me, wearing different clothes, including a shirt with a pocket in it, and pens in the pocket.
The other me had a serious, busy look on his face. He saw me, and was surprised for a second, then said:
"Oh, I know why you’re here. You’re going to manually control the filtering, to get a better neural packing order."
Then he stood aside, so I could enter the house. After that I never saw him...

The earliest thing I remember is walking around a city, near the coast. The bright afternoon sun made all the colors intense. The ocean was a striking Mediterranean blue, the dirt walkways and streets were a deep brown, the plaster walls a variety of eggshell greens, pinks, and whites. Doorways were dark and inviting. Roofs were speckled Spanish tile, or heavy chunks of unvarnished wood. Windowsills were thick slabs, windows were iron grids of tinted glass. Fluffy clouds decorated the sky. In the distance up the coast and out to sea there were curtains of mist and drifting fog, showing that I was in a patch of good weather. I could smell nothing - but that was typical, since I almost never smelled anything in my dreams.

( At first I was just walking around, enjoying the scene... )

Current Mood: indescribable

I was manager of a theme park. I had a spiffy uniform and everything. Admission was free, and guests were supposed to go from one exhibit to the next in a specific order, participating in different situations, and learning interesting philosophical lessons along the way. But the theme park had a problem with people who would wander in, then go from exhibit to exhibit and ignore the lessons, but instead eat the food that was laid out on the tables and then run off. They were exploiting it for a free lunch. I was standing on a lawn, having just caught one particular troublemaker - a little kid - and I was lecturing him about the importance of participation. I didn’t want to ban him from the park, but if he kept exploiting it, I would.

"Hmm, I wonder if the exhibits are all working properly?" I said. "Maybe people are getting confused and just eating the food because it’s there? I better run through the exhibits to check."

The first "exhibit" started immediately, while I stood there. A huge flock of seagulls flew in, from a grassy field next to the park, and one of them squawked at me, "Help! We’re running from some predatory owls and we need to be guided through the park! Can you guide us?"

I began running, while the cloud of seagulls flapped around me. I ran with them for a while and then they flew off. Job done, I guess. Then I came to a stop at a picnic table. There were two people seated at it, side by side. There was a huge scientific instrument between them, kind of like a cross between an oversized microscope and an overhead projector. On the picnic table, beneath the instrument, they had placed a frozen pizza.

They were examining it closely, and invited me to join in. I looked at it through the lens of the instrument, observing a wavy, impressionistic wash of pastel colors, like a painting. It was very pretty. While I was examining it I reached down and took a triangular slice out of the pizza and ate it. It wasn’t very tasty. Then I moved on to the next "exhibit".

There were five or six more exhibits. I can’t remember any of the details, but they were all variations on two things: Chasing or guiding someone, and examining food. I remember getting to the last exhibit and standing up from a park bench, dusting crumbs from a sandwich off my shirt, and thinking to myself, "Oh damn!! I’ve just totally done exactly what I’ve been trying to stop other people from doing! I ran through the exhibits and ate all the food! How embarrassing."

Then I stood there, thinking. "Wait a minute. There’s something funny about this whole setup." I turned around and began running back the way I came, towards the starting area of the park. As I ran, I reversed time. All the deeds I did while performing in the exhibits played themselves backwards, resulting in the opposite outcomes. Fleeing criminals got un-caught. Enemies got un-defeated. Finally I arrived back at the lawn, surrounded by the seagulls, who were squawking again for safe passage from the 'predatory owls'."

Instead I kept running, into the grassy field, and the cloud of seagulls turned back and followed me, reversing their course. Only about 50 yards into the field the cloud of seagulls was suddenly met by a cloud of owls, coming the other way! A huge brawl erupted, with feathers flying.

When it was all done, one of the owls landed on my shoulder and said, "Thank you for helping us catch those seagulls! They were wanted criminals, fleeing from our country. Now they have been given justice. For your good deed, we will reward you."

I laid down on the grass, face, down, relaxing, and one by one, the owls landed on my back, crowding in closely. After more than a dozen had landed, they all began flapping, and lifted me off the ground. I spread my arms, and glided along as the landscape spread out beneath me. Beyond the field I saw a rocky section of high desert. In the desert was a huge dilapidated victorian house - a haunted house, that I could visit and explore if I wanted. Also in the desert was a black ring of rocks, like the impact debris from a meteor. In the center of the ring was a smaller pile of rocks. I remember seeing other interesting places to visit too, but the memory comes with no details of any kind.

The owls flew me over the desert and came to rest on the branch of a huge eucalyptus tree. I spread my limbs out on the branches to avoid falling while the owls arranged themselves around me and groomed. One owl explained that they were all going to relax here while I made up my mind about where I wanted them to take me. On my back, I could feel Mira the cat resting between my shoulder blades.

I said I wanted them to fly me to the little mound of rocks in the center of the crater. I would meditate there, in the heat, and sleep for a while. The owls all piled onto my back again, crowding around Mira, and slowly we lifted off. They made sure not to tilt too much, to keep Mira from tumbling out into the sky.

I don’t remember reaching the crater. It’s all a huge blur, and the only thing I remember after that is from much later. I’m wandering around a kind of netherworld, in the streets and hallways of a city that is a twisted replica of some town from the waking world, except here there is no electricity and no sun, so everyone wanders around in the dark or with lanterns.

I remember accidentally wandering around in a big circle, and coming across rooms I’d already seen, but the details were different, like the windows were on a different wall, or the furniture was in a different layout, or et cetera. There was a group of people I was exploring with, but I’d (stupidly) gone off alone, and now the netherworld was actively sabotaging my effort to find my group again. Out of frustration, and in part to "punish" the world itself for conspiring against me, I began to knock furniture over and break windows.

The dream broke apart with the intensity of my temper tantrum, and I woke up.

I dream I am watching the opening scenes of an upcoming movie.  Something about long-range space travel.  My first thought is, "Is this that movie Interstellar that’s coming out late this year?"

"No, wait, this movie has a summer release date.  And it's way behind schedule. In fact, only the first ten minutes or so is complete."

I see a really complicated robotic rocketship, being assembled on a launch pad in a bright tropical setting.  The pieces of the robot are mostly rectangular chunks of painted metal, white with bright colored stripes. The more I look at it, the more it starts to resemble parts of a Transformer, crossed with parts of the Space Shuttle.

I am standing on a metal platform with a handrail, watching as a big piece moves slowly into a receptacle with a VOOOOM sound, and I notice two big circular holes through it, with chunky metal teeth on the inside.

"Waaait a second," I think.  "That piece looks exactly like a friggin’ audiocassette!"

I stare at it a moment longer. Yes. It's definitely a 200-foot-long metal audiocassette.

"Is this some kind of Michael Bay thing? Shit."

So then, I’m standing with a big group of people, and animals, inside a glass atrium, about the size of an indoor basketball stadium. The floor is flat industrial carpet and there are booths set up haphazardly with hardware stacked in them, like a consumer electronics show.

Most of the people around me, including myself, are actually alien animals who can shape-shift and have chosen the shapes of humans to walk around in. We’re inside this big atrium in order to ride out an ecological disaster:  The invasion of our planet by a bunch of slimy H.R. Giger alien critters.

While we’re waiting, we’re visited by a group of humans, who come walking in from some kind of interdimensional porthole on one of the walls. The group is about 15 people, and they’re all scientists and engineers and programmers, most of them with glasses and beards, and most of them are wearing jumpsuits and space travel gear. The leader walks up to me and says "I’m glad we finally got here.  Those in-between dimensions always make me feel ... fuzzy.  This place feels nice and solid."

I don’t know what to say to that, so I just stand there, clutching my drink.

"We’re here to tell you that the launch was a failure," he says.  "We can’t get you guys out of here.  You’re going to have to find some other way."

After that enigmatic message, he turns around and walks back into the portal, and his whole team goes with him.

I walk over to the glass wall of the atrium and look out into the jungle foliage beyond.  It’s moving.  Then I hear a thud, and look down.  An enormous armored insect, vaguely alien, has rammed into the outside of the wall. As I watch, it shrieks, backs up, and charges again, making a tiny chip in the glass. Then I hear chittering noises rising up all around me, loud as hell.  "We are totally fucked," I think, and back away from the glass.

Around me, all my animal friends are getting alarmed.  They’re self-organizing into a defense.  Some of them pick up weapons that were hidden in the booths.  Some of them morph into much more aggressive animal shapes.  They line up in ranks, facing outward.

Then I hear a voice booming out.  It’s a language I understand, but with an alien accent, and seems to be coming from everywhere.  It’s telepathic, and I’m hearing it in my mind.

"I am the ruler of this civilization!" it says.  "None of you are safe; I know all your secrets!  I am even inside your minds!  You will not survive!"

The voice says a bunch of other apocalyptic stuff, but I ignore it, and instead wonder how it could have made a telepathic link.  The only thing I can think of is that it took one of us hostage and performed some gruesome brain surgery on the victim.

Sure enough, the voice stops, and instead of speaking, it sends us all a series of mental images.  There’s the hostage...  Oh, it’s Ellen Ripley, from the Alien movies. Why not.  They captured her, made her think they were doctors and she was ill, then performed the operation. Now she’s incapacitated, with all her external senses dulled, and hallucinating.  But the use of telepathy has restored her to consciousness, and now we see what she sees, as she looks down at her torso and sees blood oozing out between rough bandages, running into a shallow pool in a dark cave, staining the water.  Creepy shit.  "Clearly this is meant to demoralize us," I think.

I push the vision and the voice out of my head.  Sure enough, the glass wall of the atrium is now surrounded by shiny black aliens, some with weapons, all of them beating on the wall.  Just ahead of me, one of them finally crashes inward and tackles a creature, and they start fighting. This is followed by more crashes, and now there’s fighting all around me.  I reach for a bucket of long plastic sticks and pull one out, and it’s a kind of shotgun.  I pull the handle at the middle, chambering a round, and aim it at an alien, through the glass.  I pull the trigger and there’s a "ZAP!" sound and the alien falls over, thrashing.

I realize that this weapon is only good for outer defense:  You aim it at the wall, and when you fire it, nothing happens inside the atrium, but the wall generates a projectile outside itself and sends it shooting in the direction you aimed the weapon.  A strange design.

Now there are huge fish swimming outside the walls, paddling through the air as if it were water.  I shoot some of them in the eyes, blinding them, since its the only part of their armored body the gun will pierce.

More fighting, in a haze.

Then, it’s a truce.  Everyone has stopped fighting, and is watching a figure give a speech.  It’s a humanoid body, an old dude with white hair, dressed like a victorian gentleman. He’s sitting in a kind of observation box, suspended outside the atrium, facing in, so he can watch us fight. It’s the ruler of the aliens - the one who was speaking telepathically to us before.

He’s speechifying again, something about how he will let us all live as long as we continue to entertain him, but I ignore it and sneak up to another weapons bucket.  This one has big bottles of fuel in it, with thin cloth hoses coming off, ending in a nozzle on a stick.  I pick up one of the weapons.  It looks like a piece of medical equipment.  When I push the button on the stick, a tiny flame appears, and I realize that it’s a kind of manually operated flame thrower!

Awww yeeeah.

I walk casually up to the wall, and stand on a table just beneath the observation box.  I hold up the stick, and attempt to douse the creepy alien gentleman with burning fuel, but the spark has died, so I just end up wetting his clothing instead.  I look at the stick and realize that the weapon has not been screwed together all the way.  Dammit!

Meanwhile, the alien is still talking, as if nothing has happened.  Clearly he doesn’t care about this body - he’s just projecting into it.  But setting him on fire might be a cool symbolic act of defiance nevertheless. So I fix the nozzle, and aim it again, and he goes, FOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!!!

Chaos erupts, more fighting, a cloud of reeking smoke, another hazy interval.

Now there is music playing, and people are holding drinks again.  I’m jostling around in a big crowd, of aliens and people.  Some of them are wearing costumes.  There’s fighting, but it’s scattered.  Hand-to-hand skirmishes.  Mostly, people just seem to be socializing.

A chair drifts into view, resting on a platform, carried by four grimacing aliens.  Sitting on the chair is a regal looking middle-aged woman.  It’s the frickin’ Queen of England.  But she’s babbling incoherently and making bird noises. Behind the chair is a cylindrical platform, with a box on it.  The box is covered in gold glitter, and has an ornamental lock on the front, and a few tubes coming out the side, going down into the platform. On top of the box is a cheap speaker, like the kind you’d see in a kid’s toy.

Ahead of this procession, which is having trouble pushing through the crowd, walks a somber young man in a suit and hat.  He is explaining to everyone that the aliens have decided to amuse themselves by abducting the Queen of England, then extracting her brain and replacing it with that of an ostrich, then installing her now homeless brain in a cardboard box.

Now they’ve turned it into a mobile freakshow, and are parading it around amongst us, to further amuse themselves by watching our reaction to it.

"Clearly the war is not going in our favor," I think to myself, dryly. Where's Oscar Wilde when you need him?

As the golden box bumps past me, I hear a posh voice coming out of the cheap speaker.  "Hello my friends, I am your humble queen.  Keep your chins up in the dark times," et cetera.

Behind the platform, inching along with his hat covering his face, is another copy of the victorian fellow from the observation booth.  He’s grinning with a smug expression.  "Oh shit," I think, "It’s the ruler of the aliens again."  I suddenly realize I’m still holding the flamethrower weapon I’d used to melt his face a while ago.  "Act harmless!" I think.

As I wait for him to drift by, the tube from the flamethrower gets tangled in the equipment on the back of the platform and starts dragging me along.  I have to step between him and the platform and rummage around to extract it.  "Oh no!" I say, in an absent-minded voice, trying to disguise myself, "My cloth ropes!  Oh dear me!"

I yank the rope out, glance at it to see if it’s intact, then as the man slips past me I turn around and douse him a second time with burning fuel.  "FUCK YOU!!! Hahahah!!!" I say, and drop the bucket and run.

Chaos erupts again.  The fire spreads through the crowd with bizarre quickness, leaping from head to head.

"Well," I think, dodging overturned furniture and flying bodies and shrapnel, "... At least it’s an end to things."

Then I wake up!

Mr Zog I have finished our long trek through the woods, and he’s bedding down in a room at the back of the house. His sleeping bag is on the carpet next to a wind-up alarm clock. I walk into the living room, thinking to myself, "It’ll be a few hours at least before I can sleep. Maybe I should go get some dinner?"

The whole house is cluttered. Small gadgets and toys and consumer items, most of them broken or dirty, are scattered all over the floor. It’s like a hyperactive four-year-old lives here. I get my bicycle, and push it through the front door, into the driveway. It’s dark out. Even the sky is obscured. The yellow light from the windows up and down the street is drowned by an oppressive tangle of redwood branches. The forest looms over the road, trying to squeeze it out of existence. The undergrowth is like a wall. There are creatures out there, but if I keep moving at a decent speed, they won’t get me. I’m already thinking of which restaurant I should head for.

I realize I’ve forgotten my keys, so I sneak back inside. I try to tiptoe around Zog to get them off the desk. When I walk back out, Zog is standing there, putting on a sweater. He says, "I can’t sleep, so let’s both get some food!"

We walk over to his car. It’s a Lincoln Continental, an absolutely gigantic car, except it’s been turned into a hatchback. I peek inside and there are big glass bowls of food, covered in plastic wrap, arranged in a grid covering the trunk. Salads and custards and big gooey casseroles. Zog reaches out and grabs the side of the car with two hands and yanks it up in the air and shakes it. I’m worried that the food is going to spill. Shouldn’t we be eating it, instead of going out? What a waste.

Zog has transformed the car into a motorbike. All the food is miniaturized and packed in a tiny trunk. He swings one leg over and says "let’s go!"

Just then, a tiger crashes down out of the bushes on the opposite side of the road, and lands in the driveway. Then a second one tumbles out. Zog and I watch, frozen in panic, as the two beasts get up, growl at each other, and then sit back and groom themselves.

"What the hell do we do now?" says Zog.
"Kickstand the bike," I say, already backing slowly towards the door.

Then the bushes rattle again, and an enormous white goat comes rolling out, and thumps onto the road. It bleats angrily and stands up, shaking its head. The tigers notice it, then decide to ignore it and go back to grooming.

"Damn, that’s even worse," I say.

Zog and I are almost at the door. The goat notices us and squares its back legs, then does a little hop with its front legs and charges straight for the motorbike, which is now a bicycle. He hits it head-on with a loud bang and sends it clattering across the driveway, alarming the tigers, who jump up and start circling the goat angrily. Then Zog and I shut the front door.

"We need to keep them from getting in!" I say.

Zog looks around and notices that the fly screen in front of the kitchen window is torn. "I’ll go fix that," he declares, and climbs up on the counter.

"Good idea," I say.

But no sooner does he climb up than he dives aside, and the goat comes sailing through the window at full speed, exploding it into a thousand shards that mix with the garbage already on the floor.

"Get that goat!" I yell.

I chase him around the corner into the dining room. He doubles back into the living room. I pick up a dining chair and brandish it. "If you’re tricky," I say out loud to myself, "you can figure out when a goat’s going to charge by watching him, and if you push his head down he’ll propel himself into the ground instead of at you."

Sure enough the goat bobs his head down and does a little hop, and I bring the chair over my head and clobber him. His horns tear through the vinyl and get jammed in the springs. I let go and the goat starts dragging the chair blindly around the living room.

"Hah!" I say.

But then one of the tigers leaps in through the broken window and lands with a crunch. It roars in pain, then dashes out of the kitchen and through the living room in three giant lunges, crashes through the picture window on the opposite wall, and sails off into the night.

"That was close!"

The goat manages to dislodge the chair, and gallops out of the living room, head down. A loud crunching sound tells me that it has left through the front door without bothering to open it.

"Wow," I say, walking up to the destroyed door, which has fallen in pieces around the frame.

"It’s funny," I say to Zog, who is standing in the kitchen. "In this neighborhood, people worry more about psychopaths than about wild animals."

Then I hear the ripping sound of a small motor. Through the door way, I see a tall man in a white lab coat, wearing a rubber mask. The mask is the mad scientist from Robot Chicken. "Hahahaaa!!!" he cackles, and strides towards the house. He’s waving a cheap consumer-grade chainsaw around his head, and gunning it. A cable is attached to it, which runs behind his back.

Zog and I are not impressed. Zog raises a cutting board like a shield, and I pick up a wrench. The psychopath hoots and brings the chainsaw up, intending to disembowel Zog, but Zog shoves the cutting board down and twists it, and the chainsaw jams into it and gets stuck. Then he heaves to one side, yanking the chainsaw out of the psychopath’s hands, but the cord is still attached and the man pitches forward, off balance. As he goes flailing into the house, trailing after his chainsaw, I fetch him a good two-handed thump across the back of the head with the wrench. He rolls to the ground at the head of the stairs.

I walk quickly over, and use one foot to lever him down the stairs, then I walk after him. When he slaps against the wall at the bend in the stairway, he starts to mutter a bit. I drag the door to the downstairs living room open, sandwiching him between it and the wall, then I manhandle him around the door and boot him through it. On the carpet of the living room, I can clearly see the two tigers and the goat, laying around comfortably. The psychopath smacks onto the floor between all three. Then I shut the door.

As I climb back up the stairs I can hear some very unpleasant screaming.

Then, I wake up. No screaming, no motor sounds, nothing. Another pleasant morning in Oakland.

Dreams are weird.

Profile

garote

July 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Page generated Jul. 22nd, 2025 04:56 pm

Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Entries tagged with dreams

So, is this the dream?

Dorks riffing on Nethack, like dorks do, and a dream.

The conspiracy dream

I couldn't just forget this one!

My mind is on time-share to a better author overnight

The wrong side of the wire

Interesting dream life: Blessing and curse.

LIGHT!!

Two semi-erotic dreams about school

Too much YA fiction

Finally get some decent REM sleep, and this happens...

Thanks, brain?

The firewall and the doctor

Dream: Punkopalypse

Last night's dream

Inner workings

A few hours this morning

February 6th, inside my brain at 4:30am

Interstellar? NO.

GET THAT GOAT!!

Profile

July 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary